Links

A few interesting things I’ve read lately:

Some of the earliest evidence of prehistoric architecture has been discovered in the Jordanian desert, providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago.

Excavations at the site of Kharaneh IV are providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago. Although the area is starkly dry and barren today, during the last Ice Age the deserts of Jordan were in bloom, with rivers, streams, and seasonal lakes and ponds providing a rich environment for hunter-gatherers to settle in.

….“Inside the huts, we found intentionally burnt piles of gazelle horn cores, clumps of red ochre pigment and a cache of hundreds of pierced marine shells. These shell beads were brought to the site from the Mediterranean and Red Sea over 250 km away, showing that people were very well linked to regional social networks and exchanged items across considerable distances.”

Prehistory is in danger of becoming my next love.

On the SFF side of things, Ekaterina Sedia has translated a ToC for a (sadly) non-existent collection of intersectional feminist essays about Harry Potter from Russian fandom. It’s amazing. Essay titles include:

Hermione Granger on Liberal Feminism

Professor Vector, or Anonymity of Women in Mathematics

…I could just go on quoting these. Go read the rest! They’re just as excellent.

I was also linked to an older blog post written by Sedia, in which she talks about the exoticism of foreign languages as they’re depicted in popular media. You know when two characters will be speaking a foreign language, translated for the reader’s benefit into English, but the author will inexplicably drop some of the other language’s words into the text, not because they’re untranslatable but because they’re ~decorative~? Yeah, that is a form of Othering.

This is really making me check the ways I write non-English languages (and, for that matter, other forms of English, which is a related issue I’ve been thinking about recently after my own reaction to an American’s mangled attempt to write Brit English).

On the subject of giving thought to serious issues (or not, as the case may be), the World SF blog talks about some of the recent idiocy on the part of Bakker, Watts and Rothfuss, and also quotes Jesse Bullington being thoughtful and acknowledging the position writers are in:

It wasn’t my intention to offend, and the source of the offense was in the (attempted) service of writing something that played against stereotypes of what a black heroine could be…but that doesn’t invalidate said reader’s emotional reaction to what I wrote. The bottom line is I’ll never be able to undo the hurt that I caused her, however inadvertently, which, yeah, is a shitty feeling, and one that I have to own–and acknowledge that my having my widdle progressive author feelings hurt is a good deal less sucky than encountering awful stereotypes about yourself on the page, the screen, etc. on a regular basis.

Ekaterina Sedia speaks similarly at Maurice Broaddus’ website:

Finally, I do realize that my insight is limited, and the book is really much more about the immigrant experience – something I do know about first-hand. And this is something I spoke a lot to my friend about. He was very supportive of the book, but he also said, “You do realize that some Zimbabweans will not like this book because it was written by a white woman.” And yes, of course I do realize that, and you know what? It’s a valid position. I think it’s an important thing, to accept that you won’t have a unanimous approval, and to not be hurt about it. Westerners writing about other cultures either seek validation or just default to “haters gonna hate so screw them, I’ll write what I want” positions. So for me, I think it’s important to do one’s best, but not expect that everyone will love you for it. I mean, I myself am wary when Westerners write about my culture, so who am I to expect a different treatment?

All food for thought.

Con or Bust

Con or Bust is a fundraising auction that provides financial support to people of colour who want to attend SFF cons in the US. In the past they have sent a number of POC fans to Wiscon; this year they are aiming to support people who want to go to any US SFF con. You can find out more here.

We talk a lot about wanting to see more POC at cons, without necessarily realising that one big hurdle is the cost of attending. Many POC fans live outside the US; others lack the means to travel within the US. Con or Bust endeavours to help some of these fans attend cons, whether they want to participate in panels or in the conversations all over the con. It has helped Amal El-Mohtar, Jaymee Goh, Deepa D and others attend Wiscon so that their voices could be heard. Click on the links to read what Jaymee and Deepa have to say about the importance of this.

I haven’t had time to offer something personal in the auction, but I’m offering a few used books and one un-opened audio CD.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes – starting bid $7 – bid here!

Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between – starting bid $7 – bid here!

