A few months ago now, I made a trip to my local Half-Price Books and found one of my favorite re-reads in a shiny new paperback. Oh, the joy of finding an out-of-print book for a reasonable cost! Oh, the glee of having a fresh copy for the loaner shelf! (I passionately adore a bunch of 1980s science fiction that isn't widely available, and often thrust it on people.) I snapped it up.

When I got home, I commented on Twitter that I'd found the book, and @-checked the author, who I thought might be pleased by my delight. It's nice when someone reads something I realized a while ago, and my clock only goes back 2009 (unless you have some of the ElfQuest 'zines I did in high school). The author, someone I have adored since middle school, responded.

"Trigger warning: dangerous ideas."

I sat there for a little while, stunned.

I am simultaneously very sensitive and very thick-skinned. Most of the people I know are. There are things that lance right past my armor and knock me on my ass, and then there are things that I can take for a long time. In the third category are the things I just need to be warned about, so I can choose whether I'm in the mood to deal with them. But here's the thing:

Most stories come with their own trigger warnings. They just aren't called out blatantly as such.

When I pick up a Jack Ketchum book, there will be language on the back about "horrible things" and "terrible crimes" and other coded comments that don't come right out and say "this book has rape in it," but which absolutely say that to someone who has been reading in the genre for a little while. And when I was getting started in the horror genre, I was largely operating on recommendations from friends and librarians--people who would say, when they handed me something, "this may be disturbing." They called out the things that might make the book difficult to read.

Movies are rated. PG, PG-13, R. I've seen a screenshot of a Facebook post going around recently, with a mother saying they had to leave Deadpool with their nine year old, and "why don't we have a labeling system?" Well, we do. It's called "this movie had an R rating." But R-rated movies get edited for television, and we don't think about that when we ask ourselves whether Little Bee enjoyed that film. "Oh, they've seen _________, and it was rated R, so they're ready for Deadpool." Movies get rated R for different reasons. Maybe it's language, maybe it's sex, maybe it's violence. When I was a kid, I tended to just tune out sex: you could take me to a lot of movies rated R for sexy innuendo and mild nudity, and I'd just be bored. But violence could still scare me.

(Note that this is "rated R," not "rated XXX." The fact that I saw a lot of boobies as a kid does not mean I was ready for a bunch of actual porn.)

Video games are rated. T for Teen, M for Mature. Yet everyone I know who works at a video game store has had the angry parent demanding to know why their kids have violent video games. Be...cause...someone didn't want to look at the ratings? Which are also, in some ways, the trigger warnings? Look at what's listed after a rating: those are the triggers. Maybe they're not intended for the person actually consuming the media, but once they're there, they're for everybody. I know people who only play T games, because they got tired of the casual misogyny and violence of M games. Why is that bad?

In the case of books, you're less likely to have a direct rating or label (although Angry Robot does a decent job). At the same time, if the back cover text is halfway decent, you should know what you're getting into. And yes, I am angry when a book promises me one thing and gives me something else. It's not a fun surprise, especially when the "something else" is a nice big bucket of rape and murder.

People who say they want trigger warnings are not necessarily asking to be coddled. They're asking for warning. They're asking for the courtesy that good fanfic writers afford to their readers. They're asking to be allowed to relax into the story. But saying "trigger warning: dangerous ideas" doesn't help anyone. My not wanting to read romanticized, eroticized rape in the middle of my zombie fiction doesn't mean I don't want to read exciting, complex, interesting books; saying that your book is just as triggering as something about child abuse or rape or graphic animal death does a disservice to both your work and your readers.

It can go too far: anything can go too far. I met a reader who told me that they refuse to read any books which include descriptions of food that they are allergic to, and that there should be food trigger warnings (I'm still not sure whether they were trolling me, but they seemed serious). If my book is called Spider Attack, I shouldn't need to warn people about the spiders. But common sense still gets to come to the party.

I have rarely felt so dismissed or talked down to by an author I admired, especially since I had not said or done anything to indicate that I was seeking a trigger warning; I had actually referenced reading the book before. It was a failure of kindness.

We have got to be kinder.

Welcome to the forty-ninth essay in my fifty-essay series on the art, craft, business, and occasional weirdness that is writing. All fifty of the essays in this series are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which means I only have two more essays to go. Almost there! Our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #49: Leave Reviewers Alone.

And now, because context is king, our expanded thought:

Try not to argue with reviewers in public places. It makes you look petty and it makes them feel attacked, and that's going to start a vicious spiral leading all the way down into the deepest, darkest depths of Hell. Feel free to whine at your friends if that makes you feel better, but don't make public scenes, and don't make huffy comments where other people are going to find them. Also, if everyone who's known to be a friend of yours starts attacking the reviewer? People are maybe gonna catch on. Play nice.

This one isn't very complicated on the surface: reviews are for readers. Now, most of us are readers. Sometimes, reviews are for us. When are the reviews not for us? When they're reviews of our books, or of books written by our friends. When those reviews come to the party, we're not invited. And sure, it can seem like we're invited, especially when those reviews are posted publicly on the internet; after all, it wouldn't be public if everyone wasn't allowed to comment, right?

Wrong. Today we're going to be talking about reviews, why they're not for us, and why you don't want to know what happens when you engage.

Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on reviews.Collapse )

So I was just a featured faculty member at the Pike's Peak Writer's Conference (where there was no air). I delivered the Sunday keynote speech. I got a standing ovation, which was pretty awesome. Anyway, here it is for you to read.

Thank you.

( Cut-tagged because speeches are long.Collapse )

So I have just finished my guest editor slot with Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, the latest special issue from Lightspeed Magazine. It's a follow-up to last year's Women Destroy Science Fiction!, and I am so excited for all of you to read it. So very, very excited.

I am going to have a longer post about the experience of editing and the things I observed (with no "and then this person did this thing," because that is not helpful), but this is a distinct thing, and so I wanted to talk about it first, in isolation. And here it is:

The other night I was out at dinner with a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends, which meant that some of the people there didn't know who I was. Arley, who was one of my editorial assistants on the issue, was there, and he and I started chatting a little about QDSF. At which point someone else at the table, who didn't realize I had been the editor, said, "Oh, I was told not to bother submitting unless I knew the editor."

Someone told her, straight up, that she would not make it into the issue if she didn't know the editor—which is to say, me—personally.

Um.

I did not burst into tears or throw a chair, but I thought of both things. I thought it loudly enough that any local telepaths were probably frightened.

There are eleven stories in this special issue, selected from more than four hundred submissions. Of those eleven, two were solicited, because you need "marquee names" before you can expect people to support a Kickstarter. One, Amal, was (and is) a friend of mine. The other, John, is someone I know in passing and am professionally friendly toward, but he's not a friend. Of the remaining nine stories, one was written by a friend of mine. Before I was willing to accept it, I asked both my editorial assistants and one slush reader to read it, to make sure that I was not unduly favoring someone with whom I had a social relationship. The other eight stories were by people I don't know. People I've never met. Some were by people who have never had a sale before. I was able to help people accomplish their first sales, and that's something that I'm really, really proud of.

John Joseph Adams, who is the publisher and editor of Lightspeed, knows me. He considers me, so far as I know, a friend. He buys my shit all the time. You know why? Because it's good, and because my name sells magazines. Not because he is my friend. When he first started buying my shit, it didn't necessarily sell magazines, but it was good (she said, modestly). He has refused to buy some of my shit. Why? Because it was not good enough, or because it didn't fit the guidelines, or because he needed something different to fill that space. Because despite being my friend, he is also a professional.

No one got into Queers Destroy Science Fiction! with a story that was not good, or did not fit the guidelines, just because they were my friend. No one got in just because they were my friend, period. Because I am a professional, and I wanted to put together the best issue possible. That was my job.

Telling people "oh, you've got to know the editor" is completely counter to the purpose of the Destroy projects, which are all about throwing the doors open and encouraging the underrepresented group in the title (first women, now QUILTBAG individuals) to come in, since so often it's felt like the door said "keep out." That would be completely undermined by a policy that required the writer to know the editor in order to make a sale. That sort of policy would break my heart, and would definitely have kept me from accepting the position.

The submissions periods for Queers Destroy Horror! will end May 1st; the submissions period for Queers Destroy Fantasy! will open May 1st. Both will be edited by professionals (Wendy Wagner for QDH; Christopher Barzak for QDF). Anyone who makes it into those issues will be there because they wrote good stories that fit the needs of the issue, not because they have an "in." There is no one with a secret "in."

I can't help but be somewhat hurt by the idea that writers may have thought this was the case, or have been telling people that it was. I've been struggling to think of what I could have done to give this impression, and I've come up with nothing. I can promise you that the doors were wide open for QDSF, and that anyone queer-identifying was welcome. The same is true for QDH and QDF. If you fall within the QUILTBAG and you have a story for them to consider, please submit. Do it whether you know anyone at the magazine or not.

We need your stories.

Thomas met us at the door last night, tail puffed out, already singing the song of his people. Alice shunned me for about an hour, skittering from room to room, refusing to let me look her in the eye. When she settled, she announced it by crawling on top of me and purring for an hour solid, making it impossible to sleep.

Home.

I always think, when I'm traveling, that I'll come in the door and be stunned by how much stuff I have amassed. "I'm finally going to see the mess for what it is, and be able to get rid of half of it with no regrets," I think, and then I get into my room, and crawl into the mass of plush toys that is my bed, like a Pokemon into long grass, and I remember that this is why I have so much stuff: because it defines the borders of my space. It claims the space in a way that is very precious to me. It's not careless clutter. It's careful assertion of my right to exist, safely, in this space.

Home.

I am so tired that I can feel my bones, and I'm working my way through a dozen slow to-do lists, some of them time-sensitive, others that just need to be accomplished. I am where I belong, at least for a little while, at least until I have to leave again.

Home.

There's no place I'd rather be.

Welcome to the forty-eighth essay in my fifty-essay series on the art, craft, business, and occasional weirdness that is writing. All fifty of the essays in this series are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which means I only have two more essays to go. Almost there! Our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #48: Step Away From the Pen.

And now, because context is king, our expanded thought:

If you find yourself critiquing the comma placement in published novels, it is maybe time to step away from the editing process for a little while.

Most of us became writers because we were readers. People who hate books don't devote their lives to writing them, any more than people who hate happiness go to work at Disneyland, or people who hate sugar decide to open wedding cake bakeries. We are drawn to do what we love. One of the dangerous consequences of this, however, is that sometimes this will begin to erode the love that brought us here in the first place. What are we supposed to do when our critical eye for our own work starts spilling over onto everything else?

Today we're going to be talking about turning off the editorial mind, why it can never happen completely, and why a little critical thought is good.

Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on doing the hard stuff.Collapse )

If you are a creative professional, it is a sad reality that self-promotion is a part of your job. Maybe that wasn't always true; maybe there was a time when you could emerge from your creative chambers, hand your latest piece of deathless art to your agent, and then retreat back into your office fastness to keep creating. But alas, we do not live in that possibly mythic world, and if you work in the arts, at all, you need to be willing to sell yourself to whatever degree, and in whatever manner, you are comfortable.

Maybe it's social media updates. Maybe it's occasional blog posts. Maybe it's setting up a mailing list. There are a lot of ways to do self-promotion, and since I consider sincerity to be the most important thing of all, there's really no wrong way. As long as you're comfortable and happy and not drowning in your update links, you're probably okay.

But here's the thing. There is a line between "self-promotion" and "spam," and while that line is usually pretty visible, it's also easy to cross, even without intending to. I schedule Current Projects posts; make Inchworm Girl posts once a week at max; and try to do sales announcements and convention announcements when it will have the greatest impact. It is thus possible—not likely, but possible—that all three of these things could happen on the same day. That would seem a little spammy, and take away from all three. It would also still be confined to my space, which you can read at your leisure, if you read it at all.

The same goes for Twitter. On and around book release day, I get very "OMG BOOK" for about, oh, 80% of my Tweets. I lose a few followers every time I have a book come out, since the rest of the time, my Twitter is very much "here are pictures of my cats and snarky comments about my doll collection." (Most of those followers come back again about a week later, when the book stuff dies down.) And that's fine! I am shouting and running around within my own space, they aren't interested, they go to the corner store for some milk and bread and come back when things are back to normal. This is all totally awesome.

The trouble, for me, comes when self-promotion begins going into other peoples' spaces without being invited. An example:

Last week I tweeted about how my sister is a nervous flier. Within twenty minutes I had received an unsolicited tweet from a retired commercial pilot who does not normally follow me, with a link to his book on calming fears of flying. Now, this may seem like he's just being helpful, but again, he does not follow me, and I did not ask for advice. This is a stranger who clearly has some standard searches coming across my comment and deciding that he can use it to profit.

I told him that what he was doing was spamming, and he asked why I was making such a fuss. The reason is simple: because he came into my space, without my asking him to, and tried to sell me something I had not asked for. He was spamming.

Something I see with much more frequency, although also on Twitter (and, in a modified form, on Facebook), is people @-checking random groups of authors/fans/whatever with "Hey, think about it, Soviet steampunk [link to book]." Again, this is not encouraging me to buy your book, or even to look at it. This is spamming.

It's different when you're doing it in your own space, or when you've been solicited. If I Tweet "What should I be reading?" and you give me a link to your awesome Shakespearean detective erotica, we're all good. If I click over to your feed and it's two-thirds self-promo, that's cool too. But once you come into my space, you'd best be sure you were invited. By the same token, if I'm coming into your space, I'd best be sure that I was invited.

Anything else is likely to turn my serious message into a piece of unwanted lunch meat.

Happy Halloween, everybody, and Happy New Year's Eve to those of you who share my particular calendar. May the Great Pumpkin smile upon you tonight, bringing you candles which burn brightly, candy that never goes stale, corn mazes as complicated as the twisting choices of the heart, and costumes that are inventive, interesting, and warm enough to keep you comfortable through all the long, dark hours of the evening.

I measure my life from Halloween to Halloween, instead of in candle-ends and coffee spoons. It's odd, but it works for me, and it's been one hell of a year, hasn't it? I left my day job (and still have no regrets; the tighter finances are more than balanced by the fact that I can finally sleep, I can finally be productive; it's amazing). I roved through Europe, eating all the cheese that I could get my hands on (and losing twenty pounds in the process, all hail the lack of high-fructose corn syrup in European breads and deli meats). I announced several awesome projects, and pursued several more.

I buried some beloved friends. I don't know that I'll ever stop wanting to call them, or reach for them. Lilly has joined the legion of cats that I try to cuddle in the middle of the night, when my dreams turn melancholy. Human or animal, I wasn't ready to let any of them go. Yes, death is a part of life, but that doesn't make it hurt any less.

I hope that all of you out there are ready to have a happy Halloween, full of all the thrills, chills, spooks and spills that you desire. I hope that you've had a glorious year, and are looking forward to a wonderful holiday season. Most of all, I hope that you're well.

Thank you for sharing this past year with me.

As of today, it has been six months since I quit my day job to become a full-time writer.

In those six months, I have traveled all over the country; I have seen and spent time with friends I hadn't really spent time with in years; I have finished writing multiple books; I have made word count more days than not; and I have slept. I have actually slept. It's hard to make people understand how important that is. I really had not been sleeping for several years. Slow sleep insomnia + things I had to do in the evening if they were ever going to happen + a 5am alarm all combined to = half my sick days were literally "I have pushed myself to the point where my body will not allow me to get out of bed." And now I am sleeping.

In the past six months, I have been seriously ill once, and that was a twelve-hour stomach bug that came on like a wrecking ball, and had me throwing up so hard and so consistently that I actually pulled muscles on both sides of my ribs. That may not sound like a good thing, but it was the sort of illness that fells whom it will, and doesn't care about your overall health. It wasn't brought on my exhaustion. Prior to quitting my job, I was literally coming down with a cold, flu, or other illness once a month. I am no longer losing my health to exhaustion.

I have to be a little more fiscally careful now, just because my income isn't as certain. I have to learn not to overcommit myself (I traveled a wee bit too much in the first part of the year, just out of the joy of freedom). I need to get better about finding anthologies, rather than waiting for them to come to me every single time, just to keep my finances moving in the right direction. But.

I am not sorry.

This was the smartest choice I ever made.

I can sleep, and that is worth everything that is more complicated than it used to be.

It's no secret that I spend a lot of time thinking about fanfic. (And those links are just "fanfic as a general concept"; they don't touch on my frequent crankiness about the concept of the Mary Sue, or connect to any of my actual fanfic.) I think fanfic is a hugely important part of the way we interact with stories as a society, and that it's really so much older than anyone wants to admit. Remember that Shakespeare was, in many ways, writing fanfic. Remember that the Brothers Grimm changed the stories they collected to better suit themselves, which is part of the definition of fanfic. It's an ancient tradition, and it goes back to the first time someone told a story they'd heard about a friend, but modified it to be a little bit more interesting.

I am not saying that everyone in the world needs to write, read, or adore fanfic. For one thing, I don't think there's any truly universal "everybody has to do this" experience, except for maybe peeing. Everybody pees, right? For the purposes of this essay, everybody pees. (If you do not pee, please don't tell me.) So no, if you're not into writing fanfic, I am not judging you. I am not saying you're not awesome. If you're not into reading fanfic...I think there's a very good chance your definition is too narrow. Shakespeare, as I have said, wrote fanfic. Virgil. Bridget Jones's Diary and Wicked are both alternate universe, or "AU," fanfic of other people's properties. 10 Things I Hate About You and Easy A, also basically fanfic. Any company or studio-owned property where the original author is no longer in charge? Kinda fanfic, on a lot of levels.

You do not have to read Harry/Draco romantic coffee shop Little Mermaid AUs to be reading fanfic. Fanfic is everywhere. The fact that some of it is based on things that have slipped into the public domain does not make it any less fanfic: it just makes it fanfic that can be sold for a profit.

In recent discussions of fanfic, I've seen several people say things along the lines of "but all fanfic is about sex" and "it's not okay when people write relationships that don't exist in the canon." (Neither of these is an exact quote: I am paraphrasing from multiple sources, in part because I'm not trying to call anyone out in specific, and in part because these are sentiments that I've seen repeated on almost every discussion of fanfic. I think that it's something we need to talk about.

First up, "all fanfic is about sex."

This is patently untrue. A huge amount of fanfic is about things other than sex. I read a novel's-worth of fanfic every week or so, and I very rarely read explicit sex unless it happens in the context of a long, long story about other things. Most of my favorite fanfic would not be rated above an "R." Much of it wouldn't get above "PG-13." But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that 50% of fanfic is purely about the sex. 50% of fanfic, however well or poorly written, is only there for bangin', clangin', and bringing down the house. Okay.

