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.

...is currently in France (la la!), and on pretty crappy wireless. All email bounces through her, thanks to The Great Profanity Storm of 2012, which means that some things may have gotten lost. Specifically, the emails from two of our ARC winners have not been received.

Jill, we have yours; if you are one of our other two winners, please re-send your mailing address via the website contact form ASAP.

Cranky blonde is cranky with the world, not with any of you (or with Kate).

I want to start by saying that when it comes to movies about dinosaurs eating people, I am so the target audience that they would still make a profit even if I was the only one who wanted to see it happen. It might take a little longer—one blonde does not a multi-million dollar opening make—but they'd get there, given time. My number of lifetime viewings of Jurassic Park passed the double digits before I turned twenty (and it was much harder to re-watch things when I was a teenager, on account of I am older than DVD or streaming video). My number of lifetime readings of the book and its sequel is much higher. I've seen Jurassic Park: The Lost World and Jurassic Park III about five times each, which is more than any sensible person should.

Why am I giving you my dinosaur geek cred? Because I want to be clear that when Jurassic World was announced, I was one hundred and seventy percent on-fucking-board. I was there. Literally the only thing that kept me from the first showing on Thursday night was the fact that I had dental surgery Thursday morning, and did not understand how hands worked. When I saw the first trailer, I cried. I am not ashamed of that. I have been going to Jurassic Park for my entire adult life, and yeah, if they announced the opening of the Isla Sorna location tomorrow, I'd sell a kidney if that was what it took to get me there. Bets have been taken as to whether I will one day walk down the aisle to the Jurassic Park theme.

(I probably won't. But let's face it, a dinosaur-themed wedding would be pretty fucking sweet.)

But there was one thing that made me a little...let's go with "nervous" even during trailers, when I was shushing people who tried to talk to me during my special dinosaur time. And that was the fact that you had Bryce Dallas Howard's lovely Claire—and "lovely" is a necessary qualifier for a woman who's wearing solid white and high heels and putting that much effort into straightening her hair in Costa Rica—but that was, well. About it for humans of the female persuasion. (In the JP canon, most if not all dinosaurs you encounter will be female, due to the cloning process that makes them. This does not actually count as having gender balance. Honest.)

Wasn't going to stop me from going. After all, Jurassic Park III had lousy gender balance, with only Amanda and Ellie really keeping up the side, and it's generally regarded as the worst of the original three. Surely the filmmakers would look at that and say "Yeah, little girls found their way into the franchise through Lex as a viewpoint and Ellie as an aspiration, just like little boys had the combo of Tim and Alan! Let's make sure we keep everyone at the party!" Part of my passion for this franchise comes from the fact that when I was a little girl, Jurassic Park was actually willing to invite me in. Surely the trailers were leaving something out.

They weren't.

( Because while most of these spoilers are from the trailers, it's also polite not to spoil.Collapse )

To the woman who made nasty comments about my "turning radius" when I had to move my electric scooter in front of Big Thunder Mountain; to the person who let their children sit on the ground with their hands pressed against my wheels, and scowled when I said this wasn't safe; to the people who stood on curb cuts and glared when asked, politely, if they would let me pass; to the man who snickered and murmured about lazy bitches when I drove by at Typhoon Lagoon; to everyone who sighed and rolled their eyes when a bus had to be lowered to load me on:

I do not wish you my experience. I do not wish you injury or handicap, however temporary. I do not wish you pain. I do not wish you the soul-bruising frustration of being limited by a body that refuses to listen to your commands, or the salt in the wound that is knowing you did nothing to deserve this: that you didn't injure yourself running a marathon or rock-climbing, but instead fell prey to something that can strike anyone, at any time, for any reason. I do not wish you years spent sedentary, watching your friends rush by able-bodied and healthy, and struggling not to resent them for it.

Instead, I wish you empathy.

I wish for a future where you can look at someone using an assistance device, whether it be a cane, a wheelchair, or a motorized scooter, and think "isn't it wonderful how we live in a world where this person can have the same experiences I do."

I wish for a time where you can see someone using a motorized scooter to enjoy something as large as Disney World and think "isn't that person kind, to spare their friends and family the effort of pushing a manual wheelchair around this huge place, just so that they don't have to experience the nerve-racking stress of navigating something so large and potentially dangerous through a crowd."

I wish for a society where you can listen to simple, necessary requests and hear, not an inconvenience, but a leveling out of a certain small imbalance in the world.

I wish for a place where you can see a wheelchair user sitting to watch a parade and not think "great, let's stand in front of them, that's open space," but instead "isn't it lovely how we can all get a good view."

I am not asking for special privileges. I am not asking to go to the head of the line just because my left foot doesn't work sometimes.

All I am asking is to be allowed, unjudged and unresented, to join the line at all.

Thank you.

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.

I have just received the email from the shirt shop (like, today) letting me know that the Wicked Girls and My Story Is Not Done shirts are finished! Hooray! This means they should be hitting my doorstep right around, oh, Thanksgiving.

I am not mailing shirts on Thanksgiving.

If you need to update your mailing address, now is the time. I will aim to have the mailing party to get these out in early December. Once we hit the party, your shirt goes to the address we have on file. Because opening the boxes will expose their contents to cat hair, I am not doing any mailing before the party. So I will not crack open five boxes of shirts to find your shirt in specific. I am very sorry about this. I am not going to mail hair-encrusted shirts to all our allergic people just to make a deadline I didn't agree to. This particular batch has taken a long time. Some of that is my fault (two months in Europe); some of it is not (people not responding to email/sending in their payments). Regardless, we're moving right along.

When shirts do start going out, it will be in large batches, without tracking. Tracking was not calculated as part of the initial postage cost, and is not something I can afford to do, either money or time-wise. If you have a huge, specific concern, please contact the merch address; we may be able to arrange for you to pay extra and get a tracking number. This will automatically move your shirt to the back of the queue, as it will require additional time at the post office.

Also, this is the appropriate time to note that I will not be doing further bespoke shirt runs. We've been as upfront as we can throughout this process about the fact that it makes no money, and that all updates will be posted here. If you look back through the "people make things" tag, you'll see that I have regularly updated when there was something to say. This hasn't stopped people from using every avenue they could find to ask for updates. It hasn't stopped people from mailing Deborah over and over again. I understand the need to know what's going on, but honestly, I said "this is the situation," and people didn't listen. I can't do things like this if people don't want to follow the rules and listen to the updates. I'm so sorry that there will not be a fourth print run.

But let's end on a positive note: shirts soon! And they should be gorgeous. I am so excited.

Thank you.

When I say "these are the rules for a giveaway," what I mean is "these are the rules for a giveaway," not "some of these rules are negotiable or can be ignored." If you do not follow the rules exactly as stated, you will not be eligible to win.

When I say "please use my contact form," what I mean is "please use my contact form." Not "please dig up a personal email that you have for me from some point in the past." Not "please use the contact form at miragrant.com." If I meant either of those things, I would say so. They would look like "you can only win if you already know how to reach me ha ha" and "please use the contact form at miragrant.com," respectively. If you do not use my contact form, at the seananmcguire.com website, you will not be eligible to receive your prize.

Sometimes the rules by which I live my life may seem fiddly or arbitrary, but there are always reasons. Please, if you want to receive something free from me, follow the rules which I have set for that reward.

Thank you.

...I have no issues with pointing out typos, especially in the Velveteen stuff, which is quite long, but maybe you could also, you know, acknowledge liking the thing (assuming you did)? Otherwise it gets a little pointed and aggressive-feeling, and decreases the odds of getting another story.

I spent much of the weekend looking in horror at the news, and at Twitter, and at everything else. A man murdered seven people and injured thirteen others before killing himself, explicitly because he couldn't get women to have sex with him. That's horrifying. That's upsetting and disgusting and wrong.

And then the people started saying "we'll never know why he did it," and I sort of lost my shit and had to go away for a few days.

He actually SAYS, IN SO MANY WORDS, that this is because he hates women. Because women will not give him the sex he so clearly deserves. Because "inferior men" are getting the women he should have. Because women have too much control (IE, the ability to say "no, I do not want to have sex with you"), and so the appropriate response is killing them to death.

But we'll never know why he did it.

A lot of people have said very good, sensible, logical things. Things that point out the power imbalance and the assumptions based on his apparent whiteness (he was half-Malaysian and half-Caucasian) and the fact that if someone shoots basically any other group of people on the planet, we're damn fast to accept that they did it because of hatred, but that when a man shoots a bunch of women, we'll look for any excuse but misogyny. I have not been able to say anything good, or sensible, or logical. Maybe I'll be able to in a week or two. But right now...

Right now, I look at the mounting number of incidents where "she wouldn't have the sex with me" has been used as an excuse for murder, and I'm just tired. That's all. I'm tired of the entitlement, and I'm tired of the assumptions, and I'm tired of the "not ALL men" response whenever someone says "misogyny kills."

I'm tired. No cookies today.

The ongoing discussion about diversity in fiction is, well, ongoing; that's sort of what ongoing discussions do. (Also, I have been neck-deep in edits for the past month, so the fact that I used "ongoing" three times in the prior sentence feels deliciously naughty.) On the one side, you have people saying "representation matters." On the other side, you have people saying that the urge for diversity in fiction is "selfie culture" (and somehow that's bad?), and that fiction should show us new things, not just be "a representative of the self," and that it's "jarring" when they encounter "minority characters" who don't somehow fit a list of cultural and social ticky-boxes that would justify those characters existing as anything other than straight, white, male. "Cis" doesn't even need to be spoken. There's no way a trans* character could exist for any reason other than to talk about their genitals, and that would be the ultimate in jarring, thanks.

And people wonder why I spend so much time wanting to set the world on fire.

I think it's very telling that the people who say it's wrong to want representation in fiction are almost overwhelmingly white. If I want to read about white people having amazing adventures and doing incredible things, being heroes and villains, simple and complicated, handsome and hideous, loved and hated, all I need to do is pick up a book at random. There is a literally 90% chance that I will get all those things from whatever book I've chosen, especially if I'm going for the "classic literature" of the science fiction/fantasy/horror world. 90%! And that may honestly be low-balling the number! If I were a straight white man, of course I wouldn't see any issue with representation in fiction—I'd be on every page I turned! Even as a straight white woman, I'd be on a lot of pages, even if half those pages would have me either naked or screaming (or both, if I had happened to grab a Gor book). There's no problem with representation here!

But I've never been a straight white man. I've never been a straight white girl, either. I was a bisexual kid with a lot of questions and not very many answers, and it wasn't until I encountered ElfQuest that I actually felt like I saw myself on a page. No, I didn't think I was an elf, although I sort of wished I was, because elves are awesome, but it was Cutter and Leetah and the rest who introduced me to the idea that I could love boys and girls, and not be a bad person. I wasn't indecisive or wicked. I just had a lot of love to give, and my set of criteria for who got it wasn't based on gender.

Let me restate that: I was already bi. I had already been attracted to girls, guys, and a kid in my class who went by "Pup" and refused to be pinned down to either gender (and my second grade teacher never forced Pup to commit either way, which was pretty damn cool of her, given that this was the 1980s). Books did not make me choose my sexuality; books told me a) that my sexuality existed, and b) that it was okay, it was natural, it was not proof that there was something wrong with me. And especially in grade school/middle school, sexuality is invisible in a way that very little else is. No one knew I was queer until I came out. It wasn't even a matter of openly hiding it; sex wasn't on the table, I didn't feel like sharing, I didn't share. No one knew that I was different. Everyone thought that when they read their books about little white girls having adventures, they were reading about me, too.

You know what's not invisible? Race. "I don't see race" is bull. When we read those books about little white kids having amazing adventures, we knew that it was white kids having adventures, because adventures are for white people. At the age of eight, we all understood that our non-white classmates were not represented in the books we read, and very few of us had the sophistication to jump to "this is a lack of representation." Instead, we jumped to "I guess Oz doesn't like black people." Because books shape your view of the world, books remake you in their image, and the books we had said little white kids go on adventures, little kids of any other race are nowhere to be seen.

This is a problem.

So some of us grew up, and for whatever reason—maybe it affected us directly, maybe it affected our friends, maybe it was just pointed out—we started trying to show a world that looked more like the world we actually lived in, where everything wasn't a monoculture. And for some reason, this is being taken as a threat. How dare you want little Asian kids to go on adventures. How dare you want queer teenagers to save the world. How dare you imply that transwomen can be perfectly ordinary, perfectly competent people who just want to not get eaten by the dinosaur that's been eating everyone else. That's selfie culture, that's diversity for the sake of diversity, that's wrong. And after a great deal of consideration, I have come to this conclusion:

If that's what you think, you can go fuck yourself.

