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Hey, gang!

If you are in or around Tucson this weekend, why not come check out the Tucson Festival of Books?

It’s a great show with a lot to offer.  Also, I will be there with some weird guys.  Like Kevin Hearne, Chuck Wendig, Elizabeth Bear and some Brian…Brandon….Sand…Sandyson…Sandersomething.

Anyway, here’s my schedule.  Come check me out out!

Saturday March 15^th 10am

Building a Mythology

Sam Sykes, Jennifer Roberson, McKiernan, Yvonne Navarro, Brandon Sanderson

 

Saturday March 15^th 1pm

Author Banter Hour:

Sam Sykes, Elizabeth Bear, Jonathan Maberry, Kevin Hearne, Weston Ochse, Kim Stanley Robinson

 

Sunday March 16th 1pm

Book signing at the Poisoned Pen Booth

 

Sunday March 16^th 4pm

Drop Kick your Cliches

Elizabeth Bear, Jonathan Maberry, Sam Sykes, Jeff Mariotte, Isaac Marion

If you happen not to be able to see me there, you can always pick up my signed books at the Poisoned Pen booth (or at their very lovely store)!

Also, if you aren’t there, I will beat you with a stick.

See you soon!

 

I have sat here, staring at a cursor blinking on a white screen, for some time now.

I have done this because I am absolutely terrified of making this blog post.

If you’re part of the SFF community, I guess you know what it’s about.  If you don’t, I guess you can read a summary here.

I don’t know an incredible amount about Jonathan Ross.  I’ve seen him on episodes of certain British panel shows I sometimes like to watch.  He seems funny.  If people have problems with his humor, that’s also fine.  I can see how they would and I don’t think their concerns should be discarded or dismissed.  His presence or lack thereof at the Hugo awards does not really affect me.

The fallout surrounding this event does, though.

I have never been to a Hugo awards ceremony.  I’m sure it’s nice and I’m glad that it means so much to a lot of people.  But I’m also aware of what I choose to write and where I choose to stand in the population of genre, so I long ago wrote off any chance of a Hugo being a possibility in my future.  I chose not to let the Hugo affect me.  That’s a choice I made.

And I’m mostly happy with that choice, if not 100%.  John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal are people I consider dear friends in whom I have placed a great amount of trust and care for their thoughts.  The Hugo is important to them and it’s sad to think that I won’t be able to connect with them on that particular subject.  But on stuff like the time John wiped Doritos cheese on my sleeve or Mary looked at me scrutinizingly and expressed wonder as to how I get away with being as obnoxious as I do, we connect.

Connections are very important to me.

And that’s why this fallout bothered me.

It started as a disagreement, of that I’m sure.  But I’m not sure where it stopped being a disagreement and started being uncomfortable.  I hesitate to say it was outright nasty, but there was more vitriol and anger and rage about it than I had ever seen in a typical SFF kerfuffle.  There’s a lot of talk about one side being hypersensitive or one side being callous and I don’t agree with that.  I think it was more that the Hugos were apparently so important that they were worth being really vicious to other people over.

And I don’t at all understand that.

I don’t get the Hugos.  A lot of people have claimed they don’t want the Hugos to feel hostile and alien to them, and they shouldn’t have to feel that way.  But the Hugos have always felt hostile and alien to me.  It was like visiting a war memorial with a veteran: I can understand the significance, but the emotional connection isn’t there on the same level it is for someone who’s seen it.

This isn’t a call for people to enlighten me.  This isn’t a declaration that no one should care about the Hugos.  This isn’t a call to action at all.  It’s just me making a statement.  I don’t get the Hugos.  That’s fine.

Or it was fine.

Vitriol, in general, does not unnerve me.  I’m a child of the internet; I’ve been called names, told to kill myself, received death threats, and so forth.  The only thing that really unnerves me is when I don’t understand it.  And that’s why this vitriol was difficult for me to see.  On some level, I just don’t understand the SFF community, the people whose company I enjoy and whose friendships mean an immense amount.

Or so I thought.

It really came to me as I was writing this.  Or rather, as I was thinking about how scared I was of writing this.  And rest assured, as a dude who feels on the outside of this, I feel pretty scared right now.

I’m scared that older authors who I disagree with will use a lengthy history of influence to damage my career.

I’m scared of being called problematic or privileged or phobic.

I’m scared that people will react to my fear one of the two ways they know how and have a good chuckle at this, my meltdown.

I’m scared that people will react to my fear the other way they know how and avoid it entirely and I’ll be left here, pouring emotional honesty into a black hole.

But I had to write it.  Because things don’t seem real to me unless I write them down.

And in writing it down did I realize that I’m not the outside.  I think I understand it.  Because as I sit here and think about all the ways I could be hurt in writing this, I sit here and think about all the ways in which I could hurt someone back to keep them from doing so.

And I wonder if that’s what we’re doing.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that my childhood had its difficulties.  Not the same difficulties as other children, but I had issues where I was bullied, where I was hurt, where I was afraid.  As most primates learn, my perception of social order came about as a means of understanding that I could express dominance by hurting other people first and thus preventing myself from being hurt.

I wonder if we’re just hurting each other because we’re afraid of being hurt.  I wonder if we’re trying to assert dominance over each other for fear of being edged out or silenced or made irrelevant.  I wonder if we’re speaking out because we’re afraid of everything and afraid of each other.  A friend of mine who I was talking over this with said it was going to be awkward at cons from now on, with a lot of authors feeling weird about each other.  Maybe that’s the case.

Or maybe I still just don’t get it.  I’m fine with that, too.

If it is, I don’t think I want to get it.  When I was that kid just coming out of being bullied, I was not very pleasant.  I hurt people all the time.  One of the greatest parts of becoming a writer was becoming self-assured enough that I didn’t have to hurt people.  I could make connections that felt good to make.  I didn’t have to sever connections out of fear or pain.