And?

Erotica is a big deal. Porn is a big deal. There's a huge amount of it out there, and there's a whole industry dedicated to making porn parodies of popular properties. XXX-Men and the Anal Avengers and Wet Dream on Elm Street, these are all things that exist. They're basically thinly veiled visual fanfic, much of which is incredibly male-gazey and heteronormative and gives us the superficials ("A dude dressed like Giles is going down on a chick dressed like Willow in the latest installment of Muffy the Trouser Slayer!") without giving us the things that draw us to the property in the first place. "Porn with plot" is a huge fanfic category because people want to write some fun erotica, but want it to actually be about characters, not cheap cosplay with enormous primary and secondary sexual organs.

Some of the pairings fanfic authors pursue will make some people uncomfortable. I used to be heavily involved with Supernatural fandom, and I hated the most popular pairing, which put two brothers together in sexual situations. But the nice thing about fanfic is that responsible fanfic authors will tag their smut. So if I clicked a link for a piece of fic and saw "M/M, Sam/Dean, Incest, NC-17" as the tags, I knew that I needed to nope on out of there. The authors, who hurt no one, got to have their fun; their readers, who hurt no one, got to read some awesome smut; I went and found stories about Dean and Jo being awesome, often in a fully platonic way. Not everything is for everyone.

But okay: some people don't want to read about non-canonical sex. That's cool. Just don't click that link, and you'll be safe from all the porn. Porn cannot in fact follow you home.

Note: I am not saying that you need to start reading fanfic porn. No one is required to read anything, unless they're taking a class. (If you do not want to read fanfic porn, avoid courses titled "Tranformative Erotica in the Copyright Age.") But using "there is porn" as a way to shut down all fanfic is reductive and unnecessary, and what it shows is not a clean-minded commitment to the canon; it's a refusal to consider that there could be depth and meaning to something that is hugely important in a whole lot of lives.

Secondly, we have "it's not okay when people write relationships that don't exist in the canon."

I want to tell you two very important things that it took me a long time to realize. The first is that if you're talking about something like a TV show or a comic book or a movie, the odds are very good that those characters, and that canon, were created by committee. You will have multiple people putting words into the same mouths, and while there's generally an effort made to keep characterization relatively straightforward, at the end of the day, each of the real people will have a different version of that fictional character in their heads. Take, for example, Usagi Tsukino, better known by most people as "Sailor Moon."

Usagi's role on the show is to love. It is to be a soldier of love, a warrior of love, someone who will die for love. She is love all-encompassing, love without limits. Yeah, she's a little immature sometimes, but that's okay, because she loves you.

My friend Nikki is doing an end-to-end rewatch of Sailor Moon. In a recent episode, there was a scene where Usagi, upon being presented a love letter from a girl, said "I'm taken," which is totally great and good, and then "But you should fall in love with a boy, it's way better" (paraphrase). Um, what? This is a girl who has died and been reborn for love, who is in awe of the relationship between two female friends, and who has never said anything like this before. It's just a little dagger of heteronormativity coming unexpectedly from the mouth of the living avatar of love. (Nikki points out that Usagi did say something similar once, about a hundred episodes earlier, before she really got to know Haruka and Michiru, and that both times, it was done purely for comedic effect. So take that as you will.)

It's canon. She said it on the show. But it's not a thing my Usagi would ever say, and it may not be a thing that Naoko Takeuchi's Usagi would ever say. Naoko Takeuchi created the franchise. She did not write that episode. Do you see where I'm going with this? It is entirely possible to have things in the canon that contradict the character as it was intended.

The second is that creators can be wrong. I have written scenes in various books and stories that were pointed to by my beta readers (thankfully) as being incorrect. Sylvester wouldn't say that; the Luidaeg wouldn't do that. Because I have good betas, I can fix those things, but there's always the chance that someday I will go entirely off the rails. I will kill a character because I am mad at a real person who loves the fictional person I have created. I will write a final chapter before I actually begin the series, and refuse to revise it. I will do something that makes my most loyal readers go "whoa, fuck, back it up babe."

Some of them will back it up with fanfic.

Note that this only addresses creator failure. With shows and movies, there's real life to be considered as well. I know a lot of Glee fanfic authors who have gone fully AU following the deal of Cory Monteith, who played the romantic lead. They don't want to continue the series without him, and I can't blame them at all.

Now that I have told you these two very important things, and their sub-things, here is another thing: who cares?

When I watched Kim Possible, I always expected Kim to wind up with Shego, not Ron. I believed that Myka and H.G. were meant to be (I still do). I looked at Parker and Hardison and Elliot and saw a family unit that was never going to give a damn about who was sleeping with who (although Elliot would probably tell you that Hardison had a very distinctive snore, while sleeping with Parker was like sleeping with an abnormally large housecat that hogged the pillows). In the first, it was a cartoon; never going to happen. In the second, I'm not sure why the writers made the choice they did. In the third, I got my wish. But if I hadn't, the way I viewed the show would have remained entirely valid.

I get checking out when someone is writing a pairing that doesn't work for you. My dislike of Sam/Dean in Supernatural has less to do with them being brothers than it does to do with the fact that I just can't buy them as a couple. But sometimes couples have surprised me. I just finished reading an epic-length Harry Potter fic where Neville/Padma was a primary pairing, and I would never have expected it to be awesome, and it was awesome. There is room for beauty outside the canon, especially when the canon is the work of many hands.

Especially with older fandoms, or with pairings that involve a lead character, straight is an assumed default. Well, statistically, that's not right. One in ten. So that's one Ensign, one Companion, one whatever in ten, minimum, who shouldn't be straight. When I'm writing fic about a show that didn't give me the representation I needed, what's wrong with wanting to see it? (Before the inevitable question: the reason writing Buffy/Faith is applauded, and Tara/Xander is likely to get you a frowny face, is that same issue of representation. One in ten. Currently, we have less than one in fifty on a canonical level. Taking it away because you want to show that it's an equal playing field is not creating an equal playing field. It's being a jerk. Unless that is the only story you want to write, please, consider the numbers, and don't.)

I'm not expecting to convince anyone who's already decided fanfic is awful that they should give it another try; some ships have sailed. But I am asking that you consider the arguments you hear about it, and consider why they might be flawed. There's nothing wrong with writing a little smut. There's nothing wrong with having your own view of the canon, especially when that canon goes on for more than a single book. And there's nothing wrong with seeking representation where there isn't enough.

These are all reasons that fanfic is glorious, and that I am so, so glad to be a part of the fic community. I always will be.

People ask me "well, did you have fun?" a lot. After conventions, after signings, after anything that would have involved me appearing in a professional capacity. I generally smile and say I had a very nice time, but that's not always enough. Some people want to know, for sure and for certain, that I had fun. That I am riding my giddy inner parade float off to Candy Mountain, land of sweet sugary joyness, and not counting the minutes until I can take off my shoes and stop trying to interact with humans.

This is difficult for me.

Here is what I do for fun at a convention: I cruise the dealer's room, sometimes for hours, looking at things I have no intention of buying, spending too much money at the same time. I go back to my hotel room and eat M&Ms while watching cartoons on whatever kid-oriented channel the hotel includes as part of its cable package. Sometimes, when I have a few hours of downtime, I attend a concert or get someone to drive me to the nearest Target, where I buy cranberry juice and Diet Dr Pepper and more M&Ms.

Here is what I do not do for fun: everything else.

I love being a guest at conventions. It's one of my natural environments. I grew up at cons, I'm good at cons, I always have a nice time. I always have a good time. Even at the con where I had an allergic reaction so severe that I spent literally three hours in my hotel room huddled around the toilet bowl and crying, I had a good time. But I don't have much fun. Fun is not the reason I am there. Like the girls on reality shows who aren't there to make friends, I am not there to enjoy myself: I'm there to work.

When I am a guest at a con, I am there to help you have fun. I'm there to listen and speak and sign and sometimes give hugs. I'm there to hand out ribbons and admire tattoos and do whatever is asked of me, because I'm working. I am at work. My job is awesome and enjoyable and I am so, so lucky to have it; sometimes I can't believe how lucky I am to have it. I wouldn't change it for anything. But every time I do something I consider "fun" (latest example: chasing lizards around the rocks at Disneyland), I am reminded that no, I am not at conventions to have fun. And that's a good thing.

I am making more fun for you.

Stephen King is my favorite author.

He has been since I was nine years old and first convinced my mother that I should be allowed to read him openly, not under beds and in back corners of the library. I have devoured everything I've ever been able to get my hands on, including the introductions he writes for his short stories (introductions that went a long way toward convincing me that short stories were an art form that should never be neglected). One of my favorite stories, "Home Delivery," was written for an anthology called Book of the Dead—an anthology of ZOMBIE STORIES. A whole book of nothing but ZOMBIE STORIES.

To my pre-teen mind, this was the ultimate of delicacies, the dessert to end all desserts. I already adored zombies in all their forms, and the idea of a whole book about nothing but zombies was just...well, it was staggering. But alas, for all that I had won the day on the topic of King himself, I had not yet convinced my family to buy me horror anthologies, and Book of the Dead passed outside my reach forever.

Or so I thought. I was rummaging through the books on the free book table at this most recent Boskone (and did I mention that my NESFA Press book, Letters to the Pumpkin King, is available now as both a hardcover and a gorgeous signed, slipcased edition?) when a copy of Book of the Dead literally fell into my hand. Oh happy day!

It's taken me a month to read my long-awaited treasure. Not because I was savoring it: because that was how long it took me to fight my way through. What a difference a quarter of a century makes.

The table of contents for Book of the Dead is made up entirely of male names. Some of them are unfamiliar to me; it's possible that there's a woman writing under a male pseudonym lurking somewhere in that list, camouflaged and content. But since they're all male names, and this was an invite-only anthology, I think it's reasonably safe to say that the first zombie anthology was very much a boys' club.

Most, if not all, of the stories in this book were written specifically for this book. When King talks about "Home Delivery" (I think in Nightmares and Dreamscapes), he indicates that there were questions about how much flexibility the modern zombie really had. Each of these authors really worked to find a unique take. And that unique take is so overwhelmingly straight, white, and male that it's actually jarring. Multiple stories—as in, more than one—focus on the plot of "try to rape a woman, zombies will eat you." Like, that is the core moral of the story. "Rape = zombies." It'd be sort of neat if it worked that way in the real world, but...

Of the stories in this book, two have female leads; one of the female leads is Chinese-American (she's also one of the only characters who shares POV with more than two other people). There are more rape stories than stories involving women with agency. (Interestingly, one of the two female leads, who is also one of the women with agency, was written by Stephen King.) There's one story about a little girl that made me uncomfortable in that "this book would have been taken away from me, and rightly, when I was twelve" sort of way, and I was reading Clive Barker at that age.

It may sound like I'm being overly harsh on this book, and in some ways, I am. It's a very simplistic, borderline sexist view of the zombie apocalypse, and for all the "unique takes" it contains, most of them didn't seem to work too hard to show us anything different that wasn't "oh boy oh boy I can get away with showing naked dead people." And at the same time...

This is where we started. These people weren't writing Yet Another Zombie _______ Story, they were writing, in many cases, the first story of its type. They were building a foundation. And I wonder how many people read this book, said "I could do so much better," and turned around to start constructing what would become the modern zombie obsession. I wouldn't call this a good collection now, because we've gotten so much better than most of these tales would have allowed us to be. But it's a foundational collection, and I'm glad I read it, even if I would recommend The Living Dead or The Living Dead 2 (and Zombiesque and about a dozen others) before I would recommend it.

We've shambled a long way, baby.

(Note: The following post discusses depression and suicide, quite frankly. If you want to skip it, I will understand. Also, I am calling a preemptive comment amnesty, because I don't know that I can get through whatever comments may be left. Thank you.)

***

I have a pretty good life.

That's not bragging, really. I mean, my life has its problems—it's stressful, I'm tired a lot, I'm a woman in the age of the Internet (which is unfortunately code for "I get some really disturbing hate sent my way for the crime of being outspoken and visible while existing as a non-male"), my foot hurts almost all the time, I worry about my friends—but there's no measuring stick that doesn't put me at "pretty good." I am financially secure enough to do things like take off for Disneyland at a moment's notice, to hug a woman standing as avatar for my favorite cartoon character. I have amazing friends who love me despite myself, and I struggle every day to be worthy of them. I have incredible cats. I sleep in an orange bedroom packed with dolls and books and Disney memorabilia.

I get to write books. I get to tell stories, for a living, and have people read and enjoy them. It's everything I ever wanted my life to be...

...and I spent more than half of 2013 wanting my life to stop.

I have been suicidal, off and on, since I was nine years old. I made multiple suicide attempts when I was a pre-teen and teenager; some came closer to success than others. I have my scars. My last active attempt was made when I was in my mid-twenties, and the friend who drove me to the train station has never forgiven me for making him complicit, in any way, in the attempt to take my life. I do not blame him for this, even as I know that I didn't mean to involve him; I just needed to get to the beach, and thought "hey, I can get a ride," and never stopped to consider what that might mean when he'd found out what I'd done, or worse, if he'd found out that I had succeeded. I couldn't see that far ahead. All I could see was the need to stop, to be over, to not need to do this anymore. Any of it.

A very dear friend of mine described suicidal urges and ideations as a narrowing, and she's exactly right, at least for me. It's not selfishness, not at its heart, because when things get that bad, it's virtually impossible to see continuing as an option. It's like climbing a very high mountain, and then running out of trail. You can't fly. It's not selfish to refuse to sprout wings and try. It would be selfish to stay where you are, to block the trail, to prevent others from climbing on without you.

It seems so much easier to just jump, and get out of everybody's way. It seems like the only logical choice. Selfishness doesn't really enter into it. I sort of wish it did. It would be easier to argue with the little voices, or at least it seems like it would be easier; we're all trained from childhood not to be selfish, and that makes selfishness easier to refute than narrowness. "I won't be selfish" is an easier statement than "I will continue to exist, even though there are no options, even though it will never get better, even though I am a burden to all those around me, even though I am unworthy of love, even though I do not deserve this skin, this sky, this space that I inhabit." And easy is...easy is easy. We want easy. When everything is hard, easy becomes incredibly tempting.

Writing this down is hard.

I didn't tell most people how depressed I was, because I didn't think I deserved my own depression. I have a pretty good life! I have all the things I listed, and more, and saying "I want to die" when I have a pretty good life felt like bragging; it felt like trying to claim a sorrow I had no right to. But depression doesn't give a fuck how good your life is. Depression is a function of fucked-up brain chemistry, and brain chemistry doesn't say "Oh, hey, you made the New York Times, that's cool, I better straighten out and fly right from now on." You can be depressed no matter what is happening around you, rags or riches, perfection or putridity. That does not make you wrong. Depression is a sickness. You can catch the flu at Disney World, and you can be depressed on your wedding day. No matter how good your life is, no matter how much people say they wish they had your problems, you are allowed to be unhappy. You are allowed to seek help. You are allowed to express your needs.

I did not actively attempt suicide in 2013, but that was only because I have had a lifetime of learning how to trick myself. I begged my agent to get me new book contracts. See? Can't die! I have deadlines! I cajoled my best friend into going to Disneyland with me. See? Can't die! I have to make faces with pixies! I accepted anthology invitations and convention invitations and let a lot of television build up on my DVR. Anything to create obligations that I would feel compelled to meet, but which weren't the kind that can overwhelm me. I made a lot of lists. I check-marked and itemized myself through the worst of it, and it worked, but it...it wasn't easy. I don't think it's ever going to be easy.

I am telling you this because I want you all to understand, at least on some level, that depression is not a thing you have to earn: it is not justified by tragedy, it is not created by grief. It can happen to anyone, and everyone has a right to seek help. Everyone has a right to be cared for, and to find a way to widen their options back into something that they can live with. Everyone. Even me; even you.

I would be very sad if I were not here to share 2014 with all of you. I hope—I really, truly do—that all of you will be here to share this beautiful year with me. Even if I don't know you, even if I've never met you or never will, I hope. Selfishness is easier to refute than narrowness, and we need to be here for each other, or those walls will crush the life from us.

I hope none of you have to deal with what I dealt with this past year. If you do, please, remember that you can seek help. You deserve help.

We all do.

So it's about six hours to midnight where I am, and I just woke up from a necessary and restorative nap; I think about half the last week has been spent in similar circumstances. I'm starting to take shorter naps, however, and I'm actually beginning to feel halfway rested, which is of deep importance to me.

2013. Well, that happened. In 2013, I made the New York Times List twice, and didn't make it once; I wrote more books than I really care to think about; I wrote more words than I can possibly count. I became the first person to ever receive five Hugo nominations in the same year, and learned how much hate mail that achievement generates (a lot), but didn't so much care when I got my five little silver rocket pins and my one big brass one. I won my second Hugo.

I nearly lost the ability to walk. I'm still getting it back a tiny bit at a time, and the whole process has been painful and upsetting in the extreme. For those of you who have never spent time with me in person, I love to walk. It's my primary exercise, and it's something that I usually do when I need to focus. Having it taken away from me has been horrible and upsetting. Here's hoping 2014 sees me finishing my recovery.

There were no major medical crises in either my family or my home. The cats are doing well, and apart from my foot and one bout of flu in January, this year has been one of my physically healthiest in a long time. I guess that's balanced by mental health; I spent much of 2013 incredibly depressed, and around six months actively wanting to die. Please don't respond to this post with "I'm so sorry" or "oh honey," because I know; there's a reason I didn't talk about it while it was going on. I'm doing better now, for the most part. So, you know. Yay recovery.

In 2013 I released four books: Midnight Blue-Light Special, Chimes at Midnight, Parasite, and Velveteen vs. The Multiverse. I released nineteen short stories, some through anthologies, others via my website. I got self-published fiction onto the Hugo ballot. I started writing poetry again. I didn't write enough fanfic.

I went to Disneyland. I went to Disney World. I hugged my cats. A lot.

So that was the year; it was productive but hard, and I'm ready to be done with it. Roll on 2014, if you would be so kind. I hope you all have the sort of night you dream of, and please, if you do anything, remember to be kind.

We're all we've got.

