Sidetracks - February 23, 2015

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

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➝ I Challenge You To Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors For One Year. Guess how long it takes for people to show up in the comments going, "HOW DARE YOU ASK ME TO CUT WHITE MEN OUT OF MY READING FOREVER! THEY'RE THE MOST READILY AVAILABLE WRITERS! I LOVE MEN!" Spoiler: not long! Because when you ask people to de-center the dominant group even for a short period of time as a personal challenge suddenly it becomes being forcefully barred from precious cisgender white dudes until the end of time like it's a particularly painful form of literary torture. There was a similar response to my Coverage of Women on SFF Blogs research, when I asked people to review more women by pointing out men were being reviewed more often. I didn't even ask them to stop reviewing men, I just said: "try to review more women." I still remember the utter meltdown some people in the community had. Constantly amazed at lack of nuance.

➝ Here is the best review of Jupiter Ascending on the Internet.

➝ dolorosa_12 is looking for Reviewer Recommendations. Here's the LJ mirror!

➝ Writing Is Never A Waste of Time by Kate Elliott is great advice I have been thinking about actively since I read it, examining my perception of myself as a writer.

➝ Cool beehive alert! Their indiegogo funded almost immediately.

➝ I talked about the Nebula Award nominations over at Tumblr, otherwise known as "crying over Station Eleven".

➝ I wrote a quick list review of Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. SPOILERS: IT IS GREAT, everyone read it!

➝ The Labyrinth of Flame kickstarter has both launched AND funded, before I could even get my act together to contribute. It will happen THIS WEEK FOR SURE because the first stretch goal is a poll for backers to vote on the main character of a short story. I WANT THIS.

➝ This was an interesting post about The Hugo Awards and the cost of participation. Maybe surprisingly, I disagree about making the Hugo free, because the Hugo Award is run by a group of fans — it's the organization's award where the organization is run by fans for fans. It's made itself culturally relevant by being a fan-run organization that has been largely consistent for several decades in a particular niche (well, I'm sure there was an element of white dude influence here, too, but that's another topic). You pay the dues for the club, and you get to participate in club events. I do think the price could be lowered a little, because $40 - $60 is a lot for younger fans, but running the Hugo is not free. We all contribute to make the award a success and to give people shiny cock-shaped trophies (do not fondle the statue on stage is apparently something that actually gets said??? FANTASTIC).

I don't think of having to "pay" to participate in the Hugo, myself. Instead, I've always framed it as me supporting the fans running it and the convention so I could have an award to take part in, period. Whether or not the convention or the award is worthwhile to support is another question entirely. It really depends on the direction you approach them, I suppose! And there are sometimes cool bonuses, like the Hugo Packet, and I thought there was a move to shift ratification for some of the club rules to an up or down vote by all members, including Supporting, but I'm too lazy to go look it up and see if it's still a thing (it sounds really cool, though). If it were, and Supporting memberships were given some light influence over the WSFS rules and direction, it stands to reason removing the dues portion would not only be unfair, but potentially detrimental to the award/rules that govern the award.

Book Acquisitions

Gifts: A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge, Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin (thank you, nymeth!!! ♥)
Added TBR: Forgotten Suns by Judith Tarr, The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

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➝ The internet has been circulating so many lovely photos of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha and Razan Abu-Salha, the victims of the Chapel Hill shooting. This image was shared by Imraan Siddiqi on Twitter who calls on the world to remember everyone harmed by this tragedy.

➝ Kameron Hurley posted 2014: Some (Honest) Publishing Numbers, and (Almost) Throwing in the Towel. She explains how her career has progressed since 2013, when Gods War appeared in the UK, and details the amount of promotional work she put into getting things to change. Hurley's transparency about her career is always illuminating and remains part of why I've come back to writing criticism more regularly even when I'm demoralised about my writing and its lack of wider impact.

➝ Tor.com is moving into the world of publishing for profit with an initial list of five novellas (although I assume other short fiction will still appear at their site).

Tor is one of my favourite places to find SFF short fiction. They blurb each work so you can decide if it sounds like your thing. So helpful! And I was excited when they recently announced the first list for their new venture. Sadly the gender stats of their list are a little disappointing — while the article only talks about five novellas in detail, it names fifteen authors that Tor plans to publish. That fuller list of authors contains five women, nine men and one author of unconfirmed gender (K.J. Parker) :/ The article does say Tor are planning to publish 'many more…' authors, so perhaps the gender stats will improve as this publishing venture develops?

➝ As an 80s kid, feminist and fan of silly SFF films I'm very excited about the casting for the all female Ghostbusters. This project works on every level for me so far.

➝ Check out this brilliant Storm cosplay, featuring nine different costumes.

➝ Speaking of chromatic characters in comics, The A.V. Club has a piece up about the significance of Ms Marvel, one year on.

➝ In other Kamala news, Panels has a roundup of fanwork from the first ever online Kamala Con.

➝ Jezebel says The Fall is the Feminist Crime Show We've Been Wanting. Yep. The Fall is still a really white show (the only chromatic character is played by Archie Panjabi) and it portrays extreme violence against women, but its heart is made of feminist commentary.

➝ Over at Diversity in YA, Cindy Rodgriguez talks about receiving editorial support for adding more diversity into her novel and how she handled that in her revision process:

And when the revision notes specifically asked for more diversity, I didn’t want to just swap last names and declare, "Voila, diversity!" The changes needed to have purpose—to make sense for the characters and the plot—and I needed to approach them with thoughtful intention. Otherwise, the changes would have felt hollow to me—diversity for diversity’s sake—and I would never want to do that.

All of this made me wonder about all of the novels I’ve read without a single character representing a racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious minority, a disabled person, or a member of the LGBTQIA community. Was that intentional as well? Or was it a case of "default" writing? Or perhaps the writer didn’t want these "issues" to alter the story? My advice to writers is to reconsider this. You can diversify your cast of characters, with purposeful intention, and not drastically alter your story. I did, and I’m glad for it.

Her novel, When Reason Breaks just became an instant TBR add for me.

➝ I'm not really clear on the source of this gifset about a dad supporting his goth daughter (some kind of American advert?) but it's very cute and I would like a novel about a similar relationship, please.

➝ Finishing this week's Sidetracks by styling out with a dragon wedding cake.