Sarah Ash's Blog, page 13

Joanne Hall and Mary Corran on Nobody Knew She Was There

Nobody Knew She Was There…

This week, the featured writer on the Guest Blog has been Joanne Hall;  my thanks to Joanne for an enlightening and fascinating contribution.

I’m very pleased to announce that the next guest writer will be Mary Corran; after that, the Guest Blog will take a summer holiday.

Seen and Not Heard: Joanne Hall on Nobody Knew She Was There

I’m very pleased to welcome Joanne Hall to Nobody Knew She Was There.

Seen and Not Heard

Little girls, it’s said, should be seen and not heard.

I confess, I’ve been looking back through this awesome series of blogs and feeling pretty intimidated and out of my depth, because who would want to listen to my thoughts on the subject of women in SFF? What can I, as a little-known indie writer, possibly add to the conversation?

And then I realised I had fallen into the trap of listening to just that sort of pernicious thinking that Nobody Knew She Was There is hoping to combat; the idea that, as a woman, I should sit down and shut up. That I had nothing of value to say, even on a subject that directly affects me every day of my working life.

 

And I think it starts really young. Little girls should be seen and not heard. Nice girls don’t show off, nice girls aren’t mouthy, or rambunctious, and they certainly don’t make trouble. Well-behaved girls sit quietly and wait to be asked. While little boys… well, boys will be boys. It’s ok for boys to be loud, isn’t it? It’s OK for boys to be the centre of attention, to put themselves forward, to want to be the football captain, the star of the play. The Big Name Author.

Well, maybe I’m through with being nice and well-behaved. But what I’m really through with is seeing my nice, well-behaved sisters in SFF being repeatedly clobbered by this insidious mythology about “good girls” and “nice women”. And here’s why.

I wear four hats in SFF. They are:

Author
Convention Runner
Acquisitions Editor for Kristell Ink
Anthology Editor (with my good friend Roz Clarke – we have edited Colinthology, Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion, and Fight Like A Girl We come as a team.)

And in every single one of my quartet of guises, I have come across the same problem, over and over again. When I call for panel participants, for novel acquisitions, for short stories for anthologies, I find the same reluctance among women to put themselves forward, to, if you like, show off. First there’s the inevitable trample of a horde of men shouting “me! Me! Me!” that overwhelms women’s voices and pushes them into the background. And behind that, behind the shouty men, are women writers – awesome women writers, women writers I want to publish, that I want to hear from, that I want to see on panels or read in blog posts saying brilliant and clever things. And they’re busy, and they’re tired – frankly, exhausted – from the constant battle to be heard and to remain visible, from the constant raging against lists of influential authors that exclude women, the anthologies that exclude women, the panel discussions that exclude women, the display tables in high street booksellers that exclude women… I could go on and on and on.

And because women are taught from the time they can speak that what they should really be doing is not speaking, they learn to shut up. Not to put themselves forward to be rejected, not to stick their hands up and say “actually, I know a lot about that, can I be on the panel?”, not to market themselves, because saying “Hey, I wrote this and it’s good!” is showing off and that’s bad. Which leads to less book sales, which leads to “Female authors don’t sell as well”, leads to “Don’t put women on the display tables because they don’t sell as well”, leads to women getting dropped by their publishers because they aren’t selling, because they’re fading into invisibility… That whole vicious self-fulfilling prophecy that has its roots way back in childhood, and the way we treat boys and girls differently.

So the women shrink to the back, and because nice girls don’t show off, and because women should be seen and not heard, they are (generalising here) more reluctant to put themselves forward than men. So a good anthology editor, a good con-runner, needs to go after these women, find the ones that have their heads down, the ones that are turning invisible, and cajole them forward. Convince them that what they have to say is important and worthwhile and often fascinating, and that the SFF world is richer for their input. Despite what it may feel like sometimes.

How (not) to supress women’s writing (It’s not hard):

Include women in anthologies
Review women writers on your blog, on Amazon, on Goodreads, wherever.
Read women’s writing and, if you like it, talk about it. Tell people about all those great books by women you’ve discovered!
Include women on panels and listen to what they have to say.
In fact, just listen to women full stop.

Because to hell with being seen and not heard. I want to see women in SFF, and I want to hear them too. Your voices have value. Don’t let anyone drown them out.

 

 

Joanne Hall lives in Bristol, England, with her partner.  She has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pen, and gave up a sensible (boring) job in insurance to be a full time writer, to the despair of her mother.  She had previously dabbled in music journalism, and enjoys gaming, going to gigs and the cinema, and reading.