I’m not saying that SFF is doomed or inherently flawed.  These are discussions that clearly need to be made.  But I find that so often it’s becoming a situation of “us” and “them.”  I don’t want to be an us or a them, I just want to be me.

I want to write what I enjoy.  I want to make friends, regardless of age or genre.  If I hurt them or make them angry, I want to make it right without having to write them off.  I want to make connections and I want to keep them.  And I want to write this blog post.

Because this has been gnawing at me for a while now.  And it wasn’t real until I wrote it down.

So, maybe there are aspects of SFF that are always going to be alien to me.  That’s fine.  Maybe this is just me trying to pre-empt my own fear by running away from it.  That’s fine, too.  I appreciate the Hugos’ value for what it does to friends, but I don’t think I can bring myself to get this invested in it.

Love,

Sam

You ever read Zen Pencils?

It’s one of the more peculiar webcomics out there, ostensibly being a series of cartoons formed around inspirational quotes.  It’s something of a series of illustrated affirmations, most of them pertaining to the work of a creative, be they illustrator, writer or craftsman.  Given that the aim seems to be encourage people to perform their art with as much passion as possible, I’m mostly in favor of it.

Mostly.

Lately, it seems to have gone on a bit of a tear about the nature of online criticism, conflating it with outright hatred.  I appreciate the author’s candor, but I can’t say I agree with it at all.

In general, I really dislike discussing the “spiritual” side of writing.  You know, the kind of talks where we all sit around a coffee shop, chuckling about how “arduous the journey of a thousand steps that begins once you put verse to page” is, or “how we must tap into our darker sides to really bring out the light in our prose,” or “please, for the love of God, someone punch me in the fucking face so I’ll get to fucking work already.”

I love talking about writing.  I hate talking about being a writer.

I view it as chiefly unproductive and I think this latest strip from Zen Pencils summarizes why: it’s way too easy to romanticize persecution.

And why wouldn’t it be?  It’s the essence of a good story, why we root for the underdog.  But I think, in this case, it’s turning the act of criticism into something inherently negative, something that brings the mood down, fosters hostility and generally creates an atmosphere of hatred.  It can do this, sure, in the same way that a charity can adopt hateful positions; anyone hateful enough can turn anything into a tool of hatred.  But to dismiss all criticism would be as weird as dismissing all charity.

And I wouldn’t be commenting on this if I didn’t see it prevalent in so many young writers.  I feel, too often, that young artists, upon being criticized, begin as mildly discouraged or frustrated and then go flying headlong into an internet hugbox where all criticism is bad and no one can hurt them again.  Part of this is due to the rise of caustic critics as a popular form of entertainment, but I think a lot of it is also due to the fact that no one really tells people how to handle criticism aside from “suck it up.”

As I do occasionally discuss writing technique on this blog, I thought it’d be handy to offer some tips on how to handle criticism for burgeoning young writers to get the most out of it.  So, without further ado, let’s begin…

1. Accept That Criticism Is Good

Ultimately, the only way you’re ever going to find out how fast you can go is by crashing a few times.  In this, criticism is where you’re going to get hurt.

And it will hurt.

Accept that you’re going to feel frustrated, discouraged, maybe even a little depressed when someone tells you that you didn’t do something well.  This is both normal and good; if you’re irritated, then you know you can do better and if you’re depressed, then you know the art meant something to you.  It’s fine to feel this way, but it’s not fine to dwell on it.

Trust me, as a guy who received many negative reviews, that it gets easier to move on from them.  They can still sucker punch you from time to time, but overall, you find yourself learning their rhythm and identifying what you can use out of them.

And that is what you should be focusing on.  Like a half-starving buzzard over a bloated heap of roadkill, your aim should be to completely skeletonize a critique, feasting on the tasty, rotting innards of what you can improve on and ignoring the brittle, marrow-less bones of critical hyperbole or parts where you just disagree.

Be open-minded in your view of criticism.  Be thorough in your review of a critique.  Be careful about what you choose to take from it.  Be unafraid to disagree with it.

2. Identify Who The Critique Is For

Not all critiques are for you, the writer.  It’d be nice if they were, but they are not.  Critics generally set out to do what they want to do for a reason and it’s not always how to improve your craft.  But generally, there are three sorts of critiques.

-Reviews for the Reader: These are the vast majority of blogs and reviews out there.  The reviewer’s goal is to generally inform other potential readers or an established audience.  They tend to have larger audiences and focus on general themes of the book, going off of their own feelings and instincts.

These are worth paying attention to.  If you find that the thoughts they bring up are echoed by many, then it’s something you might want to consider.

A good example (in my opinion) of this kind of blog is The Book Smugglers.

-Reviews for the Reviewer: These tend to be sites where people come to see the review, rather than what’s being reviewed.  The reviewer’s goal is generally to put on an entertaining performance art.  The audiences can be large, but are also pretty loyal to their reviewers.

At the risk of sounding elitist, I find there’s not a lot here to for a writer.  The aim is to entertain, not to inform or discuss, so it’s usually done with the benefit of the author being the furthest thing from their mind.  That’s not to say you can’t get something from it, but that’s generally just incidental.

A good example (in my opinion) of this kind of style is The Nostalgia Critic.

-Reviews for the Writer: These tend to be sites where the work has a more in-depth review, dissected and discussed at length.  The reviewer’s goal is generally to identify what works and what doesn’t work in great detail.  The audiences might be smaller, but they tend to be more involved.

These are the ones you should pay attention to.  They are often the harshest, but also the most insightful.

A good example (in my opinion of this kind of style is Staffer’s Book Review.

