Author Archives:

There’s Nothing Wrong With You

There are only two things that you need to do in this life in order to be a good person – be honest, and don’t think you have any say over any one else.

That’s it. That’s the key to life, to happiness, to finding love, to being a good member of society. Hell, those two things are the keys to making a better world. So why aren’t we all happy and loved and comfortable with ourselves? Because most of us can’t do these two things.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a girl or a boy or something in between or neither, or straight or gay or uninterested in sex or bisexual or prefer to have sex only with yourself. You’re wonderful, just the way you are. You don’t need to change for anyone. Be a writer, an artist, a math teacher, an auto mechanic, a librarian, an accountant – they’re all good careers. None of them is any more special than the others. You’ll be successful if you find something that you love and you work very, very hard at it, and if you can do that, you’ll make your job special and yourself special, regardless of what your job title is. Wear dresses, high heels, jeans and tshirts, chucks, boots, a lot of makeup, no makeup, style your hair or shave it off – it doesn’t matter. You’ll be who you are supposed to be, and someone out there will be attracted to you, if that’s what you’re looking for.

You don’t have to pretend to be anything other than who you are. Not one bit. Not at all. In fact, pretending to be someone else is probably what’s keeping you from being happy.

See, we get stuck in this idea that we have to be something in particular to be loved. Then we find a mate who wants that thing, even when we’re not that thing, we’re just pretending. Or we find someone who’s close to what we want, and we think, “Oh, well, with a little work…” and set out to change them, a tiny bit at a time, into what we want them to be. Why do we do this? Fear, pretty much. We’re afraid we’ll never find the right person, we’ll never be loved, or move out of our parent’s house, or have enough sex, or whatever it is. We get impatient and we get scared and we settle for someone who’s not quite right and we’re not quite right for.

It’s OK if you like sappy romantic movies, and it’s OK if you want to spend your weekends painting Warhammer figurines, and it’s OK if you like anything else that most people would consider geeky or strange or boring. There are people out there who like the things that you like. Go find them instead. I guarantee you that not only will you find these people if you’re open and honest about what you like, but you’ll feel more comfortable, more at home, being around the people who understand and accept you than you ever did squishing yourself into relationships with people who didn’t share your interests.

When I say be honest, I mean completely. It doesn’t work if you tell people that you love Michael Bay movies but don’t mention that you think that if someone really loved you, they’d put your needs first all of the time. It doesn’t work if you find someone who also loves camping during the summer, but don’t mention that you think monogamy doesn’t really work and that you can’t see yourself only sleeping with one person for the rest of your life. Whatever you think, whoever you are, put it out there. Display it, wear it, be proud of it. It’s who you are, and there’s nothing wrong with you.

The only thing that’s wrong with anyone is the desire to control the people around us. You don’t get to decide if the person next to you is “really” a man, or a woman. You don’t get to decide if two people should get married, or shouldn’t. You don’t get to decide that your spouse has to spend more money on you or clean the house on Saturday mornings or your parents have to be more supportive or your friends have to stop liking some tv show or stop drinking red wine at your dinner parties. It’s not up to you.

All you can decide is to be honest. If something’s not working for you, say so. If it’s something small and simple, like “I don’t like the smell of your cigar smoke so I won’t tell you to stop smoking but could you do it on the porch or let me know when you plan to smoke inside so I can use that time to run errands out of the house,” then talk about it, and make that compromise. If it’s something that can be fixed, great. If not, if the only option is for you to get your way or be miserable, then you leave. Done. End of story. That’s the only power you have. Because lying about your needs is a trick you play on your partner, where you pretend to be happy but really aren’t, and that unhappiness seeps into everything else that you do together. And trying to control the other person to turn them into who you want them to be is laziness, because it’s easier for you than going out and taking the time to find the right person for you.

How is that love?

If you’re in a relationship where you can’t be honest, there’s a problem. If the only way for you to get what you want, to be truly happy, is to lie about who you are, or what you’re doing with your time, then it’s a relationship that needs to end. If you’re only going to be happy if you can get your partner to stop having certain friends, or stop going certain places, or get a different career, then you’re never going to be able to turn your back on them. You’re never going to be able to trust them. You’re never really going to be happy … and that’s playing a pretty mean trick on yourself. If the only way to make your relationship work is to take abuse, to change things you liked about yourself, to be told (often) how wrong/bad/stupid/useless/not-good-enough you are, to give up your friends … then honey, you’re hurting yourself. You deserve to be with someone who loves you for you, and if you haven’t found that person yet, then being alone is better than letting the wrong relationship keep you from meeting the right person.

