When I first laid hands on Gail Carriger’s Soulless (Orbit, 2009), I began to wonder if the book had been written specifically to irritate me.

1. To start out, the novel is urban fantasy. Already we’re on bad terms.

2. Also, there are vampires.

3. Too, werewolves.

4. And romance!

5. In case that’s not enough, Carriger mixes in a Victorian setting and a hint of steampunk. Neither of these inherently annoy me, but combined with items 1-4:

6. The novel is heavily weighted down by trendy genre elements.* In my experience, this usually leads to books that are poorly constructed, badly integrated, and the literary equivalent of a chess club stereotype wearing star-shaped sunglasses – trying much too hard to be cool.**

Soulless should be like combining salmon and chocolate while I, in this metaphor, am an ichthyophobe with no sweet tooth. However, it appears that skilled chefs can pair salmon and chocolate. And sometimes a novel that’s full of everything wrong can go terribly, tragically right.

Soulless is the first book of the Parasol Protectorate, with the next book, Changeless, due from Orbit on March 30, 2010. The novel begins when a young Victorian woman, Alexia Tarabotti, finds herself alone in a library with a vampire. For any other unmarried miss, this situation would be frightening. However, Alexia has no soul which means that vampires can’t eat her and, in fact, her touch temporarily turns supernatural creatures into humans.

There are three types of supernatural creatures in Carriger’s universe: werewolves, vampires and ghosts. Werewolves come in packs, and vampires come in hives, but somehow this vampire doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. Alexia gets caught up with the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, or BUR, in helping to investigate this strange appearance as well as a number of strangely coincidental disappearances.

In the interview at the back of the book, Carriger reports having asked herself, “if immortals were mucking about, wouldn’t they have been mucking about for a very long time?” She considers the cultural implications of supernatural interference: “Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functioned on werewolf pack dynamics… [and then I] realized that if Victorians were studying vampires and werewolves (which they would do, if they knew about them)… technology would have evolved differently. Enter a sprinkling of steampunk…” (p. 364)

In my opinion, most traditional urban fantasy fails because it doesn’t consider the long-term, global ramifications of its conceits. This isn’t helped by the fact that a great deal of urban fantasy poses a secret underworld filled with werewolves and vampires (or fairies and elves) who covertly affect the real world. Small-scale stories revolving around this conceit can be fine, but secrets are difficult to keep, and many stories pose so many supernatural events of such import that it strains credibility to believe that magic could remain a secret. Buffy – to take an at-hand example – made a joke of it. But non-humorous texts are out of luck if they want us to believe that people die every night from vampire bites and yet no one ever notices.

Carriger’s world is one in which vampires and werewolves are fully integrated. They interact with and affect politics and society, and in turn are affected by them. For instance, there’s a post specifically designated for a werewolf to advise the Queen, but simultaneously the alpha werewolf is constrained by high society mores.

Soulless also benefits from the fact that Carriger doesn’t seem to have approached the elements of her book as disparate. As she says, Victorians investigating magic lends itself to steampunk; one genre element follows from another, creating the sense of a fully integrated world.

The novel’s action-oriented main plot takes place against a Jane-Austen-like background. Alexia, the product of her mother’s first marriage to a – gasp – Italian, is a spinster with a number of unflattering traits, such as her blunt speech and tan complexion, all of which make it clear she’ll never find a proper English husband. Nevertheless, she falls in love with one of the country’s most eligible bachelors, the werewolf alpha Lord Maccon.

No, wait. She doesn’t fall in love with him. She can’t stand him. No, I’m sorry. I mean, he can’t stand her. Wait. He’s in love with her – that’s it. It’s just that he’s strong and manly, but also messy and uncivilized. While she’s proud and intractable, but also busty and tenacious. Wait, are we reading Pride and Prejudice with Werewolves?

Soulless’s treatment of romance in its early chapters is the novel’s only major misstep. The text improves once Lord Maccon and Alexia acknowledge their romantic feelings – although there is one awkward, late-chapter sex scene that occurs in the middle of an action sequence, which could have been dramatically shortened while still serving its purpose as a release valve for romance and humor. But the early romantic sallies are winceably cliché. As soon as a male character gazes upon the heroine with a passage like–

Miss Tarabotti might examine her face in the mirror each morning with a large degree of censure, but there was nothing at all wrong with her figure. He would have to have had far less soul and a good fewer urges not to notice that appetizing fact. Of course, she always went and spoiled the appeal by opening her mouth. In his humble experience, the world had yet to produce a more vexingly verbose female. (p. 8-9)

–we readers know where we’re headed. We don’t need tingling near her abdomen or stirring he can’t explain, interspersed with fury! at his lack of manners and yet–! to guide us along the way. Carriger so facilely avoids other clichés that it’s a shame this one mars the text.

Overall, though, the Austen elements are charming. Carriger’s Victorian voice is sharp and funny. Witty observations provide a plethora of humorous clashes between action sequences and rigid etiquette. The descriptions of Victorian fashion are very nice for those readers with a weakness for bustles and lace, and I suspect I’m not the only one since the book is marketed with a Victorian dress-up doll flash game.

If there’s one weakness the Victorian voice lends itself to, it’s the underdevelopment of Alexia’s mother, step-father and sisters, who play the compliant foils for unconventional Alexia. Their insipidness is fine at the beginning of the book, but grows less convincing as their roles increase near the end. Still, this is a small complaint and easily remedied. Hopefully Carriger will toss them a few lines of character development in one of the sequels.

Other characters are created quite well. Alexia, for instance, is a fun and well-portrayed heroine, full of vigor and flaws. She, her friend Ivy, and their friendship are memorably captured in a few sentences: “Ivy Hisselpenny was the unfortunate victim of circumstances that dictated she be only-just-pretty, only-just-wealthy, and possessed of a terrible propensity for wearing extremely silly hats. This last being the facet of Ivy’s character that Alexia found most difficult to bear.” (p. 33) Lord Maccon and his assistant, Professor Lydell, are good characters as well, although Lord Maccon is at times brushed in with slightly-too-broad romantic strokes and could use a little more development within his archetype. The best character is the vampire Lord Akeldama, an outrageous gossip-monger with a penchant for gaudy attire whose underlying intelligence and immortal weariness are deftly revealed as the novel progresses.

In the end, Soulless is not a profound novel. It imparts no revelations about the human experience. I don’t expect it will change anyone’s life or that I’ll remember the plot intricacies in ten years. But it was a fun, adventurous romp that diverted me for a few hours. I might even read it a second time. I will certainly pick up book two of the Parasol Protectorate and I look forward to meeting Alexia Tarabotti again in 2010.

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*It seems possible that Carriger began writing with the intent of forecasting what tropes would be popular a few years down the line. If this is the case, kudos to her for guessing correctly.