3. Listening is Harmless

I think, in general, it pays to listen to most criticism.  Note, though, that I make a huge distinction between “listening” and “incorporating” or even “considering.”  Just because someone makes a critique doesn’t mean you have to do what it says, nor even that you have to consider doing what it says.  In fact, a number of critiques are completely contrary to what you might be trying to do.

There are plenty of critiques that will criticize a book for not being what they wished it had been.  Someone might have wanted more romance where there clearly wasn’t going to be any (this happens).  Someone might have wanted your direct artistic choices to have not occurred (this happens a lot).  Someone might want to read the newest Brandon Sanderson and have found your book and start sighing that it wasn’t Brandon Sanderson (this happens all the time).

Making the choice as to what criticism to listen to and what to incorporate and what to ignore will also become easier as time goes on, like anything else in writing.  My general rule of thumb is that criticism that I’ll listen to is criticism that’s already occurred to me (and maybe the critic put it in words that had thus far eluded me) and criticism I’ll ignore is criticism that basically takes umbrage at the book being something other than what the reviewer wanted.  No offense to them, but I can’t really use that.

This, I think, is where Zen Pencils is coming from.  The hatred can be hard to ignore, but I find it gets easier once you look at it in utilitarian concepts.  It’s not doing anything for you, so why would you listen to it?

Anyway, I hope this helps burgeoning writers.

If it doesn’t, you can tell me why.

But I probably won’t listen.

I allow myself few nerdrages.

The reasons are myriad: I don’t feel I’d have much to add to the “raving wildly at the camera and/or blog” reviews-as-performance-art that are so in chic, I don’t think it’s entirely becoming to channel your geekish enthusiasm into a frothing, spittle-laden fury, but chiefly, I don’t think pedantry is a particularly useful form of criticism.  And I don’t think I’ve ever seen nerdrage that didn’t revolve around pedantry.

I rarely weigh in on the subject of cover art of books for the same reason: it rarely tends to be constructive and more often devolves into a furious flaunting of pedantry.  At least, as far as genre book covers go.

In case you hadn’t figured it out, this blog post is going to be super pedantic.

The internet is absolutely choked with complaints about how genre book covers are “embarrassing,” “juvenile,” “adolescent” or any number of adjectives that adequately sum up the statement “I’m an ardent fan of fantasy, just so long as no one knows it.”  My own covers have not been immune to this criticism.  How could they not?  They feature a guy with a big-ass sword.

Except this one, which features a gal with a big-ass sword.  And a bunch of purple-skinned monsters.  And a giant dragonman.

That’s the French cover to The Skybound Sea by Marc Simonetti and I still think it’s badass.  But that’s besides the point.

Proclamations like this don’t really bother me.  I’m 6’4″, have an amazing jawline and do what I love for a living.  You couldn’t possibly make me feel bad for doing something I enjoy.  Thus, I don’t really get emotionally invested in cover art.  I enjoy what I enjoy and I don’t presume to tell others what they should or should not like.

I’m certainly not doing that now, even though I’m going to make a statement here.

Harper Voyager UK (who I’m sure is staffed with very lovely people who put out fine quality books, many of which are done by people I respect and admire), has just released a recover for George R.R. Martin’s obscure, little-known fantasy series you probably haven’t heard of, A Song of Ice and Fire.

And, well…

 

…yeah.

My first impression is that they look very much like they were designed to appeal to a very mainstream crowd.  My second impression is that they look a little like travel guides.  My third impression is that they look a little like they might actually be a bit like a very safe romantic novel.

But my overall impression is that they don’t look a lot like fantasy novels.

Which is the part that kind of galls me.

I was extremely reluctant to make this blog post, partly because I’m not fond of speaking out against publishers (though I think this hardly counts as that), but mostly because I’m still coming to terms with my inner and outer geek.  And I’m still very much not comfortable with getting into the aforementioned pedantry and yet-to-be-mentioned tribalism that goes hand-in-hand with a nerdrage.

But damn it, Mainstream World, these books were ours first.

I’m not about to go calling George R.R. Martin a fake geek (no one would believe me) or launch into a tirade about how Harper Voyager UK has betrayed geeks as though we were all some gang from The Warriors that you either swore allegiance to or waged war against.  It’s just…I kind of hoped this would go differently.

When Game of Thrones came out on HBO, I was pretty happy.  My friends, who were not geeks, had always been reluctant to get into the same kind of stuff I enjoyed.  But watching the show was a lot like polishing the jewel in the crown of nerdery for them.  It made them enthusiastic and I thought that’d carry across the world.  I thought we’d all be like “see, guys?  Fantasy isn’t for weirdos.  Or it is, but you can be weird and still be cool!  It’s cool to be enthusiastic about this!  It’s cool to enjoy this!  We have loads more stuff like this over here!  Come check it out!”

I’ve always said we in genre should not give as much of a shit what mainstream literature thinks of us.  I not only stand by that, I hold up Game of Thrones as proof.  This was for us.  It was a great story that happened to be fantasy.  It was written well, it was awesome, it was compelling and it was just something we enjoyed without having to prove to anyone else about it.  It was fantasy that could attract people who were not typically into fantasy and who might find that they maybe liked it.

These covers just seem like they’re trying to erase the notion that these books might be fantasy novels.  They’re like turning the fantasy switch low so as not to spook people, rather than flying their flag high and letting people come enjoy it.

I get why Harper Voyager did it.  They’re clearly not hurting for sales and they’re trying to corner the market that’s still avoiding the books based on them being fantasy novels in general.  That’s fine.  Game of Thrones’ word of mouth power is so huge that it could change its covers to an image of George R.R. Martin strangling a man with one hand and beating him with a trout with the words “THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR FINNISH-RUSSIAN RELATIONS” and it’d still sell like mad.