That's not politic, and it's not nice, and it may cause a couple of people to go "what a bitch, I'm done," but I don't fucking care. Because I am tired of people needing to thank me for making an effort. I am tired of receiving email that says it was distracting when so-and-so turned out to be gay, or asking why I have Indian characters in three separate series (and the fact that having an Indian woman show up and never speak a line is apparently enough to put Indexing on the same level as Blackout for some people just makes me weep for humanity). I am tired of "oh you feel like you're so open-minded" because I write about gay people, bi people, poly people, people who are exactly like the people that I know. I want to be unremarkable for my casting choices, and only remarkable for my characters being awesome (because let's face it, my characters are awesome).

A lack of representation in fiction leads to a lack of self-esteem, because selfie culture is important: we need to see ourselves, and the people who keep trying to dismiss that as somehow selfish or greedy or narcissistic are the ones who've had a mirror held up to them for so long that they don't even see it anymore. White becomes so generic, so default, that it's not mentioned when describing a character ("blonde hair, blue eyes" vs. "oh, she's black, of course, that's the biggest thing"). Humanity is huge and diverse and amazing, and saying that only a small, approved sliver of it belongs in fiction is a dick move. If diversity is distracting, it's because it's so rare.

We can fix that.

So the VMAs (Video Music Awards) happened last night, and Miley Cyrus did a thing. It was...well, it was not a good thing. She's making creative choices that I don't necessarily agree with or understand, and I sort of wish she'd put her tongue back into her mouth. But these are not my choices to make, and since the state of her career doesn't really impact me in any rational way, I will do my best not to criticize her beyond "I really liked it better when you were doing awesome country music, Miley, and I hope you'll get back to that, because I'd love an album with you and your godmother singing together."

As part of the thing that Miley did, however, she wound up grinding her backside (and, due to her position at the time, her genital region) against Robin Thicke's groin while wearing spanky pants made of what looked like flesh-colored vinyl. No one missed a beat when she did this, including Robin Thicke, so I have to assume that it was rehearsed, and was part of the plan for the performance. Again, still not a good thing, but she didn't start throwing in the over-the-top sexual stuff on a whim: MTV approved this. Her backup dancers learned this. Robin Thicke voluntarily did this.

I have now heard three separate people say something along the lines of "Robin Thicke's wife should slap the shit out of her," and "she should be ashamed." What I'm not seeing, though, are people saying the equivalent things about him. It appears that, to many people, Robin Thicke just materialized on stage as an innocent bystander, where Miley Cyrus proceeded to grind on him, and he didn't push her away because he's a gentleman.

I...wait.

I know this is a weird example to use, but bear with me here: this is actually a really good demonstration of how we tend to treat female "characters" in both real life (celebrities, pop stars, people whose lives are turned into narratives by the media) and fiction. Belle stole Brina's boyfriend! Sharon is a skank! Cassandra is a coward! It's always the women who are to blame, and the men around them are blameless. It's not "Brian left Brina for Belle." It's not "Sharon had consensual sex with Steve." It's not "Connor threatened Cassandra's life and family, so she withdrew." We place the full onus for anything we don't like on the female participants, leaving nothing for their counterparts. And it's just not fair.

Miley Cyrus did a thing. Very few people seem to have liked the thing, and that's on her: she should know her audience better than that. But Robin Thicke did not accidentally wander into the performance. If there's blame to give here, it needs to go both ways.

We need to drop the double standard.

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.

In the comments on my post on how difficult it is to harass people by mistake, people are branching into the cosplay discussion. It's still pretty mild here, because y'all are awesome, but I've seen it get fairly intense elsewhere. IE, "That girl over there who's dressed up like Black Widow is inviting me to stare at her, so how can the same rules of harassment apply to her?"

Well, first, the same rules of harassment apply to her because she's a goddamn human being, and all human beings, regardless of what they do or do not choose to wear, deserve to feel safe and be free from harassment. Second, the same rules of harassment apply to her because we're human beings, or alien anthropologists who know damn well where the standards for human behavior lie, and once we're old enough to buy convention memberships and book hotel rooms, we should know better. (We should know better before then, too, but that's a matter for our parents.)

I have several friends who do cosplay, both at general science fiction conventions and at larger genre conventions, such as San Diego Comic Con. This means that they are going out in public in outfits they have spent a lot of time and energy making, which may or may not be as concealing as standard street clothes. (One of my friends regularly cosplays Emma Frost. Another has won awards for a Na'vi costume which consists largely of incredibly well-applied body paint.) This also means that they are inviting a certain amount of looking at them: no one puts that much effort into looking amazing when they don't want to be looked at.

Note that "look" and "leer" are not the same word.

What is appropriate? Admiring a cosplayer's costume. Admiring how well they fit the character. Asking if you can take a picture (providing they're not in the middle of doing something else at the time, like say, trying to inhale a hot dog before their next panel, running to the bathroom, or otherwise being a biological creature in a material universe). Asking if you can take a picture with them. Asking about the workmanship that went into the costume's design.

What is not appropriate? "I really love it when a girl with decent tits dresses up as [character]." Trying to take pictures of disembodied lady pieces, like butts or boobs (also inappropriate: disembodied dude bits—they're just rarer). Quizzing them on whether or not they even know who they're dressed up as. (Spoiler alert: anyone who spent ninety hours making a picture-accurate Illyana Rasputin costume probably knows who she is, and if it's someone who, say, joined a group costume to make their friends happy, but prefers DC/spends too much time gaming to read comics/is really happier in the SCA, how is that hurting you any? There is no such thing as a fake geek.) Asking if they'll give you a spanking. Asking how much they charge by the hour. Asking if you can touch them.

There is something magical about meeting a really good cosplayer dressed as one of your favorite characters. They're avatars. Watch a small child meet someone dressed as Iron Man or Aang and see them stare in open-mouthed awe. Hell, watch me meet a really good Tinker Bell at a Disney park. Costuming is a form of magic. It makes the unreal concrete and tangible. It deserves respect.

But those Tinker Bells that I meet at Disneyland have handlers, people who will immediately step in if anyone crosses a line or makes the pixies uncomfortable. What's more, those Disney pixies are paid to be my fantasy, as long as that fantasy remains G-rated and friendly. Cosplayers? Not getting paid. They are people, and they have a right to the ball. They also have the right to say "please take your hand off me" or "please don't take pictures of my ass" without getting told "well, you shouldn't have dressed like that if you didn't want the attention." Wanting attention and wanting to be harassed are very different things.

And as a note: cosplayers are not harassing you by walking around being attractive, or semi-clothed, or interesting to look at. They are not "teases" or "gagging for it" when they put on something skimpy. They are not here to be anyone's private walking skin magazine. They are people.

(Yes, this means they can be inappropriate too. We had an issue at one of the comic conventions a few years ago with someone dressed as Deadpool inappropriately touching female attendees, and then running away. He couldn't be distinguished from the eight or so Deadpools not being giant sacks of asshole. Last year at Emerald City Comic-Con I observed two woman dressed as Jean Gray saying such nasty things about a woman dressed as Emma Frost that she was virtually in tears. None of these things were, or are, appropriate.)

Cosplay makes our conventions more visually arresting. It's a powerful form of expression. It's a hobby and a passion like any other. But costume does not equal consent.

Again, if this is something you can't trust yourself to grasp, maybe you need to stay home.

So we're talking a lot about harassment in the science fiction and fantasy community right now, and that's a good thing: that's a thing that really needs to happen. Much of the conversation has centered on sexual harassment, but it has also touched on racial harassment, religious harassment, social harassment, and plain ol' bullying. John Scalzi has put forth a convention harassment policy policy (not as redundant as it sounds), and a lot of people have co-signed to indicate that they, too, will refrain from attending conventions without good, public anti-harassment policies. Sounds good, right? I mean, "play nicely with the other children" is the building block of most people's educations, and none of us wakes up in the morning thinking "I'm gonna harass somebody today."

(Well. Maybe some people do. And fuck them.)

But as always happens when this conversation gets started, some people are standing up and shouting "THOUGHT POLICE!" and "Well I don't want to go to a convention where wearing a T-shirt could get me banned for harassment."

Oh, honey lambs, I'm sorry the world is so hard. Let's talk about harassment a little more, shall we? Wikipedia (which is not the most 100% reputable source, but is easy to copy and paste) defines "harassment" as "behavior intended to disturb or upset, and it is characteristically repetitive." It goes on to say that "In the legal sense, it is intentional behavior which is found threatening or disturbing. Sexual harassment refers to persistent and unwanted sexual advances."

Intentional. Intended. Persistent. What does each of these words mean? Let's look at definitions taken from real world experiences.

Intentional. If you run up to me in a public place and scream "I'M GOING TO RAPE YOU, YOU FAT BITCH!", you are harassing me. It only took one sentence to cross that line! Why is that? Well, because a specific threat was made, and even if there was no intent to actually cause physical harm, anyone who makes that statement clearly intended to disturb and upset me. This is harassment, and yeah, it's probably going to lead to my making a report to convention staff, and no, I'm not going to feel bad if someone gets kicked out because of it.

On the other hand, what if I'm just walking through the convention lobby and I hear some guys making dirty jokes in the corner? Is that harassment? No. It's in poor taste, but it's not harassment. I may still say something to convention staff, because most cons include children, and public space is not the place to be crossing certain lines.

Intended. But what happens if, after I tell convention staff "Hey, those guys over there are telling dirty jokes loudly in the lobby, maybe it would be a good idea for them to stop" those same people figure out that I was the one who reported them and spend the rest of the day following me around the hotel, telling dirty jokes loudly to try and get a rise out of me? What if, say, they follow me into my panels and ask questions that are really set-ups for filthy punchlines? Is that harassment?

Yeah. They intended to upset me. They wanted me to feel unsafe and unwelcome, and they did a very good job of it. But what if it was a T-shirt that made me go "ew," and not a bunch of joke-tellers? Well, if the convention doesn't have a "clean language" policy (which some cons with lots of underage attendees do have: they want Grandma to be able to look around the lobby and feel like little Timmy is safe), that's not harassment. Hell, even if there is a "clean language" policy, it's not harassment, it's just a rule violation. Running into the person in the inappropriate-to-me shirt several times over the course of the day is not harassment, it's happenstance.

I have seen costumed individuals harass people with their attire. The most upsetting incident involved someone in a bikini and bodypaint trying to force an individual whose religion forbade him to stare at uncovered women to look at her. Was the man committing religious oppression or harassment? No. He never said, at least in my hearing, that she needed to cover up her sinful, sinful body. He just didn't look at her. Was the woman committing harassment? Yes. But look at her actions: she intended to do what she did. It was intentional. Lots of women wearing as little or less walked by, and none of them were harassing him with their presence. Just the one who was yelling and touching his arms and generally being intentionally problematic.

Persistent. I've seen several people say that anti-harassment policies are the end of convention hook-ups and no geeks will ever get dates again oh noes we're going to die out. And that's where persistent comes to the party.

"Hey, you're nice, wanna have coffee?"
"No."

Not harassment!

"That dress could make a good dog break his leash."
"Crude but points for The West Wing reference."

Probably not harassment!

"Wanna fuck?"
"No."

Maybe harassment, maybe not, depending on what came before it.

"You're hot."
"Thanks, I'm with someone."
"Aw baby don't be like that."
"Please excuse me."
"Your ass is just...mmm."
"I'd really like to go over there."
"I'll come with you baby."

Harassment! Look: no one is saying "don't ask people out" or "never talk to a person you find attractive again." We're saying "no means no." We're saying "if she's trying to get away from you, let her." We're saying "if you follow him through the hotel, you are being inappropriate." We're saying "unless I have asked you to touch me, touching me is not appropriate."

Studies have shown that people are much better at picking up on "no" than they want to admit, because admitting it would mean acknowledging it. So learn to pick up on "no," both verbally and non-verbally. Watch body language. Back off. Listen.

Having a bawdy song filk circle is not harassment: it's in the program book, it's labeled, and anyone who comes to that circle and gets offended by the circle in general is looking to get upset. Singing a dirty song during open filk while staring at the girl who says she's uncomfortable with that sort of thing and going "Ha ha Olga's probably pretty turned on" is harassment. You have singled her out. You are making an intentional choice. You are persisting.

Cat and I do this panel called "In Conversation" that's sort of like "An Evening With Kevin Smith" with more boobs. We always provide a program book description that says, flat out, that we will swear, that we will answer all questions, that no topics are off the table. So no, you don't get to attend our panel and then say we harassed you with our swearing. But if we have that same conversation in the lobby, and won't stop, and get louder when asked to stop, you are right to involve the convention staff. You have a right to feel safe. You have a right to be allowed to participate freely in your community.

I've used "you" throughout this post both to avoid gendering the subject, and to make this point: If you, the reader, think that a convention where you can be asked not to make rape jokes at panelists, not to lay hands on people who have asked you (either aloud or with their actions) to leave them alone, and to treat everyone else as a human being who has a right to the ball, if you think that this convention sounds like political correctness gone awry and something you want no part in, good.

Stay home.

The current SFWA shouting match about sexism and harassment and "OH MY GOD I AM BEING OPPRESSED BY FEMINISTS" is leading to a lot of the very predictable "Help help bad people are trying to take away my freedom of speech."