**It should go without saying that any of these things can be done well. It’s just that while 90% of everything is crap, I find these tropes to suffer from even worse odds. Nevertheless, here are some successful examples: Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (vampire), N. K. Jemisin’s “Red Riding Hood’s Child” (werewolf), Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale” (urban fantasy), and Paula Guran’s anthologies of romantic fantasy which contain Coates’s “Magic in a Certain Slant of Light,” Parks’s “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge,” and Copley-Woods’s “Desires of Houses” (romance). Michael Swanwick is famous for combining disparate genre elements with strength and grace, and I was recently impressed with new writer Tina Connolly’s “Moon at the Starry Diner” for successfully condensing an epic plotline and several incompatible tropes into a short story.

When Hallmark lured David Ellis Dickerson to a Kansas City interview, they offered him a potential starting salary of $27,000. After interviewing him in person, they upped their offer to $32,000. “To this day,” writes Dickerson, “I am convinced that in person, I am $5,000 more charming than I am on paper.” (p 49)

I suspect this motivates the choice to promote Dickerson’s new book, House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions (Riverhead Books, 2009), with a series of videos called Greeting Card Emergency. Dickerson’s audience provides him with a decidedly un-Hallmark-like greeting card scenario, such as breaking a friend’s toilet or letting your snake eat someone else’s hamster. Dickerson then documents the process of creating a suitable card.

This promotion seems to be working. I’ve seen Greeting Card Emergencies reposted on a number of well-trafficked blogs and the videos inspired me to purchase Dickerson’s book.

House of Cards is a memoir of Dickerson’s experience with the Hallmark card company, documenting the period of time between when Dickerson first hears about nearby Hallmark interviews through the time when he decides to leave Hallmark for the presumably greener, warmer, and more licentious pastures of a Ph.D. program in Florida. Along the way, the book also documents Dickerson’s journey from fundamentalism to atheism.

There are three major reasons to recommend this book:

1) David Ellis Dickerson may be more charming in person, but he’s charming on paper, too. The memoir’s light, easy writing style makes for a fast and fun read.

2) The memoir provides an intriguing (if not wholly satisfying) case study about how a fundamentalist upbringing affects a twenty-something who has lost his faith. At the beginning of the memoir, twenty-seven-year-old Dickerson has already converted to Catholicism, become liberal, and started supporting feminism and gay rights. However, he still feels that he and his fiancée must avoid sex until marriage, a conviction that shifts during the course of the book until, after the pair break up, twenty-eight-year-old Dickerson is left trying to lose his virginity approximately a decade after most of his peers.

3)It’s a great deal of fun to read about Dickerson’s work process and word play. The memoir is peppered with his silly poetry, including a love poem about free popcorn:

The popcorn that thou givest unto me
Bringeth emotions I can scarcely utter.
For thou art like this popcorn that I see:
Lively and fresh, though thou contain’st less butter.
And in the carbonated beverage, too,
Which, like the popcorn, thou bestow’st for free,
Though it consist of Brown Dye Number Two,
In it, I see thy hair, and think on thee.
My Pepsi tab would founder many banks.
I can’t repay you; please accept my thanks.

(p 18)

In chapter nine (How to Write a Card), Dickerson details the process of taking a Hallmark card category, brainstorming ideas for it, and proposing a suitable card (which editors subsequently reject or accept). He explains common card types, including cards that come with attachments like paper clips and golf tees, and cards that include pop-ups. This witty, informational sequence gives what the reader has been craving throughout the book.

The memoir suffers some flaws. The first three chapters read like an unnecessarily long build-up: It’s unclear why the book begins before Dickerson even interviews with Hallmark instead of with his Kansas City interview or his first day as a new-hire. The book is called House of Cards; we’re here to read about Hallmark.

Even at Hallmark, the text lacks focus. It gives too little information about work process and too much about petty work woes. It’s not that the latter can’t be interesting grist for a memoir, but here they’re often rendered in long narrative sequences that could be summed up faster. Work events begin to feel repetitive. Worse, they take up space that might have been devoted to Dickerson’s evolving spirituality. After all, there’s more to the journey away from fundamentalism than sex.

From a feminist perspective, the text is mixed. There’s a lovely rant on page 135 defending female humorists, but in the same chapter Dickerson theorizes that women leave Hallmark’s humor department because they can’t handle the boss’s relative masculinity. It’s possible that Dickerson has evidence for this theory which didn’t make it into the text; however, given the available information, Dickerson comes across as condescending. Perhaps women leave because being the only female in that work environment is intolerable. Perhaps they leave because the boss acts sexist in ways that aren’t apparent when there are only male coworkers. Perhaps Dickerson should just ask the women involved?

Other scenes are similarly fraught. For instance, Dickerson’s fiancée is depicted as sex-averse, but this is never satisfactorily explored. From the details in the text, the fiancée appears to be suffering from some sort of sexual trauma*, but the narrative ignores that in order to focus on how angry Dickerson feels when she refuses to fulfill his romantic fantasies, such as a shared bath by candlelight. Perhaps Dickerson decided not to explore his fiancée’s perspective in more depth because he didn’t want to violate her privacy. This is a respectable reason, but the text still feels incomplete.

Of the many scenes discussing Dickerson’s sexuality, the most compelling is a flashback to his early twenties when he was still convinced masturbation was sinful. He discovered that voyeurism gave him an excuse to see women’s bodies “by accident” and thus without guilt. For this feminist reader, at least, the scene was extremely powerful because one identifies with Dickerson’s need to navigate his sexuality within his repressive culture. At the same time, one recognizes that this is an example of how otherwise reasonable, pro-feminist men contribute to the rape culture.

Despite its flaws, House of Cards is an entertaining, engaging read full of whimsical word play. Dickerson’s memoir may not meet every possible literary expectation – what does? – but it’s fun to listen to the man talk, even on paper.

–

*I might have read her as asexual except for a scene in which she reacted defensively to Dickerson’s attempts to touch her shoulders while she washed dishes. This read to me as a post-traumatic reaction; others’ interpretations may differ. In any case, the absence of any attempt on the part of the text to understand her sex-averse behavior – whatever its cause – was a noticeable lack.

Via Whatever, I found this piece by Matt Yglesias asking why — if vampires are thousands of years old — they don’t act old:

Across various fictions, why don’t vampires exhibit more cranky old man characteristics? I’m only 28 and already I feel myself periodically overtaken by a desire to tell the young people all about How It Was Back in the Day. I’ll bore people with tedious stories about the old Monroe Street Giant in Columbia Heights before the fancy new stores opened, or about how there used to not be all this stuff on U Street but The Kingpin was the best bar in DC. Just yesterday, I think, a colleague and I were explaining to the rest of the ThinkProgress team that if the new progressive infrastructure and its blogosphere last for a thousand years, men will stay say the Social Security privatization fight of 2005 was their finest hour. If I ever attain immortality, I fully intend to harangue the young people of the future with nonsense about Voltron and how people think of Harvey Danger as a one-hit wonder but really that whole album’s underrated and had other good songs.