Paper: The Dreams of a Scribe by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani – starting bid $5 – bid here!

Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie – starting bid $5 – bid here!

Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand – starting bid $5 – bid here!

Postscripts, Winter 2007 – starting bid $5 – bid here!

Audio CD of Philip K Dick’s ‘The Adjustment Team’ – starting bid $10 – bid here!

I will cover the cost of shipping internationally on all of these.

Please consider bidding on these, or on any of the amazing offers in the auction (such as Nicole Kornher-Stace’s books or caramels, a wardrobe refresher from Ekaterina Sedia, mythic prints by Terri Windling, a movie review from Genevieve Valentine, Martha Wells’ latest books, an ARC of the VanderMeers’ massive The Weird anthology, a signed copy of Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, a copy of Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, a copy of Catherynne M Valente’s Deathless).

D=

This, this right here:

This is a GOP panel about birth control on which only men are speaking. [source.]

Only men. Only men. They are talking about a woman’s control over her ability to reproduce, as well as a host of other medical benefits that come from using birth control. Some of those medical benefits (including not getting pregnant) are potentially life-saving benefits. Only men are talking about a woman’s control of her body. There should be no men at all on this panel. We should not even be having this conversation but mother-of-fuck, if we have to, there should be only women on this panel.

There really aren’t words for how horrified and terrified this makes me, and I don’t even live in the USA (and never ever will).

and don’t look no one in the eye

Editing continues on The Bone Queen. I have finally got Jeckel out of Fall, and Beth and Imi have separately reached Elashi. That’s over 30,000 words into the novel. While there’s still tidying to do in those 30,000 words, I don’t think there are any more large-scale changes.

Even though that isn’t even halfway through the novel, I still think I can finish this edit by the end of March. I am hopeful that, once I reach the halfway point, there’ll be a lot less rewriting and lot more editing, which is (I really hope) going to be a little less time-consuming.

For the first time, I’m comfortable with the idea that this isn’t a quick, short project. I’m working hard and making progress (although, this being editing, I always wish it was quicker progress) and it will get done. No doubt it helps that the changes I’m making feel like significant improvements – it’s hard to be unhappy when I’m clearly making the book much better. And it’s so good not to be depressed by the whole process. Even though friends who were working on their books when I was working on The Bone Queen are now celebrating book releases. I believe that my book will be done when it’s done, and that’s okay.

However, one exciting side-effect of throwing myself so thoroughly into editing is that my well-faked organisational skills are fraying quite fast. I keep forgetting really important things. And so, a to-do list:

- Edit poem for Stone Telling’s queer issue (by 20 Feb)
- Finish going over the edits for “Fox Bones. Many Uses.” (before 23 Feb)
- Sort out St Petersburg travel guide (before 23 Feb)
- Put waterproofing gel on boots (before 23 Feb)
- Find receipt for my lost Young Persons’ Railcard and Get a replacement (before 23 Feb)
- Akkadian assignment (by 22 Feb)
- Phone local doctors’ practice in order to finally arrange getting a local doctor (before 23 Feb)
- Go into doctors’ practice to arrange getting a local doctor (asap)
- Make an appointment after returning from Russia (1 March)
- Complete life-related thing I cannot currently discuss in public (before 29 Feb)
- Politely hassle a person relating to this thing if she doesn’t reply to my recent email (soon)
- Email Sean Wallace about a change of address (soon)
- Reply to several people’s emails (soon)
- Finish writing and then edit story for interesting antho (by 31 March)

I’m sure that’s not all of it.

Oh, and continue keeping up with Akkadian homework AND complete this term’s first assignment. Sometime. Soon.

One of the nice things about this new-found long-view is that I can look at April and May and think about how I will relax and work on short stories and the SF novella and it will be wonderful. I’m not really thinking yet about the possibility of the agent still not being sufficiently pleased with The Bone Queen. That will come, if it comes. For now, making The Bone Queen a better book.

In the meantime, do not expect me to remember or reply to everything. I’m in my natural state: quite scatterbrained.

Oh R Scott Bakker no

Oh R Scott Bakker will you just shut up.