Here's the thing: No one involved in this fight is saying "you should never use your freedom of speech." Not to anyone, not at all. We are, after all, not the government. What we are saying is "you didn't buy the 'freedom from consequences' expansion pack." And really, that's what's being requested here: not freedom of speech, but freedom from the consequences of speaking.

"Sure, I called another professional in my field sub-human because I dislike their race/religion/choice of ice cream flavors! But I'm allowed! I have FREEDOM OF SPEECH."

"Sure, I told that fatso urban fantasy author to lose some weight and brush her hair so that we could take her seriously as a writer! But I'm allowed! I have FREEDOM OF SPEECH."

"Sure, I misgendered another author for funsies, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their existence! But I'm allowed! I have FREEDOM OF SPEECH."

Nope.

Nope.

THE NOPETOPUS RIDES AGAIN.

If someone chooses to say sexist, racist, bigoted shit, that's on them: that’s theirs to deal with. I will not restrict their ability to say it. But there will be consequences. Maybe consequences as minor as me not wanting to have a conversation with them; maybe consequences as major as an editor choosing not to work with them, or an agent declining to sign them, as they would be bad for the agency’s image (and hence bottom line).

These "rabid weasels" (term coined by Mary Robinette Kowal, the voice of Toby and a glorious voice of reason) are HARMING SFWA AS A PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION. Not just by taking time and energy away from writing—which, gods know, is a thing we all need to be doing more of—but by making us look, in public, like this is what all believe. They’re very loud, those weasels, and while they have the right to say whatever they want, we’re the ones choosing to allow them to do it inside our house.

I use my freedom of speech: I use it to say "that ain't cool" about a lot of things. For my trouble I am called a bitch, a whore, a slut, a cunt, a stupid cow, a pig, too dumb to rape, and a lot of other things. Those are the consequences of my speech. And the consequences of those words are simple:

I refuse to stop pointing out the people who use them.

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 )

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.)

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 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.

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.

I am not in the habit of cut-tagging my crankiness, but in this case, I will, because I'm going to be discussing the sexual abuse of women, and I try not to be triggery when I don't have to be. This is your notification, and your warning.

( This is a cut tag. On the other side of the cut tag? Wolves.Collapse )

So a little while ago, I posted about self-promotion and my basic thoughts on same, which boil down to "don't be a dick" and "don't go door-to-door across the internet." Pretty basic, reasonably close to universal (although I don't really believe in universal truths, beyond "don't French kiss a rattlesnake"), generally non-offensive. Which means, of course, that some people took offense.

Sometimes, no matter what you do, you're going to offend people. Sometimes you'll never know why.

Things I have done in the past week that someone has found offensive: listened to loud, "weird" music. Had an opinion about whether or not people who aren't me should be allowed to make decisions about my body. Enjoyed bad science fiction. Had my hair highlighted in preparation for the Hugos. Implied that there's a double standard in how women are expected to dress for the Hugos vs. how men are expected to dress for the Hugos. Implied that it's more expensive to be female. Bought children's toys for myself. Bought children's toys for a child. These are just the things I know about mind you, and I only know because in each case, someone told me. I'm not sure why most of these things were offensive. I don't actually want to know. And that, right there, probably offends someone.

I do my best to Marilyn Munster my way through life, leaving fields of happy zombies and sparkly plagues behind me. Sadly, though, nothing is that inoffensive. Not unless it's, say, a rock, and even that will offend, if it gets into somebody's shoe. There is no way to avoid giving offense. Not if you're a thing that actually exists.

And it can be hard, as someone whose audience is largely online, to deal with the thought that I might accidentally offend someone, lose potential readers, and wind up living in a cardboard box next to the creek. My cats aren't supposed to go outside! (This is the "worst case scenario" mindset. It kicks in when I think I've upset someone. My brain is a theme park that hates me.) Case in point:

A while ago—within the last year, although I couldn't tell you when—someone with whom I had communicated on Twitter, but who I didn't really know, asked me "Why did you kill character X?" I gave the response I always give to that question, which is completely honest, despite having been originally stolen from Stephen King: "I didn't kill them. They just died." I have made the conscious choice to kill very few characters. Most of them are sacrifices to the story, and I'm as surprised as anyone else when I see what's coming. It's an odd answer, but a totally sincere one.

(Example of me killing a character on purpose: I killed Rose. It was sort of essential, since her story hinges on her being, you know. Dead.)

This person did not find my answer sincere. They proceeded to declare on Twitter that I was a horrible person who disrespected her readers and didn't appreciate reader questions and was generally horrid, and then went and amended all their reviews of my books to lower their ratings, so that it would be clear that they did not give good scores to mean authors. So with one statement that I still don't regret making, because it was sincere, I lost a reader, and the aggregate scores of my books went down. And I'm lucky in that this is one of the biggest "bad author, no authorial biscuit" scandals that I've had to deal with so far.

Do I know exactly why my response was offensive? Nope. I've said that to other people without causing offense (that I'm aware of). Did this person explain? Nope. Is that the only time I'm going to cause offense in this world?

Nope.

No matter what you do, you're going to piss people off. Hell, me saying "offense is inevitable" is probably pissing someone off. So take deep breaths, and don't dwell on it too much. As long as we're all doing our best not to be horrible and hurtful, it should be okay, in the long run.

Even if we never know why.

Which of these things is not like the other:

* Surviving IN SPACE.
* Surviving IN THE DESERT.
* Surviving BEING BITTEN BY VENOMOUS REPTILES.
* Surviving YOUR SUDDEN AND INEVITABLE POP STAR LIFE.

I...what?

A little context for you, because context is to my crankiness as the Great Pumpkin is to the Sacred Patch: yesterday was Wednesday, better known around these parts as "Seanan goes to the comic book store" day. We went to the comic book store. I picked up my books (new issues of The Boys and Hack/Slash, new trades of Chew and American Vampire), and prowled the shelves, looking to see what else had arrived.

In the "family friendly" section, I found two books I hadn't seen before: Boys Only How To Survive Anything, and its natural mate, Girls Only How To Survive Anything. They were, naturally, somewhat pink and blue, but I don't have a moral objection to pink, and if they were going to be all gendered about things, I supposed having "gender appropriate" colors made sense. I picked up Boys Only and flipped through it.

Surviving disasters, natural and man-made. Surviving conflicts and accidents and on the space shuttle and monsters. Surviving, you know, shit that can kill you. Works for me. I put down Boys Only and picked up Girls Only. Where I learned to survive...

Breakouts. Becoming a pop star (and the inevitable carpal tunnel from signing all those autographs). Saying I'm sorry (with homemade lip balm). Identifying a frenemy. Surviving, you know, shit that generally doesn't leave you dead.

Can you guess when I started seeing red?

Now look. I get that we're a culture that thinks boys and girls should always like different things, and that we start reinforcing that from a very early age. I get that to some degree, on average, boys and girls do like different things. It's by no means universal, but things like the Brony movement aside, you do have gendered majorities for many activities and interests. Fine. But you know where that breaks down? When we tell girls, through implication, that they shouldn't know how to survive in the desert. Knowing how to handle, gasp, pimples is so much more important.

Not every girl needs to know how to deal with venomous reptiles, just like not every boy needs to know how to base jump. Because of differing interests and activities, I could have believed as much as 40% deviation between the books. Teach the boys how to tie a tie, and the girls how to fix runs in the nylons, fine. It's cisgendered and assumes so much, but it makes societal sense, if you're dividing the books by gender (and I'm almost in favor of that, just so that they don't give all the action illustrations to boys, and all the pretty or panicked illustrations to girls). Understand that gendering is problematic and try to be reasonable.

But we are talking 95% deviation. The only activity they had in common? Escaping from a zombie. Because...fuck, I don't know. Because zombies are the only truly gender-neutral threat in the world, apparently. Deserts only fuck you up if you have a penis. Frenemies (how I hate that word) only endanger your reputation if you have tits. But zombies? Man, they will fuck you up, no matter what you've got.

I hate this increasing insistence that boys and girls are alien species, coming together only to do icky romance dances of ickiness, and make more boys and girls to never understand each other at all. Girls can like snakes. Boys can like looking nice for dates. And that doesn't mean a damn thing but "we are all individuals, we will all like and want and do different stuff."

At least we're all allowed to know how to fight zombies.

First off: my beloved catvalente has written a heartbreaking essay about sexism in geek and science fiction/fantasy culture. You should read it, because it is relevant. Also because it is heartbreaking and true. Having been one of those female fantasy authors threatened with sexual violence because I dared to own cats who came from a breeder, and not a shelter, I can testify that things get really ugly, really fast, on Captain Internet.

And so...

Last weekend at Emerald City, I saw a sign that infuriated me. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It was a big banner on the front of a self-published* author's booth, reading, "Finally, a book for BOYS that the GIRLS will enjoy reading, too!"

Oh. You mean unlike 90% of the well-regarded "classic" science fiction, fantasy, and young adult genre novels out there? And 98% of the horror? And 99% of the military science fiction? And, let's face it, the majority of anything that's not a romance, a story about princesses, or a horse book? As a girl who grew up reading Bradbury, King, Wyndham, Anthony, Asprin, Piper, Foster, Knight, Shakespeare, Poe, De Lint, Baum, superhero comics, and horror comics, I cry thee foul.

And no, this is not a case of me carefully editing out the female authors of my childhood. After wracking my brain, the only ones I could come up with who even managed to compete for my affections—who were writing stories with girls, rather than girl stories, and were thus worth reading in my twelve-year-old estimation—were McCaffrey, Kagan, Tiptree (who wrote as a man), Pini (whose writing still gets credited to her husband by about half the people I talk to), Jones, Duane, and McKinley.

I discovered more female authors as I got older. Emma Bull. Pamela Dean. Jody Lynn Nye. Women who were writing stories with girls, not girl stories; women who were building the foundations of a new genre, filled with interesting, clever, intuitive characters who yes, sometimes happened to have the same plumbing I did. And sometimes they didn't, and that was okay, too. But—and this is where we loop back to the beginning—it didn't matter. If I wanted to read, I needed to read books about boys. Books that were probably intended by their authors as being for boys. If I wanted to enjoy reading, I needed to enjoy books for boys.

If this has changed at all, that change has happened in the last eight to ten years, beginning with the publication of Twilight. People were writing books for girls before that, but there's always a trigger event, and Bella Swan making millions of dollars for her author (and publisher) was the trigger for a veritable flood of "girl books" hitting the shelves. These were books with female leads, with women on the covers, with a stronger romance subplot than had necessarily been required in YA before people figured out that hey, girls read, and maybe some of them will read more if you offer them female characters to read about.

Since then, the number of "girl books" has exploded, and while some of them are girl stories, some of them are also stories with girls. Some of these books are romances. Some of them are not. Some of them are medical thrillers, adventures, war stories, epic fantasies, distopian futures, cyberpunk, steampunk, mythpunk, modern day, anything you can think of. Because they are stories. And yet somehow, the fact that they have girls on the cover makes them not worth reading. The fact that the main characters have to squat when they pee makes them untenable to half the population. The fact that their authors grew up being told that real science fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure starred men doing manly things in a manly way, and yet grew up to write books about women doing the same things, does not prove that literature can be a gender neutral experience where story matters more than anything else; it proves that we need more books for BOYS that GIRLS will enjoy, too. It means that the girls keep on coming second, that we keep being the deviation, and not the norm.

I do dislike the fact that right now, sexy girls pout at me from the covers of almost every book in the YA section, because I know that culturally, we discourage boys from reading those books, and damn, they are missing out. But I also dislike the fact that I'm expected to be totally a-okay with teenage girls reading books covered in muscular men with giant guns, while sneering at teenage boys reading books with thoughtful-looking women on the covers. We say "don't judge a book by its cover" like it's a Commandment, and then we turn around and tell boys not to read books with girls on them, or books with pink on them, or anything that doesn't look macho enough.

If I could read Little Fuzzy, you can read Partials. If I could read Myth Adventures, you can read The Chemical Garden. There will always be some stories that appeal to us more than others, but when we start saying "this book is for BOYS but don't worry, GIRLS can read it, too" vs. "icky GIRL BOOK is ICKY and NOT FOR BOYS," we create a division in our literature that doesn't need to be there, and frankly, upsets me.

Let's all just read the books we want to read, regardless of covers or the gender of the main characters, okay? Because otherwise, we're missing out on a lot of really great stories. And that would be a shame.

(*This is relevant only because it implies no editorial oversight. If I were to try using a slogan like this, my editors, and my agent, would politely make me stop.)

All right: here's the thing. Discount Armageddon is officially released March 6th. That's the date we've been talking about for months, that's the date you should be able to obtain the book, that's the date when sales begin counting against my first week numbers. Any books which escape into the wild before then count against my overall sales, but do not count for that all-important first week. Also, because I am number-based OCD, any books which escape into the wild before then make me feel sick, cry hysterically, and basically become non-functional with stress. It's THE BEST THING.