So Chuck Wendig posted his thoughts on spoilers recently. I agree with many of them. There are entire media empires I have chosen to have no truck with because they were spoiled for me so thoroughly before I could start embracing them, as often through the intent of the people doing the spoiling as by accident. There is a whole subculture on Tumblr dedicated to bootlegging new movies the day they hit theaters, so that the very first spoiler-laden animated .gifs can be created. It can get really, really frustrating. While I understand the joy of having an open and enthusiastic discussion of a thing you love, part of me goes "not everyone can go to every opening night, watch every show the second it airs, read every book in ARC form three months before publication." It's just not possible, and in those cases, spoilers can steal a lot of the joy in enjoying a piece of media.

(Not for everyone, naturally. I know people who adore spoilers, and find them an exciting roadmap to what's ahead. I am just as likely to go "welp, that was the greatest hits version of the story, let's go enjoy something new.")

But saying "spoilers are bad" and "spoilers are wrong" seems very...I don't know, privileged? At least to me. I have friends who cannot watch rape. Cannot watch any threat of sexual violence. Cannot handle the use of date rape drugs or other such devices in fiction. I know people who are so severely afraid of spiders that even spiders in movies are not safe for them, or who can't deal with certain forms of bodily harm (eyeballs, sure, but no fingers, no teeth...). Most, if not all, of these people have really good reasons for their fears, and if they don't go around wearing shirts that list them off for your comprehension and enlightenment, that's because it's nobody else's business.

So they seek out spoilers. They look for them everywhere, because a little loss of surprise is worth it for the comfort of knowing a piece of media is safe. I was lucky enough to see Thor 2 early (I love you, Disneyland Annual Pass), and while I refused, for the most part, to be a source of spoilers, one person asked me a very basic "this thing will be triggery for me, does this thing happen" question, and got an answer. Because my desire not to put spoilers out into the world is not stronger than someone else's need for mental peace. I knew why she was asking. Refusing to answer at that point would have been policing someone else's choices, and saying I knew what she needed better than she did.

I will absolutely roll with "involuntary spoilers are bad": I don't want to get spoiled for everything in the universe the second I turn on my computer in the morning. I will roll with "there is a statute of limitations," and while we haven't all agreed on what it is, I stop getting grumpy after a week or so for minor things (it takes longer for big, shocking, "this changes everything" revelations). But we have to remember that for some people, spoilers are safety and self-defense. Spoilers are what makes it possible for them to enjoy media, just like everybody else.

Sometimes, providing spoilers is the only kind thing to do.

There's a trend I've been noticing lately: everything is suddenly everywhere. I think this may have something to do with the emails I receive daily that are literally checklists of every social media site in existence, complete with a handy "be sure to like this here! Be sure to tweet about this here! Be sure to make a witty Tumblr post complete with reaction .gif here! Be sure to..." and I don't know what comes after that, because I have already deleted the email and gone off to interact with something less exhausting. I have enough trouble remembering to promote myself; I can't take on the responsibility of promoting everything I come into contact with.

It feels like the signal to noise ratio is getting skewed; everything is a sea of signal boosts and endorsements and link-backs and that's lovely, if they're things that you support and believe in. I try to post and tweet and yes, Facebook and the rest about things that I care about. But I don't care about everything in the universe. That would be exhausting.

I wonder if we're just all drowning, and thus all afraid of being overlooked. Whatever it is, I admit I'm getting a little tired of being told how to use my social media. "People will be more likely to notice this if you tweet it!" Well...yes. But then they're less likely to notice my awesome Pokemon.

Everything's a trade-off.

...do not let it grieve you. No one leaves for good. You are not alone. No one is alone.

Well, here we are: the first season of Indexing is over and done, and the book has been closed on Henrietta Marchen and her friends, at least for a time. I can't tell you yet whether there will be a second season: that decision is in the hands of greater minds than mine. I can tell you that the best way to help that second season happen is to either buy the now-complete Kindle serial (available internationally), or to pick up the print book when it comes out in December (I know that I'm looking forward to having a copy on my shelf, where I can brag about it).

A lot of people have asked me about my experience with 47North and the Amazon Kindle Serials Program, and why I chose to do it. Now that the season has ended, I thought this would be a good time to talk about those questions.

First, and easiest, is "why did you do it?" I mean, in some ways, doing a Kindle Serial goes against a lot of what I've said about the digital divide, and my unending desire to have print editions available for everything, always. I never want anyone to be left in the position of "cannot possibly get a book." At the same time, the print edition was always a part of the plan, built into my contract; it was just going to come after the ebook editions. While that certainly isn't ideal, it was about the only way something like this could happen, since a week-by-week physical serial would have been way too cost-prohibitive for any book publisher to commit to. As for why I went with the Kindle program, well...they asked me. They also offered to pay me. I am very, very fond of getting paid, as it allows me to feed my cats and keep my lights on and all those other silly things. So when someone contacts my agent and says "we want to pay you to do something cool," my attention is assured.

But the main reason I agreed was because I hadn't done anything like this before. I was a universe author for The Edge of Propinquity in 2010 (when the original Rose Marshall stories were written), but that was very different than having a tight "once every two weeks" schedule, and this was a much bigger challenge. I like challenges. I like finding out whether I can meet them. In this case, I definitely did.

In terms of "what was good about this project," well, there was a lot. I got to write a serial novel in a setting I never thought I would get to expand upon (the ATI Management Bureau began in a short story I wrote years ago); I got to see a lot of people try my work because of the low price point and the easy entry point; I got to have fun with fairy tales. Fun with fairy tales is a huge draw for me.

In terms of "what was bad," there were a few things. The nature of the project meant that I didn't have time to write all twelve segments before things started going live, and that meant that if I wanted to change something after the fact, I really couldn't. I don't think any major contradictions or errors got past us and into the published chapters, but it made the whole experience a little more nerve-wracking than it otherwise might have been. The short, fixed schedule also meant that if there were any unexpected delays on either my part or the publisher's part, I could wind up with a much shorter turn-around period for copy edits and changes. Also not so easy on my nerves, given how tightly I tend to schedule myself. And of course, there was the fact that the Kindle Serial program is currently US-only, and my audience is international, which I know was frustrating for a lot of people. (Now that the serial part is over, the finished ebook is available wherever there is Amazon.)

On the whole, this was an overwhelmingly positive experience, and I would be open to doing a second season if the stars were right (and the holes in my schedule lined up, since again, I am very tightly booked). To any authors considering the program, I can definitely recommend it, as long as you work well under pressure and don't mind sometimes needing to turn things around with little to no notice. I hope to see you all again at the next once upon a time.

Now rest, my dear, and be at ease; there’s a fire in the hearth and a wind in the eaves, and the night is so dark, and the dark is so deep, and it’s time that all good little stars go to sleep.

I love reviews the way that I love snakes. I am glad that the world is full of them; I enjoy the company of a great many of them; I have been a snake keeper and I studied snakes in school; I do not particularly feel like snuggling up to every snake on the planet, thanks. Many of them have sharp fangs, deadly venom, and little fondness for hugs. While a bitey review won't kill me, I don't feel like hugging them, either. But—and this is important—I am genuinely glad that they exist. The only way to have something universally well-reviewed is to make that thing out of calorie-free vegan zero-cruelty Wonka Fudge that magically changes to taste like whatever it is you love best in all the world, and even then, I bet one person would pan it on the basis of "this has no personal integrity."

Negative and critical reviews are essential. They make people think about what they're consuming. They provide necessary information that a glowing review might skip over in favor of going "yay yay yay" a lot. They matter. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to link them, because this is my space, and it doesn't mean I'm going to wander into the terrifying depths of the Amazon rabbit hole, where "this book contained the letter 'c'" is considered a legit reason to pan something. I have a vague sense of self-preservation, and while I may be glad those reviews are out there, I'm not going to go seeking them out.

But here is the thing. Many people @-check me on Twitter. "Just finished the new @seananmcguire," or "Wow candy corn @seananmcguire must be thrilled." And this is great, this lets me talk to people and see who's talking about what. I enjoy the closeness of conversation engendered by use of the @ system. Except...

Except some people seem to forget that the people you @-check can actually see what you're saying about them, because you're saying it to them. I've had to stop clicking review links on Twitter, because there are two conventions colliding when someone @-checks me on a negative review: the Twitter social contract, which says that "Thank you!" and other interaction is appropriate, and the writer/reviewer social contract, which says that I will not engage with a negative review in any space. I don't really want to thank people for negative reviews. It seems disingenuous. I also don't want to get flagged as an "attack author" for saying "Well, I'm sorry you felt that way" whenever someone links me to their one-star take down of my latest work. But at the same time, I feel like I was invited to the conversation; after all, including my Twitter handle guarantees that you'll show up in my feed.

I actually spend a lot of time feeling faintly awkward and unsure, because people will @ me the weirdest things. Someone decided to tell me via Twitter that they felt like one of my books had been phoned-in. Um. I'm sorry you feel that way? But I have no place in this conversation. Everyone's feelings about media are valid, period. Everyone has the right to like or dislike things, even problematic things, and not need to defend themselves. But there's a big difference between a negative review, or a conversation to which I am not invited, and walking up to me and announcing "I hate your work." I am not allowed to respond in any substantive way. It's not my place. I don't get to dictate how you feel about a thing. So it winds up feeling attack-y, in a way that a simple bad review does not.

I think it's important to remember that when you @-check a person, you are inviting them to the conversation, and you may consequentially be inviting them to respond. They have been tagged; they are a part of the discussion now. And it's a little unfair to invite them in if you know they're not allowed to join. It hurts.

I am powerless before the terrible intimacy of @.

Today is the last day of September, 2013.

The first October Daye book—Rosemary and Rue—was published in September, 2009. It was not my first publication, thanks to a few anthologies that managed to speed through the publishing process (Ravens in the Library and Grant's Pass), but it was my first real sale, and it was the book that opened the door that led to those anthologies. Without Toby, I don't know that I'd be in either book, even though both were edited by friends of mine, because no one really thought of me that way. Not yet.

Since September 2009, I have published fifteen books, ranging from Toby to Velveteen. I have appeared in enough anthologies that I honestly can't tell you how many; not without counting them. I have experienced the soul-crushing terror of the Hugo Awards as viewed from the front row (which is a flavor of fear that I never truly appreciated until it was wrapping its arms around me and squeezing me tight). I have written more than a million words of fiction. Possibly more than two million words. And while I have been stressed and strained and stretched too thin, I have never lost sight of how incredibly lucky I am. I get to tell these stories. I get to see my name in bookstores, which is an honor and joy beyond compare. It's never not exciting. I hope it never will be.

Thank you. Thank you so much, for reading, for talking, for reviewing, for helping, by your very presence, because without people, there would be no publication. A book that is unread is a book that falls into obscurity, and has no sequels, and has no future.

I am very tired, but I am very grateful. The last four years have been amazing. I wouldn't trade them for the world.

Now let's go steal me four more.

Friday, The Zoe-Trope posted a really interesting piece titled "Real Girls, Fake Girls, Everybody Hates Girls," which I highly recommend that you go and read before you continue with this post. It's both the background material for some of these thoughts, and more importantly, it's a really solid, thoughtful article about the issues that we, communally, are having with female characters right now. She also coined the lovely term "Sarah Jane" as the opposite of "Mary Sue": an ordinary, flawed, perfectly reasonable character who doesn't warp the universe around her.

Meanwhile, the New Statesman has posted an article titled "I Hate Strong Female Characters," taking the position that male characters are allowed to be flawed, complex, and infinitely interesting, while female characters are expected to stop at "strong." Woo! That character is strong! Flawless feminist writing!

Groan.

I've talked before about the concept of "the Mary Sue," and why I think she is both unfairly maligned and non-existent. You can find that post here, which I think officially makes this the post with the most "required background reading" thus far this year. A lot of people have pointed this out recently—it is not an original thought—but I'm going to put it here anyway, because I think it's salient:

1. Mary Sue is the best she is at what she does.
2. Mary Sue has a mysterious and tortured past, and is probably an orphan.
3. Mary Sue is physically attractive.
4. Mary Sue is either rich or somehow never has a problem with money.
5. Mary Sue develops powers to suit the situation, because she always wins, unless she needs to lose for the sake of beautiful angst.
6. Mary Sue doesn't have to follow the rules of the story she's in. Ergo...
7. Batman and Wolverine are both Mary Sues.

(Pointing this out to people who are piously explaining how only female characters can be Mary Sues, because only female characters are ever that unrealistically written, is hysterical. And by "hysterical," I mean "a really good way to get yelled at by enraged nerds who don't want to admit, even a little bit, that their magical dick-lords could be just as much wish-fulfillment as all those violet-eyed sixteen-year-old ensigns flying starships.")

So. Let us begin.

October "Toby" Daye was in many ways my first "real" protagonist. She was complicated, she was sad, she was bruised and refusing to break, and she was not afraid to put her duty ahead of her desire to be liked. She bullied her way through the world she was created to inhabit, looking at every complication that stood in her way and saying "No, you move." After a lifetime spent moving dolls through stories, it was like I finally had a real person to follow and document. I started writing her adventures, and sending them out to people I trusted to read and review. Midway through either the second or the third book—I don't remember anymore—I got a note from one of my proofers saying "You can't have Toby do this, she's always been a little bitchy, but this makes her a total bitch. No one will like her if she does this."

I panicked. I couldn't write a series about an unlikeable character! I'd never get published, no one else would ever meet my imaginary friends, and everything I'd worked for my whole life would be over, all because Toby was unlikeable.

Then I took a deep breath, and wrote back to the proofer requesting that they do a find/replace on the .doc, and plug in the name "Harry Dresden" for every instance of "October Daye." They did, and lo and behold, what had been "bitchy" and "inappropriate" was suddenly "bold" and "assertive." A male character in the same situation, with the same background, taking the same actions, was completely in the right, justified, and draped with glory. He was a hero. Toby? Toby was an unlikeable bitch.

The proofer withdrew the compliant. I have never forgotten it.

Female characters are expected to be perfect without being perfect, a contradiction that is as nonsensical as it is impossible. There's a full list in the article I linked above ("I Hate Strong Female Characters"), but these are the ones that really frustrate me. Female characters have to be:

* Thin and conventionally pretty, but eat only junk food/eat constantly, and never, ever worry about gaining weight;
* Incredibly sexy but unaware of their own sexuality ("You don't know you're beautiful!").
* TOTALLY SURPRISED when a push-up bra or pair of leather pants changes the way people look at them.
* Convinced that every woman around them is a bitch, slut, or whore.

That last one...yeah. See, there's this huge narrative of "I'm not like the other girls" that runs through a lot of these critiques, and it's not "I'm not like..." the way that, say, Harry Potter is not like the other wizards in his year group. No, it's "You Belong With Me"-level "she wears high heels, I wear sneakers" shit, totally denying that the other girls could have anything of value to bring to the conversation. It's like being a member of the Disney Princess collection. You can't let those other princesses steal your spotlight, no! Ignore them, shame them, refuse to make eye contact. Call a girl who wears the same thing you do a skank, it's okay. Call a girl who's had two boyfriends a slut, even as you dance at the center of your own love pentagon. It's all fine, because you're not like those other girls. By creating a single focal point of "not like" that it's okay to care about, you place the rest of the world's female humans in a box labeled "icky." Not-like girls are great. They're strong female characters, they kick ass and take names and eat cheeseburgers and don't give a damn what the world thinks of them. All other girls are gross.

The amount of slut-shaming, fat-shaming, you-name-it-shaming that I see coming from these "strong female characters" is horrifying, because it requires that othering aspect be front and center. Your character must be above reproach, and since everyone knows that women are disgusting, horrifying, alien skin lizards wearing pretty makeup and hair dye to deceive and entrap men, she can't be like them. She can never be like those other girls.

I flip out when I meet a female character who's allowed to have female friends, because it's so damn rare. The upcoming Disney film, Frozen, has sisters in it. Sisters. Who get to be the same age and talk and stuff. I am ecstatic, because even if the movie turns out to be a sack of problematic eels, we got sisters on the goddamn screen, and that's even rarer than friends.

Where does this come from? Well, in part, it comes from the things we surround ourselves with. Books and movies where the Smurfette Principle is in full effect, which means that one woman must stand in for all women, and thus can't have a personality beyond "the girl." Series where you have the one sensible, sympathetic female, and every other female character is there to cause trouble or gasp no oh no panic, steal her man. Series where the female characters are killed off to further male pain, or because the male characters are "easier to write" (a statement that often matches up to an all-male writer's room).

It needs to stop.

Female characters should be people. Flawed, glorious, interesting, enthralling people. Let them dye their hair and pierce their ears without going "wah wah wah I'm so bad at being a girl wait hey look suddenly I've gotten a makeover and I'm gorgeous." Let them have female friends. Let them fuck up. Let them have bad days, and swear, and be snotty, and be people. Stop shoving them into these boxes where anything less than perfect adherence to a set of ticky-boxes means failure. They are better than that. We are better than that.

It's time for everybody's standards to look the same.

Someone commented, in reading the responses to my "stop checking my credentials" post of yesterday, that it was somewhat distressing how many people seemed to feel the need to go "yeah, I may not X, but I Y, I Z, I A B C D I am an alphabet I am a geek don't dismiss me." And it is distressing. It distresses me. I am distressed. Because I do the same thing when my credentials are challenged in an area that I can't match: I start rattling off things I do know, waving flags that prove my geekdom like I was going to be thrown out of the club. I can't stop myself. I think many of us can't. It's distressing to me, not because it makes us collectively a bunch of braggy over-achievers, but because it represents how many times, collectively, we have had our right to exist in our own spaces challenged.

The first challenge is met with confusion. The second with contention. The third, and all others, with exasperation and desperation: see me, let me be, leave me alone, allow me to exist.

Every cred check, or even shadow of a cred check, is starting to lead to this defensiveness: we're not looking for common ground anymore, we're just looking for the right to keep the ground we already have. And there's the concern that this is going to start driving new female fans away, because all the women who are already there have these laundry lists of "I am a fan because I ________," and some of them are just like "uh, I watch some TV shows?" That's not good. We don't want to lose the next generation of female fans, both because they have a right to this ground, too, and because it would show the cred checkers that they can win: push us hard enough and we go away, or at least stop coming, which can look like the same thing.

I don't think the laundry lists are going to go away. They're bruises, left from being hit too many times, and bruises don't heal instantly. But we should be aware of why the bruises are there, and promise each other not to cred check.

You are safe here. No matter what kind of geek you are, or whether or not I understand your passions.

This ground is yours.

So it's been a little more than a week since my glorious return from the San Diego International Comic Convention, where I saw cool things, met cool people, and learned that "Hell" is another word for "being on the SDCC exhibit floor in a wheelchair." I also contracted a horrific cold, and have been fighting my way back to the semblance of health, which is why my relative radio silence on the subject. But that's neither here nor there: that's just framework and excuses. Here's what happened.