And I’m not trying to paint this as a conflict of the beleaguered geek elite beset by impure outsiders.  I think it’s awesome when people read fantasy and enjoy it for the same reason I’m thrilled when a fellow fantasy author does well: there’s no such thing as a reader that reads only one book and it’s tremendous when reading one scratches an itch that someone never knew they had.

I just kind of hoped that it would be non-fantasy fans realizing that fantasy was cool and you could accept it as it was, rather than…well, this.

But I don’t know.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I’m totally overreacting and these are great covers and, despite my best efforts, this is just another pointless nerdrage.  You tell me.

But all in all, I think I’m just a little bummed and felt like moping in public.

 

 

I didn’t like Thor 2.

That took a lot of courage to say.  Fandom is a strange thing and there are few fandoms stranger than Marvel.  A slight against the Thor franchise is a slight against Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba and (if you’re feeling saucy) Anthony Hopkins.  When I first said I didn’t like this movie on twitter, I was lambasted.  Peter V. Brett said my soul was dead (incidentally, he’s correct, but for different reasons).

But I still didn’t like Thor 2.  I thought it was dumb.  A lot of people who liked it seemed to agree with me on that, but went in, anyway.

And I was content to leave it that way until I was browsing Netflix while I was editing The City Stained Red one night, looking for something to play as background while I worked.  I stumbled upon Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, as it had been sitting in my recommended list like a ripe pimple waiting to be popped and figured “what the hell.”

I put it on.

And I didn’t get any editing.

Because I loved it.

And when you are a creative type (or maybe when you’re just me), loving something has dire implications.  Because you can never just love something, you have to know why you loved it.  You have to know what worked and what didn’t so you can steal what worked and reject what didn’t.  You spend a lot of time dwelling on a movie that had a lengthy shot of a witch’s butt and sometimes, you ask yourself difficult questions.

Such as why I liked this unapologetically dumb movie and didn’t like an equally dumb movie that all my friends liked.  People like Doug Walker have touched upon this subject before, but I had to suss it out for myself before I was ready to make this blog post.  And I think I stumbled upon the answer just a few nights ago.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters does not take itself entirely seriously.  Thor 2 does.

Now, I might just be speaking for myself here (since a lot of my friends clearly did not take Thor 2 seriously), but when a movie asks me to buy its premise, I’m in, and I read the tone of the movie from that premise.

The children from a cautionary tale about strangers survived and are fighting witches with a variety of awesome toys.  The fact that they are telling me this basically means that we are in for something strange and humorous.  To that end, all the silliness of the script is charming and the plot holes are excusable.  Hansel has diabetes and keeps track of it with a clockwork syringe?  Of course he does.  Gretel fights witches in tight pants with a gatling crossbow?  Naturally.  Everyone in post-gunpowder Germany has American or British accents?  Why not.

Because, at the end of the day, I’m watching a movie in which Gemma Arterton is shooting witches with a gatling crossbow while Jeremy Renner is suplexing witches into hay carts and it’s fun as shit.

Thor 2, though, asks me to buy into the premise that Asgardians have problems.  Real, emotional problems of separation, abandonment, treachery.  It’s set against a backdrop of action and adventure, but the premise is serious.  Thor is having trouble, Loki is having trouble, Jane Foster is having trouble.  This is a serious piece with some serious messages.  And that means that the plot holes are harder to overlook, the inconsistencies are more difficult to swallow and the offensive pieces are a little more offensive.

I mean, I can’t be the only that noticed that Jane Foster was actually turned into a briefcase, right?  Something more or less extraneous to the plot, but used to carry the thing that was important to the plot.  I can’t be the only one that noticed the Asian character was written out of the movie in the first three minutes?  I can’t be the only one that noticed Idris Elba stabbed a spaceship to death?

Were this a movie that took itself less seriously, these might not be so noticeable.  That latter bit might actually be fun.  But there was so little humor, so little joy, so much seriousness that these just took me right out.  I did like Loki in the film (which seems not entirely groundbreaking), but I think only because his levity was such a reprieve from the choking overtones.

It might have escaped your notice that this crucial moral debate only came up while I was editing.  Digesting stories of all kinds is crucial to a writer because it helps us understand our own stories better.  And this was a debate I found that reflected pretty hotly on mine.

I don’t take my work or even my genre entirely seriously.

I mean, of course I don’t.  I wrote a book in which a smelly, dirty woman killed a wizard with a jar of urine.  I like doing that.

I like impractical clothing, I like silly banter, I like pee jokes, I like hare-brained schemes.

That caused me some concern.

We’ve discussed how not taking oneself too seriously can excuse certain problems.  But does it preclude them?  If Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters were to change gears and try to tell me something serious, would I listen?  Can a story be light and dark in equal measure?

Can stupidity be an artistic choice and not just an excuse?

I’d like to hope so.  Because I also wrote a book in which someone deals with a crippling despair that comes with saying goodbye to loved ones.  All of the loved ones.

Given that this is an argument that revolves around examples in the media, it seemed befitting that I turn to more media to solve it.  Or rather, it seemed befitting that, as I was talking to my friend Carl about this, he pointed out an example in the media where it worked perfectly.  One of my favorite stories of all time, in fact.

Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I still, and probably forever will, hold this show up as one of the greatest shows of all time and one of the best stories ever told.  It was epic, it was sprawling, it blew my mind.

And it was undeniably stupid at points.

There were pro-wrestlers who threw rocks at each other.  There were greasy hicks in the middle of a swamp that made windboats out of magic.  There were six-legged bison that flew through the sky and an army that was defeated by kids with hang-gliders and a gigantic, horrible drill so big as to be implausible, let alone impractical.

And yet, it was undeniably serious.

There were characters consumed with shame and self-doubt.  There were budding romances that were the most important things in the world to these people.  There was war, death, carnage.  Every failure hurt and every betrayal stung.  Sometimes, things looked so dark it was hard to believe that we’d ever get out of it, let alone believe that just last week we were in a cave that we could only find the way out of via the power of true love and magic badgers.