As of midnight Monday/the very beginning of Tuesday, Amazon has been shipping copies of Discount Armageddon. Consequentially, Barnes & Noble is doing the same thing. I haven't been saying anything because DAW is trying frantically to fix it, and I didn't want to drive sales to the sites which have chosen to release my book early. (I don't blame B&N for reacting when they saw that the book was on sale; they're a business, after all. But it's not helping my stress level any.) Please, please, do not buy my book early. I know it's hard. I know that the urge to have the shiny thing now is strong within us. I've ordered dolls from Japan and Australia, and DVD sets from Canada and the UK, for just this reason. But those things were legitimately released in the regions where I was ordering them, and Discount Armageddon has not been legitimately released anywhere at all. Please wait until March 6th. Don't punish independent bookstores, and local brick and mortar stores, for some computer's hard-to-fix mistake. Please. I am literally begging you here.

It doesn't help that so much of a book's success is measured by their first week. I've basically thrown up every time I thought about my week one numbers (including just now), because these early sales could mean the difference between a series and an accidental duology. It's unlikely—DAW is very loyal, and they stand by me—but it could happen, and I am very much worst-case-scenario girl when I'm this flipped out. So please. Do not buy early. Wait until March 6th.

And then there are the ebooks.

Both Amazon and B&N have put the physical edition of Discount Armageddon on sale, but are still holding the electronic edition for the actual release date. People who receive their physical books early are reaping the benefits of a fortuitous, author-breaking error. People who have to wait for their electronic books are not being denied anything; they're doing what was supposed to happen in the first place. This has not stopped the exciting emails from rolling in. They mostly stopped after the first day, but on that first day, I was called...

( A lot of bad things are behind this cut. If you don't want to see, just go with 'I was called a lot of bad things.'Collapse )

See, apparently, the ebooks are being withheld because I, personally, am trying to force everyone to buy my preferred format (physical). So sexual threats and relentless abuse are totally acceptable, because it just shows me the error of my ways.

I have nothing to do with the books being available early. I wish they weren't.

I have no control over whether the electronic editions are available early. I'm glad they're not, but it's not because I'm a greedy bitch; it's because I don't want any editions available early.

I am literally sick with stress, and this is not in any way helping. Please, don't buy my books before their actual release date. Please, don't place an order with a site which is offering my books before their actual release date. Please, don't call me horrible names because you can't have what you want the second that you want it.

Please.

(Because it must be said...comment amnesty. I'm already crying hard enough.)

I read a book recently* that I should have adored. It had a great cover, an interesting premise, and blurbs by several authors that I idolized and trusted. If they were endorsing it, it should have been amazing.

It is currently at the head of my short list for "worst book I read in 2012." I want those hours of my life back.

It wasn't offensive; it didn't call me names or slap my hands or steal my shit. It wasn't poorly written, although it had some pacing issues; the words were in the right order and generally spelled correctly. I can't in all good conscience call it a bad book. But I hated it. Absolutely, empirically, and with very few caveats. It was not my cup of tea. It wasn't even in my cup of tea's time zone. So why did I pick it up?

The blurbs. They made me think this book and I would get along, thus projecting one of the Geek Fallacies onto an innocent piece of prose. Friendship is not transitive, and neither is readability.

This is the dark side of blurbs: this is why authors sometimes have to say "no," even if they like another author's work. Because when I put my name on the cover of a book, I am saying "I like this, and if you like the things I like, you will like it, too." But what happens when you don't? Suddenly everything else I like is questionable. What if Diet Dr Pepper, Monster High dolls, and carnage are all waiting to betray you, too? Where is the line?

We have to be careful. We are trading on your faith, and our reputations.

Have you ever read a book based on the blurbs, only to find your faith in the authors who provided them somewhat shaken? Not your faith in the author who wrote the book—presumably, if you bought it based on blurbs, you didn't have any—but your faith in the blurbers?

(*No, I will not name the book. Why? Well, one, I am not in the business of bad book reviews, unless it's a non-fiction book riddled with factual errors. Other people obviously enjoyed this book, otherwise the blurbs wouldn't have been there in the first place. Your mileage may vary, and all. And two, as an author, I wouldn't want to find someone ranting about one of my books like this. So since the book didn't murder my puppies, I will not name it.)

Hey, look! I'm in an anthology! River, from Dark Quest Books, edited by Alma Alexander. It's a book of stories about, well. A river. My story, "Lady of the Waters," is about a ship called The Jackdaw, her centaur captain (no, really), her faintly annoyed crew, and some giant catfish. I quite like it.

Oh, and hey, the audio books of all the Toby Daye adventures are still available at Audible.com, including Late Eclipses and One Salt Sea, which periodically appear as customer favorites. I find this awesome, and you should totally check it out if you haven't already listed to the fabulous audio narration. Or even if you have. I'm not picky.

SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS. It's like a beautiful dream. With pom-poms. There was no earthly way not to share.

...and because that last link may have restored your faith in humanity, here are some insanely depressing "rules for girls" collected from Twitter. The next time someone asks you why I keep threatening to ignite the biosphere, this is why. We can't have nice things until we've burned out all the stupid.

The title of this article right here is "How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid." Again, destroying faith in humanity through the aid of my link file. You're welcome.

So it's a mixed bag today, but it includes SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS and CENTAUR SHIP CAPTAINS, so I'm going to call it overall a positive. Your mileage may vary.

This is a topic that's been sitting in my rolling note file for a while, waiting both for the sting of the event that triggered it to fade, and for the actual event to recede far enough into the past that even a vague description wouldn't trigger a big red SPOILERS sign. So you know, it took more than two years. That's a long time, even for me.

I watch a lot of television, read a lot of books, and buy a lot of comics. I am a huge consumer of media of all types. And, like many consumers of media, I'm looking for characters I can relate to. For me, yes, that usually means the females* (although not always). And yeah, it bothers me that in a narrative with eight males and one female, it's frequently the female who will be the target of violence or killed off to make a point.

Now, I'm not saying that female characters should have a "get out of mortal injury free" card, nor that they should be immortal. But there's "everyone in this story gets the crap kicked out of them on a regular basis, it was Karen's turn," and then there's "mysteriously, every male character survives the explosion unscathed, again, but Karen is in the hospital, again." Or, even worse, "all the guys are fine, Karen's dead, meet Katie." Karen, in this scenario, was probably a replacement for Kelly, who replaced Kendra back in season one. And the beat rolls on.

I am not saying that all things must have absolute gender equality. Big Bang Theory was a primarily male cast for the first several seasons, and that was fine. H2O: Just Add Water was a primarily female cast for its entire run, and that was fine, too. Sometimes, there are situations where it makes sense for it to be mostly one gender or the other. But this is a "sometimes" thing, not a "four times out of five" thing. If there's no pressing reason for a character to be one gender or the other, why not try striking a balance? One of the only things that's ever disappointed me about Leverage is the way that the "evil doubles" of all the main characters have been male. Male thief, male hitter, male hacker, male mastermind. When your core cast is so well-balanced, why not make your Mirror Universe equally well-balanced?

(Yes, we have seen another female grifter, but as she was brought in to essentially be a replacement Sophie while Gina Bellman was pregnant, she's a bit of a different duck, and she wasn't brought in when they needed an alternate team. Which is too bad, because she's awesome.)

And now to the event that caused me to start thinking these things so critically:

Once upon a time there was a show, and it was made for me. It could not have been better tailored to my tastes if the producers had been bugging my phone. I loved it without reservation, even though the cast was almost purely male, and I defended it from accusations of misogyny. It was my show.

Time passed, and more female characters were introduced. They didn't become core cast, but that was okay; there were natural limits on the number of core cast members, and I was happy with the expanded universe. It made things more realistic. And then things started getting bad in that expanded universe. How could they make us, the viewers, understand how bad things were?

By killing all the female characters who had appeared in more than one episode, naturally. And by doing it in a way that was meant to be "heroic," but involved them failing to navigate a scenario that left the male characters entirely untouched.

I cried until I was sick after that episode. I turned off the show. I never went back. Literally never; I haven't watched so much as a preview since that narrative decision was made. Was I overreacting? Maybe. But there is so much media out there these days, so many stories, that once you make me cry for reasons that are not "this is so moving and tragic," but are instead, "this is so unfair and infuriating," we're over, you and I.

And that, right there, is when a story loses me. When they use the female characters as a shortcut to emotional anguish; when they kill or maim the women because that's easier than setting up a genuinely and realistically painful scenario. Especially since we almost always start out with a severe gender imbalance in genre or action shows, and that means that killing the token woman can leave us with an all-male cast.

Bones, which I adore, has a rotating cast of interns, only one of whom is female. When they had to kill an intern last season, it wasn't her. I cried like a baby over the death they chose; the intern they killed was my second favorite among the available choices. But it didn't make me angry the way it would have if they'd chosen Daisy. Why? Because killing the woman is so often viewed as the "cheap and easy" choice that I wouldn't have been able to focus on the tragedy through my anger.

Again, I am not saying "never kill the woman." Veronica Mars is one of my favorite shows ever, and they started off by killing Lilly Kane. NCIS, which I also adore, killed off a central female character very early in their run. But both shows killed their characters in a way that made sense for the show, and did not reduce her to an emotional red stamp. "We need this to hurt, so kill the girl." You need to kill the character, not "kill the girl." If you can do that, you'll keep me. If you can't, you'll lose me. And I am not the only one you'll lose.

I find it a little fascinating that women make up such a large percentage of the audience for these stories, but we're still the ones who die when the monster comes, to prove that the threat is real. I'd like to see it change.

And I still miss Lilly.

(*I don't say "women" because I watch a lot of science fiction, and a lot of cartoons and teen dramas. So "girls" is often accurate, as is "blue lizard people of the egg-laying gender.")

A good chunk of the internet is blacked out today to protest SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP). If you have somehow managed to miss this, you must not visit any news or geek-culture blogs, read very many web comics, use Google or the Firefox homepage, or access Wikipedia. (Also, if you have somehow managed to miss this because you don't use the internet for any of the things I've cited above, I am a little bit afraid of you. What do you use the internet for? How did you even find this page? Are you a robot?)

How has the blackout impacted me? This is my morning routine:

1. Get up, get ready for work.
2. Internet! FOREVER! Okay, for about fifteen minutes. First up, web comics.
3. Second, toy collecting sites.
4. Thirdly, io9 and Television Without Pity.
5. Wikipedia, to both check facts about things I'm writing (do parrots eat meat?) and to confirm which shows I follow will have new episodes tonight (for some reason I trust Wikipedia more than I trust the TV Guide site).

This is my morning routine after SOPA:

1. Get up, get ready for work. Because everything else is blocked, removed, or under attack.

This is a broad-strokes "protection of copyright" that actually goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that it's like getting a pack of trained attack basilisks to keep those damn kids off your lawn. Basilisk crap is going to wind up getting everywhere, but who cares? No more kids on the lawn!

Now, I am a creator of things, and I appreciate and enjoy making money off of them. It enables me to do silly little things like keeping the power on and feeding the cats. I appreciate and enjoy it even more when people don't steal from me. But you know what doesn't steal from me? Book reviews. But SOPA could make it a crime to post book covers or quote inside text, something my favorite book reviewers often do. Hell, SOPA could make it a crime for me to maintain my own website, since I use art that is technically under copyright to either my publishers or the original cover artists, and if someone wanted to be a real dick, they could report me for posting pieces of my own books.

You know what else doesn't steal from me? Fanfic. The legal arguments about fanfic and fan art are huge and complicated and a matter for another day, but I can honestly say that I have received email from people saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and so I read the originals." I haven't received email saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and it was so bad that now I am stealing all your shit forever." Whatever impact fan works may have on my sales, and whatever the legality behind transformative fan work, it isn't stealing from me. It isn't internet piracy. But under SOPA, you could totally rat out fanfic archives and most of DeviantArt for violating copyrights, and watch the pretty, pretty fires as they burned.

Piracy pisses me off. I don't feel that I have wasted my time when I got upset about piracy and copyright. But there is such a huge difference between "I will now protect you from piracy" and what these bills will do that isn't even funny. Don't believe me? I mean, why should you? I am, after all, not a lawyer or anything like that. But I do have access to the internet, and to the smart people it currently contains, the ones I am allowed to communicate with freely and without fear of being slapped for violating a law that seems a bit too broadly written.

John Murphy would like to talk to you about SOPA. Better yet, he does it very intelligently and coherently, with good, clean information.

Still not convinced? The folks at reddit have actually dissected the text of SOPA, and point out some terrifying potential abuses. If you want to get your legal language on, this is the place to go.

And the ever-fabulous and profane Chuck Wendig has also pointed out some of the major issues with these anti-piracy measures. Like me, he's approaching it from a writer's perspective. He just says "fuck" more.

You know what? Fuck SOPA. Fuck PIPA. Fuck the idiots who think that they can control the internet. And fuck them twice for forcing today's internet blackout, because I still don't know whether parrots eat meat.

Fuckers.