Be honest. Be open. Let the wrong people go, let the right people in, and be happy. There’s nothing wrong with you, but there might be something wrong with the friendships or relationships you’re currently in.

Adding It All Up

As a  writer I often get asked when I’m going to publish a novel. For many people that’s the big step forward, the symbol of legitimacy, like getting a record deal or a major gallery show. I’d love to say that I’ve been working on a novel but the truth is that I haven’t. I’ve got ideas and done some research and there’s a few chapters each of a couple of different things, but I haven’t finished a novel, no. What I’ve been doing is writing short stories.

There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s simply the route less glamorized. There are some award-winning writers who’re very well known for their short story collections (Ted Chiang, for instance). But in order to say that a bunch of short stories equals having written a novel – and, more importantly, having sold a novel – I’d have to publish, for money, a number of short stories whose word count equals an average novel.

Which in some ways is harder.

I went through my sales in the last 20 months, which is how long it’s been since my first paying sale in 2010, and here’s what I’ve got:

1. “Mitch’s Girl”, Rigor Amortis anthology, Oct 2010 (1100 words)
2. “Call Center Blues”, Daily Science Fiction, Nov 2011 (861 words)
3. “Monsters, Monsters, Everywhere,” Crossed Genres Magazine, Dec 2011 (3625 words)
4. “Dancers in the Dust”, Goldfish Grimm, Mar 2012 (1475 words)
5. “CL3ANS3″, Eldritch Chrome anthology, due out Fall 2012 (4230 words)

Total: 12,361 words

I’m only counting the stories I sold for actual cash money. There are other sales in the last year + that were not to paying markets, including a personal favorite, Annabelle Tree, which I donated to a charity anthology. I’m also not counting the two stories (equaling about 9000 words) that I have out to markets which have contacted me to say that they’re likely to buy them. I don’t know for sure, so they’re not going on the list.

Still, five paying sales in less than two years is pretty good for a new author. I got a pro-rate sale in there (which got me an SFWA membership) and another that sold for nearly $200. But look at how many individual sales that is. At this rate I’ll need to sell 30 to 40 different stories in order to make up that 80,000 word average novel length. I have to sell EIGHT TIMES what I’ve already sold. This means working with another 30 editors, submitting to at least another 30 markets (and getting accepted), waiting for contracts and edits and delays. All of that is why selling a collection’s worth of short stories can be harder than selling a novel once.

At least now I have a goal. I don’t have to feel bad that I haven’t written and sold a novel yet, because I’ve already sold an 1/8th of one. The hardest part is the beginning, right?

My Secret Love Affair With Jazz

I could argue that Jazz is the most important musical style out there. The most groundbreaking, the most influential, the most responsible for shaping modern musical expression. I may not be able to prove it (though I’m happy to debate it), but I can say one thing definitively: it’s the biggest musical influence on my life.

And I don’t know why. It’s a question I don’t have an answer to yet.

I don’t listen to it every day. But I don’t have to. The music that I do listen to, and that I like, when it’s not Jazz, is probably created by musicians who were raised up on Jazz, taught it, loved it, and built something new out of it. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about foundations, about influence, about where our tastes come from. Just as I’ve been going back and re-reading (and reviewing) classic works of science fiction, so too have I been going back to my musical roots. I’ve been rereading some old music texts, listening to songs, studying where lines of style intersect and veer off. Did you know that Jazz in the Philippines, for example, didn’t start with the influx of American soldiers in the 40s, but most likely began earlier, with a group of Filipinos who’d fled the Spanish-ruled islands decades before and settled in New Orleans? (Before I left Penn I was writing a paper on it for my World Music class.)