And I think that’s where Avatar’s strength lay.

And I think that’s what makes levity and even the occasional stupidity more valuable than any bleakness.

The two impact each other.  A bit of comedy gives readers space to breathe and is almost welcome after they’ve been drowning in drama.  Tragedy hits harder when the times have been good up until it strikes.  The bleaker and darker things get, the more wild the triumph is.  The live action movie of this was bad for so many reasons, but one of the big ones was that it forgot that this movie, at its heart, was energetic, wild and carefree enough to be stupid from time to time.

And speaking of movies I didn’t like, there was one aspect of Thor 2 I truly loved.

SPOILER ALERT.

When tragedy has been visited upon the Asgardians, a tragedy that strikes Loki more than anyone, Thor goes down to console him.  Loki appears totally unfazed, smiling and laughing until Thor tells him to cut the crap.  Loki cringes and his illusion falls away, revealing that, in his cell, he’s been an absolute wreck: taking out his anger on everything around him.

This, I think, only worked because Loki, up until this point, had seemed untouchable.  And I think it only worked because he was finally forced to take things seriously.  And I think it only worked with Loki because Thor, up until this point, had been taking everything seriously, so this didn’t seem to affect him as much.

I detest the word “balance” because it’s such a cop-out in conflict because obviously balance is ideal and extremes of anything are bad (hence why they’re called extremes).  So maybe this blog post was more for my sake than for yours, giving me the opportunity to put this to words for me and working it out for myself.  But if you managed to take anything from it, let it be that it doesn’t pay to take yourself too seriously.

Or let it be that Avatar: The Last Airbender is a fucking rad show and you should watch the hell out of it.

Whatever.

Trigger Warning: This blog post discusses rape briefly.

To give you an idea of my relationship with the concept of maturity: I spent most of last weekend arguing with Peter V. Brett over the definitive function of a magical system as cast by a mysterious order of proctomancers known as Butt Wizards.

If that’s not clear enough, I mean to say I’m pretty fond of silly stuff.  I don’t really buy into a lot of the traditional ideas of maturity as put forth by society today.  I mean, if I did, I’d have to acknowledge fantasy and the writing thereof as a silly, frivolous endeavor and I’d likely be out of a job.

Perhaps, though, it’s inevitable that, as you get older, your priorities start changing.

Case in point.

I’m working on A Mortal Tally, the next book in the series Bring Down Heaven (more on this soon).  Granted, my definition of “work” is also fairly untraditional, in that I’ve spent the last three nights sitting on a scene, trying to figure out how to make it perfect.  This isn’t unusual for me, I used to do this all the time when I was working on The Aeons’ Gate trilogy, trying to figure out how just to make things happen in just the right way to make the audience enraptured.

The difference being is that back then I was working on combat scenes.  Nowadays, the scenes that cause me trepidation are ones of emotional intimacy, such as sex.

The sound you just heard was a thousand readers rolling their eyes at once with such velocity as to give Harrison Ford a flashback to Raiders.

That’s to be expected, of course.  Sex has traditionally had a bad reputation amongst fantasy readers.  I can’t help but wonder if that’s one of the reasons I’m more interested in pursuing it, if that’s the next thing to be explored amongst a genre that has largely come to terms with excessive violence and bastardry.  It’s a dialogue that interests me lately because I think we’ve been going about it the wrong way.

There are dozens of arguments against it, of course.

“It’s always written embarrassingly,” for example.

When you get down to it, sex is embarrassing.  It’s a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability (usually, anyway), where both characters are at their rawest.  It’s an awkward, gangly mess of limbs and exchange of fluids and grunts and everything you say is stupid but it doesn’t matter because hormones.  I inwardly groan whenever anyone complains about Joe Abercrombie’s sex scenes being embarrassing because he’s writing about broken people trying to feel normal; it’s supposed to be embarrassing.

“It’s never written in an appealing manner” is another.

I think it’d be more accurate to say that it’s not written in a manner that appeals to the reader.  Like anything else, from character to plot, sex scenes have a voice.  It’s interesting that readers can agree with everything about a book up to a scene of emotional intimacy and then have a wildly different opinion.  Did the voice of the scene change?  Or does a reader’s perception just change that much?

“I’m okay with it if it’s written well.”

…you don’t say.

“It’s totally unnecessary,” though, is the big one.

And, interestingly, this is one that’s given me a lot of thought.  Because for a very long time, I haven’t exactly been able to refute this.

Sex is frequently titillating, enticing, visually-arresting.  In a lot of ways, it’s gratuitous by nature, since it’s something (presumably) a lot of us aren’t doing every second of waking life.  Ironically, I think because of the special intimacy we attach to the act, it becomes something not often looked at in our genre and thus, seems gratuitous when we do.

For awhile, I was content to believe this.

The arguments that it didn’t add anything to the character, that it didn’t enhance the plot, that it didn’t start a conflict seemed to add up to me.  The idea that it could only be there for gratuitousness was one that I felt compelled to admit had a degree of weight to it.  This didn’t bother me overmuch–after all, I was fine with admitting that a lot of my combat scenes were gratuitous, as well–but there was still something about the argument that didn’t sit entirely well with me.

And it wasn’t until I was talking with my friend Jessica that it hit me.

I was ranting about a book I was reading that I had just put down because of a rape scene.  It’s not that I was offended by the inclusion of the scene.  Rather, I was looking ahead, deducing that, from this author’s writing style, I was about see another instance of Rape As Shorthand.

You know what I mean.  You’ve probably read it yourself.  A female character needs to be strong, but how do we make her strong?  We can’t just have her strong.  Better throw in some rape to excuse it.

As a note to writers: we should stop doing this.