I've had a few people emailing me recently, asking questions I can't answer, over and over again. Not "what is the solution to the Riemann Hypothesis?", which is a question I can't answer because I'm not a math genius. Questions like "How long has Tybalt been in love with Toby? Why isn't he courting her?" and "Who are Quentin's parents?" Questions that relate to my books, but are not about things that have yet happened in my books, or about the background of the world. I can explain Cait Sidhe biology until the cows come home. I cannot, at this time, tell you who Amandine's mother is.

And this is a problem for me.

I like answering mail. I'm incredibly slow about it, because I have a thousand other things I need to be doing at the same time, and a message that just says "thanks for writing books" but isn't from a teenager or asking questions may just be smiled at and tucked into my files. At the same time, these questions make me dread opening my inbox.

How do I say "no" without coming off as an arrogant bitch? How do I explain that these are questions I can't answer, because it isn't fair to all the readers who didn't ask me? And most of all, how do I explain that I can't answer because I don't want to lie to you?

Things change. As far as I'm concerned, if something isn't in a book that you can buy on the shelf, it isn't set in stone. I mean that literally: while there have been very, very few last-minute changes, there have been at least two instances where the ARC came out, I did my ceremonial "I will now read the ARC to see how it feels as a book," and have then called my publisher in tears, begging that something be fixed. Even the ARCs can change. If you had asked me who the important characters in the Toby series were going to be before the first book came out, my list would not have included Quentin, Raj, April, Walther, Etienne, or Danny. Danny actually didn't exist until after Rosemary and Rue had been purchased by DAW.

If I say "oh, don't worry, X is happening in book Y," there's a good chance I'm wrong. The original villain of One Salt Sea isn't in the book. At all. The original first chapter of An Artificial Night didn't even make it to my publisher. And those are just the examples I can give that don't come with associated spoilers.

It's really difficult. I have a lot of trouble navigating these questions, and no matter what I say, I wind up feeling like I'm being mean. I'm not, really. I just don't want to spoil any surprises, and I definitely don't want to tell any accidental lies. So please, don't ask those questions. I can't answer them, and it makes me want to cry when they just keep coming.

Bah. Writing is hard.

This morning, I awoke to find the annual award season argument raging on my Twitter. It's a familiar dance (we dance it every year), and it goes like this:

PERSON #1: "Here are my eligible works!"
PERSON #2: "That's crass and inappropriate!"
PERSON #1: "But...how else am I supposed to make sure people know what's actually eligible?"
PERSON #2: "SILENT HATEFUL MAGIC."

(I always get Ursula from The Little Mermaid in my head right about now. "You'll have your looks! Your pretty face! And don't underestimate the importance of body language...")

This was followed by the second loop of the award argument:

PERSON #2: "I will never ever ever ever vote for or nominate someone who announces they're eligible."
PERSON #1: "But...that just penalizes the people you know about."
PERSON #2: "I KNOW ALL THINGS."
PERSON #1: "What about conversations in bars? Isn't it better to be upfront and public?"
PERSON #2: "ALL THINGS."

Cue the Sea Witch.

So here, then, is the big conundrum of authors during award season: If we say "I am eligible, and here is what I am eligible for," we get people complaining about crass, inappropriate self-promotion, no matter how gently we word it. If we say nothing at all, we get people complaining about how we didn't remind them about our eligibility, with a side order of "why didn't you make sure I knew nominations were open in the first place." In short, we cannot win for losing. So which option causes more unhappiness? Which option is more problematic, in the long run?

In this case, I'm going to say...silence. Because here's the thing: the only way a zero promotion model works is if there is genuinely zero promotion. If one person with a lot of friends makes an off-hand comment in a bar, that can change everything, especially with as narrow a margin as most fannish awards tend to have—and yes, that includes the Hugos and the Nebulas. Since zero promotion is impossible to enforce, the best option is for everyone who cares about the horses they have in the race to say, publicly, politely, and without hiding behind the veil of anonymity, "I am eligible for these things, in these categories, thank you for considering me, please remember to consider all the worthy works from this past year."

I have horses in this year's race. So do an enormous number of my friends, and an enormous number of authors and creators who are not friends of mine, but whose work I respect and admire. And I genuinely want to see the ballot reflect what we, as a community, think, not what I think, or what Bob thinks, or what Bob's fifty friends who he took out for drinks last Friday night might think. I want us to be global, and that means sometimes, creators will need to open their mouths and say "I am eligible." There's no shame in that. Saying it every day for a month, on the other hand, will get me slapping you in the back of the head with a tentacle.

Just saying.

Having been provided with a handy link wrap-up of the way my post on the digital divide has spread, I made the natural "hey, let's open this box Pandora left me" mistake, and clicked some links. I quickly discovered that...

1. I am a man.

2. I am advocating that authors, without support from publishers, agents, or the reading public, continue to slam ourselves against the brick wall of martyrdom in order to keep a dying medium alive.

3. I am swathed in moralistic superiority, rather than genuinely concerned.

4. I hate all technology, and it's a miracle I was willing to write my post on a devil machine, rather than committing it to beautiful calligraphy and pasting my broadsheets all over town.

5. Poor people don't want to read anyway, so why am I bothering?

6. Saying that some poor people won't be able to afford an ebook reader, or wouldn't waste the money on one if they could, is just stupid, and I'm totally wrong.

7. Also, no one in America goes to bed hungry. American poverty is actually pretty nice.

8. Did I mention that I was a man?

9. My view of poverty is romanticized. (This was actually the one that really made me go "WHAT THE FUCK?!" out loud. Once the word "cockroaches" enters a discussion, the romance is dead.)

10. I'm an idiot.

Well, yes, point #10: I am an idiot, and should not have looked at those links. Thank you. As to the above, wow. The range of interpretation possible on the internet is incredible. Also, before you quote any of those things out of context (please don't), they're not true. And no, I'm not saying "wah, some people didn't agree with me." Lots of people didn't agree with me, and some of their disagreements were fascinating and thought-provoking. I'm saying "I do not have a penis, children go to bed hungry, and if you think my view of poverty is romantic, I do not think we should continue this conversation."

I hereby declare comment amnesty on this post. I am too tired to play nicely with the other children, and think that I should just stay in my room.

Cranky blonde is cranky. And armed.

I would like to begin by noting that this is not a post about the ethics, morals, or legalities of creating free torrent files of material which does not belong to you. I've talked about this in the past, repeatedly and at length, and while I'll doubtless talk about it again in the future, that's not today's target.

Instead, I want to talk about illegal resales.

Yesterday afternoon, some bold soul wandering the internet jungles encountered a site that looked too good to be true: a private seller offering huge numbers of ebooks, some by extremely popular authors, for two dollars each, or ten for ten. That's, like, amazing! That's incredible! And best of all, that's totally against the law! This individual told a few authors, who told a few more, who told a few more, and then the wrath of the internet came down upon that seller's head, since people don't take kindly to being stolen from. The sales page was taken down. The seller changed the name on her twitter. All done, right?

Not quite.

First, there's the matter of the seller herself. She's not going to be named, because I don't play that kind of game, but I think it's important to note that she justified her actions by saying that she was trying to make money to pay for her kidney transplant medications. This? Is a sad story. It may even be a true story. It's also the kind of thing that's sort of calculated to make people back off and not want to be the bad guy by yelling at the woman who's just trying to afford her drugs, so she doesn't die. To this I say...

I am so very, very sorry that people are ill. I hate that we live in a country without medical care for everyone. It's a huge, scary, horrible issue. But I can't sit back and let people profit off my work because they're sick. There are a lot of sick people, and sometimes, I'm one of them. If I said "oh, it's okay because you're sick," I'd wind up in a world of trouble. And Alice would be dead, since only being paid for my work enabled me to pay for her extremely expensive, extremely unexpected vet bill last year.

Second, I can almost understand people who put things up for free. Yes, they're stealing, and no, I don't condone it, but they're not trying to profit off someone else's property. They're not taking cookies out of the back of a bakery and selling them for half-price at a food truck down the street, they're giving out cookies for free. One of the big "you're over-simplifying, you're not seeing the big picture" arguments in the whole book piracy discussion is "not every download is a sale." Well, if someone is selling my books, independent of my publisher, every download is a sale, and it's a sale I'm not getting paid for.

People like getting things for less money. It's the natural way of mankind. It's why we clip coupons, shop at Ross, and wear last year's sweaters. But there's legitimate discounting, and there's stealing, and sadly, it can be hard to tell them apart.

Finally, and most troubling to me, this represents a snapshot of the biggest problem I see coming down the pike, as ebooks become a bigger and bigger percentage of the books sold: there is no ebook secondary market.

I love used bookstores. I exist because of used bookstores. In the last month, I have been to three Half-Price Books, two independent used bookstores, and a library book sale. When I was a kid, eighty percent of my books came from these places. Without the secondary market, I wouldn't have been able to read the way I did, and I would have grown up to be someone very different. I am worried about the smart, poor kids of today, and I can easily see more and more sites like this cropping up as people try to "resell" things that can't actually be resold.

I don't know that there's a solution. I'm worried, and I'm scared for what comes next. But this pirate site, at least, came down.

Please, remember that there's no secondary ebook market, and that if a price seems too good to be true, unless it's a promotion offered directly by a publisher...

...it probably isn't legit.

ETA: Please stop trying to make this a discussion about piracy. As noted above, that is not this post. We are treading old ground, and I do not have the energy or time to moderate this conversation right now.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

Some of you may have breathed a sigh of relief when you realized that you had entered a relatively feline-free zone. "Finally," you said. "She's going to talk about something that doesn't meow." Others may have been concerned. (I've heard from the concerned contingent, not from the relieved, but I have no trouble with the idea that both sides exist. Honestly, I don't demand that anyone be interested in everything I have to say, and that includes my cats, machete collection, horror movies, the X-Men, and candy corn.) Even more of you may well have been confused, given how focal cats have traditionally been around here. But I haven't been blogging about my cats.

John Scalzi has just made a lengthy post about the shit female bloggers get that he doesn't get. Go and read it. I'll be honest: after more than a decade on the internet, I find his experiences to be pretty spot-on. I make a controversial comment, I get death threats, comments about my weight, accusations of bitchiness, comments about my weight, offers to "fuck the stupid" out of me, comments about my weight, insults, comments about my weight, and, best of all, people swearing up, down, and sideways that I deserve whatever I get. It's been a few years since I've had a really bad troll problem, but when I had one, it was...

It was bad. It was "Kate monitored my journal and deleted comments before I could see them" bad, with a side order of feeling sick every time I considered getting online. I didn't sleep, I didn't eat, and I was scared all the time. It's invasive, and it's scary. Cracks about my weight aside, I'm not that big, and if someone wanted to fuck me up, they could. Easily. (Is this a motivator for my large and oft-discussed machete collection? Possible! Anybody comes to my house with the intent of doing me a mischief in the woods, they will not be thrilled by the results.)

And I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

I'll be honest: I understand people being dicks for the sake of being dicks. We're all a little mean when we've had a bad day. My mother used to snap at me, even though she loved me. Sometimes I pick fights with my friends, or snarl at my co-workers. Human nature sometimes trends toward asshole, and no matter how hard we work to control it, it's going to happen. What I don't understand is why being a dick towards a woman on the internet so often turns into a) threats of violence, b) sexual insults, c) threats of sexual violence, or d) comments about perceived attractiveness/weight. Or violence toward the things that woman loves.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently, because someone has been sending me email, from dummy accounts, threatening to kill my cats. In graphic detail. They know what my cats look like, thanks to the amount of blogging I have done in the past, and they've been able to get really, really specific in what they're going to do. Why? Because I got my cats from a breeder, and not from a shelter, and that means I need to suffer in order to understand the suffering of the cats waiting for adoption. "Bitch," "cunt," and "whore" feature heavily in these emails, which is always a nice seasoning for my rage and terror stew. It's all very gender-specific.

And they're threatening to kill my cats.

So no, I'm not going to talk about them right now; not until this email stops, not until the trolls find something else to chew on. And yes, I realize that making this post may reawaken some of my old trolls (and oh, Great Pumpkin, I hate it so much that I even have to take that into consideration), so I'm going to be watching comments carefully. Anything insulting will be deleted. Anything malicious will result in an immediate banning. I mean that. I am not going to let that shit stand.

We need to stop acting this way toward one another. We need to remember that there are humans on the other side of all those keyboards. We need to be decent human beings, because otherwise, everything is going to fall apart.

And none of this changes the fact that if the fucker who's been telling me what he's going to do to my babies comes anywhere near them, I will probably be going to prison for assault.

Some days I hate being a girl.

First, go and read this post from Wil Wheaton. It's okay. I can wait.

You're back? Cool. Okay, so...