Leading up to SDCC, basically every woman I talked to expressed the fear of being "cred checked" at least once. The fake geek girl may not be a real thing, but her shadow is long, and since people started claiming to have seen her, the rest of us have been accused of being her with increasing frequency. She is the geek urban legend, the prowling, predatory female who's just there to take up precious space/time/swag with her girly girlish girliness, and she's like The Thing From Outer Space—a creature with no face and every face, AT THE SAME TIME.

I attended SDCC and similar shows for years before anyone said "Gasp! Some of these geek girls ARE TOTALLY FAKE!" and I started getting my geek credentials checked. Since that began, I have been forced to defend my knowledge of horror movies, the X-Men, zombie literature, the Resident Evil franchise, Doctor Who, and My Little Pony.

Let's pause a moment and just think about that. Men—adult men—have asked me to defend my knowledge of and right to be a fan of My Little motherfucking Pony. My first fandom, the fandom that is arguably responsible for getting me into epic fantasy (not kidding), the franchise that I have publicly credited with teaching me how to plot long-term. A franchise that was, at least originally, aimed exclusively at little girls who enjoyed ponies and hair-play. I think that all fandoms should be for everyone, and I love that My Little Pony has finally found a male audience, but are you kidding here? Are you seriously telling me that the second men discover something I have loved since I was four years old, I suddenly have to pass trivia exams to keep considering myself a fan? Because if that's the way things are going, I want to hear the Sea Pony song right fucking now.

Ahem.

Most of the female fans I know have expressed concern about this credential checking, in part because who the fuck wants to have to take a quiz when you're standing in line waiting to get Chris Claremont's autograph? I mean, really. And there's always the possibility that you'll fail the exam, and a) many of us have deep-seated test anxiety, courtesy of the American school system, and b) no one likes being bullied. Telling me I'm not a real geek because I can't name the members of the Justice League (spoiler: I can't, I don't read DC) is bullying. It's offensive and it's upsetting and it leaves me feeling like a faker, even when I'm not. Even when I'm demonstratively not.

And this "you're a fake, you have no right to be here" routine is almost universally directed at women. I see these women in these incredible costumes that took hours to make and will cause chafing and shin splits and lots of other discomforts, and then I see them getting mocked for being "fake" by men in jeans and hero logo T-shirts. Captain America probably doesn't like you making fun of women, good sir. Just saying.

Then, this year, I saw something wonderful. I was crossing the floor with Amy when we encountered a tall blonde dressed as Emma Frost. I will always stop and admire a good Emma—it's in my genes—so we paused to study her costume and tell her how amazing she looked. She saw the name on my badge and lit up.

"I was hoping to run into you!" she said. "I remembered that you love Emma!"

One of my fans dressed as Emma Frost and she did it for me.

I have never felt so much like a rock star.

We stayed and chatted with her—because let's face it, you dress up as Emma Frost to make me happy, you have damn well earned some chatting with—and she confessed that she had been cred checked not long before. "I said Emma was both the White Queen and the Black Queen," she said. "Was that right?" I started explaining the Dark X-Men. While we were doing that, a man with a camera came up and started taking her picture without asking permission. She stopped talking to us, turned her body slightly away from him, held up her hand, and said, "You can't take my picture unless you can tell me who I am."

She was dressed as a very iconic Emma: all in white, with the half-cape connected to a semi-corset top, white boots, and a white "X" logo on her belt. She had small snowflakes on her collarbones, representing Emma's transformation. She had the white choker. She had the blue lipstick. Basically, if you have any familiarity with Marvel, you would recognize her, and since that version of Emma has been on literally hundreds of comic book covers in the past five years, even most DC readers should have recognized her.

"Storm?" guessed the man.

All three of us laughed, but uncomfortably, like we were discovering a terrible secret. And while Amy and I stood there, this happened four more times: the unsolicited pictures, the refusal, the incorrect guess. Only three of the men actually stopped taking pictures when told to.

As women, we are afraid of being unmasked as somehow "not geeky enough." Meanwhile, these men, who were clearly just trying to take pictures of a scantily clad woman, not pictures of an awesome costume, can't identify one of the most iconic figures from one of the largest publishers.

I've been saying for a while that the "fake geek girl" thing was a form of harassment: a way of making sure that women in fandom don't "forget their place." But this, more than anything, drove home to me just how big of a double standard it is. As women, we're expected to know enough to "earn our spot," but not so much that we seem like know-it-alls; we're supposed to add attractive eye candy to the proceedings, but shouldn't expect men to stop taking our pictures when asked; we're supposed to worry about not seeming geeky enough, while never worrying whether the men around us could pass those same tests. The mere fact of their maleness is sufficient.

There was something beautiful about seeing the fake geek girl check flipped back in the other direction, but there was also something profoundly sad about it, because it illustrated just how deep this divide is growing. We're all geeks. We need to have respect for each other, in all ways—no taking pictures without asking, no shouting "Emma!" at a cosplayer and then saying "See? I told you she knew who she was dressed as" when she turns around. Just no.

It needs to stop.

(And if you were that Emma, drop me a line, hey? I never did get your name, and you were awesome.)

(Note: This is originally from my Tumblr, but I felt like it was a conversation worth having here, for ease of searching and such.)

stopdropandbeauty asked: "Hi! Me again with another complicated writing question. Um, I've been trying to figure out the whole self publishing thing, but it's been hard for me to find accurate information. It's all really polarized, either 'everyone and their dog should self publish, there are no down sides' or 'if you self publish you're an idiot and your mother smells of elderberries.' So I was wondering if you had any thoughts about it/knew any good online resources. Please and thank you!"

I am going to start this answer by noting that I have not “self published" anything in the sense of “I took a thing and I formatted the thing and then I sold the thing and made money for it." All of my for-profit fiction has been traditionally published, meaning that it was presented to someone else in manuscript form, and then they did all the heavy lifting of bringing it to market. My free fiction has technically been self published, since I was the only motive force behind it, but as I haven’t seen a dime from that, I don’t consider it a self publishing success. I hope that makes sense and is clear and doesn’t make me sound like a magical self pub fairy here to wave a wand and clear everything up. Cool? Cool.

So here is the terrible secret of self publishing: no one knows why it works. There is no magical combination of ingredients that makes you an automatic success, no sorcery that makes people sit up and take notice. There are elements that will help you a great deal—good writing is one of them, but good, professional-looking cover design is another, since that’s what catches eyes and brings people to your story. A solid web presence. A good sense of appropriate self promotion. And luck. Oceans of luck, galaxies of luck. Why did someone else hit big while you languish in obscurity? NO ONE KNOWS, and anyone who tells you that they know the cheat codes is probably lying.

I do feel that long term success in publishing of any kind will be dependent on the quality of your writing, which is why I tend to recommend trying traditional publication first, even if you ultimately decide it’s not for you. Why? Because when the rejections go from form letters to “this is good, keep trying" to “not this time, please submit again" to “YES YES WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE," that means you’re in a good place with your craft. You know the words are really genuinely good, not “my mother says I’m a genius" good. I’m honestly grateful self pub wasn’t an option when I first started trying to sell a novel, because the books I wound up writing in my quest to become good enough were better than anything I would have thrown to the wolves of the world if I’d been given the opportunity. I got better by throwing myself against the wall.

Now maybe that’s not for you. Maybe you’re already mad awesome because you had walls to throw yourself against. That’s totally cool, and I support you—and honestly, some stories still have to be self pub, because they’re niche or they’re experimental or because people just don’t take enough risks. But you need to be sure you’re ready, emotionally and skill-wise, because a lot of self pub ends in “failure" when no one sees your book, or it doesn’t make a million dollars overnight.

That’s another thing: “I made a million dollars with my self published novel" is like “I lost a hundred pounds eating McDonalds every day" or “I fell off a thirty story building and didn’t even break a bone." It happens, but it’s a statistical anomaly. Most people will fall inside the bell curve, not on the hard, improbable edge. Don’t pin your hopes on a one-in-a-million chance. You might get what you wish for. You’re way more likely to break your own heart.

Invest in a good book cover. Invest in a good website. Understand that you will be spending money to make money, at least at first, and that there’s a good chance you’ll never make that money back. That’s part of the value of a publisher: they take that risk for you. They also take a good portion of the profit you may eventually make, which is a reason to self publish—if you make any money at all, it’s yours. Just consider what that money is going to cost to make.

Keep writing. You have the potential to be amazing. All you have to do is work as hard as you can, and learn to be a phoenix: learn to be reborn even as you die inside.

You can do it.

My friend Elise Matthesen asked me to post this; the words below are hers. I agreed because this is important information for every member of our community to be aware of.

Because this is a guest post, I will be watching the comments carefully for signs of incivility, but will not be responding to all comments.

Thank you for reading.

ETA: The contact list mentioned below is at http://www.jimchines.com/2012/07/reporting-sexual-harassment-in-sff-2/

***

How To Report Sexual Harassment, by Elise Matthesen.

We're geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment. In case you ever need or want to know, here's what I learned and how it went.

Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different house joined the conversation briefly and decided to do the thing that I reported. A minute or two after he left, one of the hosts came over to check on me. I was lucky: my host was alert and aware. On hearing what had happened, he gave me the name of a mandated reporter at the company the harasser was representing at the convention.

The mandated reporter was respectful and professional. Even though I knew them, reporting this stuff is scary, especially about someone who's been with a company for a long time, so I was really glad to be listened to. Since the incident happened during Memorial Day weekend, I was told Human Resources would follow up with me on Tuesday.

There was most of a convention between then and Tuesday, and I didn't like the thought of more of this nonsense (there's a polite word for it!) happening, so I went and found a convention Safety staffer. He asked me right away whether I was okay and whether I wanted someone with me while we talked or would rather speak privately. A friend was nearby, a previous Guest of Honor at the convention, and I asked her to stay for the conversation. The Safety person asked whether I'd like to make a formal report. I told him, "I'd just like to tell you what happened informally, I guess, while I figure out what I want to do."

It may seem odd to hesitate to make a formal report to a convention when one has just called somebody's employer and begun the process of formally reporting there, but that's how it was. I think I was a little bit in shock. (I kept shaking my head and thinking, "Dude, seriously??") So the Safety person closed his notebook and listened attentively. Partway through my account, I said, "Okay, open your notebook, because yeah, this should be official." Thus began the formal report to the convention. We listed what had happened, when and where, the names of other people who were there when it happened, and so forth. The Safety person told me he would be taking the report up to the next level, checked again to see whether I was okay, and then went.

I had been nervous about doing it, even though the Safety person and the friend sitting with us were people I have known for years. Sitting there, I tried to imagine how nervous I would have been if I were twenty-some years old and at my first convention. What if I were just starting out and had been hoping to show a manuscript to that editor? Would I have thought this kind of behavior was business as usual? What if I were afraid that person would blacklist me if I didn't make nice and go along with it? If I had been less experienced, less surrounded by people I could call on for strength and encouragement, would I have been able to report it at all?

Well, I actually know the answer to that one: I wouldn't have. I know this because I did not report it when it happened to me in my twenties. I didn't report it when it happened to me in my forties either. There are lots of reasons people might not report things, and I'm not going to tell someone they're wrong for choosing not to report. What I intend to do by writing this is to give some kind of road map to someone who is considering reporting. We're geeks, right? Learning something and sharing is what we do.

So I reported it to the convention. Somewhere in there they asked, "Shall we use your name?" I thought for a millisecond and said, "Oh, hell yes."

This is an important thing. A formal report has a name attached. More about this later.

The Safety team kept checking in with me. The coordinators of the convention were promptly involved. Someone told me that since it was the first report, the editor would not be asked to leave the convention. I was surprised it was the first report, but hey, if it was and if that's the process, follow the process. They told me they had instructed him to keep away from me for the rest of the convention. I thanked them.

Starting on Tuesday, the HR department of his company got in touch with me. They too were respectful and took the incident very seriously. Again I described what, where and when, and who had been present for the incident and aftermath. They asked me if I was making a formal report and wanted my name used. Again I said, "Hell, yes."

Both HR and Legal were in touch with me over the following weeks. HR called and emailed enough times that my husband started calling them "your good friends at HR." They also followed through on checking with the other people, and did so with a promptness that was good to see.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal. Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that had ever been formally recorded.

Corporations (and conventions with formal procedures) live and die by the written word. "Records, or it didn't happen" is how it works, at least as far as doing anything official about it. So here I was, and here we all were, with a situation where this had definitely happened before, but which we had to treat as if it were the first time -- because for formal purposes, it was.

I asked whether people who had originally made confidential reports could go ahead and file formal ones now. There was a bit of confusion around an erroneous answer by someone in another department, but then the person at Legal clearly said that "the past is past" is not an accurate summation of company policy, and that she (and all the other people listed in the company's publically-available code of conduct) would definitely accept formal reports regardless of whether the behavior took place last week or last year.

If you choose to report, I hope this writing is useful to you. If you're new to the genre, please be assured that sexual harassment is NOT acceptable business-as-usual. I have had numerous editors tell me that reporting harassment will NOT get you blacklisted, that they WANT the bad apples reported and dealt with, and that this is very important to them, because this kind of thing is bad for everyone and is not okay. The thing is, though, that I'm fifty-two years old, familiar with the field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I've got a lot of social credit. And yet even I was nervous and a little in shock when faced with deciding whether or not to report what happened. Even I was thinking, "Oh, God, do I have to? What if this gets really ugly?"

But every time I got that scared feeling in my guts and the sensation of having a target between my shoulder blades, I thought, "How much worse would this be if I were inexperienced, if I were new to the field, if I were a lot younger?" A thousand times worse. So I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and said, "Hell, yes, use my name." And while it's scary to write this now, and while various people are worried that parts of the Internet may fall on my head, I'm going to share the knowledge -- because I'm a geek, and that's what we do.

So if you need to report this stuff, the following things may make it easier to do so. Not easy, because I don't think it's gotten anywhere near easy, but they'll probably help.

NOTES: As soon as you can, make notes on the following:

- what happened
- when it happened and where
- who else was present (if anyone)
- any other possibly useful information

And take notes as you go through the process of reporting: write down who you talk with in the organization to which you are reporting, and when.

ALLIES: Line up your support team. When you report an incident of sexual harassment to a convention, it is fine to take a friend with you. A friend can keep you company while you make a report to a company by phone or in email. Some allies can help by hanging out with you at convention programming or parties or events, ready to be a buffer in case of unfortunate events -- or by just reminding you to eat, if you're too stressed to remember. If you're in shock, please try to tell your allies this, and ask for help if you can.

NAVIGATION: If there are procedures in place, what are they? Where do you start to make a report and how? (Finding out might be a job to outsource to allies.) Some companies have current codes of conduct posted on line with contact information for people to report harassment to. Jim Hines posted a list of contacts at various companies a while ago. Conventions should have a safety team listed in the program book. Know the difference between formal reports and informal reports. Ask what happens next with your report, and whether there will be a formal record of it, or whether it will result in a supervisor telling the person "Don't do that," but will be confidential and will not be counted formally.

REPORTING FORMALLY: This is a particularly important point. Serial harassers can get any number of little talking-to's and still have a clear record, which means HR and Legal can't make any disciplinary action stick when formal reports do finally get made. This is the sort of thing that can get companies really bad reputations, and the ongoing behavior hurts everybody in the field. It is particularly poisonous if the inappropriate behavior is consistently directed toward people over whom the harasser has some kind of real or perceived power: an aspiring writer may hesitate to report an editor, for instance, due to fear of economic harm or reprisal.

STAY SAFE: You get to choose what to do, because you're the only one who knows your situation and what risks you will and won't take. If not reporting is what you need to do, that's what you get to do, and if anybody gives you trouble about making that choice to stay safe, you can sic me on them. Me, I've had a bunch of conversations with my husband, and I've had a bunch of conversations with other people, and I hate the fact that I'm scared that there might be legal wrangling (from the person I'd name, not the convention or his employer) if I name names. But after all those conversations, I'm not going to. Instead, I'm writing the most important part, about how to report this, and make it work, which is so much bigger than one person's distasteful experience.

I just received an email from an anonymous source using the option that Livejournal affords that says "you can send me email if you want to" (and I will be turning that option off now; if you want to reach me, you can use the website contact form and go through my PA, like everyone else). The author didn't sign their name (hence the "anonymous"), and went out of their way to say that the email address used will be invalid in two weeks. I am not reproducing the entirety of the email here, but as points have been raised that I feel are relevant to certain ongoing discussions, I will be reproducing parts of it. I will note that I have printed fan mail, both in parts and its entirety, on this blog before, and that this is not a change of policy.

In order to fairly address certain points raised by my anonymous correspondent, I will need to provide relationship spoilers for some of my works. This includes all currently published books in my three primary series; the "Velveteen vs." short stories, which are available here; and Sparrow Hill Road, which is not currently available, but is a part of the InCryptid universe. To avoid these spoilers, please do not click the cut-tag or read the comments.

( Click to continue, or do not click, and be at peace.Collapse )

A few months ago, I got an email from a reader who had a question she wanted me to answer. I like questions. If they're not spoilery for things that haven't been published yet, I'm generally willing to give them a go. This question, however, stumped me for a little while:

"what is the purpose of Dr. Kellis being gay? It neither adds or subtracts to the story line but is distracting."

Dr. Kellis was gay because Dr. Kellis was gay. I "met" the character in the same scene that everyone else did, when his husband showed up to try and convince him to leave the lab for a little while. He was a man, he had a husband, he was at minimum bisexual, and for the purposes of the story, he was gay. He was a gay scientist. Since he wasn't working on gay science (I'm not even sure what that phrase means), it mattered purely in the sense that when he talked about going home, it was to a husband, and not a wife. I honestly never thought about changing it. While everyone in the world is at least somewhat defined by their sexuality—it shapes us throughout our lives, both in the exercising of it and in the existence of it—I've never felt like it was the be-all and end-all of human experience.

What weirded me out a little, and still does, is that no one has ever asked me "What is the purpose of Character X being straight?" No one has ever called it "distracting" when Velma has naughty thoughts about Tad, or when Toby blushes because Tybalt is commenting on her clothing. Men and women, women and men, it's totally normal and invisible, like using "said" in dialog instead of some other, more descriptive word. It's invisible. But gay people are distracting. (Bisexual people are apparently even more distracting. I've had several people write to tell me that a piece of text in Blackout can be read to imply that Buffy and Maggie had sex, and some of them have been less than thrilled when I replied that there was no implication intended: Buffy and Maggie had sex. Repeatedly. Lots of sex. Lovely sex. They enjoyed it a lot, but Maggie took it more seriously than Buffy did, and Buffy wanted to keep things casual, so they broke up. But before they broke up? They had so much sex.)