That and, you know, murder people in order to feast on their blood.

I totally agree with Yglesias. This is what vampires would be like.

It’s also the only thing I like about vampires. Vampires have the potential to be soooo antithetical to their usual representation. They have the potential to be antiheroes who spoil any epic by wandering off to complain for three hours about this annoying modern lack of chariot races.

This is also the reason I enjoyed Angel on his own TV show. Every once in a while — alas, not all the time — they would show Angel as an extremely handsome, immortal, super-strong, crime-fighting crank. “What kind of bill is this?” I remember him demanding at a restaurant, though his dialogue is paraphrased here. “I remember when you could get a loaf of bread for a guinea!* Damn kids, get off my lawn!”

–

*My utter lack of knowledge about pre-Euro English money is here revealed.

Is there a “My mother was pro-choice” / “My mother is pro-choice” bumpersticker? And if not, why not?

I vaguely wish there were a “Sorry your mother was pro-life. My mother chose me” bumpersticker, but it’s too long, and there’s no way to make sure the snark would just reach those who deserve it with their asinine assumptions that the only way a woman would have a baby is if she didn’t believe she had any other option.

ETA: Oo, or for mothers, “Pro-choice: my children are wanted.”

But you wouldn’t want to put that out there because it would be cruel to the still-children kids of pro-life mothers who are old enough to process the implication they aren’t wanted, but not old enough to understand that the political point is about challenging preconceptions about pro-choice mothers. “Pro-choice and a mom” is probably better, if less amusingly snark-ridden. That’s got to already exist somewhere, right?

I linked to these a couple years ago when they were published, but the magazine’s website seems to be down. So, here they are in a blog entry. Happy Halloween (in a couple days)!

i.

Gwennie the good-hearted ghoul
did her best to avoid being cruel.
She offered to mate
with the men that she ate
and then let them drown in their drool.

ii.

Nanette the near-sighted ghost
was frequently witnessed to boast
that her spectral sneer
froze mortals with fear.
In fact, she was haunting a post.

iii.

Maureen the malingering mummy
felt aches in her kidneys and tummy.
“I feel pale and drawn,
but my organs are gone!
So why do I still feel so crummy?”

Said her doctor: “In matters of health,
the issue’s not absence, but wealth.
You’ve got too much time
to moan, groan and whine.
You’re too wrapped up in yourself.”

My brief, light-hearted fantasy story “Great, Golden Wings” is available on Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Check it out, if you like. I’m told it will also be available in audio soon.

Lady Percivalia watched the young cinematographist’s hands as he set up his equipment. They were narrow and graceful, dusted with pale-colored hair. His limber fingers moved rapidly as he angled his screens and adjusted his projectors.

Beside Lady Percivalia, the Lady Harrah gave a dramatic sigh. She sank back in her chair, fluttering her lashes, her face arrayed to look attractively ill. Lady Harrah was well-known for feigning such attacks of faintness. They’d won her the attentions of several young men who, while not known for their intelligence, were smart enough to seize the opportunity for getting close to a distressed young woman with a heaving bosom. Unfortunately, Lady Harrah’s best efforts had failed to make any impression on the cinematographist.

Lady Harrah enjoyed a miraculous recovery from her faint. She leaned over to Lady Percivalia. “Watch this,” she whispered. “I’ll get his attention.”

She unpinned a dragonet brooch that adorned her ruffled bodice and tapped its head. The intricate gold carving blinked into a semblance of life. It stretched like a waking cat and flew brightly into the air, a whir of jeweled wings. It caught the cinematographist’s sleeve in its jaws and tugged politely.

There’s something that gets bandied about a lot in workshops when people are talking to newbies. “You don’t have to kill your characters to up the stakes,” they say. “There are worse things that can happen to people than death.”

This is… well, I don’t know if it’s true, as stated. But there are certainly many things that are more fictionally interesting than death (in most cases) that one can do to one’s characters.

The art of character torture is one that all writers need to master. For those writers who wuv their characters, it can be a hard thing to force them into dangerous situations, to push them to emotional brinks, and to take away the things they love. For others of us who are more cold-hearted, character torture can be a fun way to pass the time. When I was in college, I used to spend hours with a friend of mine plotting ways we could torture our characters.

To torture your character effectively you have to really understand them. You have to know what their fears are so that you can force them to face those fears. You have to know what they love so that you can take it away. If your character has a deftly, deeply created psychology, then you can accomplish subtle and fascinating things by forcing them to face the things that they, personally, don’t want to face, instead of just forcing them to come up against the problems that scare everyone.

To use TV as an example, if you really want to torture Monk (or Felix Unger from the Odd Couple), you make him use a port-a-potty. If you really want to bother House (or Sherlock Holmes), you make him face a problem he can’t solve.

Those are big, bold characters with big, bold problems, but it applies to subtler characterization, too. It’s a little harder to find cultural touchstones to tap into here, but literature is full of moments where a character is crushed because of a seemingly small event that symbolizes a great deal more to them because of their history.

Now, if you wanted to push these characters’ buttons, you could do it with less subtle devices. They all fear death. None of them want to see their family members killed. But good characterization gives you more than one tool with which to up the stakes for your characters — not just the hammer that you can use to devastate any character, but also all the little pincers and hot irons that are tailored to your character specifically.

However, when I see this advice handed out in workshops, I usually see it being invoked in an ableist way. “Your character doesn’t have to lose his life to show he’s sacrificed to show that he’s lost something. There are other things you can do that are even worse. You can…”

And here comes the ableist parade: You could mutilate him. He could lose his arm. He could lose his legs. He could become disabled.

Now, I’m not going to argue that becoming disabled isn’t a bad thing for most characters who start out abled. Losing an ability that you used to have is no fun. But you know what it isn’t? Worse than death. Being disabled is not worse than death.

Yet I know I’ve sat in workshops where these statements were made, and I nodded along, and I probably even repeated the sentiment (hopefully not to students, but I certainly don’t remember every thing I’ve ever said in class). It wasn’t until I was sitting here, thinking about ableism, that suddenly an old piece of criticism someone gave me on a story drifted into my mind — he has to lose something, maybe you could have someone cut off his arm — that I realized: Oh, hello ableism. How are you today?

I know that writers have different techniques for writing, and so I wouldn’t submit this as being proscriptive for everyone. But I’d like to ask people, including myself, to think about what it would be like if we removed disability from the list of things that we can use to torture any generic character with, the things like death, and losing family members.

It would still be a tool we could use when we wanted to torture a character whose psychology made them specifically susceptible to fears of being disabled — doctors who pride themselves on being able to cure everything and can’t deal with their disability because it’s a constant reminder of their failure to do so (to bring us back to House), but also piano players who fear losing their manual dexterity, athletes whose careers are built on being able to run, or even just people who are really ableist.