The San Diego International Comic Convention (and really, any of the large media conventions, but SDCC more than most) is simply crawling with famous people, ranging from your stealth famous (most directors, producers, and writers) and formerly famous (the obscure character actors and aging child stars selling autographs near the rear of the dealer's hall) to your currently huge famous (the cast of True Blood) and your geek darlings (the cast of Eureka). Where someone falls on this scale during the convention may have absolutely no relation to where they'd be on the scale out in the non-convention world, although it mostly works as an enhancement of fame, not a reduction. Britney Spears would be mobbed at SDCC, no matter how few fans admit to liking her music, but I doubt Felicia Day is going to get stalked by paparazzi if she tries to go out for a burger.

If you attend SDCC, the odds are good that you will see famous people. Buying breakfast at the deli! Crossing the street! Trying in vain to get some shopping done in the exhibitor's hall! Walking really, really fast toward the nearest bathroom! Standing on the sidewalk with a stranger's arm around their shoulders, smiling graciously for a camera! This is going to happen. It is unavoidable. And I, from the bottom of my heart, make this request of you:

Don't go batshit because you're breathing the same air as a famous person.

Nathan Fillion is awesome. He's a funny guy, he's nice, he's considerate, and he worked on one of my favorite horror movies. He does not, however, give off a chemical signal in his sweat that causes my ladyparts to explode and my brain to stop functioning above a third-grade level. Stephen King is one of my personal heroes, and wrote three of my five favorite books. That does not mean that he intended Annie Wilkes from Misery to be taken as an ideal of fan behavior.

I am, by the standards of any media convention, a fourth-string celebrity at best. I'm a writer, which makes me invisible; I don't wear miniskirts or preach controversial opinions or have a TV show based off my work; I'm relatively new on the scene. I'm a very small fish, and I appreciate that, because even at my current, erm, fish size index, I've been stopped while walking someone, interrupted while very clearly doing something, and, my personal favorite, grabbed—physically grabbed, by people I do not know, and did not consent to being grabbed by—on my way into the bathroom.

Now, I don't know about you and your strange Earth ways, but on my planet, when someone is walking briskly toward a bathroom, they probably intend to do something involving bodily wastes and a toilet. Consider that I drink roughly four liters of Diet Dr Pepper a day during the average con. Now consider the danger of grabbing me while I'm on my way to make some room for more soda.

And there are people who say "well, you signed up for this" when a famous person, regardless of fish size index, has issues with being grabbed or interrupted or otherwise poked at in public. But at the end of the day, no one, no matter how famous, no matter how big of a fish, signed a contract saying "anyone who wants to can now grab you at any time, have a nice day."

These are the circumstances under which it is acceptable to touch a stranger:

1. If they have a hornet or something on their shoulder and you're brushing it off.
2. If you're shoving them out of the way of a Martian ray gun blast.
3. If they're standing on your foot and you need to tap them in the shoulder to get them off you.
4. If they just dropped, like, their wallet or something, and shouts of "Sir? Sir!" or "Ma'am? Ma'am!" aren't getting their attention.

There may be others for this list, but you get the idea. These are the circumstances under which it is NOT acceptable to touch a stranger, regardless of whether they're famous:

1. Because you want to.
2. Because they're there.
3. Because you feel like you have a personal connection to them, even though you've never met.
4. Because then you can tell your friends about that person you touched.

...again, there may (will) be others on this list, but you get the idea. Saying "Excuse me? Mr. Whedon? I love your work, could I get your autograph?" when you see him in the hall is cool. Following him into the men's room is not. Camping out in front of his hotel, also not. And the coolest thing of all is taking "no" as a legitimate, and understandable, answer.

Please, treat everyone with the same respect you want applied to you, whether they're famous or not. Do not separate people from their friends and family, or grab them, or stop them from getting to the bathroom. If you wouldn't let someone do it to you/your significant other/your kids, don't do it to someone else.

Don't let proximity to fame make you batshit, and these conventions will be a lot more fun, for everyone.

My house was broken into yesterday.

I had managed to leave my house keys on the floor next to my bed when I left for work, so I called my mother and arranged for her to pick me up from the train station. The Great Pumpkin was looking out for me; if she hadn't given me a ride, I would have come home alone, less than twenty minutes after I did.

When we reached the house, we saw a razor scooter parked next to the trash cans. "Huh," I said. "I wonder what that's doing there?" But we dismissed it as having been left by one of the neighborhood kids, and kept going.

There was a large Aaron Brothers bag, and a backpack, in the front yard. "That's weird," I said. But we decided it probably belonged to my little sister, who will sometimes put things in odd places while she does other stuff, and we kept going.

Inside, the cats were in a state of high dudgeon—even moreso than normal for a weekday afternoon—and appeared to have expressed their unhappiness by knocking a bunch of stuff over. Mom scolded them amiably while I started for the fridge to get a soda, and saw that Alex's bedroom door was open. His room is one of the only places in the house the cats aren't allowed. I thought "wow, lots of mischief," and went to close it...

...only to find that his bedside table had been cleared onto the bed. And the door to the laundry room was open. And the door connecting the laundry room to the back was open. And the DVD player was gone.

Cue freaking right the fuck out.

Mom searched the house while I got the stuff out of the front yard. The bags proved to contain everything that was missing: the DVD player, Alex's computer (mine was untouched), a bunch of small electronics, a few DVDs. (Ironically, our thief only took Firefly-related material. So we're looking for an asshole Browncoat. Nice!) The Aaron Brothers bag was mine, which explains why my pictures were scattered all over the floor.

After a heart-stopping moment of not being able to find Lilly, we got ourselves calmed mostly down, and Mom went to the hardware store to get new locks while I called the police. An officer came out and took my statement; we walked the perimeter, and found that the hide-a-key (which I didn't know existed until I called Alex) was missing. So that's probably how they got inside.

We think we came home and surprised the thief in the process of going back in for another load. That's why we found all their stuff (and the scooter). Had I come home alone, they would probably have still been there. And I would have walked in on them, without a car to warn that I was coming.

Alex got home and confirmed that all his stuff was there. Mom changed the locks. Victor and Lara came and took me for dinner. The cats got fussed over. And I took a machete to bed.

So...

1. Nothing is missing.
2. In fact, net gain: I have the thief's scooter.
3. We think it was a teenage boy, based on the scooter, the things grabbed, and the fact that none of my girly things were touched.
4. Alex is working from home today, so the house is not empty.
5. The cats are fine.
6. I will be sleeping with a machete for the foreseeable future.

It's an ignite the biosphere kind of day.

Every year in July, I go to the San Diego International Comic Convention. It's huge, it's crowded, it's complicated, it's messy, and it's still, for all its faults, one of my favorite conventions (the other being OVFF). I love SDCC. I've been going since I was a teenager, and if the con has changed, well, so have I. I can be happy there. I feel like the rest of the world gets to wait a little while.

Which is not to say that the con is without its problems. One, that's been getting more extreme with every passing year, is the issue of THE COMICON EXCLUSIVE (dun-dun-DUUUUUN). These are toys made for and offered solely at the con. They can't be obtained anywhere else. There have been My Little Ponies, special perfumes from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, and action figures, action figures, action figures. Oh, the action, oh the figures, without end. Collectors swarm the exhibit hall the second it opens, rushing to get the exclusives on their list.

I, it must be said, am no different. I went to SDCC 2011 with the following exclusives on my list: diamond form Bishojo Emma Frost, Waid-era Bishojo Susan Storm, the SDCC 2011 My Little Pony, and the Deadfast cosplay Ghoulia Yelps. I got there early on Wednesday, and hit the floor while the throngs were at their lowest pre-Sunday ebb, ready to stand in lines, fork over cash, and get my goodies. There is nothing wrong with being a collector of things. I have been a collector of things my whole life. Some of the things I collect now, I started collecting when I was four years old. Four years old. My ability to throw stones at collectors died a long damn time ago.

That being said, there are limits.

People were getting mean this year. There was a weird sort of mass hysteria sweeping the floor, where totally reasonable, rational people that I would normally enjoy having a chat with suddenly became consumed by the crazy-pants need to be at THE FRONT OF THE LINE RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Part of this may be due to the steady increase in toy scalpers, people who come to SDCC just to buy the exclusives and resell them on eBay at a hefty markup. Think I'm kidding? Look at eBay. The Monster High doll I bought for twenty dollars two weeks ago now has a base "buy it now" of sixty dollars...and people are paying it. The market has stabilized, and the people who bought as much as they could carry at the convention are reaping the benefits.

Because the scalpers were clearing things out as quickly as they could, the people who wanted those toys for their own collections acquired a new sense of urgency—suddenly, it wasn't "walk briskly," it was "run." And when the scalpers started running, too, "run" turned into "stampede."

Saturday, after being asked to pick up a Monster High doll for a friend, Amy and I went over to the Mattel booth to get in line. The line was...ugly. Basically, a single guard was doing crowd control at the mouth of the actual line, and letting people in one at a time, right to left. Amy and I were on the far left; four people literally shoved past us to get into the line before we could. Shoved past us. But we were there for girl toys (which always sell slower than boy toys), so we waited until we could get past the guard, and we got into the lineup without major incident.

About six people behind us in line (and thus right next to us, due to the amusement park ride setup being used for people moving) was a mother and her seven-year-old daughter. The daughter was pretty clearly upset. The daughter was also dressed as Draculaura, one of the major characters from Monster High. I asked what they were in the line for, and guessed that it might be Ghoulia. The little girl, still looking miserable, confirmed.

I asked her mother what was wrong.

"We've tried to get into this line four times," she replied.

Why so many tries? Because people were pushing her child. People were stepping on her child. So when the crowd was crazy, they had to withdraw—no doll is worth injuring a little kid, period. And the girl was, naturally, very concerned that she wouldn't be able to get her toy.

I asked the mother if they wanted to go ahead of me. She looked stunned. She asked, several times, if I was sure; Amy and I both affirmed that, if one of us was getting the last Monster High doll, we wanted it to be the little girl. (None of the six people between us and the kid were there for Monster High toys; like most collectors, they wanted the "boy toys," which always sell out before anything else.) We let the girl and her mother go ahead of us...and the mother's level of gratitude was so far out of proportion with the cost of the gesture that it made me want to go around yelling at people. Don't step on kids! Cheese and crackers, that's just common sense!

Most of the kids at SDCC are very well-behaved, possibly because they're too terrified by the size of the crowd to do anything else. It's pretty easy to believe that the bogeyman will get you if you're bad when you can see the bogeyman, he's right over there and he's buying comic books. Maybe he needs a snack! It could be you. So they're pretty cool, those con kids, the next generation of our species. I mean, unless someone in a giant Perry the Platypus costume has just walked by. There are limits.

And I'm not saying kids get everything. I didn't give the girl my toy, I just let her go ahead of me to get hers. But there are moments where you really need to pause and ask yourself "is my eBay profit worth stepping on this little girl?" And if the answer is ever "yes," maybe it's time for some serious soul searching.

Here's a goal for all of us who are planning to attend San Diego Comic Convention 2012: let's not be dicks. And when we're buying cool stuff, let's make sure we're buying it for ourselves or our friends, not for our burgeoning eBay business. Okay?

Cool.

I am currently trying to transform my place of residence from a welter of stuff* into something halfway functional. I have a lot of motivation. I not only want to have a viable idea of what I have, thus telling me what I need to acquire if I want to finish various collections, I want to get rid of things that I don't really want. That way, I can pack with more assurance. Every move is focused on that sweet eventual goal: Seattle. I want to get out of the Bay Area, and after co-habitation with The Housemate for over a decade, my extraction has to be slow and careful, lest we wind up going to war over who owns that battered old paperback book.**

Some of the de-cluttering efforts are obvious. For example, I am putting books in boxes, indexing their contents, and putting the boxes in a big stack of boxes (also filled with books). I am putting things I have no emotional attachment to/desire to keep in other boxes, and sending them away on a regular basis. I am freely giving things to strangers. Other efforts are less obvious. I bought two new cat trees, because cats knock stuff over, thus creating more mess than they will when given places of their own. I've been saving boxes, which makes more mess, at least until the boxes are filled and put away. And so on.

My brain is no tidier. In trying to clean up my link list, I found things that have literally been waiting for their shining moment for up to two years. Will I ever really get around to some of these? No. No, I will not. That makes me sad, but I'd like to see the floor in my rotating "to do" file someday, just like I'd like to see it in my kitchen, and so away they go. Farewell, sweet links. I hardly knew ye.

Still. Once, Feed was a best-selling title in an Australian bookstore. I was nominated for a Romantic Times award. Apex put out an anthology with my wacky Fighting Pumpkins alien invasion story in it. And I needed to take a nap.

I will probably do some really random review posts in the next few days, just to clear out some links that have waited long past their best-by date. This has never been a judgment on those reviews in specific; it's just how out of control the file has gotten. I need a maid to go with that nap, I swear.

Anybody want to come over and help me index stuff?

(*Let's be clear here: most of it is good stuff. That's why it's there. But not all of it is good stuff. Some of it is bad stuff. Some of it is the kind of stuff that seemed like good stuff six years ago, when I was a different person, or when I really thought that someday I, too, would be a world-class guitarist. And some of it, sad to say, is crap.)