Her short stories have been published in several anthologies, including “Dark Spires” and “Future Bristol”, as well as a number of magazines. With Roz Clarke, she has co-edited the anthologies, “Colinthology”, “Airship Shape and Bristol Fashion”, and, in 2016, “Fight Like A Girl”.

Her “Art of Forgetting” duology, as well as the stand-alone “Spark and Carousel” were published by Kristell Ink, and her latest novel, “The Summer Goddess” is due out in September 2016.

In the interests of not showing off, she’s not mentioning that her work has been longlisted for both the Tiptree and the Gemmell awards.

Joanne is also one of the founders of BristolCon. Her blog can be found at www.hierath.co.uk, and her Twitter is @hierath77. She’s always happy to hear from readers.

 

 

From the Author’s Point of View: Women in SFF

Nobody Knew She Was There

My thanks to Justina Robson for her refreshingly different and challenging post : Being the Insufferable Deadpool. Them’s fighting words – and well worth reading, whether you’re a reader or an author (or, most probably, both)!

Coming up next on the Guest Blog is Joanne Hall; please look forward to her contribution – on Monday!

Justina Robson: Being the Insufferable Deadpool

It’s a great pleasure to introduce Justina Robson to Nobody Knew She Was There. 

Being the insufferable Deadpool

I’ve written this blog three times and thrown it away. I’m on tight deadlines and I don’t have time to write it again but I am because I want to say it right.

When Sarah first asked me to guest blog here on the subject of women’s visibility in SF I was really pleased and sketched out my plan. I was going to say a few obvious things and remark on my own experience which has been remarkably positive given the overarching theme of things, but having read the blogs which have gone before in this series I’ve felt my frustration with the situation steadily ramping up to the point where what I was going to say seems like so much anodyne potwash.  I realised that I was also lying by omission by not mentioning stories in case they negatively impacted my fate as that incredibly rare and fascinating creature of outlier statistical mystery, the woman that writes SFF and is still published. Not at living wage levels you understand, don’t get all excited and go thinking I’m in the hay or the gravy or whatever. I’m alive, that’s what counts.

Time out for one second: reading this instead of having me tell it to you myself is lessening the impact and missing the tone. Although since we have the advantage of using your imagination to assist us I think I can do even better than I could in person. You probably have some mental image of me as a woman, a bit earnest, a bit geeky, over 40, mildly sarcastic. That’s not how it is on the inside, where experiences take place, not at all.

I want you to go back and look at the second paragraph and re-imagine me saying them to you as Deadpool.  You may be wondering why the red suit? That’s so the bad guys can’t see me bleed…

That’s more like it.

But how did you turn into Deadpool, Justina? Allow me to explain.

First of all there was the cancer.

My initial impression of SF was that it was only for adults, was hard to read and was something my father liked. His copies of Asimov, Orwell and Huxley were my first exposure to literary SF. These things really aren’t for eleven year olds. I learned what SF was from them and I added in my assumption that SF was something which must be of the same scientific integrity as actual science, because my dad was an actual scientist and he was impressed by it. So there I had a model that was complex, boring and required a lot of tedious hard work to understand. It was also about sad, bad things that made adults fearful and involved men doing things with technology and betraying each other. I didn’t notice it was all men so much at that point because in the late 1970s everything was. I tried hard to read it and to like it but failed at both attempts. I felt inadequate and unworthy. I made a note to go back to it later and then returned to my favoured reading: Susan Cooper, Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, Mary Renault, Elizabeth Goudge, Tanith Lee and whoever was writing SpiderWoman at the time.

These cancerous meanings about what SF is inform my work to this day, both positively and negatively.  Positively: I try hard to think about what matters in a story and give it a thoroughly mature work-over, whatever subject it is I’m writing about. Negatively:  I overcomplicate because I see so many angles in an effort not to miss anything. I try to solve everything, especially difficult questions about human nature. I want to impress my dad and show him I’m as good as these men. Dad and I  both loved Star Wars and Middle Earth exuberantly. As a result I write with deep sincerity to impress the orthodoxy on bigass SF subjects, whilst my true love of adventure, wild imagination and romance tries to survive the attempt. I should be writing like someone more worthy and in a properly serious manner, says the cancer, I should beat SF at the man game.

Dad died in 1979, impressed with my ability to use long words correctly which is as far as I’d got with the project at the time.  Mum told me I could do whatever I wanted. She believed in me. Mum hates SF and Fantasy. With a vengeance. So the cancer of the poisoned SF gets another leg up because I know she and I can’t ever watch together as C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. At least she knows that the idea of SF being a man thing is silly. I really don’t want to let her down but I don’t think I’m going to change the world before she dies, or before I do, because the cancer that got me has got a lot of other people too and even if I survive it I can’t do anything about the others.