What would it be like if disability was portrayed as something that specific people feared for specific reasons, rather than being used as something unilaterally feared and reviled?

I’m looking for non-fiction about Mars, or possibly fiction that’s as educational as non-fiction. Please leave your suggestions!

Reprinted from Therinth, a burn ward RN.

Having spent the past twelve hours hanging out with a bipolar person in their full blown manic state, i’d like to make a few comments. And i’m making this post public, unlike most of them here.

(Perhaps them being manic wore off on me some, because i can’t get to sleep without saying some of these things.)

I watched the first 30 mins of the first episode of House for this season. Let me list the ways this show is wrong: House attacks another pt, and is still bunked with that pt, and not moved to the violent psych ward with people who are manic with a side of stabby. They give House haldol. Haldol by mouth is like the unicorn. NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN IT. If someone’s fighting you, you think you’re going to stick your finger in their mouth to give them a pill where they can bite you, and/or spit out the pills, or cheek them? No. Haldol is an IV/IM drug. House’s manic buddy, who helps him out, is mildly plausible as a character, until he starts…helping House out. Rhyming, yes, too much energy, yes. Annoying? Hell yes. Responsible enough to help someone else follow through on a plot? Oh hell no.

And also, the time he’s cuffed, no one is in the room with him, that’s UNLIKELY, given restraint laws these days, and when he’s in solitary…for reals? That room is *that* white? No fucking way. Not a single stain of shit, piss or blood? Unnnnnnnnnnlikely, my friends.

House is usually enjoyable enough that i can suspend my disbelief. But if i’m going to keep watching, the next hour had better have him have his ass back in the hospital, where i can merely smirk at the thought of doctors hanging IV meds.

So, while i’m babysitting this patient, stopping him from picking off all of his dressings with continual reorintation and redirection, what plays in the background? That new medical show, Three Rivers.

Gah. I didn’t pay attention to the whole thing. I didn’t have to. What i heard was enough. The part where someone who doesn’t have insurance (and isn’t even an American?) needs a transplant. The doctor smugly tells some secondary character that, “You’ll find a way…” implying that somewhere there’s a loophole big enough to drive that truck through. I’m sure by the end of the episode it happened — someone reached up their rectum, and found a quarter of a million dollars that they didn’t know was there to fund the operation.

I hazard a guess that this is what is wrong with America’s interpretation of their current healthcare system. Perhaps, not having recently been ill, or having always been well monied, you’ve never pondered what typical medical care is like, or how much it all might cost, were you without insurance. You think it’s all like it looks on TV. And even if the worst does come to pass, and you’ve blown through one liver and need a new one, well, surely someone will break some rules for you, too.

No.

You lose your job, find out you need coverage for cancer-car-wreck-diabetes-your baby-can’t-breathe the next day?

You’re fucked. (Unless you pay into Cobra’s outrageous system. And when that runs out? Still fucked.)

You never had a job with health insurance?

Way fucked.

While i’m so very damn proud of my profession, i believe we cannot continue to go honorably on. Not when the real deal is that people are denied care every day because of situations they cannot control. Even if they could control them — they shouldn’t be denied.

There’s no Dr House or Grey’s Anatomy blowhard who is going to come down from on high to save you on your worst day, no matter how much TV you have viewed.

You’re one job away from losing it all, or going bankrupt to pay for it. Not only you, but your children, your parents, your neighbors. (All you people who are getting by on Medicare, get off my fucking lawn unless you see the irony in the care that you receive.)

We need a public option. We needed it yesterday. We sure as hell need it tomorrow.

Please, if there’s anyone you can talk to about this, do so. Get the word out. We are all in this together, honest to fucking god, as humans on this planet, as Americans, as people who at the very least should have the wisdom and self preservation to hope their nannies and dishwashers won’t have untreated TB.

Strange Horizons is an online magazine that publishes short stories, poetry, art, and articles. Part of their mission is to increase diversity in the publishing sphere, which includes getting work out there by women, people of color, and people on the LGBTQQI spectrum.

They’ve published The Angry Black Woman and they’ve published Nojojojo. They publish other kick-ass people who you should read, too.

Strange Horizons is in the middle of its annual fund drive so that it can continue offering excellent free fiction to the public. They’re struggling a bit this year — they’ve just reached $1,500 of their $7,000 goal. John Scalzi has stepped into the ring to offer matching donations up to $500 if you donate before midnight today.

I’ve thrown in $20. I hope you’ll consider donating, too, if you have the means. And whether or not you donate, I hope you enjoy the excellent, mind-bending fiction in their archives.

Link to the Strange Horizons fund drive.

Quite recently, something rather nasty happened to K. Tempest Bradford. On this blog, you know her as the angry black woman.

For various reasons, Harlan Ellison believed Tempest to have said some nasty things about her, so he wrote a publicly available letter which she discusses here. It contained the following paragraph (the “she” refers to Tempest):

She is apparently a Woman of Color (which REALLY makes me want to bee-atch-slap her, being the guy who discovered and encouraged one of the finest writers and Women of Color who ever lived, my friend, the recently-deceased Octavia Estelle Butler). And she plays that card endlessly, which is supposed to exorcise anyone suggesting she is a badmouth ignoramus, or even a NWA. Ooooh, did I say that?

Harlan later apologized to Tempest for this behavior, writing that:

Apparently, I received inadequate information, some of which I interpreted incorrectly, some of which was simply wrong.

Tempest accepted this apology. You can read his apology and her acceptance here.

I have no interest in dredging up the fight that caused these things to happen, and for all emotional intents and purposes the fight has been had and apologized for, and the apology accepted, said and done. However, this fight did happen in public, and I’m glad to see that the Carl Brandon society has written an open letter about it, outlining some guidelines that they hope science fiction and fantasy writers who are interested in opposing racism and sexism will bear in mind in the future.

The full text of the Carl Brandon society letter is here. Here’s an excerpt:

1) The use of racial slurs in public discourse is utterly unacceptable, whether as an insult, a provocation, or an attempt at humor. This includes both explicit use of slurs and referencing them via acronyms.

2) Any declaration of a marginalized identity in public is not a fit subject for mockery, contempt, or attack. Stating what, and who, you are is not “card playing.” It is a statement of pride. It is also a statement of fact that often must be made because it has bearing on discussions of race, gender, and social justice.

3) Expressing contempt for ongoing racial and gender discourse is unacceptable. Although particular discussions may become heated or unpleasant, discourse on racism and sexism is an essential part of antiracism and feminist activism and must be respected as such. There is no hard line between discourse and action in activism; contempt of the one too often leads to contempt of the whole.

I think these principles are abstractable to many contexts. Thanks to the Carl Brandon society for an intelligent response.

In the history of publishing, it hasn’t been uncommon for publishers to take books about black characters and white-wash them by depicting the characters on the covers as white. The example I was most familiar with as a kid was Dawn by Octavia Butler. On the cover of the old paperback my parents had, we see the events of the book depicted as a skinny, naked blonde white woman being sealed into some kind of pod. Of course, the main character of the book is a black woman named Lilith whose race and sex are pivotal to the way that the other characters interact with her.