(**If you don't think this is something worth going to war over, you're either not a bibliophile or have never had someone try to take one of your best-beloved books away from you. Not being in the mood to start global thermonuclear destruction, I am doing my best to avoid this.)

So I'm a crazy toy collector. This is not news. I spend hours upon hours stalking toy stores and flea markets and auction sites; I follow toy news blogs and read all the latest developments in the world of little plastic people. I'm a play-with-it collector, rather than a leave-it-in-the-box, look-at-it-smugly collector, and my room is basically the one I used to fantasize about when I was a little girl. The biggest scolding Thomas has ever received is when he whacked Draculaura off the shelf to see what would happen. (What happened? He got yelled at and felt bad. He has not repeated this offense.)

Being a crazy toy collector means, among other things, that I wind up acquiring and treasuring some things which are limited, and some things which are no longer available through anything but the action figure black market. It's all part of the game. And that includes the limited dolls made for the San Diego Comic Convention, or for the various Tonner Doll Conventions.

I have a point, I swear.

While I was in New York, I missed the 2011 Tonner Doll Convention, because, well, BEA. Several people on my Evangeline Ghastly Doll Collectors mailing list attended the Tonner convention, and were excited to get the convention-exclusive dolls. They started lining up at 7AM to get them. Supplies were exceedingly limited, and not everyone got a doll. There was much wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth. And the first dolls started showing up on eBay less than twenty minutes later.

Now, these are dolls which cost $150 new. Not cheap, but understandable for a limited-edition vinyl ball-jointed doll. And they went up on eBay at $450 each. Why? Because people would pay it. The same thing is happening right now in my Monster High community. People who can't get to San Diego are ordering dolls from eBay scalpers who promise them the exclusives at three or even four times the original purchase price. (These are people who don't even have dolls yet, mind you; they're selling doll futures, the promise that they will go to the convention and somehow find a way to obtain all these toys.) It isn't limited to exclusive dolls, either. Toy scalpers regularly clear the shelves of "new and hot" toys, listing them on auction sites at two to four times original purchase price.

This bothers me. I understand supply and demand. I understand "I bought this doll and now I don't want her and I'd like to make back my purchase price," or even "I bought her and I want my purchase price plus five bucks for me standing in line." But there's something that just seems faintly scummy about going into a collector situation and buying things to resell at that kind of markup when you know there are other people in that line. Saying "I'm doing it for the people who can't be here, I have to charge extra to pay for my time and effort" doesn't really wash for me unless you're doing it at the last minute, after all the people who are there have had the opportunity to get the toys for themselves.

I wish we didn't do this sort of thing to each other. I wish we'd share, and say "I need one for me, and you need one for you, and maybe if there's some left over, I'll take an extra for selling later," instead of forcing the conventions to put tighter and tighter restrictions on people, because they feel like we just can't be trusted. Maybe they feel that way because we keep proving, over and over again, that we can't be.

And it sucks.

Time for our time-delay travelogue, in which I attempt to prove that I am, in fact, still a real person! Yay! So...

Last Saturday, I flew to New York to begin my whirlwind tour of the East Coast and Midwest, as represented by New York, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Seriously, even considering this particular set of stops probably qualifies me as slightly out of my tree. Actually doing it? Totally insane.

I began in San Francisco, where my mother and youngest sister drove me to the airport. I dressed for success in business class, wearing a bright green tank top and my Scooby-Doo Halloween pajama pants, with my hair in pigtails. I wish I could say this was me making a statement, but in reality, it's just that I travel so much, and the security theater has become such a circus, that I am no longer willing to deal with uncomfortable clothing on top of everything else that air travel entails.

Virgin America (my preferred airline) has recently moved into SFO's newly reopened Terminal 2. This was my first trip to the new terminal. I was dubious, but after five minutes experiencing Terminal 2's charms, I am here to tell you that I, brothers and sisters, am a true believer in Terminal 2. A full-sized supermarket! A wine bar! A burger joint selling Diet Dr Pepper inside security! And a full-sized bookstore, to boot. I have seen the airport promised land, and it is Terminal 2.

I found copies of Feed and the Toby books in the airport bookstore, and signed them, pigtails and orange Halloween pants and all. I believe I am now marked down as one of the bookstore's more surreal author visits.

Thanks to a combination of good luck, good timing, and flying Main Cabin Select, I managed to be the first one on the plane, and nested myself solidly in my lovely exit-row seat, with velociraptor, laptop, sack of DDP, and lots and lots of work to do. As soon as we were off the ground, I commenced to doing just that, working on Blackout, "Rat-Catcher," "Landslide," and reading a manuscript I've been asked to blurb. The flight was smooth, the middle seat was empty, and it was, all in all, lovely...with one notable exception.

The people behind me (and in the row across from theirs, making six in total) seem to have taken Jersey Shore as an etiquette guide. They talked loudly, even shouting across the plane. They argued with the flight attendants. They listened to some sort of media player, again loudly (I could hear it through my headphones) without using headphones of their own. One of them passed gas several times, causing the rest to laugh uproariously. I didn't recline my seat, since I was working; somehow, this wasn't enough room for the person behind me, who kicked me, a lot. Seriously, what were these people, twelve? No, most twelve-year-olds have better manners. It was a real relief to get off the plane and see them nevermore.

Jon and Merav met me at the airport with Subway and DDP, and whisked me away to scenic Jersey City, New Jersey, one of my many homes away from home, where we watched Doctor Who before stumbling to sleep the sleep of the righteous, the just, and the exhausted.

My New York adventure was underway at last.

I am, to a degree, a public figure. I know that. I am also a low-level enough public figure that I am accessible, unlike, say, anyone who's actually famous. That means that some of the things I do and say will be judged in ways that will seem unfair to me. I know that, too. I've basically come to grips with the fact that if I want to be an author, and if I want to make my living doing this, I'm going to have to deal with people judging me. That being said...

Don't you ever, ever insult my cats. Don't you ever, ever imply that I own them because they're "status symbols," or because I am in some way taking pleasure in the knowledge that other cats are being put to sleep right now. Lilly, Alice, and Thomas are my companions. They are my friends. They are the closest I intend to come to having children, and while I may be up for judgment, they are off limits. Leave my cats the fuck alone.

Why do I get my cats from reputable breeders, rather than from the local shelter? A whole bunch of reasons.

I do it for the health of the cat. When I visit a reputable breeder, I can not only meet the kitten I'm hoping to take home with me, I can meet their parents and grandparents. In the case of Alice and Thomas, I met their great-grandfather. I want to know that my cats have a good genetic shot at a long, happy life.

I do it for the temperament of the cat. I have had incredibly sweet, loving shelter cats in my life. I have also had bitter, terrified, xenophobic shelter cats who couldn't be integrated into a household, because they were too damn scared. I want a kitten that has been socialized and loved, and that has been bred to have a good personality to go with those good genes. I want a Lilly, an Alice, a Thomas, a Ripley, a Toby, an Alligator.

And yes, I do insist on kittens whenever possible. At best, I'm bringing home a new cat to an adult who isn't sure about the situation; at worst, I'm bringing home a new cat to two adults who already think there's no room at the inn. I am loud. I move quickly. I go away for long periods of time. I do things the way I do things, and a lot of adult cats can't adjust to me, no matter how hard we both try.

There are cats in shelters. There are cats in rescues. There are cats in need of homes. But I am not in the market for an adult rescue, and the kittens don't need me to be the one that saves them; kittens stand a much better chance than adults. Why do I know this? I know because I have volunteered at shelters and rescues and free clinics since I was twelve years old. Just like I know that I want as complete of a genetic profile as possible on my cats, because I buried so damn many of them when I was bringing them home from the pound.

My cats are not a zero-sum game. Bringing Thomas home from Betsy's didn't kill a kitten somewhere in the world that was waiting for my love; if it hadn't been Thomas, it would have been no new cat at all. Do I wish that there were no cats anywhere in the world waiting for their forever homes? Yes, I do. But that doesn't mean we shut down the breeders, abolish the breeds, and become a Domestic Shorthair and Domestic Longhair-only world. It means we breed responsibly. It means we support the shelters. It means we spay and neuter our pets.

And it means that my cats are not fucking status symbols. They are not somehow less worthy of love and comfort and a place to sleep than cats who have been abused or abandoned. They are exactly as worthy of all those things. And they are getting them from me, as will all the cats in my future.

If you can't be nice to my cats, you leave them the fuck alone.

Okay, so. A few things...

1. I am still assembling the T-shirt spreadsheet. I had intended to finish last night, but then my home internet decided to emulate the mighty banana slug and travel at a speed of approximately three miles per hour, making navigating LJ borderline impossible. So if you haven't heard back from me, you do not yet need to worry. I will post one more time when the spreadsheet is done, saying "if you haven't heard back from me, worry." But if you followed the instructions (name, size, color, email address on the original post) or contacted me and asked politely for an exception, you should be fine.

2. I just found out that apparently, my drummer on Wicked Girls was never paid. I thought he'd been paid out of the money I gave my producer, but no, that all went to mixing. Given the math of albums, this is totally believable, but marginally, you know, inconvenient. So if you don't yet have a copy of Wicked Girls, or wanted to get one for a friend, now would be an awesome time to do so, as I now have an unexpected recording-related bill to pay.

3. I have a convention this weekend, and word counts to make, and I'm trying to post a piece of Newsflesh-related short fiction every day during the countdown to Deadline. So in the interests of maintaining my own sanity, I'm declaring amnesty from my normal "answer all comments" blog policy where those posts are concerned. I'll try to answer direct questions and the like, but I won't answer every expression of "yay, more story." I'll read and appreciate them all, I just need to use my time in other ways right this second. :)

4. My phone is dead. Not just a little dead; dead-dead, the great death from which there is no returning. So I'm a little grumpy, and only accessible via electronic channels right now. Some of which don't work from home, where the internet is toast. Did I mention that this was the best week ever?

5. There is no number five. I just didn't want to end the list on an even number.

I try to remain as accessible as possible, because it seems polite, and because I genuinely like hearing what people think. There is, however, only one of me, and that means it's time for a few notes.

1) My response time is generally measured in weeks, not hours. Sometimes it's measured in days, and those are the scary times, because those are the times when I have somehow managed to make my inbox disappear. Fire may have been involved. I try to answer time-sensitive things first, and sometimes I succeed. If you email me three times in three days, going "WHY HAVEN'T YOU ANSWERED ME YET?!" the answer will change from "Because I was busy" to "Because I have started deleting your email for fun."

2) Okay, so everyone is afraid of spammers and having their email address harvested. I get that, I really do. But I don't have a mailing list, I don't automatically subscribe you to my newsletter when I get an actual email address in my hands, and I don't have the magical capability to beam my response to your thoughtful and impassioned email directly into your brain. Honestly, I don't! I know, that was a shocker to me, too. So when you intentionally withhold part of your email address from my "contact us" form in order to keep it safe, you also keep yourself safe from my ever answering you. And if I notice the missing address after composing a thoughtful and impassioned email of my own, you have annoyed me deeply. Which makes me sad, because I hate to be annoyed.

3) Mira Grant and I have our own inboxes. I check them both, since I'm both people, but email submitted through her website goes to a different place. One which I check less often. If you actually have something time-sensitive, it's best to send it through my main website, just for the sake of hearing back before the sun turns cold.

And those are your memos for the morning.

Just last week, I announced that I would have a story in the YA anthology Wicked Pretty Things. I was extremely excited; this was going to be my first young adult publication, and I really, really want to start publishing some of my YA (werewolves and movie stars and sociological experiments, oh my). It seemed like a great opportunity.

Then I heard that one of the authors, Jessica Verday, had pulled out of the anthology. Which seemed a little odd, given how late we were in the process.

And then I found out her reason. To quote her blog post on the subject (originally posted at http://jessicaverday.blogspot.com/):

"I've received a lot of questions and comments about why I'm no longer a part of the Wicked Pretty Things anthology (US: Running Press, UK: Constable & Robinson) and I've debated the best way to explain why I pulled out of this anthology. The simple reason? I was told that the story I'd wrote, which features Wesley (a boy) and Cameron (a boy), who were both in love with each other, would have to be published as a male/female story because a male/male story would not be acceptable to the publishers."

...uh, what? That's not okay. I mean, really, that's not okay. I began, in my slow, overly careful way, to get angry. Then I saw a statement from the editor, saying that the decision had been entirely hers, and had been in no way a reflection of the publisher's views. I sat back. I thought very, very hard. And I decided that, barring any additional developments, I would stay in the anthology, rather than hurting the other authors involved with the project by pulling out.

Naturally, there were additional developments. In light of the ongoing situation, my own discomfort with this whole thing, and the fact that discriminating on basis of sexual orientation is never okay, I have withdrawn my story from the collection.

And here's the thing. There is absolutely no reason to censor a story that was written to the guidelines (which dictated how much profanity, sexuality, etc. was acceptable, as good guidelines should). If Jessica had written hard-core erotica, then rejecting it would have made perfect sense. Not that kind of book. But she didn't. She wrote a romance, just like the rest of us, only her romance didn't include any girls. And she didn't get a rejection; she got her story accepted, just like the rest of us. Only while we got the usual editorial comments, she got "One of your characters needs to be turned into something he's not." And that's not okay.