My recent post about passion and The Wild Girls was inspired by R Scott Bakker’s recent idiocy (Nick Mamatas has a handy index of the first 3 posts), but I wanted to take my feelings about that and spin it into something positive, focusing on Le Guin and passion and getting it right instead of Bakker’s foolishness. Alas, no longer.

After claiming it was all a social experiment (lol, really), he is now claiming he knew he’d lose from the beginning. Everyone has proved his point by not ~actually responding~ to his arguments (calling them stupid isn’t a response, I guess) and joining in the big sheep-like group because it’s easy (are the people siding with him also choosing the easy route, one wonders?). But then he goes beyond inanity into shitfuckery.

“I could spend all my time writing and talking for people who already agree that, yes, Sexism is a devilishly difficult and complex thing, and so on. I could exchange all the slaps on the back of the head for pats on the back… Anyone can. All you have to do is say the right things to the right people. Be groupish.”

I find this really, really offensive to people who are engaging with sexism. Not least because I know he thinks he’s striking out into new and uncharted waters, while he considers Requires Hate harmful. The flying fuck. Requires Hate spends a lot of time calling out sexist, racist, homophobic and other offensive shit in SFF books, some of which have been widely lauded. How is that not useful? Calling out is required for as long as shit needs to be called out. How is that “groupish”? So everyone who agrees with her is just patting each other on the back and taking the easy route? Fuck. Off.

And yeah, Bakker, the fact that you’re a dude is relevant, because half of what you say makes it sound like you want feminist discussions you’re comfortable with, and no others, when feminist discussions are not primarily for you. You do not get to define a good feminist discussion. Women do. If a woman was saying Requires Hate is harmful to feminism, it would be a different argument. Stop trying to be the cleverest feminist. Shut up and listen.

“But a few of us genuinely strive to be nomads, not in the boutique sense of philosophers like Deleuze, but in the sense of not really belonging to any institutionalized group, because they strive to belong to humanity at large, a humanity trapped in a game theory nightmare.”

Do you know anything about actual fucking nomads?

Not sure I need to bother answering that one. Stop appropriating cultures you know fuck-all about to support your bullshit argument.

“I spent about a half an hour last night, laying in bed and pondering sexism and what I was attempting in my books, worrying all the different angles.”

D’aww, a whole half an hour.

“Then I fell asleep disgusted because the Leafs had lost to the Jets. What a pisser that was.”

Oh fuck you. I can’t tell if you’re trying to be ~provocative~ or just are that much of a shithead. Wait, even if it’s option number 1, it’s automatically option number 2! Congrats!

ETA: Bakker found me. BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

So that’s 1 display of complete and utter not-giving-a-shit for nomadic peoples, 1 dismissal of my argument because I’m ~swearing~ oh noes (tone argument, how you doin’), 1 comparison of swearing to gang violence. I honestly can’t work out if the guy is trolling now or if he actually buys into the idea that saying fuck and shit a lot is comparable to serious assault and murder.

The Wild Girls & thoughts about passion

Passion is so refreshing.

I have waded through my share of arguments in favour of misogyny and the generally appalling treatment of women in works of fantasy that – I can’t say they’re based on medieval Europe, because judging by their remarks the authors have either never picked up a history book or never got further than the Horrible Histories. Jesse Bullington’s books are based on medieval Europe and he has the bibliographies to prove it. The generic fantasyland popularised by every Tolkien rip-off ever – including the supposedly “subversive” works of Abercrombie & co – is about as close to medieval Europe as my piss is to wine, and this includes the apparently widespread attitude that women’s historical narratives were 24-hour suffering and also BORING and why would we talk about them? Men men men raped women men, ad eternum. I have waded through these arguments and come out of them so fucking tired and then -

Oh, hello, Ursula K Le Guin’s The Wild Girls. It is about young women who are enslaved, forcibly married and generally treated appallingly. And it’s amazing. Here’s why: Le Guin cares. And not just cares. Le Guin is pissed off. Le Guin is passionate about the mistreatment of women and people of less privileged races.