Dawn was first published in 1987 (which I just looked up on Wikipedia; I’d thought the book was from the 70s). While there are always stories about how cover art misrepresents the contents of books — sometimes in blatantly racist or sexist ways — I’d thought that kind of blatant miscasting of black characters as white ones was over.

It’s true that publishers seem to believe that audiences won’t buy books with black people on the covers, especially when those books are YA. The grounding for these beliefs is tenuous — something which I’d heard before, but which is confirmed here by the author of the book, Justin Larbelestier, and discussed in comments by Tor editor, Patrick Neilsen Hayden. Publishers have used a number of techniques to avoid putting black people on the covers of their books. Books featuring black characters may show a silhoette on the cover, or an abstract painting, or some other kind of image that intentionally keeps the characters out of view. Of course this erasure is terribly problematic. But while it exists on the same spectrum of behaviors as replacing black characters with white images, the latter is so much more blatant and corrupt that I find it really shocking that Larbelestier’s publisher felt comfortable pulling these shenanigans.

Larbelestier has written in detail about what happened, and I recommend you take a look at it. Here are some excerpts.

On the difference between how the book is read in Australia (where it was published without a face on the cover, which Larbelestier says she prefers), and how it’s being read in the US:

No one in Australia has written to ask me if Micah is really black.

No one in Australia has said that they will not be buying Liar because “my teens would find the cover insulting.”

Both responses are heart breaking.

On the claim that books without black covers won’t sell:

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?

The notion that “black books” don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them4 Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”

On how white-washing in the publishing industry is peculiarly retrograde:

Are the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people? That’s not a very sustainable model if true. Certainly the music industry has found that to be the case. Walk into a music store, online or offline, and compare the number of black faces you see on the covers there as opposed to what you see in most book stores. Doesn’t seem to affect white people buying music. The music industry stopped insisting on white washing decades ago. Talented artists like Fats Domino no longer needs Pat Boone to cover genius songs like “Ain’t That a Shame” in order to break into the white hit parade. (And ain’t that song title ironic?)

And on actions that readers might consider taking to support work by, about, and showing people of color:

When was the last time you bought a book with a person of colour on the front cover or asked your library to order one for you? If you were upset by the US cover of Liar go buy one right now. I’d like to recommend Coe Booth’s Kendra which is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Waiting on my to be read pile is Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger, which has been strongly recommended to me by many people.

I’ll add some more recommendations. Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson, Fudoki by Kij Johnson, and the anthologiesSo Long, Been Dreaming edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Dark Matter edited by Sheree R. Thomas.

Myself, I just pre-ordered The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Kingdom) by N. K. Jemisin whose posts come to Alas through Angry Black Woman where she writes as Nojojojo (although I have to say that while the cover seems to be depicting a black woman, her face is in shadow and mostly hidden)*. I also ordered Racing the Dark by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

Bloomsbury: you’ve done something really contemptible. I hope you’ll republish the book with a better cover.

I’ll even buy it if you do.

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*In comments, Nojojojo points out that the face depicted on the cover represents a character without a specific race or sex. I apologize for my assumption. So, while purchasing her book doesn’t count as purchasing a book with a non-white character on the cover, I’m still looking forward to reading it when it comes out.

A number of people are discussing the art on the covers of one of (if not the) most successful remaining genre magazines, Realms of Fantasy.

K. Tempest Bradford contends that the covers show “plenty of boobs. Fish-girl boobs and nipple-less boobs and snake-woman boobs and boobs and more boobs.” Jim Hines adds that he’s “tired of my genre worshipping at the Altar of the Big Breasts.”

As often happens, this controversy gelled at a particular instant over a particular image, and there are a lot of behind-the-scenes politics about changes in the management at RoF. Without getting into all of that, I wanted to share some links to some websites that this discussion reminded me of. They provide some pretty compelling evidence about how men and women are portrayed differently in fantasy art.

First off, we start with some pages from a book about how to draw women and men in comics. There’s a lot of traditional sexism here. Check it out, just because some of it’s pretty facially ludicrous.

Then there’s the turn-around where an intelligent artist took the same images and showed how sexist they are by switching the sexes of the figures. It’s all pretty strange looking, since we don’t often see confidently over-muscled women, and arched-back pouting men. But it gets more remarkable toward the end, in the section on how to draw sexy poses. We’re so used to seeing women in those sexualized poses that they seem almost unremarkable and generic — but when we put a man in the same poses, it becomes really clear that no one ever really stands like that.

Finally, there are a bunch of scattered illustrations of male superheroes in poses that female superheroes are shown in all the time. These really show how silly the poses are in the first place.

Anyway, I thought all these links were really neat when I saw them in the first place. I was happy to be reminded of them, and I wanted to share. Enjoy!

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P.S. I said that I didn’t want to get into all the controversy about the specific RoF cover that has been the flashpoint for all this, but I do want to say — while the image is sexualized, there are some really nice things about it, including some very palpable textures, and an interesting color palette. I’m sure it must suck for the artist who painted that image to have it being discussed as the nadir of fantasy art and I really don’t think it is. The female is in a pose I find sexualized, and her breasts are large and gravity-defying, but compared to a lot of fantasy art and even past Realms of Fantasy covers, it’s a pretty unremarkable piece on the objectification front. That doesn’t mean that the piece can’t or shouldn’t be considered in the context of a large number of illustrations of naked women that contributes to a broader context of how women are represented in fantasy art, fantasy fiction, and art in general — but I do think it’s unfortunate (if inevitable) that this piece bears the brunt of the frustration just because of the particular moment when it was published. Despite the fact that I can criticize the art (hell, I can criticize anything), I would probably be pleased if that picture were an illustration of one of my stories, particularly if the story itself had sexual undertones.

Damn. A while ago, after reading on Questioning Transphobia about something that happened on Pam’s House Blend, I wrote a whole, lengthy post trying to say what TransGriot says so succinctly here:

Cisgender is a neutral term that doesn’t have the negative accumulated baggage of being used to ‘other’ or used as a rallying cry by the Forces of Intolerance to oppress someone’s human rights rights like trans has.

There are no people being made the butt of societal jokes because they are cisgender. There’s no ‘cisgender panic defense’. There’s no one being denied a job because they are cisgender. There’s no one being killed because of folks hating on you for being cisgender. There’s no Cisgender Day Of Remembrance.

I repeat, cisgender means your body and the gender identity housed between your ears is comfortably aligned, nothing more, nothing less.

Thanks, TransGriot.

Via Womanist Musings.

It also occurred to me that I should probably mention that I’m giving a reading at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco on July 23 at 7:30pm.

