Tag Archives: books

I Like Men. There, I Said It.

Recently Don, who happens to be both a man and a writer, talked about how he needed to read more male writers. He’s a voracious reader and especially loves indie writers, and has introduced me to some of the women who now live in my “favorite writers” list. As he says:

Everyone who does know me as a writer, or has read this blog, knows of my love of M. Rickert, Aimee Bender, Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler (her short work, at least), and Kelly Link. I’ve recently acquired and devoured collections by Joan Aiken and Margaret St. Clair. My favorite issue of Tin House thus far is 33: Fantastic Women. The only novel I’ve really, truly enjoyed in the past few years was Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Madeline is Sleeping. I wish I could write like Lydia Davis, Ann Beattie, and Amy Hempel. I also wish I had Fran Lebowitz’s brain. These writers have really sort of set the bar as far as what I look for in a story.

Sure, there are male writers who do that for me, too. Etgar Keret, Ray Vukcevich, Howard Waldrop, Peter S. Beagle, Harlan Ellison, Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, and… um… and… and…

See, therein lies the problem.

Yes, that is a problem. I know how it used to be, when women didn’t get to be writers (especially not of genre fiction) unless they had a lot of male friends to stick up for them or submitted under a decidedly male pen name. It used to be that the only choices you had were male writers, and as we moved forward in time, the push to include female writers became almost a push back against the men. While you’d never find a convention panel on the mediocrity of female writers these days, panels on “Great Women Writers” abound. This is good, because it introduces lesser-know women to an audience that hadn’t read them before. That’s the point of the panel. Panels on the misogyny of male writers exist too. That’s not OK. (Edited to add: Neither is declining to let panelists speak because they’re “white males” and then following them around to harass them for being male, which I witnessed at this year’s Readercon.)

It’s just as sexist and wrong to label the entire male gender as “bad” as it was to label to entire female gender as “weak”. Yes, we needed to move past the point where men got the word counts and women got to be secretaries. BUT! It seems the drive to promote women in fiction has evolved into open season on men, as if a predominately male field of writers in the past means that men writing now must all be assholes.

Even Don, who loves women writers, and is having to force himself to read more men because his bookshelf is lacking in that department, has to carefully defend his choice lest he be labeled a woman-hater. This is what we’ve done, readers. We’ve allowed ourselves – as a community of writers and readers – to think that talking about women (in a positive way, of course) is right and good, but liking men leads to shady behavior. So here I am, a woman, and a writer, and a reader, proclaiming that when it comes to the authors I admire, I like Men. Not “the best”, not “only”, but there exists in my world a deep and abiding love for some very manly writers, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

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Your Book Synopsis Should Never Be This Bad

Searching through my Netflix instant viewing options, I was struck by the similarities between a movie blurb and a book blurb. When we’re pitching our novels, especially in person, we often have to be able to explain our brilliance in only a few sentences. Even when talking about our work with other writers, it’s helpful to be able to give a quick “this is my book” speech. Reading movie blurbs can help give us a sense of what works, and what doesn’t.

Below are some of my favorite bizarre, disturbing, and completely unnapealing choices:

MUTANT HUNT, 1987. “When a corporate executive named Z comes morally unhinged and unleashes an army of cyborg robots on an unsuspecting New York City, there’s a lone mercenary who can save the Big Apple from complete and total annihilation.” What is it? Are they mutants, or cyborgs, or robots? Pick one!

NARCOSYS, 2000. “The world is ruled by the heartless IT Corporation, which controls citizens through manufactured drugs and a destructive virus that’s spread through the streets. Can a gang of cyber-punks stop the mammoth institution bent on domination?” Aside from the awful plot, the grammar makes this blur read like there’s a diseased street out there, citizens, so watch where you step!

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I Haven’t Felt Write In a While

I haven’t felt like much of a writer lately, nor much of an editor either. I’ve let my real life distract me, with changes and drama and illness and the maelstrom of everything that nibbles at you all at once, wanting attention. Life does that sometimes. It rises up to meet you, and you rarely get to decide when.

I spent the end of February being very sick, the month of March being sad, lost, stressed, and worried over what was happening with my life (and other peoples’), and not much got done worth reporting here. I did write, a little. I submitted a few pieces (one which was rejected two days later, and others still waiting on answers), including one revised piece of flash that made it past the slush reader to an editor, but has been languishing there for another 45 days. I spent much of March researching a non-fiction piece for an academic conference that I decided at the last minute not to submit to, for personal reasons, and I’ve been kicking myself all week about it. I should have done it anyway. I should have been a writer first, and a person with relationship issues second. Shouldn’t I?

Maybe not. Research isn’t useless, the paper will still get finished, and whether I submit it to a journal or to the original conference (in another year) I will do something with it. I learned a lot along the way, which makes me feel smarter, a feeling I can always do with more of. Looking over the last month or so, I realized that while I edited very little and wrote only a bit more than that, I did learn. I found myself finally making time for the one thing a writer needs to do even more than put words onto paper – I read. I read journal papers, I read short story collections, I read a few novels … I read every week, and usually several days out of that week. I haven’t reviewed it all here, but I’ll probably get to most of it, because it’s work I’d recommend that you read too. Laying out what I’ve accomplished I can see it all at once and the day-to-day worry that I was failing as a writer has been replaced with the realization that everytime I’ve gone through this before, each time that I took a break from writing to drink in other people’s words, my own words improve. I gain polish and depth, and I find a tiny piece or two of my own voice. It’s like I have aimed myself at being a great writer, the writer I will one day be, and each story I write, or read, pushes me along the wobbly path towards that goal. It isn’t a straight shot, and sometimes I go far one way or the other, but I’m moving forward. I am accomplishing.