The Wild Girls is a short piece, reprinted in a beautiful little chapbook by PM Press as part of their Outspoken Authors series (and having also read Eleanor Arnason’s Mammoths of the Great Plains, it is looking to be a damn fine series). It is about two captive “Dirt” girls, brought to a more “advanced” city in order to marry men who are considered gods – who can only marry Dirt women – and bear their god-children. The men claim them and name them, and that is to be that.

The whole narrative puts these women in a position of less privilege – and normally that’d make me angry, except that Le Guin knows exactly what she’s doing. For example:

But Modh did not know of any other system, any possibility of another system, which would have allowed her to say “But.” Neither did Nata know of that alternative, that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice, in which the word “But” can be spoken and have meaning.

YES. YES FOREVER AND EVER.

It is so plainly stated, but this sort of thing can never be too plainly stated. Anyone who has ever been in a position of non-privilege knows what it is like to say “But” and to be utterly ignored. There is no “But” for sexist jokes, there is no “But” for an unwanted hand on your thigh, that will have any effect whatsover on the person harming you – and it is nigh impossible to get certain privileged people to understand this. (I remember trying to explain it to my brother, who is a straight white cis middle-class able male – there is no way I can think of in which he is not privileged. He really struggled to wrap his head around the idea that sexist jokes are different to non-ist based jokes, and he is a rare case in that he genuinely did try.)

I cannot stress enough how much I love Le Guin for putting that in such beautiful, plain words.

The two girls, named Modh and Mal, are brought up comfortably in a rich household, but they are haunted by the ghost of a baby callously tossed aside and left for dead during their capture. Because their captors named the baby – not understanding the ways of the nomadic peoples (who of course have all sorts of names for themselves, and not one of them is “Dirt”) – it can follow them to the city. And as an especially unpleasant man bargains to have young Mal as his wife, and Modh, who has already married one man to protect her, cannot help again, events turn inexorably worse.

I want to highlight this:

“If he does lie with her it won’t kill her,” Bela said. “It might do her good. She’s been spoiled here. You spoil her, Modh. A man in her bed may be what she needs.”
“But – that man – ” Modh said, her mouth dry, her ears ringing.

This does several things.

This is a narrative focused entirely on the people faced with systematic rape. Rape is not a source of queue-frustration or manpain; it is horror, to which Modh physically reacts. Rape is also not sexy. (I’d say “Duh!”, but when things like The Windup Girl with rape that reads like it’s someone’s fap-material gets so many awards, I fucking wonder about my fellow SFF fans.) This is angry and helpless and so achingly real.

Also:

“Neither of you has ever been mistreated,” Bela said, resentfully, as if answering an accusation. His mother frowned at him and clicked her tongue.

His mother is a Dirt woman too, and she is not having any of his “but it’s not soooo bad how we forcibly marry you” bullshit. <3

This is the sort of thing The Wild Girls is laced with: the expression of privilege and the clear message that this is fucked up shit, but there’s nothing much that can be done about it. Well, nothing that will change life in the long-term. In the short-term, Mal has her revenge: an act of strength and helplessness, all at once, one of the only recourses left to a girl faced with a life of rape. (In case you couldn’t tell, this story does. not. flinch.)

And then, in the end, the final lines of story make plain what the people of privilege care about:

Bela ten Belen buried his wife and unborn son with the Belen dead in the holy grounds of the Temple, for though she was only a Dirt woman, she had a dead gob in her womb.

Am I the only one who can feel the anger seething out of every word in that sentence? See it, even?

This is not the only way to write anger (I am also a big fan of the angry person striking back narrative), but damn, it is effective. It is so real. This story is gutting and harsh and it burns bright with its anger: there is no attempt to forgive the men, there is no attempt to shame the women for their inability to change the system. There is also an examination of why captive people aid in their captivity. Plus, separate from all this, there is gorgeous worldbuilding that I want to roll around in like a cat in freshly turned soil. The Wild Girls is a richer, cleverer work than most novels.

Taking this back to my comments at the beginning, about shittily treated female narratives for the sake of historicity – fuck, they’re worlds apart from Le Guin. Galaxies. There are the authors who care about that (typically oh-so-inaccurate) historicity and make vague remarks about how sexism is bad, mm’kay; then there’s Le Guin. Le Guin who takes trodden-upon women and writes a stunning, beautiful story brimming with anger at the injustice of it.