Here’s the event listing from Borderlands:

Clarion West reading with Amelia Beamer, Vylar Kaftan, Pat Murphy, Tim Pratt, and Rachel Swirsky, Thursday, July 23rd at 7:00 pm - In honor of 25 consecutive years of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, Borderlands Bookstore will be featuring a special Clarion West reading on July 23rd. Clarion West is a non-profit literary organization that administers the Clarion West Writers Workshop, an intensive six-week workshop for writers preparing for professional careers in science fiction and fantasy, held annually in Seattle, Washington, USA. The readers for this special event consist of former students of the workshop: Amelia Beamer, Vylar Kaftan, Pat Murphy, Tim Pratt, and Rachel Swirsky.

I haven’t personally encountered Amelia Beamer before, but Vylar Kaftan, Pat Murphy, and Tim Pratt are all amazing authors. Pat Murphy may be most famous for her story “Rachel in Love”. As for Tim Pratt and Vylar Kaftan, I can recommend work of theirs that I’ve published on PodCastle: Tim Pratt’s “Cup and Table” and Vylar Kaftan’s “Galatea”.

Hope to see some of you there!

Hey y’all,

I’m reading Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, and I find myself really wishing I had a group of people to talk about it with, so I figured maybe it would be possible to have a gathering where people could talk about it. I’m close enough to the LA area that it would be possible for me to go there for a meeting sometime in the future. What do people think? Might other LA-centered people be interested in reading the book and getting together to gab?

(We’d need to establish a place and date, but I thought it might be more useful to establish interest first!)

I wrote this a long time ago, but I never got around to posting it, which is why the articles it refers to are old. I think it’s still more or less relevant though.

The fellas and lasses over at Feminist Critics have a tag for issues called What Feminism Got Right. Well, here. This is something Feminist Critics (the site, not the general population that might be so titled) Got Right.

Dick jokes are awkward.

So, let’s start with a personal anecdote. When I was in college, I had an acquaintance who decided to try to commit suicide because of his penis size. Also, because I wouldn’t date him, and neither would my boyfriend. (He’d decided we were to Become Polyamorous on his say-so.) Also, although I didn’t know this at the time, because he had profound issues with paranoia, delusion, and depression, and tried to commit suicide about once a week, particularly if he could find a (usually several years younger) female to reassure him that no, he shouldn’t do it! He was smart and good and wonderful and unique and worthwhile! (For the record, I do think that he would have hurt himself if the women he trapped into spending their evenings reassuring him had failed to reassure him. Just because his attempts were manipulative and a plea for attention didn’t mean that they weren’t also genuine.)

But anyway. The first time I talked him down, the initiating trigger was that his penis was so much smaller than my boyfriend’s.

So, already there are mixed feelings. There’s pity for Manipulative Suicidal Dude (MSD?) because this angst over his penis size was obviously deeply felt, and very painful for him, enough so to trigger suicidal thoughts — even if a lot of things did.

Simultaneously, I have the same sense of WTF? about the whole situation that I had then. The overt reasoning for why the MSD was so upset about his theoretically small penis was that the small penis proved he was “less of a man” than my boyfriend. As evidence for this, he proffered the fact that I was dating boyfriend instead of MSD. Therefore, boyfriend’s bigger penis was better able to please me. Or something.

However, the whole theoretical centering of me as the issue — alas my small penis shall never please ye! — seems suspicious. For one thing, boyfriend’s penis was indeed big. And, consequently, it was often painful. I do not like big penises, not because of aesthetics or morality or anything, but out of simple preferring not to hurt.

But, of course, no one was asking me.

That doesn’t mean other women don’t like big penises, and I do remember conversations in college in which other girls would say, “OMG, I had a threesome with very-good-looking-blond-boy-on-our-hall, and he’s ENORMOUS!” or, with a cat-who-seized-cream smile, “I love my boyfriend’s (expletive expletive superlative indicating very large) penis.” I also remember that my shudder of oh dear god, how can you possibly like that, ow? was not totally unique to me.

So, we have here an issue in which the women’s opinions really aren’t being solicited. My “ow” was irrelevant to the point of being written out of the scenario in favor of my wholly imaginary (sorry, ex-boyfriend, but yeah) “ohhhhhh.”

The real meat, if you’ll excuse me, of this competition wasn’t heterosexual — with me involved — it was homosocial. It was between boyfriend and MSD. This was fairly overt. MSD, in pre-suicide-attempt complaints, said that he couldn’t stand to live because Boyfriend outdid him in all ways. He had a better car, bigger dick, and a girlfriend (namely me) — and why, there’s that pesky woman showing up again, but not as a person, as a reward object.

So, there’s an undeniable ugliness here. Dick-size contests, in my experience, have been primarily homosocial, with women and women’s experiences both used as an excuse and effectively ignored.

But that’s only one salient pole (cough) of analysis.

In a number of other ways, MSD’s insecurity about his penis seems, to me, to be a good parallel for some kinds of women’s body insecurities. For instance:

1) MSD’s penis, by the reported averages, wasn’t actually small. It was actually perfectly penisly average.

Now, partly MSD was here a victim of statistics. A lot of penis size studies used to be based on self-reporting. When given the chance to say where their penises were size X or size X+1, men proudly reported themselves as X+1, leading to studies that yielded an average of X+1 inches — which I believe for years was 6 — when in fact, the actual data-as-measured produced an accurate measure of X, or 5. So, the majority of dudes were mistakenly told they were genitally sub-average.

Let’s look at women’s dress sizes. The majority of women think they are too fat, and that their bodies are unacceptable. They aren’t victims of specific studies with incorrect methodologies, but of widespread and systemic cultural beliefs and portrayals of women which create a visual default of a size X, when the majority of women can be found at size X+8-10.

There’s also 2) It didn’t matter the least little bit that MSD’s penis wasn’t actually small. Nor did it matter that I (or other women) reassured MSD that, even had his penis been small, that was still fine, because we preferred that or didn’t care. Because the problem that MSD was experiencing had very little to do with actual bedroom antics with women. It had to do with self-perception based on unrealistic ideals and associated with concepts of masculinity as divorced from the actual performance of masculinity.

When I write that I prefer penises on the average-to-small side — which I do — I can’t help but think of all those so-helpful men who launch themselves into threads on women’s bodies to assure us lamenting lasses that “they think curves are hot” and “I’ve never seen the appeal of skinny bodies anyway.” The reaction to this is inevitably, and justifiably, grumpy. Thanks, we reply, but we don’t need you to stigmatize skinny ladies (or, in the parallel, large penises) on our behalf.

And besides, we point out, the problem isn’t whether or not we can find a dude who wants to fuck us. We’re married; we’re asexual; we’re involved; we’ve had more sex in the past week than you’ll have in the next ten years; we get enough ‘reassurance’ of our ’sexiness’ from strangers with roving hands on the subway. The problem is the social attitudes which malign our bodies as gross, which mean that our wages go down as our waistlines increase, which indicate we will be treated poorly by strangers in public places, and so on.