Jazz is so interesting to me partly because I don’t remember why I like it. I grew up listening to rock with my mom. She woke up almost every morning, opened the doors to the deck, and turned on her sound system loud enough to wake the neighbors. Most days, this was on purpose. From her I get AC/DC, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Leon Russell, Jethro Tull. From a close family friend I get Bluegrass, and from a couple of years when I was about 6 or 8, I think, I got my mom’s brief country influence – Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson – and a vague memory of how to 2-step. This led to an understanding of the fundamentals of Heavy Metal when I got into high school in 1991, mixed with some hard rock: Metallica, Iron Maiden, Pantera, Guns N Roses. I spent some time with Foreigner, Def Leppard, Journey, Night Ranger, Aerosmith, and Chicago cassette tapes in my Walkman. By the end of high school I was into Nirvana and the Cure, got into Bauhaus and Psychedelic Furs in my first bout of college, did some time in the goth scene, got into chick/indie rock and 70s glam rock (hello Indigo Girls, Iggy Pop, David Bowie) …

But where does my love of Jazz come from? The thing I didn’t mention above is that at the same time I knew the words to every song on Iron Maiden’s Powerslave album, and GnR’s debut, I was hanging out with the jazz band at school. I was in band, too (yes, there was marching, and an outfit), going from flute in middle school to French horn, trumpet, and percussion in high school. I could sit and listen to the trumpet line for hours, I dated a few drummers, I befriended the jazz choir kids – I loved it all. I’ve asked my mom and she has no idea where I’d have heard Jazz outside of school. She says I just liked it because I liked it.

Maybe that’s it.

But like my spotty ability to play a musical instrument, my musical history knowledge has some gaps in it. I took a class in American Musical History in Sacramento, when I was finishing up my AA degrees, and like I said, I’ve read some books, but I don’t know as much as I’d like to. Music matters to me, and always has, and though I’ll never work in it, it’s like my art history studies – it helps me to understand the world and to understand myself. So this is me, educating myself. I am going back to the beginning and I am going to teach myself what I don’t know. It’s never too late to learn, after all.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Racism is Stupid

Recently a post about hipster racism has been going around, and if you haven’t read it, you should. The bottom line is that ironic racism is still racism, just slightly more likely to have dressed from a combination of products sold on Etsy.

Part of that is white people making jokes about people of color who they care about out of some idiotic belief that they must not be racist because they know/love/fuck/live with a person of color. *headdesk*

Racism, in all forms, is stupid, and everyone just needs to fucking stop it.

But, of course, I can say that, right? I’m a white person, so I’ve been protected by white privilege, so what would I know? To some extent, that is true. I am extremely white. I have red hair and freckles. I can’t even tan (though everyone else in my family does; it’s weird). My white privilege means that the one time I was pulled over by a police officer for blowing through a stop sign, I was given a warning. It means that I have walked through one of the poorest neigborhoods in Oakland, while on drugs, and jaywalked in front of a cop, who yelled, “Watch out for cars!”. At 3 am. It means that no matter how poor or uneducated I was (I lived in that neighborhood at the time, and worse ones after), people never told me that I couldn’t make something better of myself.

I’m not speaking as someone who was personally affected by a lot of racism. I am someone who got a free pass when a lot of other people I love and admire didn’t. So if I, who am not being repressed by racism, can tell you it’s stupid and useless and wrong, will that matter to you? Will it mean more to you than hearing it from a person of color?

To a racist, yeah, it will. How stupid is that?

But maybe you think that because I am so very white, it doesn’t really affect me, so I can say “don’t be racist” and it’s not that important. I’m just being trendy or something.

The thing is, racism does affect me, everyday, because I see it everyday, and it affects the people that I love.

My grandpa Joe was black. He and my (white, red-haired, Irish) grandma Helen loved each other very much. Before they both passed away, I got to see that, and it would become fundamental in shaping what I thought love was. The good kind of love that I’m still not sure I’m ever going to find.

Joe was kind and – normal. He wasn’t a “black guy”, he was my grandpa Joe, who just happened to be black. One of my nephews (I have more than one sister) has a dad who’s half black and half Chinese. Some of my best friends, including a guy who has been my friend, consistently, for 17 years, have been Filipino.

This fact doesn’t make me cool, or open-minded, or some kind of special. It just makes me not stupid. I’m not stupid enough to believe that human beings are divided by something as arbitrary as the color of your skin. We have grown to fill this whole planet, we have lived in a variety of climates, and some of us show the difference in skin tone that comes from having ancestors who mastered a certain spot on the Earth. That’s all it means.

This way of splitting up the world into groups, so that we can decide who we’re better than, and these jokes and comments and advertising and every other little way that we pass judgment on different colors of people … It’s all so stupid.

More than that, it hurts. It hurts me to see people that I respect being insulted or dismissed or patronized because they’re not white. It hurts those people who have to face prejudice every day for something they were born with. (No one gets to pick for themselves what color their skin is or who their parents are!) And it hurts us, as a global society, to still be fighting each other over this arbitrary classification.

So please, stop being stupid.

