The subtitle for Booklife is “strategies and survival tips for the 21st-century writer,” and that’s basically what it is – and what makes it different to just about every other writing manual out there. Booklife is not about how to write, it is about how to Be A Writer, which actually should make it out-sell every other writing book and magazine out there if there is any justice in the world, since a large percentage of those are aimed at and sold to people who prefer the idea of Being A Writer to actually doing some writing.

The book is divided into two halves – public and private – and while the private section has some useful advice, mostly on how to try to protect your creative writing side from your ‘I want to stuff around on the Internet’ side, it’s the public half that was most interesting to me, and which I think is most worth the price of the text.

‘Your Public Booklife’ is about the time and attention you may wish to give to promotion of your newly published books, and also promotion of yourself as an author, with the tools currently at our disposal, from personal appearances to internet & social media platforms. I read the book in a couple of days, tearing myself away from other projects to do so, because it was just so engaging and interesting. In particular VanderMeer looks at the thin line between using social media or events to promote your work constructively, and how to avoid that promotion turning on you and becoming destructive to your reputation. (in short, how to be nice to people and not look like a dick while constructing and selling your brand)

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This is a great blog post in response to Lizzie Skurnick’s article and the original PW list.

There is no objective, essential “best”. There is stuff we like and stuff we don’t — texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as “great”. Perceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other broad social categories mix with our experiences as readers, our educations, etc., to produce the judgments we make. Though we may struggle to create vivid and convincing justifications for our judgments, there are still mysteries to any evaluation that strives for nuance. But even so, we can expand our awareness, question our gut instincts, analyze our justifications, wonder why we are doing what we do and saying what we say.

Read the whole thing, it’s awesome and honest and as ever it’s lovely to read something like this by a bloke who gets it and has no problem with arguing against his own privilege as a reader.

 tammy212 sums up some of the reaction to the recent all-male top 10 by Publisher’s Weekly, and adds some thoughts of her own on the glorification of Great Male Writers.

This article from Politics Daily caught my eye (tweeted by @robinwasserman) yesterday.  Lizzie Skurnick discusses the consistent way that literary awards lists are dominated by male authors.  As some of you know, this one’s a pet topic of mine.  Skurnick’s article particularly interests me because she cuts right past the idea that this is a deliberate exclusion of women by the patriarchy (the straw argument that most people argue against when this topic comes up – “I’m not sexist, we didn’t consider gender at ALL, so there,” etc.) and deals instead with the rather more troubling idea that our culture is so geared towards calling “books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric,” that we don’t even realise we are doing it.  And that the ‘we’ in question can as easily encompass women readers/jurists/reviewers as men.

I’ve been arguing this for a while.  We’re past the point where anyone can actively stand up and say “well women’s work is inferior” without looking like a complete arse, so instead we get “it’s all a matter of taste and I just happen to like these books that just happen to be written by men.”

“But that’s the problem with sexism. It doesn’t happen because people — male or female — think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man’s wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he’d be a better manager. It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.”

Skurnick is against affirmative action as a solution.  I go back and forth about the idea.  I understand the arguments against it.  Whether we’re talking about editors selecting stories to publish, or jurors deciding which books are best, the idea of giving someone “an unfair advantage” doesn’t seem right.  Many people are understandably offended by the idea of being asked to reassess what they think of as “good” or “the best” or even “stuff I like.”  Demanding some kind of quota system (as was proposed and promptly squashed) for the Hugo’s this year) is threatening because it asks people to reassess their notions of quality.  But it is also an important question to consider, because it asks people to reassess their notions of quality.

Until it is universally recognised that having one gender consistently recognised as “better” than the other is an actual problem, we need to keep returning to this conversation.

I thought this article was particularly interesting in the description of language used to assess male v. female authored works.  The use of the word ‘ambitious’ is particularly telling – where men are being consistently honoured for books that try and fail to achieve something great, and women are being penalised for writing books that are, you know, good.  But ‘unambitious’.  She may be talking about the literary world, but there are parallels in spec fic – in the dismissal of urban fantasy as some stupid vampire-shagging genre that only women like, in the way that women can never write SF “hard” enough to count as the real thing, in tables of contents that just happen to contain all male authors (not because of sexism, cos the editor is so non-sexist that they don’t even think about gender when they choose stories, isn’t that awesome?) and in a reviewing culture that prioritises books (ambitious or otherwise) which are written by men.