(Incidentally, Jesse Bullington? His The Enterprise of Death, set in REAL historical Europe? Lots o’ women. Main character is a lesbian black woman. The book has some squicky stuff, I should warn you, but it also has some marvellous, wonderful stuff.

Protip, dudebros: FEMALE. MERCENARIES. Faaar from the only interesting female narrative – cf: the whole issue of how domestic narratives are considered boring; queens; Joan d’Arc; anchorites; & more – but if blood ‘n’ guts is your thing, FEMALE. MERCENARIES. There really is no fucking excuse, broturds.)

I think Le Guin succeeds because of one important thing: passion.

I see someone like R Scott Bakker clutch his pearls because people think acrackedmoon of Requires Hate (who, incidentally, is also passionate) has worthwhile things to say about sexism, racism, homphobia and other fails – coincidentally, she’s criticised his works – and he says: “My books are meant to problematize gender, to ask the hard questions that have to be asked if we are to have any hope of getting a handle on social problems like racism or sexism … But that’s the thing when you take risks. Sometimes you lose.”

Yes. Yes you do lose.

I don’t doubt that Bakker thinks sexism and racism are bad (mm’kay), but when he tries to ask the hard questions there is something he lacks: passion. He does not give me the impression of being angry about racism and sexism. Have his hands ever shook while he’s typing because he’s trying to write about these issues but he’s so upset he can’t type properly? (Mine have, re: sexism and rape culture.) Has he ever spent entire gym sessions chewing over these issues in his head, even though they’re upsetting him? Has he ever lain awake at night with the same? Has he ever been made suddenly angry by a music video or an offhand remark on QI or a friend’s unthinking comment, but there’s no “But” he could use to mke that person understand why they’re being horrible?

I’m not saying that you can’t intellectually understand a problem without being personally upset by it. There is empathy, too.

But I would argue that the people who protest about historical accuracy and how they just tried to ask the hard questions are not angry, are not passionate – and the work that speaks to me on these issues tends to come from an obvious place of anger and passion. It feels so good to find these works. It feels so refreshing. It feels like coming to a place where everyone understands – to a home.

The rest – I wish they’d blow away on the wind like old leaves. Sadly, a lot of them land on award ballots instead. Thankfully, The Wild Girls won a Nebula Award when it was originally published. That gives me hope, though there’s a very long way to go.

Περιπέτεια

I have always boggled a little bit at writers who struggle with the “Dreaded Middle” of their novels.

The middle is the turning point! It’s where something happens after which nothing can ever be the same again. It’s the peripeteia, if you spent two years of your teens studying Greek drama and apparently absorbed the general notion into your own narrative structures. While I wouldn’t say that all my novels have a peripeteia, even in my own fairly non-strict definition of the term (Aristotle I am not), there’s always something going on in the middle, something very important.

This post is not, sadly, brought to you by reaching the turning point in The Bone Queen (where Beth and Imi go to see the Bone Queen; Jeckel’s plot has no comparable point), but by seeing a Tweet about not knowing what happens in the middle of a book. Hooooow?

tl;dr – All writers are different, news at 11.

Sale to BCS!

A day job + an evening class (Akkadian) I really care about, with a fair bit of homework I always strive to do + gyming twice a week + editing The Bone Queen = TIREDFACE. I really tired myself out last night going to the gym and then speed-transliterating Akkadian like a pro (well, not really – I only know 2 or 3 signs – see above for why I’ve not had time to try to learn them) and then translating most of it, so I suspect I’m going to be out of order for another night or so. Hopefully Friday night I will have a brain again – for more Akkadian! Then The Bone Queen this weekend. I think tomorrow I’ll chill, unless I’m mega-inspired. zzzzzzZZZZZZ is all my brain wants right now, that’s for sure.

(Fished out so many typos in this post already. I’m sure some remain.)

But! I have news! Because I have sold my story “Fox Bones. Many Uses.” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies!