For the most part, I let my characters tell me what their sexuality is, once it starts to have an impact on their characterization. I don't write Bob as a gay man and Tom as a straight man and Suzie as a lesbian: I write Bob as a zookeeper and Tom as a ballet teacher and Suzie as a ninja, right up until the moment where they have to interact with someone they'd be attracted to. Sometimes, that's when they tell me what they're into. Since this is all in first draft, I can go back later and clean things up, clarify things to add any additional detail that needs to be there, but I almost never tell them "Oh, no, you can't be gay, it would be distracting. It's not allowed."

(The one exception is with characters who are here to go—the ones created to be slaughtered in fifteen pages or less. They're not all straight, but I have to stop and think long and hard about how I would have felt, as a bisexual teenager, if I had finally, finally encountered an awesome bisexual woman in fiction, only to see her die before she got to be amazing. Sometimes this does result in my reexamining their relationships, as it's also difficult to really form strong character portraits in fifteen pages or less. Anyone who's sticking around for more than fifteen pages is fair game.)

Gay people don't walk around saying "I'd like to have an urban fantasy adventure, I'm gay, I like men/women, let's go fight a dragon" any more than straight people walk around saying "I'd like to go to space, I'm straight, I like men/women, let's go steal a rocket." People is the word that matters here. And yes, being anything other than heterosexual and cis in this world means that you're going to experience different things, and have some different perspectives, but it doesn't inform one hundred percent of what you do. I eat pizza the same way my straight friends eat pizza. I watch TV the same way my straight friends watch TV. I chase lizards...well, I chase lizards in a uniquely singleminded and slightly disturbing fashion, but as I'm not a lizardsexual, it has nothing to do with who I do or do not choose to form romantic relationships with.

Dr. Kellis is gay because Dr. Kellis is gay.

He doesn't need any reason beyond that.

Thanks to the graphic magic of Tara O'Shea, there are new wallpapers on the October Daye Wallpaper page, this time allowing you to dress your monitor in the fine, fine image of "In Sea-Salt Tears." You can find the wallpaper here:

http://seananmcguire.com/wallpapers.php#short

I am still, to be honest, a little bit staggered by this story's inclusion in this year's Hugo ballot. Not that I'm not staggered by every single nomination—because I am; for some people I may have become a predictable choice, but for me, this is only the third year that I've been on the ballot at all—but this one is...it's special. It's a purely urban fantasy story, for one thing, and stories in that sub-genre don't often get recognized at this level. And it's about women, just women, two women who loved each other for as long as they were allowed. There's no grand battle or flashy challenge.

There's just women.

People talk about "writing what you know," and the parts of this story that are what I know are the parts with kitchens and farmer's markets and Italian dinners and love. So much love. Love that seems like it could change the world forever, even when you know that it can never really change anything but you.

I got urban fantasy on the Hugo ballot.

I'm a little proud of that.

I just got home from an afternoon showing of Now You See Me, chosen both because I wanted to see the movie, and because it's a swelteringly hot June day here in Northern California; we were hiding from the sun. A fun little caper movie about magicians robbing banks seemed like just the way to go. Plus, air conditioning.

I got half of what I wanted: I got air conditioning. I will be as spoiler-free as I can, but I am unhappy.

The setup of the movie is thus: four magicians, all of whom are awesome in their solo acts, are Recruited To Do Something. This isn't a spoiler; it's the premise, which leads to them teaming up and being awesome and also robbing banks and shit (all in the trailers). We have a mentalist, a classic slight-of-hand trickster, an escape artist, and a pickpocket/misdirectionist. As they start to do their shit, they are pursued by an FBI agent, an Interpol agent, a professional debunker, and a dude who got robbed.

Of the characters listed above, two are female. They never speak to each other. No, never. No, not even then. There are two secondary female characters, who also never speak to each other (one is there purely to be a pretty status symbol). The female magician is the only one who never gets an awesome moment where her field of magic, her specialization is both key to the plan and saves the day. Literally the first thing one of the other magicians says to her is "you're pretty."

YOU'RE PRETTY.

Now here's the thing: while I disagree that some roles are particularly "gendered," I can accept that right now, in our current media climate, you will want at least 75% of your romances to be between characters of opposite genders. I don't like it, but I will roll with it. And that being said, there was not a single fucking character in this movie who needed to be male. Make the smug team leader a girl, and make the ex-girlfriend an ex-boyfriend! Make the action character a girl (I basically spent every moment one of the magicians was on screen wishing he would turn into Beth Reisgraf). Make more than one important member of your team a fucking female.

And we now stand, again, at the edge of one of my biggest complaints about media today: a team with three men and one women wasn't seen as imbalanced, but the opposite team would have been. It's very possible that even a two-and-two team would have been seen as dominated by women. I am not calling for gender equality in every movie. I saw The Fast and the Furious 6 earlier this month; it was male-dominated, and it was fantastic. Not without its issues—what is?—but well-balanced, casting-wise, with multiple interesting, nuanced female characters who were allowed to interact.

When I go on these "why was so-and-so a guy" rants, someone always says "would you have this complaint if the cast were exactly gender reversed?", and I always say no. I still say no. Because there are so many male-dominated action movies and caper flicks and summer blockbusters that adding a few female-dominated examples would not be "reverse discrimination," it would be balancing the backlog. What I really want is gender neutrality. I want a team of two girls and two guys robbing banks with slight-of-hand and being awesome, rather than another movie that reduces me to a prize or a non-entity.

It's exhausting being this unhappy all the time.

The media won't let me stop.

All right, here are the basics: in the latest issue of the SFWA Bulletin there was an article essentially saying (among many other problematic things) that if I say that taking about my gender as if it somehow makes me an alien creature makes me uncomfortable, I am censoring and oppressing you, rather than just asking that you, you know, stop doing that shit if you want my good feeling and respect. jimhines has collected links to a wide range of responses and rebuttals. You don't need to read them all, but they're still a good, overwhelmingly unhappy view of a bad situation. I recommend reading at least a few of them, because it'll help you understand what's going on, although for many people, the important points are:

1. This article came after several instances of sexism in the Bulletin.
2. The Bulletin is the official publication of SFWA*, which makes it look like organizationally condoned sexism.
3. It's 2013, for fuck's sake.

One of the things that Resnick and Malzberg, as the authors of the piece in question, objected to was that people were unhappy that they were defining their peers as "lady authors/editors" and "gorgeous." These are, after all, factual definitions! A female peer is a lady peer. A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman. Don't women like being told that they're beautiful? Aren't we supposed to be precise when we talk about people? And to this I say sure, except that your precision is unequal and belittling. "Bob is my peer, Jane is my lady peer" creates two classes where two classes do not belong, and humans are primates, we're creatures of status and position. Give us two things and we'll always start trying to figure out which is superior to the other. Right or left? Up or down? Peer or lady peer? What's more, adding a qualifier creates the impression that the second class is somehow an aberration. "There were a hundred of us at the convention, ninety-nine peers and one rare lady peer."

No. Fuck no. "Bob and Jane are my peers." Much better.

As for the appearance thing...yeah, people often like to be told when they look good. But women in our modern world are frequently valued according to appearance to such a degree that it eclipses all else. "Jane was a hell of a science fiction writer...but more importantly, she was gorgeous according to a very narrow and largely male-defined standard of conventional beauty." All Jane's accomplishments, everything she ever did as a person, matter less than the fact that she got good genes during character generation. You don't think that burns? You don't think that's insulting? "Bob knew how to tell a good story, and he did it while packing an impressively sinuous trouser snake." What, is that insulting? How is it more insulting than "Jane could really fill out a swimsuit"? It's the same thing. If my breasts define my value to the community, you'd better be prepared to hold up your balls for the same level of inspection—and trust me, this is not sexy funtimes inspection, this is "drape 'em in Spandex and brace yourself for a lot of critique that frankly doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with how well you write, or what kind of human being you are." Don't like this idea, gentlemen of the world? Well, neither do the ladies.

It's very telling that you'll get people saying, again, "author and lady author are just true facts," but then getting angry when you say that fine, if they want divisions, it needs to be "male and female author." No! Male is the default the norm the baseline of human experience! How dare you imply anything different!

I, and roughly fifty percent of the world's population, would like to beg to differ. It's just that women get forced to understand men if we want to enjoy media and tell stories, while men are allowed to treat women as these weird extraterrestrial creatures who can never be comprehended, but must be fought. It's like we're somehow the opposing army in an alien invasion story, here to be battled, defeated, and tamed, but never acknowledged as fully human.

Does that seem like a lot to get out of the phrase "lady author"? It kinda is. But that's what happens when the background radiation of your entire life is a combination of "men are normal, human, wonderful, admirable, talented, worth aspiring to," and "bitches be crazy."

Am I disappointed that these sentiments were published in the official Bulletin of the organization to which I belong? Damn straight. It shows an essential lack of kindness on the part of the authors, who felt that their right to call me a "lady author" and comment on my appearance mattered more than my right to be comfortable and welcomed in an organization that charges me annual dues that are the same regardless of gender. Maybe if I got a discount for allowing people to belittle and other me? Only then I would never have joined, because fuck that noise.

At the same time, SFWA is a wonderful organization that has done and is doing a great deal to help authors, and moves are being taken to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. My membership is up for renewal at the end of this month, and I'm renewing, because change comes from both without and within. I am an author. I am a woman. I am not going to shut up and slink away because I feel unheard; if anything, I'm going to get louder, and make them hear me. (Please note that I absolutely respect the women who are choosing not to renew their memberships; voting with your dollars is a time-honored tradition. But everyone reacts differently. For them, this is a principled stance. For me, it would be a retreat. I am the Official SFWA Stabber, and nobody is making me retreat.)

One of the big points of the Resnick/Malzberg article was "anonymous complaints." Fine, then: I am not anonymous. My name is Seanan McGuire. You can look me up.

(*The Science Fiction Writers of America.)

Jay Lake recently asked me to collaborate with him on a novella (which is awesome, by the way, and it's about belief and duty and ghost stories and Captain Hook and you're going to love it, really, I can't wait for you to see it). Knowing how busy I am, he coached his request very much as "this is a long shot, but," because he is a sensible man who knows I cannot bend time (much). He was thus, I think, understandably surprised when I started flipping drafts like pancakes. Jay has learned the terrible secret of Seanans:

There are only two speeds. "Stop" and "go." This is why it's taken so long for my foot to heal; once I can move again, I move, running hard toward the horizon because otherwise, it might move before I can get there.

Being a two-speed creature is not always ideal. I strip my own gears a lot. Exhausted collapse is not uncommon. But when everything's working, I can almost break the laws of physics, and for me, it's a worthwhile cost/benefit structure. I'll run, and when I fall, the ground will catch me, over and over again, until I don't get back up. And that, too, is a portion of the price that comes with how I'm wired.

I have people periodically look at my inchworm lists and wonder how the hell I can do the things I do. The answer is a combination of practice and planning. Every day has to be accounted for, because I'm moving too fast to cut corners; if I slow down enough to back it up, I'll drown.

In my dayplanner, I keep a running list of the day's tasks, including target (minimum) project word counts. Writing-related tasks on today's list are as follows:

1. 2,000 words, "Not Sincere" (Indexing #10)
2. 1,000 words, "Loch and Key" (InCryptid, J&F short)
3. Process edits (two files pending at time of this entry)

Note that #1 and #2 will not stop at the exact minimum; usually, I'll have overrun of somewhere between 100 and 2,000 words over the course of a night, depending on when my bedtime is and what point I've reached in the story. At the same time, if I hit that precise minimum, I stay on target.

Separately, on a notepad, I keep my progressive word counts list. This is just a sheet of paper that reads:

6/5 - 2,000/3,000
6/6 - 4,000/4,000
6/7 - 6,000/5,000
6/8 - 8,000[LOCK]/6,000

6/9 - 76,000/7,000

...and so on down the line. That's showing the current word counts of projects in the #1 and #2 positions—so "Not Sincere," which I'm starting tonight, should have a value of 2,000 words before I go to bed, and when I go back to The Winter Long on 6/9, that first day's work should bring the book to a minimum of 76,000 words. [LOCK] signifies a project's projected removal from the list. Every morning, I cross off the totals that have been reached. If I "wrap" the next goal—say, "Not Sincere" hits 6,000 words on 6/6, because I'm so excited—then I completely rewrite the list, advancing everything by one day (8,000 words on 6/7, changing projects on 6/8, etc.). This is because it's always better to be ahead of target: it allows me to do things like "attend a friend's birthday party" and "sleep in on a Sunday" when I earn enough breathing room.

It's hard. I don't pretend that it's not. But there's something comforting in having constant, manageable milestones: if I can write 2,000 words a day for fifty days, I have a 100,000 word book. Not too shabby, all things considered.

This is the terrible secret of Seanans:

We never really stop.

So last week, while I was at Disney World, the "Amazon Worlds" program was announced. In a nutshell, Amazon has acquired a "derivative works" license for certain properties (inc. Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries), which will allow people to publish authorized fanfic through Amazon Worlds. It can't be smutty, and there are no crossovers allowed at this time (even between the properties Amazon has already licensed), but genfic in a single universe is completely okay.*

Now, from a strictly "I am a child of the fanfic mines" standpoint, I can see two really awesome aspects to this:

1. If I publish through Amazon Worlds, I can't be sued for playing in someone else's sandbox.
2. I could get paid.

Let me be very clear here: right now, under the law, you can't be paid for fanfic, because then you're abusing someone else's intellectual property. By creating this license, Amazon has essentially set up a licensed tie-in factory, which allows for payment of authors without any illicit exploitation of someone else's IP. There's even a clause in the Amazon Works program which makes it okay for the IP holders to read the fanfic-for-pay: the rules state that if the IP holders want something you created and put in your Amazon Worlds-published fanfic, they can just take it. Since most of the "no please, don't tell me" attitude among some creators comes from fear of being accused later of stealing someone else's ideas, this is a great protection for IP holders.** For fanfic creators, maybe not so much.

"But wait," some people may cry, "are you saying you want fanfic creators to erode your copyright?" No. I am not. For one thing, copyright doesn't work that way. But original characters in fanfic sometimes shed the skins of their origins and go on to have adventures and worlds of their own. A lot of today's working authors started in the fanfic mines, and many of them brought their OCs with them when they moved on. It's easy enough to change things—Penny from The Rescuers becoming Jenny in Oliver and Company when Disney realized they didn't want to put those moves in the same continuity—but still, it creates a potential muddy water scenario that would make me uneasy if I were a fanfic writer in those fandoms, considering submitting stories that contained original characters or ideas. There's also the concern that, well...fanfic writers like to share our toys. My fanon could wind up in your fic could wind up on the show, becoming canon. And yeah, most of us would kill for that, but since there's no way of tracing things back, it could become a case of "I borrow your ideas, the show takes what they think are my ideas, you were never consulted, you didn't get to opt in."

As for the question of payment, I regularly pay people for fan art of Emma Frost, which then hangs in my house, because I am a nerd. Why should paying someone for fanfic, under the right set of conditions, be any different?

But this is all sort of speculation and relatively harmless "maybe." I mean, much of what Stephen Moffat has done as the showrunner of Doctor Who is make his fanon canon, and it hasn't hurt him any; I dream of the day I get to start making some of my X-Men fanon canonical. What concerns me more is the possibility that creating "licensed fanfic" as a category will lead to more of a legal crackdown on "unlicensed fanfic." "Oh, sorry, your archive is outside the bounds of our derivative works licensing, here is your C&D."***

I've seen a lot of people talk about how fanfic works because it is a community effort. And I've seen a lot of the "ha ha all fic is porn, this won't fly" laughing. But what I haven't seen much of is acknowledgement that fanfic is a way for marginalized people to take control of stories that are so often aimed at a sort of safely privileged able-bodied straight male whiteness, engage with them, and fall more deeply in love for that engagement. Fanfic gave me women who were allowed to be strong, not stuffed into refrigerators. It gave me lesbians and bisexual women, and people who owned their often messed-up sexuality. And it gave them to me in the framework of a world I already knew and loved and was aching to interface with as a coherent equal, not as someone treated as a "fringe viewer" by the main narrative.

Yeah, there's a lot of porn. But don't we all deserve a little porn every once in a while?

Fanfic is a huge, collaborative, interactive way for people to be a part of the stories that they love, and I worry that Amazon Worlds is a big step, not toward monetizing fanfic, but toward mainstreaming it in a way that will sap many of the qualities that make it so important. The minute I can say "sorry, this fanfic over here is licensed, and yours is not, so cut it the fuck out," there is a problem. People need to be unafraid to write their stories, the way they want to write them, and learn in the process.

So yeah. I am leery and concerned.

(*This is my understanding based on a reading of the program rules, and based on discussion by other people. I could be wrong. If I am, I'll update.)
(**This is not true of everyone. Some people just hate fanfic. I've never understood that, so I can't really speak to it, but it's a real and pervasive point of view, so I don't want to sound like I'm speaking for those folks.)
(***Technically those C&Ds would be legal even now. I've seen them served. But without something like Amazon Worlds to be held up as proof that fanfic writers are somehow "stealing income" from either the IP holder(s) or the publishing program, they seem to be short-term things that everyone quietly forgets about.)

Let's talk about fairy tales.

Yesterday, Mattel—the company that makes my beloved Monster High Dolls, literally dozens of which occupy multiple rooms in my house—announced the launch of a new toy line: Ever After High, where the children of famous fairy tale figures go to school as they prepare to take the Legacy Pledge and relive the stories of their parents. Hundreds of generations of Wicked Queens and whiteout girls passing poison apples back and forth between them like Valentines.

One of my favorite TV miniseries of all time, The 10th Kingdom, is about a world where fairy tales are true, and where the descendants of the stories we know here, today, in our world still live, trying to eke out a chance at happily ever after. The main character, Virginia, is both Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood, just one more girl in danger (and falling in love with) a wolf. The novelization of the miniseries is one of my first choices for comfort reading.

Once Upon A Time, currently airing on ABC, is basically someone filming the playtime of a group of very inventive children (I'd say about age twelve) who have between them a complete set of the Disney Princess Collection dolls, a Peter Pan playset, and whatever other toys they've been able to scrounge from the rooms of their siblings. I keep expecting a T-Rex to show up, just before all the other kids start shouting at Crystal about how they let her make Red a werewolf, why does she keep ruining everything.