So, I put the book down, as I had no real interest in seeing this trip rehashed and I went to rant to Jessica.  She started wondering why, amongst all traumas, it was only rape that ever made a female character strong.  Like, losing your parents and being abducted was never enough.  Rape needed to be thrown in as the icing on Awful Cake.

It struck me as wildly gratuitous, but I was forced to admit that a lot of the sex scenes I wrote about were also gratuitous.

And that’s when she corrected me.

I should preface that I do not presume to speak of the effects this has on a person’s life, having never undergone it myself.  I am only trying to discuss what I see being utilized in fiction time and again.

To paraphrase Jessica:

“Rape is just there.  It’s in the story and there’s not a lot of ways to interpret it.  Whereas consensual sex is the beginning of something more, a lot of emotions coming out and making themselves known.  Fear, lust, desire, sometimes even hate.  Things don’t get less complicated after you introduce those.”

And that’s when it hit me.

We had been thinking about sex entirely wrong.  I had been thinking about sex entirely wrong.

You look at media today, traditional storytelling, it seems like sex is often the reward.  Once the beast is slain and the couples unite, we get a sex scene.  Once you do the right amount of side quests in Dragon Age, you get to have sex with Morrigan by the fire.  Once everything is said and done, it’s all down to the sex.

I think I bought into this, too.

Which seems stupid, since I’ve been an ardent defender of romance in the genre by saying it’s as much a source of conflict as any dark lord.  Sex is like that, an escalation of conflict, a raising of the stakes, peeling one layer of emotion off to get to something raw and bleeding underneath, something that makes everything more difficult in the story to come.

And suddenly, everything made sense.

“What about casual sex?” you might ask.

I can only really talk about what I’m doing here, but I honestly think that, because of the intimacy we attach to the act, every bit of sex has some meaning to it.  There are novels out there that try to dissociate this meaning, but I think it’s inevitable that readers will attach emotion, even if the author doesn’t.

“Nonsense, I’ve read tons of stories and never felt emotional attachment,” you might say.

That’s also fine.  I might argue that you haven’t found a scene yet that resonates with you on the kind of emotional level that I’d like my scenes to resonate with, but I’m hardly in the business of dictating how people should experience a book.

“I’m still not convinced and still don’t like reading sex,” you might say.

Sure.  One of my dear friends, who is an avid reader of my books, is also not particularly fond of the scenes.  She asks me to tell her where they are so she can skip them.  I don’t take offense.  They’re not for her.  Since she’s a great friend of mine, I tell her and she enjoys the rest of the book just fine and I’m glad to have helped her out with that.

“Well, I don’t think I’ll read you,” you might say.

And that’s also okay.

In the end, this is only something I can do.  It’s a discussion that interests me.  In the future, maybe I’ll get bored of it and want to talk about the impact of feasting scenes on the reader’s psyche or something.  But for right now, this subject is one I find fascinating as an emotional study and I’m interested in writing more about it.

Hopefully, you’ll enjoy reading it, when the time comes.

I’m always at a loss as to what to do around genre award season.

Everyone’s either talking about books I have no real intentions of reading, votes I have no real intentions on thinking too deeply about and, as always, speeches on the state of the genre that I have no real intentions on listening to if there is something slightly more interesting going on.

Like cake.

But one aspect of award season I do make a rather guilty point of keeping up on is scandal.  Whether it be who’s getting nominated that doesn’t deserve to be nominated or who’s not getting nominated that should be nominated, I love watching the drama that surrounds award seasons.  I say this without judgment (like all spectator sports, I consider it to be something worth keeping out of), because I feel largely unqualified to comment on it (owing to the reasons stated in the second paragraph of this blog post).

Until today, that is.

The scandal of this particular era is self-promotion.  Specifically, whether or not it’s ethical and/or tacky to make your eligibility for awards known.

There are dozens of arguments out there about it, the big ones being Adam Roberts’ perspective on it (generally against it), John Scalzi’s counterpoint (generally for it) and Amal El-Mohtar’s post on social effects you might not even have considered.

My perspective?

I don’t chase awards.

There are plenty of reasons why I don’t, but like any human endeavor, the big ones are Fear and Apathy.

I’m at a point where I’m comfortable enough with myself to not fear being judged by others.  I’m confident enough in my book, my personality and my skills to say that, yes, I do believe you should read them and you would probably enjoy them.  But I don’t think any author ever moves past the fear of being met with apathy: people either not voting or not caring enough to nominate.  There’s nothing worse than standing up on a chair, screaming “I AM IMPORTANT” and being met with deafening silence.

“Apathy” might not be the right word for the second reason, but it’s slightly more poetic than “I ain’t got the time.”  A lot of energy goes into being an author: writing, reading, social media-ing, worrying about death and, of course, self-promotion.  Not the “I am eligible for this award, please nominate me” kind, but the “I really would like to not die, please look at this book I wrote” kind.  It’s not that I don’t care about awards, I just care more about solidifying my career, first.

Award-chasing always seemed like a rich man’s game to me.  Something you do when you’re no longer concerned with things like rent.  I’m sure there are arguments to be made for why it’s a worthwhile endeavor, but like I didn’t say: I ain’t got the time.

All that said, though?

I’m definitely in favor of award eligibility awareness and, in fact, very in favor of all self-promotion.

Not that this should come as a surprise to most people who read this blog, what with me having made an entire post about how to self-promote oneself effectively.  But generally, I like the idea that writers succeed at what they do.  And, whether you like it or not, that requires self-promotion today.

Publishing is a shaky industry.  Editors are decidedly more cautious about who they take on and generally inclined to take the safer bets of pushing authors who are known to be popular.  Writing is precarious career to begin with.  And when you’re in a precarious career within a shaky industry, you should not only be forgiven for doing all you can within reason to support your position, but lauded for doing so.