I have wanted to sell to BCS since they first opened up. Literary secondary world fantasy, hell yes. I’ve had a couple of rejections from them – then, with “Fox Bones. Many Uses.”, I actually tried to write it with them in mind, beautiful secondary world fantasy with adventure and a heart (or so I hoped!) – and they bought it! I’m so happy.

There’s more I want to write about how this story developed and how it interacted with developments in my personal feminism, but that will have to wait until my brain is back on.

….So that’s 2 fox-stories that have sold to awesome pro-paying markets (“Feed Me The Bones Of Your Saints” being the other). Makes me feel pretty good about “Out They Come”, the 3rd fox-story so far, out on submission right now. As soon as The Bone Queen is done, I’m story-ing for a few months, and there are going to be foxes, oh yes, so very many foxes. Fund my dreams, you wonderful animals.

those who go they don’t come back

That feeling when you get an even deeper insight into what makes one of your characters tick. It’s the kind of thing that makes me believe I’m becoming a better writer.

I’m working on Imi’s plot in The Bone Queen, tweaking her first chapter to make it more urgent. So far that’s involved: upping the stakes, removing a chunk of slow infodumping, adding one or two more mentions of her frustration at the dead-end her research has taken.

And then I changed a paragraph into this:

“And it* sounds so interesting. I want to find it all, I want to bring it back into storytellers’ knowledge.” New ideas about the Umer descent cycles were interesting, but they weren’t this. She wanted to be Imi Who Brought Stories Back To Life, not Imi Who Picked At Well-Known Tales. Let Karash do that — and do it wonderfully — but Imi knew she would never find happiness in it. “It looks like I may never know the tale,” she said, and drank deeply from the tea so that she would not cry.

*a story

Which prompted me to write something she’ll say later in the book: “It is said that, in addition to her fascination with bones, the Bone Queen collects stories, and owns one for every vertebrae in her palace’s walls.”

DUN DUN DUN.

But, seriously, one of the most powerful words I’ve found for my characters is want. What do they want, in general, in that scene? Sometimes just stating it brings so much to light.

(I was going to quote “When The Chips Are Down” in the post title, because I was singing it earlier, but then I thought about the lyrics and went NO, THAT WOULD BE BETH’S SONG.)

and frame it all in gold, in gold

I’m back to working on The Bone Queen, the weird secondary world fantasy novel I’ve been writing and editing on-and-off for some years – and, shockingly, editing is still hard and slow and somehow it’s 22 January and I’ve only read to the end of Chapter 4. I still need to actually edit Chapters 2 and 4. I’ve made the opening of Chapter 1 more urgent and I think Chapter 3 needs little more than a polish after some tweaks today.

I have set myself a deadline of 31 March to get this done, but I really need to focus more if I’m going to reach that. (I don’t think I could bear it dragging on even longer, unless it has to.) The novel has 30-something chapters and a lot of it needs rewriting because how the plot unfolds is changing quite a bit. This is doable, I still think; I just need to ignore all other projects, besides the story and the poem with submission windows closing before the end of March. (Having two other things to work on when The Bone Queen is really stuck will do me good, I suspect. Plus, I should remind myself, I can always translate more Ḫammurabi if I’m bored of writing! The Old Babylonian is excellent, but it’s also time-consuming.) As for the other tempting things, they will have to be patient.

One thing that makes me even more determined to do this is that The Bone Queen already has a life beyond the .doc files on my computer.

I’m wearing a Chimera Fancies necklace that Amal gave me, because she saw it and immediately thought of The Bone Queen:

On my desk is a box that Tori gave me, its lid decorated with the Bone Queen herself:

And I have a whole series of sprites and comics and .gifs drawn by Pen, some hilarious, some horrifying (it is best we do not speak of The Boner Queen mockery-cover). This, for instance, is how Jeckel feels when given a rubix cube:

That… probably makes no sense unless you’ve read the book. (He doesn’t like squares, okay, FOR REASONS.)

It’s amazing, that this book isn’t published, isn’t even agented, and already I have things like this, gifts from people that connect to this book. I can’t properly imagine what it will be if it does get published.

It will be edited. It will be done.

Be bold, be bold.