Fables and its spin-offs—especially Cinderella, which is deconstruction of both her story and of the modern myth of the super-spy assassin who never dies—are some of the best things happening in comics today. The worst issue of Fables is better than the best issue of a great many other things (none of which I will name here, because that's rude). It's a glorious fairy tale stew, and it tastes so very sweet when we put it in our mouths.

I could go on for quite some time (and eventually I may, because these are all things that are very much worth experiencing, for their similarities, for their differences). There have been Marvel Fairy Tales, recasting X-Men and Avengers into classic roles. There have been movies like Sydney White, recasting Snow White into a college-age modern woman and the seven dwarves into her socially outcast friends. Fairy tales are everywhere. Fairy tales are older than you think. They were the first form of urban fantasy, and I fully expect them to be the last. They are urban legend mellowed and fermented from vinegar into fine wine (and yes, sometimes, turned sour by the passage of time and changing cultural standards).

And here's the exciting thing. Each and every work I've cited above is, at its core, transformative fan fiction. Snow White is a really common figure in modern retellings: something about that whiteout girl with the bloody lips and the murderous mother figure appeals to us. Don't know why, although I know why she appeals to me. Don't much care. I'm having too much fun writing and reading and watching and loving fanfic about her, and I'll leave the deep contemplation to other people. We're all bringing our own touches to the reimagining, and that's the most fun part of all: is Snow White a politician? A gunslinger? A witch? A government agent? Does she have a wicked stepmother, or just a rival? Is she going to eat the apple? Can she escape her story? Does she want to?

It's the little things that make all these stories individual, distinct, and worth enjoying. (And before someone says "but if it's fanfic how can any of these things be under copyright, that makes no sense," remember that original characters and plot elements can be copyrighted even when the public domain source material is not. So my ATI Management Bureau, and Bill's Fabletown, are both protected by their recent creation, even as we stuff them full of characters that belong to everyone, forever. Again, this is how we don't all wind up getting sued by Disney.) We're in a period of remaking the fairy tales we grew up with, trying to turn them into something that we feel is still relevant, and will be relevant for generations to come.

Fairy tales are powerful things.

There's always room for one more happy ever after.

A comment that I see frequently in reviews and discussions of literary work—both mine and others;—is "oh, this reads like a response to reviewer criticism of thing X," or "see, the author realized that fans didn't like thing Y and so they changed it," or "this is such a take that to people who didn't enjoy thing Z." And I will admit, every time I see it, I smack my head against something and moan.

Now, don't get me wrong: it is entirely possible that this is a valid criticism, especially with shorter works. "Velveteen vs." for example: if you say "I don't like how Jacqueline is acting in this story," I can absolutely address that in the next story, because they're being written and posted at a pace that allows for that sort of thing. But with novels?

Not so much.

Right now, we're a little under six months out from Chimes at Midnight. I have the page proofs for review, and it's locked to any major editorial changes. I'm also writing The Winter Long, which is due at DAW before the end of the year. Technically, this means I would have time to read reviews of Chimes and incorporate any criticism into the finished Winter manuscript, but let's be honest here: I won't. I never have. By the time Chimes comes out, I'll be finishing draft two, the plot will be locked into place, and nothing structural will happen that doesn't come from my editor or agent (or Vixy, but she has a unique place in this ecosystem).

As the first reviews for Midnight Blue-Light Special were coming out, I was finishing the second draft of Half-Off Ragnarok. And yes, I have cringed every time someone said, seriously or in jest, that book three would suck because it wouldn't be about Verity. I couldn't bench this book and write another one about Very if I wanted to, because there isn't time, even if it were her place in the story (which it's not). I'll get back to her eventually—with book five, to be specific—but the fact that some people don't want her to go doesn't make her stay. Hell, I don't want her to go. The narrative is set.

This is not to say that writers don't listen to criticism or commentary, because we do. I have made it a point to include more QUILTBAG characters in the Toby series since I realized that, due to most fae marriages being about procreation, the majority of the on-screen relationships were monogamous and heterosexual. I've clarified things that people found confusing...but I've done it three books down the line, because that was when the schedule allowed for it to happen. At any moment in time, my world looks like this:

1. The book that just came out.
2. The next book in the series, which I just finished.
3. The book after that, which is very tightly plotted.
4. The book where comments about book #1 can be considered.

With series like Newsflesh, which was only three books long, or Parasitology, which is only going to be two books long, we literally never get to step #4 in the conversation. By the time you see book #1, I'm either writing book #3, or I'm about to get started. With Newsflesh, I wrote book one, outlined books two and three, and then rewrote book one to fit the series outline and account for feedback from my editor. Book two was done before book one saw shelves, and so on.

I love reviews. I often wish that I could go back and change things, and sometimes I fantasize about the Feed: 20th Anniversary Edition where I get to revise and rewrite and address the accidentally problematic aspects of the story and do my job as a storyteller a little better in some places, because oh man that would be amazing. (And some people would hate it and accuse me of pandering, and I would then dream about hitting them with the book, because it would totally be a hardcover big enough to stun rabid wolves.) But I've never gotten feedback about book #1 and then gone into book #2 with the idea that I'LL SHOW THEM I'LL SHOW THEM ALL HOW DARE THEY QUESTION MY GENIUS. I can't.

Because the publishing cycle? It's longer than you think.

The main flush of angry kvetching over the Hugo ballot has passed; we're on to complaining about other things, like the Clarke Award short list and whether or not "fake geek girls" really exist. (I have a guest post about fake geek girls and why they're a fiction that makes me want to set everything the sun touches on fire coming up later this month, so I'm not going to go into that now.) And to be honest, I'm really glad. Sure, it's nice to have everyone you've ever met in a friendly capacity saying congratulations for a couple of days, and it's an honor to be nominated—nothing can change that. But the personal comments got to be a bit much within the first twenty-four hours, and by the time the primary articles stopped, I was basically just hiding under my bed and waiting for it to be over.

(And yes, because I know it will be said, I know better than to go ego-surfing and link-chasing during the immediate aftermath of the ballot's release. This isn't my first rodeo. The trouble is, there's no way to make everyone else know this. I get emailed things, I get linked to things by people I trust, and while I try to be a sunshiny murder princess, I don't actually live inside a bubble of good feelings and kittens with machetes. I'm sure I could find way worse than what I encountered organically. I'm not going looking.)

Some people didn't like my nominated works; that's normal, that's okay, that's the way this is supposed to go. I assure you, the Hugo ballot is not 100% the ballot I would have designed, for me, to suit my idea of the best the genre has to offer. I think the only category that would escape my meddling completely unchanged is the Campbell, and that's just because I don't have any strong idea of who else was eligible this year. If you like 100% of this year's Hugo ballot, congratulations: you have won the genre lottery, and I do not envy you the stress of trying to decide how to vote. (And no, I'm not going to post my "in an ideal world" Hugo ballot. I have no interest in slighting the very worthy nominees who would not have been on there if some weird-ass rule had caused me to be solely responsible for selecting this year's candidates.) If you don't like what I write, that's totally cool. Vote for what you do like.

But the thing I encountered, in several places, that puzzled the living shit out of me? Was criticism of my excessive self-promotion.

Um.

Sunil helpfully went back over my blog for this past awards season, and found two posts: one summarizing my eligible works from 2012, and one saying "these are things which I have nothing to do with, but would love to see make the ballot." (Two of those things made the ballot, two of them did not.) I can't search my Twitter stream as easily, but I know I reminded people a couple of times that nominations were closing, usually by retweeting reminders made by other people. I never said "me me me nominate me me me." I did say that I really wanted to win a Hugo for fiction. I said it once. I said it with a clarifying note that I felt it was dishonest not to state my biases in that context. And that was it for my 2013 Hugo self-promotion.

I bring this up because I've seen more self-promotion—a lot more—from quite a few other authors, some of whom are on the ballot, most of whom are male. And that's fine! Self-promotion is not a sin! It's sort of our job. Word-of-mouth is awesome, and it sells books and builds fans, but that word-of-mouth begins with someone standing up and saying "I did something cool, please look at it." You should self-promote to exactly the level with which you, personally, are comfortable. If other people don't like it, they can stop following you into whatever venue you're promoting yourself in. I am not personally comfortable with excessive self-promotion, even as I find myself grateful when other people do it, because it keeps me up to date on their accomplishments. The human mind is a funny thing, and it doesn't have to make sense all the time.

But here's the thing: I have not seen charges of "excessive self-promotion" lain against any of my male counterparts. Not the ones in my weight class, not the ones above me, not the ones below me. Not the ones who self-promote ten times as much as I do. I have, however, seen the "excessive self-promotion" accusation lain against other women who make it onto award ballots. And that troubles me, because it demonstrates a gender bias that has been found in a great number of social settings and contexts.

Language Myth #6: Do Women Talk Too Much?

Click the link. Read it. And see why I get so upset when I don't self-promote much (and feel terrible about self-promoting at all, even though I recognize that it's a part of my job), yet get tarred for doing it "excessively." (And no, this is not a case of "protesting too much" or "where there's smoke, there's fire." This is a case of "I become distressed and depressed when accused of things I didn't do, especially when they're connected in any way to things which are innately difficult for me.)

These two quotes especially resonated with me:

"Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time."

And...

"The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women."

I am not a silent woman. But I am not louder than the men who are in my peer group. We're all talking at about the same volume, some a little louder, some a little softer. And it would be nice if my gender would stop being the one factor that determined the worth, and appropriateness, of everything I did.

I did a Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything") last week. It seemed to go well; lots of people asked me lots of questions, and some of them were questions I had heard before and some of them were questions that were totally new, and I typed answers until my hands actually started to cramp up. Yes: I took stress damage from a website, because it was that active, and that much fun.

Toward the end of the session, someone asked a question that I've heard before, in a variety of different forms. It boils down to, essentially, "Why did you choose to do this thing with which I did not agree?" Sometimes it's about a character dying, or an animal dying, or a character leaving the cast. Sometimes it's about the relationships between characters. But it comes up, again and again, and I keep trying to answer it. During the AMA, I came as close as I think I'm ever going to come to an answer. So here, in modified form, it is:

People ask me "Why did you decide to go that way?" a lot. There's a big assumption in that question, and it's one that's gotten me in trouble before, for answering in a way that someone felt was flippant. So please understand that I am in no way meaning to be flippant: I'm just trying to unpack the way I work.

I didn't decide anything.

I frequently say that my subconscious spends a lot of time lying to my conscious mind, and that's not far from the truth. It's not uncommon for me to write my way into elegant, if unusual solutions, react with surprise, and look back to find a hundred pages of foreshadowing that was right there, if only I'd taken the time to look. Part of me clearly knew what it was doing, and just didn't inform the rest. I think this is because that part of me is the smarter part, and it knows that I over think when given time to do so.

With every death, betrayal, or departure, I reached a point in that story where something needed to happen, and the characters said "This is the thing, this is what is going to happen." I build for characters, not for plot, but still, every time, I've said "You are wrong," because every time, it's been something that I didn't want to do. And every time, the story has said, "They are right," and when I looked back at the story, the signs were there all along. They were there from the very first chapter, sometimes even from the very first page. They are often small, subtle signs. They're not always billboards. But they're always there.

In a lot of cases I've tried to find another way, because I know that if something makes me uncomfortable, it's probably going to make some of my readers uncomfortable, too. But I always stop trying when I realize that any such solution would be overly convoluted...and more, it would be dishonest. I am telling stories. Storytelling is a form of lying, but it's a form of lying used to tell bigger truths. If you start turning the story itself into a lie, if you start forcing the narrative into a shape that isn't natural, it all falls apart. I have to make these lies as honest as I can, or their centers will not hold.

And that is why, no matter who you are or what made you ask this question, I did the thing you didn't like.

I don't regret being honest with the story. It's what I've promised, over and over again, to do. I am sorry that some of the lies I've used to tell the truth have made some people uncomfortable. I think that's a healthy response, quite honestly.

I would still do it again, if that was what the story needed.

I'm just going to get this out of the way before I say anything else:

THERE'S GOING TO BE A VERONICA MARS MOVIE THERE'S GOING TO BE A VERONICA MARS MOVIE THE KICKSTARTER FUNDED AND THERE'S GOING TO BE A VERONICA MARS MOVIE!!!!

Ahem. Look, my cat is named "Lilly Kane," there's a signed poster hanging in my guest room, what do you want from me? I wear my geeky heart upon my sleeve. And now, on to the actual substantive post you may have hoped was hiding here. To whit:

Yesterday morning, Rob Thomas, creator of the show Veronica Mars and author of books such as Rats Saw God and Slave Day, announced a Kickstarter to make a Veronica Mars movie. The Kickstarter, which is still going, had a target of two million dollars, with reward levels starting for a $10 donation. Here's a link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project

The Kickstarter raised its first million in four hours. Last night, I watched it click over the two million dollar mark. There was much rejoicing, because dude. Veronica Mars movie. I shrieked, I chair-danced, and all was right with the world...

...only not, because it turns out a lot of people are really perturbed by the fact that a movie which will have corporate backing (Rob Thomas is not the Veronica Mars intellectual property owner, which means Warner Brothers has to be involved) was asking for money on Kickstarter. Mind you, no one held a gun to my head and forced me to fund this project; no one forced me to sit here carefully considering the reward tiers and choosing the one which came with the most awesome swag. No one clicked the button for me. But somehow, my backing this movie has stolen projects from indie artists who really needed it.

And unto this do I say: bullshit.

The world is not a zero-sum game. Yes, if I have one dollar, and I give it to Sunil, I am not going to be able to give it to Vixy. But if I only have one dollar, I'm not giving it to anybody. I'm keeping it for myself, to live. I am an artist and a creator of art, and I know as well as anyone that art is a luxury: art is something that we pay for after we've paid for food and housing and heat in the winter and all the other things that keep our physical bodies going. Yes, I do believe that we need art to live, but that's a spiritual and emotional life, not a "I can no longer breathe because Fringe is off the air" life. They are different.

So let's say that I've paid for my necessities, my survival is assured, and I have a dollar to give to a super-deserving project. Obviously, if I give it to one person, I can't give it to anyone else (although I could give both people fifty cents, but I digress). And you know what? That experimental retelling of The Crucible with sock puppets probably needs my dollar more than the Veronica Mars movie. But I'm paying for my luxuries here. I'm paying for what I want. And what I want is to see Logan, and Veronica, and my fictional friends again. I miss them.

The Veronica Mars movie did not take my dollars away from "more deserving" projects, because no one gets to measure that but the person who holds the dollars. Me. And Sunil, and Chris, and Rae, and every other Veronica Mars fan I know. Rob Thomas did not violate the Kickstarter terms and conditions: I know, I checked. I am not somehow being rooked into paying for something that I will then have to pay for again: I chose a reward level that gave me enough stuff that I felt the price tag was justified (and they did a great job of balancing the rewards; $10 gets you a PDF of the script, and that's reasonable, if you're a fan of the show). Yes, I'll have to pay if I want to see the movie in the theater, but that's paying the theater, which has its own bills to take care of (and will feed me delicious popcorn).

Life is not a zero-sum game. Kickstarter is not a zero-sum game. The money I am willing to shake out of the couch cushions for Veronica Mars is not the money I am willing to shake out of the couch cushions for anything else. Living in a capitalistic society means I get to pay for what I want, and saying that it was tacky of Rob to even ask, when there was no better funding channel available, is missing the point.

You do not have to want what I want. No one does. But just like I don't get to say "the things you want are worthless and not worth wanting, come want this other thing instead," nobody gets to make that statement to me. And there is nothing that makes "I want two million dollars to make a movie of a TV show that the network canceled, that the studio won't fund, but that the fans adore" any more or less legitimate of a request than anything else. And "Well, what if the studios start holding your shows hostage?" doesn't scare me. I've been waiting to be able to pay for the things I love, to count directly with my dollars, not just as a shadow of a Nielsen household, for a long time.

It's not a zero-sum game. But it's a good one.

So here's the thing:

I am writing a lot of stories set in the history of the Price-Healy family, slowly pushing my way toward the modern day. There are also stories set in the present day, such as the Antimony-centric novella, "Bad Dream Girl," which is going to appear in the anthology Glitter and Mayhem. A lot of these get given away for free on my website, in a variety of formats, with covers and everything. I like keeping the canon centralized.

That said, unless an anthology is commissioning something, it can be hard to carve out the time for what is essentially unpaid work. I need to prioritize my time according to what I'm getting paid for (which is why, for example, the rate of "Velveteen vs." stories went up so sharply when I got a print contract). So...

How would people feel if I opened a "tip jar," with the understanding that for every X amount of dollars, I would add a story in one of my universes to the master list of Paid For Things? Those stories would still have to fit around everything else, but it would make them easier to schedule, and would also make my lights easier to keep on. The stories themselves would remain free on my website, so if you didn't want to donate, you could just stand back and wait for nature to take its course.

Thoughts?

So it's done: the story is told, and we've all had time to sit back and digest it. There was a lot of evolution, growth, and change between "Velveteen vs. The Isley Crawfish Festival" and "Velveteen vs. The Epilogue," and I like to think that was a good thing.

The character of Velveteen has been with me for a long time; there are sketches of her dating back to high school, which puts her in about the same era of inception as Toby Daye. That may explain some of their similarities: the parental issues, the trust issues, the perpetual poverty and fear of going hungry. These are all things that I was struggling with during high school, and for several years after. While I don't base my characters off of myself intentionally, there's an aspect of "write what you know" that is simply unavoidable. She didn't have a civilian name for years, but when the time came to start writing her story down, I named her Velma, after a friend of mine who needed a pick-me-up. And thus was Velma Martinez properly born.

The first "Velveteen vs." story had a weird genesis. See, I was getting ready to go to Worldcon in Melbourne, Australia, and I realized that going to Australia is expensive. Like, it costs a lot. So I started doing things to save money. I cut back on caffeine and new book purchases, and I began selling blog sponsorships. I did the math on how many dollars I would need to save every day, and said "pay me this much money and that day is yours." And people did!

My very first sponsorship was for an anonymous group called The Crawfish Minions. Wanting to start the sponsorships off with a bang, I decided I'd write them a little story about crawfish. Velveteen seemed like the perfect character to fight river-dwelling crustaceans, and somehow my "little story" grew into the first Velveteen adventure. This is also the reason for the early installment weirdness in that one: I hadn't paused to think things through just yet. The shape of the world was there, but there's more snark in the narration (the characters would always remain snarky, I wrote them), and Velveteen monologues at the Claw for no apparent reason (something which she thankfully never did again). Still, people liked it a lot, and it was fun, and things progressed from there. As they always do. To quote Amy: "Where'd those 10,000 words come from? Did you trip?"