I view it less as a matter of ego and more as a matter of survival.  And I think this is a point that fails to connect with a lot of people who speak out against self-promotion.  I don’t particularly hold it against them if they remain unswayed by this idea.  Goodness knows I’ve certainly been put off by the degree of some peoples’ self-promotion (points I have covered in the above-linked blog post).  But it can’t really be helped.  If the options are between being perceived as obnoxious but still permitted to write for a living or being dignified and slipping from public perception, well…

But here’s the truth of the matter.

Anyone who would hold self-promotion against you wasn’t going to like you, anyway.

Readers, by and large, do not idly drift through the literatosphere, happening on each book in its own time.  Reading is a culture.  Reading is a social activity.  Reading communicates ideas that we are keen to communicate to others.  Readers want to read what their friends are reading, what their peers are reading, what people they trust are reading.  Readers want to talk to their friends about the characters they love, the plots that make them think, the wonders they find elsewhere.

Readers want to read. 

For prolific authors, word of mouth takes care of that.  For people struggling, it’s a little harder.  If you can honestly say to someone that you think they’d like your book, you absolutely should feel fine in saying so.  People who would resent you for it probably aren’t one going to one pick up your book, fall to their knees and weep: “The…the genius!  If only he hadn’t self-promoted so much!”

I won’t speculate why I think they think self-promotion is such a sin.  I won’t even try to convince you I’m right.  This blog is here primarily as a means of 1) saying whatever happens to come into my head and 2) fulfilling a mad power trip fantasy.

But, for reasons listed above, I’m for self-promotion.  And I can’t really begrudge anyone who thinks enough of their book to speak well of it.

So, fellow fantasy author Paul S. Kemp, published this piece entitled “Why I Write Masculine Stories.”

For those of you who can’t be bothered to read it (but you really should), the gist of it is that Paul writes stories extolling what he considers to be traditional virtues of manhood.  He is fairly unapologetic about writing what he enjoys and a lot of what he enjoys are attributes that he believes positively embodies aspects of masculinity such as adventure, fighting, putting women and children first, what have you.

I’ve spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how I felt about this article.  I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good idea.

I’ll preface this by saying I am, by and large, very fond of Paul.  I read his first book, Hammer and Blade, and enjoyed it.  Paul writes the adventure, action and larger-than-life characters that I came to love from fantasy and he seems to be one of those increasingly rare authors that isn’t obsessed with bastards or worldbuilding and I’m pretty damn pleased he’s unapologetic about that…

…but I can’t get on board with the idea that bravery, a lust for adventure and a desire to protect people are traditionally masculine virtues.

I said I spent a lot of time considering my response to this article and a lot of that time was spent looking inward, reflecting on my own books.

Is The Aeons’ Gate trilogy a masculine series?

You could make the argument that it is.  It features a lot of over-the-top violence, a lot of witty banter, a lot of people in impractical or skimpy clothing (many of them women), a lot of charismatic heroes, a lot of dark pasts, a lot of the things you might come to associate with the kind of adventure stories that embody these traits of manhood.

…and yet.

The characters of The Aeons’ Gate aren’t really…traditionally masculine.  The male characters are frequently depressed, lethargic, paralyzed with self-doubt or consumed by petty, boyish ego (and they, too, often wear impractical or skimpy clothing) and they frequently spend a lot of time crying.  The characters who frequently suck things up and resolve to get things done, pushing past pain, paralysis and doubt are the female characters.  But even they are consumed by introspection, doubt and concern over their relationships.

So is The Aeons’ Gate trilogy a feminine series?

You could make the argument that it is.

And, in fact, many have.

And I guess that, for as much as that’s unintentional, that’s also inevitable.

I suppose we all have fairly clear ideas of what gender is.  Paul has a pretty solid idea of what he thinks a man is, many readers probably agree or disagree based on their own assumptions.  My clear idea of gender is that I clearly think that gender is a pretty unclear subject.

I feel that Paul (and I’m speculating here, I don’t presume to speak for him) probably shares the opinion of a lot of readers out there that masculinity is to femininity what fire is to water: something opposite, diametrically opposed, clashing where they collide.  Man is hard where woman is soft, man is brash where woman is thoughtful, man is stubborn where woman is yielding.

Frankly, I’m not so sure that’s the case.  At least, not from where I stand.

Instead of viewing masculinity and femininity as two lines heading toward each other, I view them as heading roughly in the same direction, with the key distinction lying in how close they touch each other.  On certain subjects, they are miles, nay, leagues apart.  On others, they are so close you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.  They cross each other frequently, bounce off each other often, blend seamlessly sometimes.  It’s a long, convoluted mess that stretches out into infinity.

And that’s where I write from.

Like I said, I applaud Paul for embracing these virtues and writing very entertaining stories from them.  But I don’t think these are solely male traits.  Bravery, selflessness, a lust for adventure and a thrill of struggle have always been traits of a hero.  It’s just that we used to be in a world where the only heroes in stories were men.

This is no longer the case.

Frankly, it strikes me as weird when there’s no prominent women characters in a fantasy book these days.  I’m not outraged.  I’m not incensed.  I’m just kind of…bored.  I’ve read books that my friends have raved about and picked them up and been struck by the absence of women.  Like I said, it’s not necessarily an offensive omission (to me, that is; plenty of wiser minds than I have far bigger things to say about it), but it’s just not authentic.

Writing reflects reality, or what we see of it.  My reality includes a lot of women doing a lot of stuff.

I’m not presuming to sit in judgment of Paul or the people who agree with him.  I’m not going to lecture them on what I think they’re doing wrong (I think that’s a pretty bad way to teach people).  I’m not going to demand they change one thing or another.  I’m probably not going to stop reading Paul’s books (unless he just goes totally apeshit, which I doubt he will).  I’m content to let this be one of those things in which we are miles apart from each other on.