It’s not like the urge to write ever completely goes away. That’s the thing, which when combined with actually getting the work done, that makes us into writers. Reading is the fuel that fills us up, the mortar which seeps into our cracks and makes us whole again. Until I am ready to get new words out of my head, I will take in these other words, these other writers’ stories, and that will never be a waste of time.

What I’ve Been Reading, Mar 4th edition

As the “being sick” portion of the program has gone over the scheduled performance time, I don’t have much writing or editing to report. In between lots of sleeping and thinking about the things I’ll be doing once my brain, you know, works again, I have been getting some reading in. Several graphic novels and some short stories this week:

Unwritten Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity; Mike Carey (author) and Peter Gross (illustrator), Vertigo, 144 pages. In a world where Harry Potter was, at least for a while, the King of All Media, it’s no surprise that someone would write the “our wizard is better and also very similar but better because he’s really real!” story. And yes, you can say it’s analyzing the way our society reacts to the creation of the classic boy hero archetype blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter. Whether Carey is ripping off (or being inspired by) Potter or Timothy Hunter or Luke Kirby or T.H. White’s Wart, it doesn’t matter. Carey pulls in literature and alt-history possibilities and a league of extraordinarily bad men, and puts his own spin on the whole adventure. What you get, then, is a book that is literate and almost delicate in the way the pieces slide together. I loved it, and can’t wait to get the rest of the series.

Locke & Key Volume 1: Welcome to Lovecraft HC [Hardcover]; Joe Hill (author) and Gabriel Rodriguez (illustrator), IDW Publishing, 152 pages. Beautiful, brilliant, and oh yeah, fucking dark. I mean, let’s start the story with some gruesome murder, shall we? And, while we’re at it, let’s throw in a bunch more. In between the loss and pain and moving across the country and (by the way) there’s a creepy thing in the well, Hill’s written a mad masterpiece. You just know that everyone he brings into this tale is going to die miserably, but the story is so good, you’re kind of willing to make that trade. They die, you’re entertained, and you’ll keep coming back for more.

Planetary Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories; Warren Ellis (author) and John Cassaday (illustrator), WildStorm Productions, 160 pages. Oh, Warren Ellis, you’re so meta. A comic book about superheroes who don’t act like superheroes but find out our world has been mixed with other worlds where comic book things have happened? And their superheroes want to fight ours? And Asian men talk about their testicles while worrying over the corpse of Mothra? *sigh* So far, I’m not in love with the series, but it’s interesting. I do like Ellis’s work, and the writing isn’t bad (the art’s lovely too) so I think I’m just having a hard time with the HA HA HA IRONIC USE OF TROPES of it all. There are moments where I think I might be too well read, and reading PLANETARY isn’t helping.

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die; Ed. by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, David Malki, 464 pages. From the first story, I loved this collection. The premise, first bandied about by a cartoon T-Rex, is that a couple of guys create a machine which tells you, often in one word, the manner of your demise. From the first story (“Flaming Marshmallow”), which tells how such a machine can change the social structure of a high school lunch room, to stories about how the machine can make you afraid of love and death and sex and the machine itself, this anthology says something about the human reaction to such perfect news of our mortality. The machine is, after all, never wrong – it’s just a little vague, as in the story where death by SUICIDE doesn’t exactly mean you’re going to kill yourself. Definitely recommended.

I’ve also been keeping up with the daily offerings at Everyday Fiction. They’re not always great but the flash-length stories are new every day, short enough to be read on a break from work or while dinner’s cooking, and it’s good exposure to a wide variety of writing styles. Bonus: a better idea of what does or does not work in terms of storytelling under 1000 words.

Getting Back in the Swing of Things

After losing myself to the first few weeks of a new day job, I’m finding myself settled enough to get back to the parts of my life I can’t live without. Reading, editing, and (of course!) writing, have been gnawing at me, begging for my attention. Projects were due, emails needed answering, and people I care about had started wondering where I’d gone off to.

I started the weekend by getting out of town. My “real life” has distractions, many annoying ones and a few beautiful ones, but all things that give me an excuse to not write. Distancing myself gave me a chance to breathe as well as a chance to think. 5 hours in a car, alone, works to solve that problem as well. Once I arrived in my home-away-from-home, I knew I’d get to spend the weekend with one of my favorite people, who was not only going to show me around town but who was going to have serious writer talks with me, and help me sort my brain out. The night before I was due to leave, however, I started coming down with a cold … Since finding a weekend that would work for both of us was hard enough without having to rescedule and find a second one, we talked and decided I should come up anyway. I am so glad that I did! My cold managed to hang on but not be serious enough to keep me from anything we had planned, and neither did the snow that fell Saturday (sandwiched between two perfectly blue days which made driving there and back easy). Since “showing me around town” included a stop at two bookstores and a comic book shop, this meant I left with loot: three new anthologies and the same number of new graphic novels. Also, there was bowling. We talked out a project we’re both currently working on as well as one we’re in the nascent stages of, and I left there incredibly happy.

I woke up Monday morning feeling like I might die. A quick trip to the doctor’s revealed my little cold had turned into strep (Sorry, Don!) and I’m off work til at least Thursday. Antibiotics in hand, I retired to my couch, nested under a pile of blankets, and started reading. If I’m going to be off work, I might as well be productive, right? Continue reading →