I did at least sit down to figure out a bit more of the shape of the setting before the second story. I knew who Sparkle Bright and Action Dude were, their relationships to Velveteen, and what had really caused their falling-out before I wrote "vs. The Coffee Freaks," although it wasn't until "vs. The Flashback Sequence" that I realized just how deeply Sparkle Bright had been, and still was, in love with Velveteen. You can see the signs if you go back to Yelena's early appearances; she's very clearly dealing with a crush, and very clearly has no idea how to handle it. Whereas poor Aaron was just clueless from day one.

A lot of the secondary characters were unplanned, including several who became incredibly important. Jackie Frost and the Princess were intended as one-offs, showing that Velveteen had friends outside of The Super Patriots, but once I'd allowed them into the story, they refused to leave. The Princess was always transgender; it's part of her origin story. I honestly wasn't sure I'd be able to reveal that on screen until the scene with Jolly Roger's ship, which gave me an opportunity to force everyone into stating their birth names. Tag was introduced because otherwise Velveteen's inevitable reunion with Action Dude would be too easy. Um. Sorry, Action Dude. Didn't mean to break your happy ending.

Maybe the most important of the accidental characters was Victory Anna. I knew that Polychrome needed to have a girlfriend, and I knew that I wanted her to be a gadgeteer, because we didn't have one in the main cast. I wanted to show that power set, even if it was only for one story. So I introduced a time-traveling steampunk gadget-girl, and just sort of ran with it. Because Yelena is described as looking a lot like my friend Torrey, I described Victoria as looking a lot like Vixy. Yes. I just built in the opportunities for cosplay.

Victory Anna was supposed to be a one-off. She absolutely wasn't supposed to become the first character other than Velveteen to have a story focusing on just her (and remains one of only two who have been given their own narrative: the other was Jackie Frost). And she definitely wasn't supposed to turn into a member of the "core team."

Whoops.

On the whole, this series of stories evolved into something larger, more complex, and more honest than I could ever have intended. It's about figuring out who you are and being willing to fight for it, because nothing comes free; it's about forgiving people who hurt you, and sometimes even letting them back into your life; it's about love. Because love is good, and we need more of it.

It took me a long time to tell Velveteen's story.

I think it was worth the wait.

I love the SyFy Channel Saturday night movies. The goofy effects, the giant monsters, the sometimes wooden acting, it's all a delicious cheese sandwich to help me relax into the one night of the week where I don't feel rushed to accomplish ALL THE THINGS before I go to bed. I try to judge them by what they are, and not by what I want them to be: silly, shitty movies that accomplish what they set out to accomplish, no more, and no less. Sometimes they're even pretty good.

This past week, the Saturday night movie was The End of the World. It was about a group of geeks who owned/worked at a video store specializing in disaster movies, the judgmental SO of the geek who actually owned the store, the faintly evil cousin of the geek who actually owned the store, the disapproving parent of one of the geeks who worked at the store, the disaster guru idol of all the geeks, and a bunch of extras. The extras fell into three categories: evil looters who wanted to take stuff from our heroic geeks, assholes at the mental hospital where the disaster guru had been committed, and people at the military base.

Now. Looking only at what I've written above, how many of these characters were female? If you guessed "judgmental SO" and "disapproving parent," then ding ding ding! We have a winner!

None of the geeks were women. The SO even knowing what the Death Star was called was treated as a virtual miracle, and something so hot as to make the alpha geek temporarily forget about saving the planet, because she was speaking Forbidden Knowledge, yo. She was saying things that implied girls could be geeks too, and man, that was so impossible it was like she was demonstrating super powers! The mother figure was literally introduced calling one of the secondary geeks at work and asking him how the job search was going, because it was time for him to get a real job, in the real world, amirite girls? (The SO had a similar speech.) That's how we should interact with geeks! We should drag them kicking and screaming into respectability, because no one can ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be happy and fulfilled just being a professional fan of things. And women can't even start being fans of things. It's not allowed.

None of the extras were female. None of the secondary characters, apart from the two listed above, were female. One of the female characters was there to nag and be a burden; the other was there to be a prize and to be enlightened about how Geek Things = Man Things and Man Things = Awesome.

And here's the thing. None of these characters—not a single fucking one—had such a gendered role that their character could not have been played by a member of the opposite sex. Testosterone did not unlock the key to saving the world. Estrogen did not cause the cataclysm. You could have literally flipped a fucking coin for every single role, and cast accordingly. "Whoops, female lead, male antagonist, female love interest..." Better yet, make it a d10, and if you roll a ten, roll again for assigned birth gender, and then go from there. "Female lead, male antagonist, ftm love interest..." It would have been the same damn movie.

But they didn't do that. They went with boys and boys and boys, and an exclusionist narrative that had me saying sadly "I like disaster movies. I exist, too."

I wound up stopping the movie halfway through because the lack of female voices had become so alienating to me that I needed to wait a while before I came back and finished watching. It was an okay movie. I won't be watching it again. There's no one for me there.

Men can identify with women, and should. Women can identify with men, and should. But there's a big difference between saying "Seanan, you should have been able to identify with the struggles of the protagonist, regardless of gender," and saying "Seanan, you should have been able to accept a world that cast your gender into the role of harpy and martinet, and not felt objectified or rejected by this setting." I did identify with Owen. I did care about his story.

It was everything around him that lost me. And honestly, I'm still lost, and I've been lost too many times.

Sometimes it would be nice to be found.

My beloved Chuck Wendig (he upon whose shoulder I ride always, invisible, intangible, and whispering horrible profanity into the jellyfish-like ridges of his ear) made a post about book piracy yesterday, declaring today, February 6th, International Please Don't Pirate My Book Day. He asked people to post about their experiences with piracy. And as I am an amiable blonde, I am posting.

I've talked about book piracy before, and at the end of the day, it really does come down to a pretty simple statement for me: I don't like it. It makes me uncomfortable, and it makes me sad, and it makes me feel like the hours I spend working hard to write good stories would be better spent doing something else, like say, watching Criminal Minds. I do recognize that piracy is a huge, complicated issue, and that no one is innocent, because everyone who exists in the modern media world has committed some act of digital piracy, whether intentionally or accidentally.

Books are a luxury item. When I was a kid below the poverty line, if I'd had access to book torrent sites and an e-reader, I can guarantee you that I'd have been one of the biggest pirates around, making me the biggest hypocrit around. And those authors would not have been losing sales, because my money was never on the table to begin with; I didn't have any money. Instead, they would have been gaining my undying loyalty, and I grew up into an adult with a passion for owning things. I love owning things. I want to own all the books I love, so that I can stroke them and loan them to people and yes sometimes, give them away when somebody loves them more than me. (No, Bill, this does not apply to any of my folklore collections.) But I am not the norm. My housemate hates owning things, and if he hadn't been conditioned that free books come from the library, not the internet, I think we would have a very different set of things to fight about.

But you know what? "I'm sorry I downloaded your book, I couldn't afford it" sounds very different coming from the teenager in tatty jeans than it does coming from the thirty-something fan with a Starbucks in their hand (and I have heard this statement from both these people). There's a point at which we have to make choices about our luxury items, and sadly, those choices sometimes involve going without. My book or your fancy coffee: please choose, and don't tell me you chose "ENJOY ALL THE THINGS" when it meant that your choice didn't help me feed my cats.

It's funny, but for a culture that's obsessed with wealth and fame, we view money as somehow crass. I love money. I am terrified of slipping back into poverty; terrified enough that I sometimes have trouble remembering that I can afford to buy brand-name cereal. I didn't become a writer for the love of money, but it's the need for security that's kept me working two jobs. I write four books a year. I write a lot of short fiction. I put in, easily, forty hours a week at my keyboard, and that's after I spend forty hours a week at my day job. I pray to the Great Pumpkin that my books will sell, because I want to get out of that day job, I want to spent sixty hours a week at my keyboard and have twenty hours to do stupid shit, like sleeping. And no, it's no one's responsibility to pay my bills but me; I have to do that. I have to make my budget and live within it, and while the things I'm most likely to share with the internet (dolls! Disneyland!) can seem financially silly, I assure you, they happen after I pay the power bill.

If I wanted to write for free, I would have stuck with fanfic, where I was paid in a loose publishing schedule (I.E., "whenever I wanted to post") and with immediate, unrelentingly positive comments, because no one wants to stomp on a fanfic author. I became a professional author to get a wider audience, to share my work with more people, to be someone else's Stephen King (the way Stephen King was mine), and yes, to get paid. I do a job, I really, really enjoy getting paid for it. And yet I see more outrage over someone not tipping their waitress than I do over someone not wanting to pay an author.

(It's horrifying that we pay restaurant staff under minimum wage because "they'll make it up with tips." When you add up the time it takes to write, revise, edit, polish, and promote a book, many authors also make below minimum wage.)

So please, don't pirate my books. When you buy them, you feed my cats and you pay my bills and you let me sleep a little easier and you keep me sitting down at the keyboard, ready to slam out another story. And if you really feel you have to pirate my books, if your situation is such that you can't buy things and this is the only joy you have, please buy them later, when you can, even if you're not normally a re-reader. Please make it possible for me to keep doing this job. I am a human too, and I could really use the help.

I will close with a quote from Chuck:

"If you find that some component of the books doesn’t work for you—some kind of DRM or issues of access, I might suggest pirating the book but then paying for a physical copy. And then taking that copy and either using it to shore up a crooked table or, even better, donating it or passing it along to a friend. Don’t donate directly to me; my publisher helped make my books exist. Publishers catch a lot of shit for a lot of shit. Some of it is deserved. But the truth is, my books—and most of the books you’ve loved in your life—are due to the publishers getting to do what they do. They’re an easy target but they deserve some back-scratchings once in a while."

Thank you.

I want to open this by saying that I love my cover art. It's a blanket statement: I am one of the rare, lucky authors who has never had to grit her teeth and stand behind a cover she didn't care for. The Toby covers are atmospheric and brilliant and show Toby accurately. The Newsflesh covers are iconic in a way I could only have fantasized about. The InCryptid covers are amazing representations of the characters, done by the first cover artist I got to choose for myself. I virtually campaigned for Aly Fell, and I could not be happier with his work. Like, seriously, could not be happier.

But here's the thing.

When I go to the bookstore, half-naked women greet me in literally every section except for cozy mysteries. There are elegant half-naked women on action novels, waiting to be ravaged. There are misty, wistful half-naked women on YA novels, ready to embark on romantic adventures, probably while drowning. There are lots of half-naked women on science fiction and fantasy, many of them happy to show me their posteriors. And this doesn't even touch on the comic book store, where there are so many half-naked women that I barely even notice them anymore. Once I stopped expecting puberty to give me a figure like Dazzler or Illyana Rasputin, I just tuned all the thrusting hips and pointy boobs out, like the white noise that they were.

I don't actually know very many women who go "Oh, oh, I gotta get me a book with a naked chick on the cover." I do know a lot of women who are uncomfortable with those naked chicks, and who try to avoid reading books with naked chicks on them in public. I had a few people get angry on my behalf when the cover of Discount Armageddon was released, before they realized that I had petitioned for that image, and that it was an intentional send-up of certain cheesecake conventions. And without speaking for any other authors, I am the only one I know of who actually said to her publisher, "Hey, you know what would be awesome? If my smart, strong, savvy, heavily-armed protagonist was in a miniskirt." (DAW took this in stride, by the way, which was hysterical when you consider that my one cover request for the Toby books was "Can she be wearing clothes?")

I also don't know many, if any, women who defend the often exaggerated and impossible anatomy that shows up on these covers. In fact, women tend to decry it, and when I have heard defense, it's mostly come from men. These are very general statements, and I know that: I am not trying to imply that all men love plastic spines and thighs the length of torsos. Jim Hines, for example, has done some excellent deconstruction of these covers, recreating them in the physical world (as much as he can) to demonstrate just how ludicrous they are. And if you think I'm exaggerating, I invite you to Google the phrase "Escher girls," and see how incredibly much oversexualized, anatomically questionable art makes it onto the cover of books and comics.

So it seems likely that the intended audience for the half-naked women is largely male. Okay. As a bisexual woman, I like looking at pretty girls, and I don't see anything wrong with men liking to look at pretty girls. When I sit on the train, I should see dozens of men reading books with half-naked women on them, right? Because they're trained to the male gaze, so they should attract it, right?

The single most common critique I received of the cover for Discount Armageddon was from male readers saying they could not read the physical book in public. And while I think anyone should be able to read anything they want to without feeling ashamed, this critique does raise a question about who the half-naked women are actually for, if guys don't want to be associated with them.

I was recently involved in an online "cover battle," where people voted for their favorite cover of 2012. It was super-fun, and I made it to the finals, where the cover of Discount Armageddon was rightfully defeated by the cover of Chuck Wendig's fantastic Blackbirds (which you should read if you haven't already). Except maybe I'm exaggerating a little when I say that it was super-fun, because for me, the fun started dying when people started leaving nasty comments about my cover.

"Wow, so garbage made in Poser consisting of a scantily clad woman in thigh-highs is winning over that beautiful piece of art on the Wendig book."

"WHY IS DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON WINNING? D: When did we start liking slutty girls in miniskirts holding guns and swords, Dragonites? WHEN?"

Even some of the site text was faintly shaming, with comments like "because of our male readership massively voting for the sexy cheerleader chick" when trying to deduce why my (fantastic, thank you Aly) cover was still in the running. (The site text was updated after Chuck stated that my cover was still in the fight because it was a damn fine urban fantasy cover. The text was, in fact, updated to quote Chuck directly. I love Chuck.)

But let me tell you, shit like that? Harshes my squee real fucking fast. Thanks for the assumption that a girl in a miniskirt must be slutty, commenter! Thanks for calling it garbage, other commenter! Thanks for making me feel like I don't get to be a real author because I wrote a book where the main character can accurately be depicted by the cover image I asked for and received.

Riddle me this, o world. If women mostly don't ask for half-naked girls on book covers, if most book covers seem geared to the male gaze, whether rightly or wrongly, then why is it men stepping up to call those covers garbage, and to call the women who grace them slutty? Why is my cover getting slut-shamed by someone who doesn't know the girl in that picture, doesn't know who she is or why that image is an accurate one? It's like the art is awesome as long as it's on a closet door, but if you're asked to like it in public, it's time to throw out a few micro-aggressions to keep people from thinking you're "that kind" of person.

Fuck. That.

I want every book to have an accurate cover. If I open a book with a half-naked girl on it, I want that half-naked girl to be inside. I want to read those books while proudly proclaiming to anyone who sees them in my hands, "I have a book with a half-naked woman in it." I want everyone reading everything, and I don't want any more of this "these are the covers that sell, so these are the covers you'll get, but no one's ever going to admit to liking them." And part of this is going to be dialing back the crappy anatomy and the questionable sexuality. If the characters keep their clothes on in the text, they should do it on the cover, too. If the characters get naked, they should still be painted or photoshopped to look like people, not plastic nightmares with eleven-inch waists (unless they're wasps or something).

And let's stop slut-shaming fictional characters based on a single picture. It's not fair to the books, it's not fair to the authors, and it's not fair to the readers who might be waiting to fall in love with them.

We should be better than this.

So I received an email recently, from someone* who wanted me to know that, while they enjoyed the October Daye books, they didn't like the fact that the plot for Ashes of Honor involved a missing child case, since this had come up before. Furthermore, if there was any hint of a missing child in the back cover text of Chimes at Midnight, they would be dropping the series.

This? Is totally, absolutely, 100% fair. You should never have to read anything you don't want to, unless it's for a class (and even then, only if you want to actually pass said class). Life is too short! Don't read bad books unless reading bad books brings you joy, and don't read books that don't interest you unless you have a damn good reason.

At the same time, while I can totally appreciate the sentiment, I'm not sure it's a sentiment that I, as a reader, would ever feel comfortable expressing to a writer. Especially not now that I'm a writer myself, which means I know that a) the story will go where the story will go, and b) by the time you get your hands on book one in a series, book two is finished and turned in, making it impossible for the writer to avoid the plot elements you've said that you dislike. "Don't do this or else" is a wasted statement. It is already too late to avoid doing whatever it is you want to have avoided.

But still, for every person who speaks, there are ten more who don't, so I thought this might be a good time to say something about what's coming up for Toby. Specifically: yes, there will be more missing people, because after defeating Blind Michael and preventing a war, finding people is what she has a reputation for being good at. Ironically, Toby herself prefers murder cases; they're less time-sensitive, and she's less terrified of getting it wrong. But if she gets a call from out-Kingdom, there's a very good chance that it's going to be about somebody's missing son, daughter, or heir.

The plot of Chimes at Midnight doesn't center around missing children, but it does involve someone who has been lost. The Winter Long is still in progress, and is more about people being found than people being lost; there's also a murder, which is good for Toby's admittedly frayed nerves. This doesn't mean that there won't be missing children somewhere down the road, because those are the cases that make people sit up and say "I want my baby back alive, get that October woman."

Losing and finding people are huge themes in the Toby series, and that's a very intentional thing; that's never going to change. If that isn't the sort of thing you want to read, I'm really sorry. InCryptid has different themes, and changes narrators periodically, which should help to keep things more varied. But much like Newsflesh was about truth, Toby is about loss. At least until we find the ending.

So that's what's going on for Toby, and why things are the way that they are. I hope it makes sense; I hope you'll all stick around. And if not, I hope you'll at least understand why I write it this way.

This is how the story goes.

(*Names are withheld, as always, because that's how we roll around here. Playing nicely is the new black.)

I became a geek when I was four years old. That's when my grandmother handed me my first My Little Pony (Cotton Candy) and told me that if I liked her, I could have more. That was also the year when I first really and truly understood that Doctor Who had an ongoing storyline that could be followed and thought about, even when the TV wasn't on. I don't remember much about the year when I was four, but I remember those two moments of epiphany.

But wait, some people would have said (and did say), as recently as three years ago: being into My Little Pony doesn't make you a geek. It makes you a girl. And to them I said, every time, that if being into My Little Pony didn't make me a geek, then they had to turn in their Transformers street cred. Science fiction and fantasy got tickets to the geek-out party, and if teleporting unicorns who live on the other side of the rainbow and fight darkness with magic and thumbs doesn't count as fantasy in your world, you are not relevant to my interests. You don't gotta like it. You do gotta admit that not only the boys' cartoons of the 1980s contained the seeds of geekdom.