Although women’s anxiety over body image is often framed as being a woman’s desire to be (or be seen as) more attractive, that’s a red herring. If that were the case, if our problems were solely based on the need to have partners who are attracted to us, then our body image problems would vanish with the introduction of men who are attracted to us. I’m married; I don’t want to attract any more men; my body image issues persist, though thankfully my eating disorders don’t.

As woman gain weight, their femininity and worth is called into question. As men’s perception of their penis size declines, their masculinity and worth is called into question.

The problems are very different in scope, in the kinds of social consequences that exist, and in how publicly the insecurities are paraded. It seems unlikely that a poorly endowed man will suffer lowered wages, mistreatment in public spheres, and so on.

However, there’s a pain here that can be understood, via analogy, to be somewhat similar in its core.

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So, dick jokes.

Liberals’ use of dick jokes are premised on the idea that all liberals (all feminist liberals?) should theoretically understand that penis size — beyond extreme cases — is more or less irrelevant to sexual experience. We’ve all heard the stats about how the sex-sensitive nerves in a woman’s vagina can be more than adequately rubbed, prodded, and pleasured, by all but the most diminutive dicks. We all theoretically know that there are lots of ways that couples can sexually pleasure each other besides penis-in-vagina intercourse, and that there are grave problems with the elevation of the model of an enormous tree trunk thrusting into a delicate woman as if it were a battering ram.

So, to some extent, we’re saying: “Here, we all know that this isn’t something that matters. Isn’t this framework in which masculinity is based on cock size ridiculous? Yes, it is.”

However, we’re doing something else, as well. We’re tapping into the framework that penis size = masculinity.

There’s a cultural narrative that penis size is related to masculinity. With dick jokes, liberals are identifying people with an abusive, unhealthy, or anxious masculinity that leads them to do asshat-type things. They’re then making overt the connection between masculinity and penis size, and subverting that relationship by making the comments that would apply to the masculinity directly about the penis size. (Rather than saying, “You don’t need to be so anxious about your masculinity, dude. You’re a man no matter what you do,” we say, “You don’t need to worry that much about your dick, dude. It’s the way you use it that matters, not the size.”)

Both of these uses of dick jokes become unfunny when the joke moves from a theoretical framework to talking about an actual penis. In the first case, in which liberals are reassuring each other through humor that everyone knows dick size is irrelevant — well, you know, not everyone knows that. Or if they do *know* it, they don’t necessarily feel it. The cultural meme saying that a man is robbed of all masculinity if he has a small penis continues to have power even when one intellectually knows that it’s bunk.

In the second case, the joke works as long as it’s clear that what the liberal is targeting is not an actual penis, but an inflated sense of masculinity. The moment that an understanding of the poking at the framework disappears — that’s the moment when the joke starts to go flat, or look nasty, or both.

It’s absolutely vital to maintain the separation between mocking what a penis stands for, and mocking actual penises. I hope that liberals will, by now, accept that when you insult something as ‘gay’ or someone for being ‘fat’ you aren’t able to actually confine your meanness to just that person you’re targeting; you end up more generally aiming at all fat and gay people. If Rush Limbaugh, for instance, is mockable not just because he’s an asshat who extrudes pre-digested food products whenever he opens his mouth, but also because he’s tubby, then you’re saying that tubbiness is an objectively bad thing which can therefore also be used to malign people with whom you agree.

Now, it’s okay to mock fatphobic people for being fat, because they are trying to hurt other fat people while ignoring their own bodies. It’s okay to mock homophobic people for being gay when they try to use their influence to hurt other gay people.

And it’s pretty much okay to mock over-anxious masculinity by mocking penises, as long as you can make sure that your text never condenses the concept and the physicality. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to attain that level of precision in a humorous text. Combine that with the actual trauma that you can expect to have inevitably been experienced by some, probably young, guy in your reading audience, and you end up with a difficult situation.

So: dick jokes are sometimes okay, but difficult to pull off, and have the potential to trigger people.

I think liberals might be better advised to make fun of big penises when they want to lampoon the connection between anxious masculinity, and dicks. I find it both more amusing and less fraught when a liberal responds to some bloviating, hyper-masculine, stomping asshat with, “Yes, thank you, we all know your penis is enormous,” rather than suggesting the penis is small. It gets across all the same points about the silliness of the construction of American masculinity as something that can be easily lost, but it has less potential for triggering innocent bystanders.

And anyway, everyone’s penis is tiny compared to this.

Another progressive blogger and I have had a few discussions about how we don’t see the word “lame” as really a big deal. However, we both concluded, it wasn’t really our fight and the stakes weren’t as high for us as they are for disabled people. So, that’s fine — we decided we were willing to believe disabled people when they said the word hurt them, and stop using it on the blog, and try to stop using it in real life.

I think I’m starting to get it now, courtesy of reading this occasionally frustrating thread at Pandagon.

The Pandagon thread is a consideration of safe space, or lack thereof, and what kinds of language are legitimately policed (everyone seems to agree there should be no pejorative use of the n-word) and what kinds of language are not legitimately policed. It was really, really starting to bug me that there (and in another location where the issue had been discussed) everyone’s go-to example for hypersensitive use of language policing was the word “lame.”

“Ugh,” said the aforementioned fellow progressive blogger to me over IM when I pointed out this dynamic. “If people are going to make an example of what’s oversensitive PC policing, maybe they should gore one of our own particularly feminist oxes, rather than picking on the language sensitivities of a related but not identical out-group?”

(Yes, I just paraphrased the fuck out of fellow progressive blogger, herein called FPB for short, which is why hir dialogue suddenly started sounding like my academic writing.)

So I started in from that point. But people’s constant defenses of I! Should! Be! Able! To! Use! The! Word! Lame! kept coming thick, fast, and with ever-more-desperate indignation.

Some of it came from people who themselves identified as “lame,” and you know, I’m not going to pick on them. If they want to change the character of disability rights activism, then that’s something they certainly have the right to do, and if the consensus ever shifts, I’ll re-evaluate.

But a lot of the arguers weren’t themselves disabled people. They just really, really, really wanted to be able to use the word lame. It’s fun, after all. And colorful. And also ACCURATE!

It’s not okay to call a coward a pussy, or a bad thing gay, they argue, because there’s nothing bad about having a vagina or being homosexual. But there IS something bad about not being mobile! In fact, it’s no fun at all, just totally miserable. All other things held equal, isn’t it better to be not-lame than lame?

(Yep, I’m basically paraphrasing someone, but because these arguments are very prevalent, I don’t think it’s fair to either quote them directly or name them. My purpose here is not to shame an individual, but to describe and argue against a common attitude, even though this individual did happen to express it at a particular time that was meaningful to me.)