For those of you reading this and thinking, “Oh good for you, Carrie,” don’t. It doesn’t take much for me to take a stand on this, I know that. What you should do is to take a moment to redefine the people around you. All of those little labels we have in our heads? Rewrite them. Stop thinking of your black neighbor or your Asian coworker or the Hispanic woman in the PTA. And for fuck sake, stop describing people that way. Find another label.

Think of them as Bob who has the amazing rose bushes next door, or Jimmy who drinks four cups of coffee a day or Paula who’s allergic to dogs. Something about who they are as people. Because no matter what color you or I or anyone else is, we’re all the same. We’re all people.

Do that, and then I can start thinking of you as someone who isn’t stupid.

Please.

A Better Class of Genre

I think that way that we, as booksellers and publishers and reviewers and readers, use the descriptive labels we have to define “genre” is wrong. What we commonly consider to be major genres, aren’t.

Simply put, there are two kinds of genres: one set describes an aspect of the plot or characters; the other set are much broader terms that should be used as adjectives. They can be used together, but using the umbrella terms alone doesn’t give enough description to accurately place the story within the context of surrounding literature.

The major umbrella terms, which I’m calling metagenres for the purposes of this discussion (because they don’t describe a genre as much as they describe a class of stories, or settings, which also have other genre lables) are Fantasy, Science Fiction, Westerns, Literary Fiction, Alt-History, Historical, Horror, and Weird. There are probably others but these are very common. If you think about it, none of those labels actually describes a story enough to tell you what it’s about. All a story has to have to be Science Fiction is an element of fictional science. Fantasy requires some kind of magical element, a Western is set in the American old West, Horror is meant to be scary, and a Weird story has a strange or occult element, meant to disturb the reader in some fashion. Literary fiction is fiction without a speculative element. Historical takes place in the past, and Alt-history stories take place on a world similar to ours but that evolved differently. That’s it. That’s all. Those labels cover much of fiction, and yet, they tell us almost nothing.

But as adjectives, tacked on to other genre labels, they better fit the stories we’re discussing. Just as calling something an “apple” isn’t as descriptive as calling it a “green apple”, but calling something “green” tells us very little about the object we’re looking for. Calling a story “romance” tells you that it centers on a relationship between two or more people. The story may have other elements but what’s important is that relationship. A reader will pick it up to experience the joy and longing and romantic tension between the characters. Compare that to “scifi” – right, that just means it has science in it. What’s it about again?

We don’t know. But if your romance is set in space, you can call it a SciFi romance, and suddenly you have a much better idea of what the story is about. The romance is with a vampire? Ok, call it paranormal romance, and you’re all set. Story has dragons? Fantasy romance. Love interest is a cowboy? Western romance. A Shoggoth? Weird romance.

What other genres describe parts of the plot? An adventure story is focused on action, moving forward, exploring, brave new world/frontier mentality. Military stories are centered around characters in the military, following or rebelling against orders, being part of a unit, some battle, some interacting with the government. Spy stories are similar but usually have a solitary character being a lot sneakier. Detective stories involving solving a mystery, whereas noir stories may have a detective (and may not) but are noted for being setting in a noir world, where the character either dies, or fails to solve the problem, or solves it but nothing changes. Humor stories are funny, and will end in a light-hearted and happy way. Thrillers show characters trying to escape from danger or unravel a mystery but also imply that the answers are kept from the reader too, so that they and the characters figure out who the bad guy is at the same time.

There are more, of course, but don’t they give you a much better idea of whether you want to read a story than any of the broad metagenres do? And by putting a genre lable with a metagenre label, you get very well defined categories… think Military Fantasy, Weird Noir, Erotic Horror, SciFi Adventure, and so on.

We need genre labels to sell books to new readers without giving away the whole plot. We have to have accurate labels in order to make sure that what we’re selling is what the reader wants to buy. They have to be able to trust us, trust our recommendations. It also helps us as writers to be able to describe our own stories – if we can clearly define it to ourselves, it gives us a better idea of whether we end up with the story we meant to write.

I’m not sure if breaking it down this way is the best answer. I do think it’s better than simply saying, “Oh it’s fantasy,” or “Oh, that’s science fiction,” which all too often can be said in a dismissive way, as if the book isn’t good enough for the reader, or the reader isn’t smart enough for the book.

But you tell me. I want your opinions. I am working toward a more thorough explanation of genre and even if I don’t agree with you I want to be sure I considered all the options.