He-Man? She-Ra. Both were epic fantasy adventures. The Care Bears were basically friendly aliens who just wanted us to stop blowing shit up all the damn time. The Littles lived inside your walls. How is any of this not genre? But if you asked the boys in my neighborhood, it was girly, and hence it wasn't good enough. I saw proto-geek after proto-geek give up and drop out after she'd been told, yet again, that Transformers were serious and My Little Pony was stupid. I very quickly found myself in the unenviable position of being the only girl geek in my neighborhood.

I played with the boys pretty much exclusively (after I'd beaten respect for My Little Pony through their thick skulls), at least until we got to middle school, and my being a nerd became a problem. (Note: I'm using "geek" to mean "obsessed with geeky things and very open about liking them" and "nerd" to mean "thick glasses, read constantly, did math for fun.") The boys scattered. The girls, who had been socialized that geeks were icky, wanted nothing to do with me. I nested in my interests, and waited for the world to be fair.

Then, like a shining beacon: high school. Access to conventions. Access to that new miracle, the internet. I was no longer going to be a girl geek. I was just going to be a geek! I could be interested in ANYTHING I wanted, FOREVER, and my people would understand me, because they'd been through the same thing! FOREVER!

...only My Little Pony wasn't really fantasy, because it was "too pink," and Amethyst Princess of Gemworld wasn't a real comic book, and I had to be lying when I said I loved Warren Magazines because girls don't like horror, and Stephen King? Ugh so lame. In order to be a geek, I had to conform to the shape that others defined for my geekiness, hiding the things I really loved behind a veneer of Star Trek and learning the names of all the members of the Justice League (even though I had zero fucks to give). During that period, I guess I was a "fake geek girl" in some ways, because the people I perceived as having power over me had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that loving the things I genuinely loved, following my true geeky passion down the dark corridors it so temptingly offered, would mean I wasn't a geek.

It would just mean that I was lonely.

I learned to fake it. I can name multiple incarnations of the Flash, even though I am not and never have been a DC girl. No one who's ever asked me to do this has been able to explain the entire Summers family tree, but I've known since I was fourteen that if I confused Wally West with Barry Allen, I would be decried as a faker who didn't really like comics. I learned to quote Monty Python without ever seeing the show, and made at least a stab at all the big popular epic fantasy series of the day. My geek cred was unquestioned.

And it got better. I discovered fanfic, where people were a lot more willing to tolerate whatever I wanted to get excited about, as long as I didn't expect them to read my novel-length fixfic for a Disney Channel Original Movie. My Little Ponies became "retro" and "vintage," and my collection was suddenly "ironic" in the eyes of the people I allowed to judge me. I learned to roll my eyes at moments of judgement that would previously have reduced me to snotty tears. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped giving two fucks about what other people thought of my geekiness. I stopped trying to be a gender-neutral geek and became a geek girl.

But you know what? I wish I hadn't been forced to go through that particular evolution. I wish I'd been able to walk in and say "My Little Pony is as good as Transformers" without needing a sudden surge in male My Little Pony fandom to make that opinion acceptable. (I love all My Little Pony fans. Friendship is magic. But as a girl who grew up with Megan and Firefly, it really does feel a lot like "okay, girls, we've finally decided your sparkly unicorns are cool, so they qualify for membership in the genre now.")

I've been watching the "fake geek girl" mess go around, and it feels like middle school. It feels like people going "your passions don't match my passions, ergo your passions must be invalid." And I say fuck. That. Noise. Geeks like things. That's why we exist. If what someone likes is costuming, or Twilight, or SETI, or looking for Bigfoot, why the fuck should I care? If you like something enough to shape your life around it, you're a geek. Period. You do not need to prove anything. Ever.

I look at geek culture now, and we're primed to allow a whole generation of little girls to grow up without that horrible middle stage that I had to live through. But they can only have that freedom if we stop pretending that unicorns are inferior to robots, or that girls can't like zombies, or that boys can't like talking bears with hearts on their stomachs.

Now if you'll all excuse me, I'm going to go to Target and buy some Monster High dolls, which I will unbox, redress, and play with, like a boss.

LIKE A GEEK BOSS.

The election is almost here.

For the most part, I try not to get political, both because I don't have the bandwidth for the arguments, and because I'm just so tired from being angry all the time. But I'm hearing the usual "oh, the bad storm that has done so much damage is because of ALL THE GAY," and according to the Mitt Romney campaign...

"As president, Mitt will not only appoint an Attorney General who will defend the Defense of Marriage Act—a bipartisan law passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton—but he will also champion a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman."

Gay marriage is now so terrifying and troublesome that it needs to be banned constitutionally? What?

So let me tell you what gay marriage looks like to me.

Same sex marriage was legalized in California in 2008. It was rendered illegal that same year, by Proposition 8, but before that happened, thousands of gay and lesbian couples were able to sign their marriage licenses and take their wedding vows. My middle sister, the one I call Young James Dean, was one of the happy women who took the hand of the woman she loved and promised, legally, to stay with her forever.

It was not a fancy marriage. YJD and her girlfriend (now wife) were both worried that same sex marriage would be made illegal before they could formalize their union. So I, my mother, and my youngest sister joined YJD, her girlfriend, and her girlfriend's family at the city courthouse.

They were both nervous and terrified and ecstatic. They signed their papers and affirmed that they knew what they were doing, and we were all escorted up to see the Justice of the Peace.

It was a hot day. No one was dressed particularly fancily. YJD had a silver sixpence in her shoe that I'd bought from a local rare coin dealer; there were no other wedding accoutrements in place. We didn't need them.

The Justice of the Peace asked if they would do all the things a spouse is meant to do: they said that they would. And they were pronounced married in the eyes of the State of California. Both of them kissed the bride. We had the wedding dinner at Denny's. Bride of YJD's father paid for it. For their wedding gift, I had their marriage certificate nicely framed, and it hangs in their front hall. They are raising Bride of YJD's three children together. They have bought a house together. They're happy, and they're healthy, and if any God really and truly disapproved of same sex marriage, He (or She) wouldn't have shown it with a hurricane: that's inefficient. We live in earthquake country, after all.

But the ground didn't shake. Every day my sister wakes up, loving her wife, and the ground doesn't open up and swallow them whole. They've had their problems—all marriages do—but none of those problems have been scored for Locusts in C Minor, accompanied by Plague of Frogs.

Look: I can appreciate the religious angle. I can appreciate saying "my church says this isn't cool." But my church does think it's cool. My church thinks it's awesome. And the separation of church and state means that giving my sister a marriage license and a big box of legal protection to be used on the day when, Great Pumpkin forbid, something happens to Bride of YJD...that didn't do a thing to change the churches. Individual churches can perform same sex marriage, or not, as their scripture demands.

Young James Dean's marriage has not damaged my relationships, or the relationships of our youngest sister. They have not undermined the lives and loves of those around them. The only thing gay marriage has done to my family is bring us more love, every day.

The world needs more love.

And I am so glad my sister found her wife.

Being a devout follower of the Great Pumpkin (hallowed be His fields), today is my local new year, for values of "local" that include me, my cats (who enjoyed their new year's treat of tuna juice from the can), and any pagans in my vicinity.

I like having multiple New Years. It gives me the chance to try again if I feel like this one isn't working out (although strict application of the math involved may well mean that I'm in my sixties). I like the fact that everything is different today than it was yesterday, even if everything is also exactly the same.

I hope you all had a fantastic Halloween, whether it's something you celebrate or something you endure or something you barely notice until it's over and the basic cable stations stop showing endless horror movie marathons and repeats of Hocus Pocus. I hope you ran amok, or didn't, as your heart prefers. I hope you spent some time in the cornfield of your heart, remembering the sweetness of the season.

From all of us here (mostly me and the cats) to all of you out there, Happy New Year. Welcome to November.

It's going to be a good year.

Things I have learned in the last week:

If you make a post about the state of rape culture in urban fantasy, be prepared to deal with a lot of comments, reposts, and administrative scramble. This is not a complaint, I just want to write it down so that I'll remember next time. Also, I am still answering email and comments, it's just taking me a little while.

Things that make me proud:

With one exception, every discussion thread I have encountered has been totally civil and cool. Like, seriously, one site has had people going "but rape is essential to modern storytelling," and that is an amazing ratio. Thank you to everyone who has participated in this conversation, anywhere. This has been an incredibly civil, enlightening, interesting discussion, and I am so, so grateful that we all played nicely with each other.

A clarification of my position:

Okay, so. The one thing that I have seen people saying, which is reasonable, is that rape is an unfortunate reality of the world in which we live, and saying it never happens is not just unrealistic, it can feel like we're trying to erase the reality of survivors of sexual abuse. As a survivor of sexual abuse, this is absolutely not a thing that I am intending to do, or interested in doing.

But here's the thing. Had the question been "Will you ever write about a character who has been raped or otherwise abused?", I would probably have answered in the affirmative, just because I write a lot, about everything, and I'm not taking anything off the table. That wasn't the question. The question was "When will a character whose story you are already telling, who has not had this experience, have this experience on the printed page?" (Note that this was not the exact wording of the original question, but my reading of such. It's better punctuated, for one thing.)

I am not willing to write rape. I am especially not willing to write the rape of a first-person character, which describes all my current urban fantasy protagonists. I don't live vicariously through my characters, but there are sentences I am never, never writing as "I, me, mine." That doesn't mean I'm trying to erase the reality of sexual abuse. Just that it will never be a thing which happens during my books, because honestly, that is a thing I am not willing to put myself, my characters, or my readers through. I'm not telling stories that require it. I don't want to.

The other point I'd like to clarify is this: I've had a few people say that sexual violence should always be on the table simply because it's so realistic for male villains to want to use that against female heroes. Well, in my two primary universes, I have feral pixies living in a San Francisco Safeway, and frogs with feathers. If a lack of "I will dominate you with my dick" is all that makes you think I'm being unrealistic, I want some of whatever you're having.

deird1 wrote a really fascinating article about something she terms "the Vegemite Effect,", which is so accurate and earnest that it should just about be required reading. Because she's right. The short precis:

"No matter how good something is, if you were expecting something else, you'll hate it."

People ask me periodically why I chose to be Mira Grant for my science fiction when I was already happily myself for my urban fantasy. My standard answer is all about marketing and branding and setting expectations, and all of this is completely true...but the real answer is all about Vegemite. People who like me for me were going to know that I was Mira Grant, because it was an open secret, and they were the ones who'd just be expecting my words. People who like my urban fantasy weren't going to pick up a book by someone else expecting magic and hijinks. And once Mira established a readership of her own, people who liked science and zombies weren't going to up my books expecting the dead to walk.

The Vegemite effect explains a great deal about how we approach media of all types, not just books, but comics, movies, and television. There's a lot to think about. And if you've ever wondered why sometimes I say "this is salty" repeatedly before I hand you something...

...well, there you go.

Growing up in the 1980s means that I can't remember when I first heard of Stephen King, because everyone had heard of Stephen King. I know I giggled with recognition and delight when I saw the shirt that Sean was wearing in The Monster Squad (1987). By that point, I had already seen the "Gramma" episode of The New Twilight Zone (1986), and Creepshow (1982; I didn't see the theatrical release, so you can stop freaking out about what kind of movies my family took the four-year-old to see). Stephen King was my background radiation. Bruce Banner got Gamma Rays. I got a baseball fanatic from the state of Maine.

(Had someone told me when I was eight that Stephen King loved baseball, I might have learned to give a damn about the game. Clearly, the universe missed a bet.)

The first really serious piece of writing I can remember doing was a twelve-page essay, when I was nine, explaining to my mother why she had to let me read Stephen King. It had footnotes and a bibliography. I slid it under her bedroom door; she bought me a copy of Christine from the used bookstore down the street. I had already read Cujo and Carrie illicitly, sneaking pages like other kids snuck looks at dirty magazines, but Christine was my first ALLOWED Stephen King. I devoured it. And then, like a horror-fiction-focused Pac-Man, I turned on the rest.

Stephen King, without ever knowing who I was, helped me through some of the hardest times in my life. I read IT all the way through a court case that seemed like it was going to destroy everything I loved, forever. I was nine. My grandmother bought me his new hardcovers every year for Christmas. I bought tattered paperbacks with nickels I had hidden in my pillowcase, where no one else could find them. I skipped meals to buy more books. I read them all, over and over, and I endured. He taught me that sometimes, dead is better, things change, and you own what you build. He taught me to read if I wanted to write, and to love the words, and to never be ashamed of loving whatever the hell it was I wanted to love.

In a weird way, Stephen King gave me permission for a great many things, and since those things are integral to who I grew up to be, I have to say that he, through his work, was just as big an influence on me as any other adult in my life.

He taught me you can get out.

Today is his birthday; he was born in 1947, and he's still writing today, which I appreciate greatly. I may never meet him, and that's probably a good thing, as I'm not sure I'd be able to speak English if I did. But I surely do appreciate the man.

Happy birthday, Stephen King.

Thank you.

I love Emma Frost.

I love her characterization, I love that she's never actually changed herself for the sake of the men in her life, I love that she will melt your brain out your ears if you annoy her, and I love that she is completely upfront about how much work it is to look the way she does. Plastic surgery, dieting, push-up bras, and hair dye: check. Painful shoes, fabric tape, and baby powder to avoid chafing: check. Emma is all about appearances, and she never pretends that it's easy.

I also love that she has flat-out said, several times, that she dresses the way she does for the effect it gets. This is a female comic book character who, possibly uniquely in the comic book world, is actually working the male gaze. She wants to be underestimated by opponents. She wants to be taken for a slutty slutty slut slut who can't possibly have earned a damn thing. And when people treat her badly because they don't like what she wears, she calls them on it.

Now, Emma is not always appropriate. Not going to pretend she is. But she's always Emma. Even on the occasions when she's fully clothed. She's a character who makes choices, and sometimes those choices require telekinesis to stay on.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the cover for Midnight Blue-Light Special, and why I love it so much, and why it's not a better portrayal of Verity. It's just a different one.

Verity Price is a professional ballroom dancer specializing in Latin styles of dance. This means she spends a lot of time wearing outfits that are, as her grandmother puts it, "more rumor than reality." I spent a lot of time hanging out with real ballroom dancers, figuring out how many knives you could conceal under a costume made entirely of fringe (the answer: a surprising number). She can fight in high heels because she can samba in high heels, and once you've done the one, the other comes naturally. This is who she is, as a character and as a person. It's just that she also fights monsters sometimes.

Verity also works as a waitress at a strip club, because something's got to pay for all those bullets. She's wearing her work clothes on the cover to book #1, because it made more sense to put her on the roof in work clothes than in a ballroom costume, and because for Verity, that moment was totally in-character and reasonable. She was, in short, dressed on the cover like she was dressed in the book.

Some people didn't like the cover; that's okay. Nothing is universally liked, not even ice cream and kittens. But some people also got mad on my behalf, because Verity had been "sexualized." And really, she hadn't been. She was presented accurately, as she appeared in the book. It was an accurate portrayal.

Jump forward to the cover for Midnight Blue-Light Special, which I love. Verity is dressed for her other job: monster-hunting. Sensible shoes, sensible trousers, sports bra under the shirt, and look! She's brought a friend! Sarah Zellaby, telepathic mathematician, who is wearing about eight layers of clothing and looks profoundly uncomfortable being even that exposed! Sarah is as de-sexualized on this cover as Verity was sexual on the previous, and again, it's because I asked for it; it's because that's what Sarah is like. She doesn't want you looking at her. She doesn't want to "show a little skin." Bless DAW and my cover artist, Aly Fell, but when I said "Sarah can't be sexy," they didn't try to make her. She's beautiful. She's supposed to be. She's also modest and shy.

Now here's the thing: both Veritys are correct. Both of them look like her. The next time she shows up on a book cover (for volume five, Professional Gore-eography), I'm going to be lobbying for a ballroom dance costume, and she'll probably be accompanied by her heavily-tattooed, cut-off-wearing grandmother (add a giant snake and we'll be able to play urban fantasy cliche bingo with that cover alone). And it will be accurate to the text. And if Sarah ever appears on a cover in a bikini, it'll be because it's somehow accurate to the text (although I can't imagine how).

Making characters like Toby or Sarah dress like Verity is not cool. Making Alice dress like Verity wouldn't be cool, either; she often wears skimpy clothes, but it's for reasons other than "I want to be hot so you'll tip me better." At the same time, assuming that any character who does dress like Verity is somehow being inaccurately represented doesn't seem quite fair to me.

Sometimes a girl just wants to get her Emma Frost on.

This past weekend was the latest iteration of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show (about which there will be more later; I'm pulling together our set lists). And, as has become the norm for us, we had several children under the age of five in attendance, at least for the first part of the evening. I'm pretty sure only Josh, who I keep referring to as "the micro-human," made it to the end of the evening. The Circus itself comes with three children under ten. All children were fabulously well-behaved, with attentive parents who kept them occupied and distracted them whenever they started getting bored.

Early on, one of the children, who is just hitting the age of "oh, wow, music is AWESOME!!!" did some delighted laughing at the sound check. A few dirty looks were directed. I promptly claimed the microphone, pointed out the kid in question, and made sure the room was aware of just how happy I was to have him there, and how happy I was that his parents felt we were a safe space.

I did not see any further dirty looks.

So here, just to be clear, is my official position on children at book release parties: as long as you're happy to miss part of the reading or the set list because your kid is crying and you need to go walk around outside, I am happy to have you. Not just happy: ecstatic. On the rare occasions where I have events that are not child-friendly, it will be clearly stated from the get-go. You know, "Hey, it's me and Chuck Wendig, we both swear a lot and egg each other on, so unless you want your kids to get sent home from school eighteen times, please leave them home." Why?

Because when I was a kid, people took me out to see and do things. I fell asleep behind the harp case at Golden Bough concerts, I fell asleep on the lawn at Beach Boys concerts...I was a very sleepy child. And before I fell asleep, I ran around, I laughed, I shrieked, I was fussy, I did kid stuff. I was allowed.

This is not me saying "you, person without children, you are less important than that baby who has been screaming next to you for ten minutes." I expect that parents who bring their kids to my events will be responsible, and guess what? So far, I've been right. If that changes in the future, I'll be taking the microphone to say "hey, if you need a quiet space to walk your baby back to sleep, here's a place you can do it." I'd say the same thing if an adult had been screaming for ten minutes. Although maybe a little less nicely.

What this is is me saying "everybody gets to come to the party." As long as we're all playing nice and being responsible, we are all welcome. No dirty looks for anybody. And our reward? Is watching my mother dancing with toddlers, which is pretty damn awesome.

I love my fanbase. Y'all are so cool.