Books do not determine a person's sexual orientation. I was not somehow destined to be straight, and led astray by Annie On My Mind and the Valdemar books. I was born with universal wiring. I have had boyfriends and I have had girlfriends and I have had both at the same time, and none of that—NONE OF THAT—is because I read a book where a girl was in love with a girl and I decided that being bisexual would be a fun way to kill a weekend.

But those books did tell me I didn't have to hate myself, and they did tell me that there was nothing wrong with me, and they did make it easier on everyone involved, because here was something I could hand to Mom and go "See? It's not just me, and it's not the end of the world, and it's not the only thing that defines me." Supposedly, ten percent of people are gay or bi with a tropism toward their own gender. It stands to reason that there should be positive non-hetero relationships in at least ten percent of YA literature. And they're not there. And things like this are why.

I am not withdrawing from this book because I'm not straight. I am withdrawing because of my little sister and her wife, and because of my girlfriend, and because of my best friend, and because of all the other people who deserve better than bullying through exclusion. Thanks to Jessica for bringing this to our attention, and thank you to everyone who has been supportive of my decision to withdraw.

I am sorry this had to be done. I am not sorry that I did it.

What's happening in Wisconsin right now scares the hell out of me.

I won't pretend to have an absolutely perfect view of the political situation; most of the information I'm getting is either from Internet news articles (which slant very pro-union, pro-education, and pro-not being total assholes) or from people who are actually in Wisconsin. But from where I'm sitting, it looks like the new Governor of the state took a budget surplus, turned it into a budget deficit by granting tax breaks to corporations and extremely rich people, and is now trying to take the balance out of the public school system. And maybe succeeding.

I keep hearing the phrase "personal responsibility" being thrown around in discussions of Why This Is The Right Thing To Do. We need lower government spending, including lower educational spending, and if you don't like it, that's what private schools and home schooling were invented for. Um. Okay. You know who doesn't have much personal responsibility? A kindergartner. When I was in kindergarten, my idea of "personal responsibility" pretty much began and ended with remembering to leave room for lunch in my schoolbag, which was otherwise packed with My Little Ponies. I wasn't very consistent about this. Does that mean I shouldn't have been allowed to go to a decent school?

Little kids don't know rich from poor. They don't learn racism, or sexism, or religious intolerance until we teach it to them. They just know that when they go to school, they want the teacher to be fun to learn from, the crayons in the art cabinet to be unbroken, and the library to have books worth reading. They want to learn. Bad schools beat that desire out of them, and underfunded schools, unfortunately, often turn into bad schools. Not because the teachers don't care. Not because the parents don't care. Because the resources aren't there to do anything more than just get by.

I grew up in California, so far below the poverty level that sometimes, there was no heat in our apartment. We moved at least once a year, because that was what the eviction notices required, and every time we moved, we wound up somewhere smaller, and uglier, and scarier than the place before. And through it all? Through it all, I went to great schools. I attended Sequoia Middle School, a magnet school for college prep kids. It was Nerd Prep, and I loved it there. I took Drama and Art and Computers, and I got the exact same classes as the kids whose parents made six figures a year. I attended College Park High School, the college prep high school, and I took Drama and Ceramics and Art and AP English, and I learned.

Did I get picked on for being poor? Yeah. My clothes were old and often ugly, my haircuts were unfashionable, when my glasses got broken, I glued them back together and wore them for another year. But I got to learn. I had access to teachers and books and librarians who knew what they were doing. If I had been forced into an underfunded school with teachers who had to work a second job at night to keep their own heat on (and teachers are already pretty poorly paid, especially when you consider that they're educators, role models, mentors, impromptu counselors, and half a dozen other things besides), that wouldn't have happened, and the person I am today wouldn't be here.

People like me cannot exist if we stop prioritizing universal access to good schools, good teachers, and classes that do more than force every student through the same cookie cutter curriculum—something that becomes necessary when you have more than thirty students to a teacher. If we start making education a matter of "personal responsibility," then we're really saying that poor children should have one more disadvantage added to the heaping tower of things already stacked against them. Not every parent can home school. Not every smart child can afford tuition, or be the one to win the scholarship. Not every child has choices.

My tax dollars fund schools. If I were allowed to decide where my tax dollars went, all the dollars currently funding guns would fund schools. But I don't get to do that, so all I can do is hope that people who benefited from our public school system, or have ever known anyone who benefited from our public school system, will say "You know what? I don't need another tax break on my five billion dollars a year. Let's buy some desks."

What's happening to the Wisconsin school system is wrong. And I'm terrified that it's going to work, and the people who think it's a good idea will start trying to do it everywhere else in the country. Children don't need personal responsibility.

Children need to learn.

So far this morning, I have deleted seven spam comments, and blocked the commenters from posting in my journal again. I have also deleted five spam emails submitted through my website contact form (which proves, I think, that we're training spambots to pass Turing Tests, since you have to prove humanity before my website lets you email me).

I read a web comic called Skin Horse, and pretty much daily, the comment section is kudzu'd by spammers, until one of the admins comes along and deletes the offers of cheap drugs, hand bags, imported wives, and free money from a bank in a country that doesn't exist. So far as I know, none of the readers of Skin Horse really want any of these things.

My message boards are in a continual state of "behind" when it comes to approving users, because we have to work so hard to not approve spammers.

And through it all...I don't know anyone who has ever purchased something from a spammer. Most people are so anti-spam that they reject perfectly legitimate purchases, because they've decided that they're "spammy." (This did not happen to me, thankfully, but a friend of mine was told, on their own journal, "I will never buy your books, because you're SO SPAMMY about them." Said friend pretty much confined talk of books to that journal. The journal is gone now. Because that's how much we fear being slammed for spam.) All spam seems to do is waste our time and make us paranoid about clicking things. It's like the TSA of shit you encounter on the Internet.

I do not want .jpgs and spam. I do not want them, Sam I Am.

My mother called me last night just before nine o'clock. "I thought I should let you know," she said. "My car threw a rod today."

Not being a driver myself (which is why there are so many entries that include the phrase "and then Mom drove me to..."), I asked naively if this was a bad thing. She explained that yes, it was a bad thing, and that further, given the age of her car (a third-hand station wagon we bought in early 2010, when her prior car, a fifth-hand station wagon that I think she bought from evil gnomes), it would be cheaper and safer to buy a new car than it would be to buy a new engine.

Well, crap.

So now we need to find a car. As cheaply as possible, since the money isn't exactly flowing like water around here. My mother gets me to the majority of my book events, as well as needing a vehicle to, you know, work. (One of the sad ironies of our current culture: She can't afford to live where there's good, dependable public transit, so she lives in a place where you have to have a car, but she can pay the rent. Take away her car, she has to move to where there's dependable public transit. Only she can't do that, because there is no more dependable public transit in even semi-affordable places. So she needs a car...)

If you know of anyone in the Bay Area who is selling a vehicle and not too wedded to using the money to buy a boat, please let me know? A station wagon would be preferred, since Mom regularly hauls a lot of crap around, including me.

I swear, it never rains but it pours.

I thought fairly hard about whether or not to make this post, as I generally try not to say negative things that can't be veiled behind a lovely shimmering curtain of "no details here." In the end, I decided that the details I had were vague enough to be borderline-generic, with a few careful omissions. And this is an important "please don't be this guy."

On Sunday at Arisia, I was on a panel called "Fanfic As Writer's Workshop," for discussion of how the skills and techniques learned from writing fanfiction can be applied to writing original fiction. (Yes, Virginia, you can learn how to write by writing fanfic. But that is another post for another day.) I was, at the time, incredibly sick, due to exposure to mango (which I am highly allergic to), but I was determined to soldier through. It's probably a good thing that I was as sick as I was, since it prevented my becoming annoyed enough to shout. See? Vomiting has value!

The panel consisted entirely of women (myself, three other writers, and Diana). The room, while small, was quite well-filled, with a nice mix of people who wanted to discuss learning about writing through, well, actually writing. And, in the front row, was That Guy. He was fairly large; fairly unkempt; had not brushed his hair; appeared to be wearing basic black for its stain-concealing properties, rather than out of any goth sympathies; and was, when first sighted, vigorously picking at his teeth.

Please don't be That Guy, part one: If you're sitting in the front row of a panel, in full view of the panelists, please don't pick your teeth. If you must pick your teeth, please use a toothpick, or something, rather than using your fingers. We'd really rather not watch.

The panel began with enthusiasm, as each panelist explained their views on our topic, and we began taking questions from the attendees. That Guy stopped picking his teeth, which was a mercy, and began, instead, picking his ear. With the same finger.

Please don't be That Guy, part two: Sometimes we have itches. I get that. I, too, am an itchy person. But if you're sitting in the front row of a panel, and have already been seen to be picking your teeth, please do not stick the same finger in your ear. It makes the panelists very uncomfortable.

More questions from the audience. This is the point at which That Guy began truly interacting. "How do I get more readers for my fanfic?" he asked. "I wrote an alternate universe [SHOW] [SEASON], where instead of [MAN] killing [WOMAN], he rapes her."

Cue horrified silence. The fanfic community is largely female, for better or for worse, and that sort of statement is rarely going to go over well in mixed company. Diana, who was by that point far more diplomatic than I, tried pointing this out, along with the note that maybe, if he wanted people to trust him writing about rape, he needed to get them to trust him writing about other things, first. He countered with the fact that he had received good feedback from women. We moved on as quickly as possible.

Later in the panel, the topic of porn came up. Porn is, after all, the stereotypical reason people write fanfic, and that's not entirely a bad thing. So all of these women are now saying the word "porn," with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Please don't be That Guy, part three: If you think there is ANY CHANCE that you might become visibly aroused by live women saying the word "porn," please DO NOT sit in the front row at a panel on fanfiction. They're going to say it, and what's going to happen is going to happen, and then I'm going to have to fight the urge to eject you from the room.

That Guy attempted to drag the panel back to a recounting of the plot of his fanfic several times, to the point where I actually asked him "How is this relevant?" (If you've ever been on a panel with me, or attended a panel with me, you'll know that I'm not opposed to topic drift, so long as it remains interesting and vaguely tangential. If I'm the one shutting you down, it's because you're so far off topic that you're no longer even in the topic's time zone.)

So please. This is a plea for everyone, male and female, who attends conventions and goes to panels: Please don't be That Guy. Don't sit to take up three chairs, sticking fingers in your facial orifices, and try to engage women in discussions on how rape in literature is awesome and not inappropriate in the least. Don't look offended when the panelists don't want to hand the panel to you, so that you can tell us about your magnum opus and why we all need to read it. And please, please, don't be creepy. For the rest of the weekend, if I saw That Guy, I moved to another elevator.

Let's play nicely with the other fans, and only creep them out with their permission, okay? I've done my best to be general here, but this one specific incident really drove home why this is something that needs to be said. No one was touched, cornered, or specifically harassed, but I had three people who attended that panel tell me how uncomfortable That Guy made them. Beyond that, I know how uncomfortable he made me.

I'm just saying.

ETA: Because this has come up twice, and is hence distracting: "please don't take up three chairs" does NOT mean "please don't be fat at a panel." You may be as fat as you do or do not wish to be, and as long as you're happy and healthy, I'm happy for you. But as I say on a regular basis, your backpack does not deserve a chair of its own. Neither does your leg, unless you are injured and require elevation. Neither does your arm. And if you're taking a chair each for your leg, torso, and arm, you have perhaps crossed a line.

Note the first:

I automatically friend back anyone who friends this journal, because it seems the polite thing to do. However, as noted in my user information, I don't have time to read everyone who friends this journal. I might have been better off going with a "don't friend anyone, ever" policy, I don't know, but I didn't, and it's too late now. So if you've posted something and you wanted me to see it, you need to tell me directly, rather than just assuming I'll come across it on my own. Being shirty with me because I haven't seen it will just get you looked at blankly. I do a very good blank look.

Note the second:

Yes, Wicked Girls has arrived at my house, and yes, I have started mailing them. That being said, there are 300 to be mailed, and there's only one of me. I've managed to get one batch packed and to the post office, with another batch ready to go out today...leaving only 220 in the database to be dealt with. Asking me where your CD is will only make me cry. You should receive an email when your order is officially ready to go to the post office, and it will be sent within twenty-four hours (or so) of that email being sent. If you really, really need to update your address information, you should mail me yesterday, and be prepared for bribery.

Note the third:

Yes, I am still mailing "Wicked Girls" posters, although I can only carry a very limited number to the post office each day. At present, all but six paid orders have been mailed, and I have eight more orders pending unpaid. If you have a question about your order, please feel free to contact me. When I say "please send your shipping information to this address as a reply to this message," I mean it; don't include it in your PayPal receipt. Shipping information in a PayPal receipt will not be seen or captured.

And that's the administravia for today.