But…

This is something, I think, that’s good to consider.  Because I think, as geeks continue to change the world and “nerd” becomes less of a dirty word, as fantasy books are read more and more widely, that the realities of many people will start to include many other people.

Nothing, after all, is more impermanent, liquid or false than what we know is certain.

So, Mike Krahulik, also known as Gabe from Penny Arcade, has just posted his New Year’s resolution.

I used to read Penny Arcade religiously.  I’ve got a few books of Gabe and Tycho’s, each one signed.  I’ve enjoyed many of their recommendations and have generally thought they were (ultimately) a positive influence for gamers.  But we’re not going to talk about that today.

Krahulik has also said some exceedingly fucked up stuff.  Stuff that goes beyond merely being insensitive and offensive and digs its heels in deep with the intent to harm whatever it is that he and Holkins have created.  But we’re not going to talk about that today, either.

Really, what I want to talk about is this particular passage from the above link here:

So what am I? As a young person I imagined myself a sort of vengeful spirit. A schoolyard Robin Hood who attacked the strong and popular on behalf of the social outcasts. I’m 36 years old now though and I realize what I am is a bully. I may have been the one who got beat up but I sent plenty of kids home in tears. I also realize that I carried those ridiculous insecurities into adulthood. I still see people who attack me as the enemy and I strike back with the same ferocity as that seventh grader I used to be. I’m ashamed of that and embarrassed. The crazy thing is I don’t even necessarily believe the stuff I say a lot of times. It would probably be more noble if I did. The truth is I just say them to be mean. I say them because I know they will hurt. It’s pretty fucked up.

I’ve mentioned before my own rough childhood.  I dealt with bullies, abuse, name-calling, teasing.  I highly doubt anyone who went on to be successful creatively had an easy childhood.  I suspect anyone who has a talent for creating worlds to escape in first had to have a reason to escape from their own.  And I can completely understand where Krahulik is coming from here.

Because really, the “vengeful spirit” thing is not exclusive to him.  I’ve mentioned before that constant bullying turned me into an asshole.  By the time I was old enough to realize words could hurt and I had a talent with them, I used both those facts to insidious ends.  I would quickly tear other kids down, diminishing their accomplishments, making them feel guilty for things they didn’t do, generally making them feel like garbage.

I know I’m not alone in this.  Some of the most venomous, vicious, virulent people I’ve met were bullied as kids.  Probably a lot of them thought that they were “vengeful spirits,” as well.  And maybe it began that way.  But the truth of the matter is–for me, and them, and I think for Krahulik–that this behavior is motivated by the same thing that motivates most human behavior: fear.

Someone who comes from a difficult position will do anything to avoid going back to that position.  Some of the most ardent fitness gurus out there were overweight children.  Some of the most steadfast atheists came from staunchly religious households.  They were in situations where they were being made miserable and will do damn near anything to avoid being made to feel like that again.

Myself, I was picked on, bullied, ostracized and generally made to feel like an outsider in my own life.  I constantly felt the looming specter of being bumped to the bottom of the social ladder.  I got into a fistfight with my best friend over New Year’s because of it, lashing out because–for an instant–I felt like I was back in school, back to being the guileless, chubby kid with no friends.

For even as we get older and more successful, the ghosts of those days don’t ever really die.  As we become more confident and self-assured, we never really feel like no one can hurt us, we just feel like we can make them pay a steeper and steeper price for doing so.  No one ever really moves past those fears.  They just bury the old ghosts, one at a time, and patiently wait for new ones to arrive.

This particular fear is cannibalizing, though.  You grow up being bullied by people in positions of power.  When you have a position of power yourself, you feel the need to hold onto it to keep yourself from being bullied again.  To apologize, to admit fault, to self-reflect is to show weakness, is to give up some of that power, is to invite the bullying all over again.  The bullied becomes, as Krahulik notes, the bully.

And there is no greater evidence of this cannibalizing influence than the fact that a vast number of people have met Krahulik’s apology by sitting down, drumming their fingers on their knees and gleefully awaiting the moment he fucks up and says something offensive again.

And that’s what we’re here to talk about.

Now, it could be that we all run in different social circles.  Maybe I frequent message boards that are meaner, twitter groups that are harsher.  But I’m pretty sure that, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a geek of some sort.  And I’m pretty sure that all the groups I hang out in and all the ones that you hang out in touch each other at some point.  And everywhere I go, I see Krahulik’s apology met with declarations that he’s insincere, that he doesn’t mean it, that he does mean it but he can’t help himself and we should just start counting down the days until he fucks up again.

And he’s going to fuck up again, it’s true.  Like I said, no one really moves past that fear.  They just learn to deal with it in better ways.  But even if he didn’t, how could he not fuck up with a not insignificant portion of the internet rooting for his failure?

Some of these people are just jerks.  But I think a lot of them are feeding into that cannibalizing fear.  I think a lot of people are looking for vindication, to say that Krahulik was always going to be a jerk and that they always were right, to assert power over him and their situations.

I can understand that.

Be mad at Krahulik.  I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t be.  He’s said some truly awful shit in his days.  And I’m not going to tell you that you need to buy this idea of cannibalizing fear or that the only way forward is to walk away, because I know what a frustratingly lame answer that is.

I’m just telling you how I think this whole fear thing works.

I’m not going to go into depth on what I think of Krahulik’s resolution.  Nor am I going to tell you what to think about it.  But personally, I think that if I dedicate time to wanting him to fail, then he eventually will, and all the good he and Penny Arcade have done will eventually just collapse under the weight of that fear.  So for now, I think I’m going to believe him and wish him well with this resolution.

Because I got into a fistfight with my best friend on New Year’s Eve because of that fear.  And I don’t wish it for Krahulik or the people who are mad at him.