And you know? I think I’ve made those arguments before, though I tend to do that kind of reasoning things out in private rather than on blogs because of my beliefs about what allies should and shouldn’t do. (I do not think it is a productive ally action to complain about tiny details that the ally has no particular investment in.) Certainly, I’ve heard these arguments. Recently, I was moderating a discussion in person, and someone made the comment that “writers shouldn’t cripple themselves by…”

I caught another audience member’s wince.

“Excuse me,” I interjected, “Can you rephrase?”

The gentleman did. Later, I caught up with him at a party, and said, “Hey, thanks for taking that in stride.”

And he started to argue with me — “Well, you know, we should be able to use that metaphor, because it’s accurate, it’s not a good thing to be crippled and–”

I interrupted, “OK, but even if that’s true, we know that it’s hurting the feelings of people who are in the community. And we don’t want to do that. Right?”

He nodded. I smiled. I moved away.

But while that was the logic I was using for a long time — that it didn’t really matter what the logic behind seeing this as an insult was, or if I disagreed with that logic, I still shouldn’t be an ass by using words that a number of disability activists have made clear are hurtful and perceived as ableist — I think I get the deeper logic now. Finally.

Let’s start with that point from earlier that it DOES suck — in this society — not to have the same freedom of movement an abled person. (Although of course, here, we’re already starting in with ableist assumptions, because a big portion of the reason it sucks is because society is set up for people with bodies we consider normal.) OK, so let’s rephrase. Having functional legs is useful. Therefore, the state of having legs which are not as functional as other legs is not as nice as the state of having normally functional legs. (Again, there’s some ableism around the concept of normal, but moving on.)

But even accepting that impairment to mobility is itself a sucky thing, MAYBE DISABLED PEOPLE DO NOT APPRECIATE BEING THE CULTURAL GO-TO FOR THINGS THAT SUCK.

And maybe — since people have been historically all-too-willing to relieve disabled people of the burden of having to live through all that suckiness — just maybe disability activists know what the fuck they’re talking about when they say that the constant condensation of visible disability with “suckiness” as a metaphorical cultural touchstone has real, concrete, and evil ramifications on the lives of people with disabilities.

Just maybe.

I think I’m starting to get it.

Hello everyone!

I believe that Tempest has posted the write-a-thon to Alas previously, as syndication from the Angry Black Woman site, but I — too — am participating in the Clarion West 2009 write-a-thon.

The Clarion West Write-a-thon is a charity thing wherein people sponsor me to do marathon writing over the course of six weeks (at twenty hours a week), and then their sponsorships go to fund future science fiction and fantasy writers attending Clarion West. You can check out my Clarion West website here: clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/Rachel…

Why fund Clarion West? Well, for people who like fiction, this is a great way to get more of it. Clarion West is a training ground that helps writers get the finer points of publishing fiction. It’s also dedicated to helping more people from groups who haven’t always had access to the free time and training that writing requires — such as people of color, women, GLBTIQQ, and so on. The write-a-thon also helps fund scholarships for writers who don’t have the means to attend on their own — which is a big deal in terms of representation — since writing has often been for the leisure class.

Clarion West has also produced a very long list in the best writers working in science fiction and fantasy over the past thirty years — including my personal favorite, Octavia Butler.

When I attended Clarion West in 2005, Octavia Butler was one of my teachers. It was amazing to be in the same room with the woman who had written all the novels I loved, and won the MacArthur Genius Grant. She died the next winter, and I am forever grateful to have had the experience of learning from her.

Another incentive: the write-a-thon is fun, and you can make me do tricks!

The primary trick I’ll do is that if you donate $25 or more to the write-a-thon in my name ($4 a week, or $25 total), I’ll send you a pair of hand-made earrings. I make darn fine earrings. I’ll even take requests about what kinds of earrings you want. The earrings may well include semi-precious stones. You can give them away as gifts, or torture your cat with them.

There are lots of other writers involved, too, so if you’d rather sponsor someone other than me, check out: clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/2009

This cartoon talks about the perils of even trying to tell stories about the work that people do, at great risk to themselves, to help women achieve reproductive justice. Via silk_noir.

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And this one — which is much more uplifting, and which I have now watched three times — is a video of a number of GLBTQQI (and allies?) teenagers lipsynching to Lily Allen’s “Fuck You Very Much” as a response to prop h8 being upheld. I particularly enjoy the use of phallic popsicles to create imagery that can be used as a weapon against bigots. Via ktsparrow.

UPDATE: Watching this second video a fourth and fifth times, it really grinds home to me how much the people in this video are the kind of people I consider “my people.” It’s beyond me how anyone can look at such joyful profusion, so much color and joy in the way they dress and act and exist, and see something threatening or disgusting.

Yet I know they do. When I was a teenager, my presentation — though abnormal for teenagers — was never enough to unsettle adults. In fact, I probably dressed in a more adult-friendly way than most teens. Long skirts, pseudo-professional clothes, often bizarrely formal for a high school student. But my friends didn’t.

There was one girl I spent a lot of time with. A pixie-like joy of a person, Dawna, who wore her blonde hair almost totally shaved, and strung chains on her jeans. People who saw her knew there was something unusual about her. They didn’t take joy in her oddness, in her willingness to sing in the middle of the street, in her humor, in her desire to leave strange and beautiful things in public places for strangers to find and puzzle over. They shouted “dyke!” at her from car windows; they deployed store guards to follow her around; they sneered and snarled.

When I was 17 and Dawna was 15, she went out with me and started acting very strange. “Is she on meth or something?” a friend of mine asked. I said, “I’m sure she isn’t” — but I was wrong. She was on meth. She called me that night, crying. She’d been taking a lot of drugs for a long time — to try to deal with the pain of her isolation, the pain of how people pricked and pained her, and othered her, and told her she was nothing.

I told her I’d help. I arranged for her to be transferred to my high school and set her up with the teachers who’d been best for me. Nothing worked; the teachers who were more than happy to deal with my casual attitude toward authority had no tools in their kits to handle a girl who was too depressed to go to class. I’d thought they would recognize in her, as they had in me, independence and intelligence. I suppose they did. But even if they wanted to, there was nothing they could do.

I always worried Dawna would die. I thought she would overdose or commit suicide. When I read a few years ago that she was dead, and the obituary hinted at a cause of death that couldn’t be announced to potentially scandalized ears, I knew I was right.

She was twenty-two.

Dawna lived twenty-two years in the toxic hatred of our homophobic, gender policing, joy-killing world. And then it murdered her.

When people stand with bigots to say that gay marriage is an evil to society — when they agree gay people should be excluded on the basis of their sexuality — when they doubt gay people’s goodness or morality — they contribute to the deaths of people like Dawna. Yes, I do mean you, individual Alas commenter who may be a good person in other ways. You participate in a culture that kills people like my friend, and “fuck you very much” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I hope that someday people will realize what they’re doing when they vote and act hatred. In the meantime, I can only be glad that there are still colorful, inspiring, joyous, unique people in the world, and try to give those people my love and support.