I also see parallels to recent discussions by  sarahreesbrennan, Justine Larbalestier and others on how even male characters can get away with so much more than female characters, who are judged more harshly for their flaws and for being too perfect.  Hell, I see parallels in the way it’s so hard to find coverage of women’s sport because “people aren’t interested” (how can we be interested if there’s no coverage?”) and as touched on in the previous post, how “girls don’t game” so it’s fine to ignore/not ask what they want from games.

The problem is not, for the most part, the sexism that people know they are perpetuating.  It’s all the other kinds.  And this is why the internet reacts by piling on when, for instance, a new anthology appears which presents the totally-gender-neutral-concept that mindblowing SF can only be written by men.  Once your eyes are opened to the hidden, unintentional inequalities, it’s hard not to see them everywhere.  Because they really are everywhere.  Still.

PS: other people have commented on Twitter etc. about the headdesky nature of the comments to that article. I was pleased I had not risked sanity points by looking at them.  This time around, I accidentally read some and omfg. The 78 yr old man who proclaims that women can’t write as well as men because they only write books of interest to other women – thus they sell more despite being not as good.  And not having as many words in their sentences.   Also he’s not a chauvenist (sic) cos he has three successful daughters.  WITHOUT IRONY, PEOPLE.  HE SAYS THIS WITHOUT IRONY.

PPS: Must – stop – reading – comments – before – stupid – rubs off on me – gah.

I’m listening to the latest Sofanauts (no. 31) which is my latest obsession (in the last fortnight or so I have mainlined their entire backlist).  I’m loving the kind of discussions they have, about SF books and publishing and new media.  I occasionally arch an eyebrow or two, usually when they start talking about fantasy novels (seriously, if you think the only reason fantasy is published in trilogies is because the authors are churning out words to suck extra money out of fans, you’re not really on the pulse of the industry).  For the most part, though, they are cool smart people talking about stuff that interests me, and there’s always at least one British accent.  Can’t do better, as far as podcasts go.  (it’s also reinvigorating my interest in podcasting, might have to get back to that)

The current one has Paul Di Filippo and Peter Watts talking with Tony C Smith about the videogame industry.  One of the things they discuss is whether games are going to replace prose as an artform.  They bring in the whole issue of – photography didn’t kill off prose, TV and film didn’t (though they killed off most of the pulp magazines), etc. etc.  So why would games do it?

The most obvious aspect of this discussion that jumps out at me is that – okay I get that people are enjoying participatory artforms and that many are turning to these instead of static artforms (games rather than movies, blogs with communities rather than hardcopy newspapers) – but what about me?  I don’t mean the me that still likes to read a novel (but has to tear herself from the laptop in order to do it).  I mean the me who is 31 and female and in no way the kind of person that games are designed for.

Sure, there are plenty of women who game.  Hell, I spent two years of my life completely immersed in an RPG.  One that was almost entirely peopled by female players.  During that time, I certainly read a lot less than I do now.  But… the kinds of games that they design to sell, the big shiny ones with all the graphics, may appeal to some female gamers, but they are not designed for us.  As far as I know the entire medium, from its protagonists through to its storylines and priorities, is directed at not only the male gamer, but pretty much the teen male gamer.

Thanks to Hollywood, I’m kind of over media which have the male audience as their main priority.  Worse, they have a particular IDEA of the male audience in mind, which I’m pretty sure assumes that men are sex-mad, gun-fetishising idiots, and is just as irrelevant to many of the guys I know as it is to the women.  I’m not sure I want the games industry to be providing any let alone the majority of my future entertainment.

Sure, the SF field has a dodgy record with acknowledging audiences other than a certain kind of male reader, but there’s still plenty out there for me to read.  Far more than I have the time to consume.

(The second thought that jumped out at me was – seriously, there are people who think prose might die out? Do they not know about NaNoWriMo?)

I was going to tie this into the article I found yesterday about why men win literary awards, but this is long enough already and I haven’t reached my day’s word target yet.  Must write book.  More later.