The trouble with diseased ideas is that they’re contagious. The meme that SF by women does not sell (is not as good, is not as interesting, is not the real thing) is pernicious. If you’re a man with this meme you may question it or accept it and move on, it’s no big really. For men it’s not a cancer so much as part of the scenery or perhaps an opportunity to take an heroic stand as a feminist supporter. If you are a woman and you contain this meme and you want to write SF then it’s likely that you’ll make the mistake of performing a superhuman effort to prove it wrong as you valiantly continue to host it, instead of doing the smart thing that you do with cancer which is excise it and kill it the fuck dead with chemicals and radiation.

In the Marvel story Deadpool is offered a way to become a superhero, through a horrible transformation which leaves him unkillable but ugly and able to suffer an endless battery of wannabe lethal assaults – ow. But after that the joke’s on the other guys because he does not stay down. Plus funny. And rude.

But in my early incarnations I was all unwitting cancer victim. My transformation came about much more slowly. There was no hushed crowd waiting to see if I lived. There were only predictable questions about what it was like to be a woman writing SF. Always that first point of contact and interest, always the heartfelt pondering about why it is that men dominate the field.  Let’s talk about them some more. Let’s reinforce the cancer a bit further and confirm its power for ever and ever and ever by cementing it into the head of anyone that goes near this article. And I agreed by saying yes, that is how it has been but it’s not…

Meh, by then everyone’s gone on to the next article. I wrote a book about AI, I didn’t turn into one, so that wasn’t going to be a game changer. Time to read about the next Terry Pratchett (whom I love, by the way, so no dissing our greatest ever satirist).

So I was busy endorsing the plague whilst thinking I was doing something against it. But my eHarmony date with Destiny was already on if I had but known it.  I met a fabulous woman who became a good friend of mine. In the course of our early getting to know you conversations we shared a mutual love of immersion in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. And role playing. She’s more hardcore than I am. She makes her own costumes and is regularly mistaken for David Bowie. But more importantly that all that great stuff we discovered is the fact that we’d both secretly been playing the same meta game.  In World of Warcraft we were men.

I don’t mean we had male avatars. I mean we were men.  I RPed a male character and if there was any metachat about players I was a man then too. When I played I was a man.  I wanted to go the whole hog and see if anyone could tell or notice. It wasn’t too difficult to set up –  I was safely concealed without any realtime voice chat to give me away. Meanwhile my friend didn’t RP, she was the guild leader of a successful raid guild and had made a male character to avoid all the stupid gamer bullshit that goes with being a woman player/character because not only is the SF cancer around there’s the videogame cancer too: long story short she was also a man behind the screen. She used a top of the range voice changer to make herself over into a slightly toned down version of Brian Blessed. We both got rid of all the hesitations, qualifiers and deferrals from our behaviour and language. Nobody suspected a thing.

The most interesting aspect of the experience for both of us as players is that we really did feel different. It’s very different to being a woman. The lack of shit you have to put up with from other people in general is awesome. Nobody expects you to look after them. They take direction much more easily. The complexity of the RP on both the character and personal front was a great liberation because we completely put down all the What Female Is cancer shit.  In addition the What Male Is cancer shit was something we were only toying with so we weren’t there long enough to be poisoned by it. It was a brilliant holiday because everyone unwittingly played along. So the insight from that really began to change the way I felt about my real life position.

And what I felt was – all of this is an RPG and all of the cancerous stuff is optional. Your social upbringing may have sold you some old sob story or convinced you that you have to live up to some parental destiny of your own making, but you’re not obliged to believe it. And since it is all an RPG then the real game is in choosing your character and commanding the stage.  The SF isn’t for women meme – like all the social memes – sets the global stage. When I talked as the outlier woman of SF, I endorsed that global stage and gave it power.  Now I no longer wanted to do that. I was sick of being the walk-on worthy little try-hard. I couldn’t blame anyone else for that part. I’d agreed, right? So I decided that from now on I was going to be whatever I was at any given moment.  SF is for anyone who wants it. Anyone may buy it and anyone can write it and sell it. And, most importantly, I was reclaiming the stage.

Reclaiming the stage is tricky. I can’t re-stage things in another person’s head and I can’t ever know what stage they’re actually playing on.  Other people’s minds are their business.  Collectively all the jibber jabber about what is what is an effort to constantly reinforce the global stage and to perpetuate the status quo of any given human arena.  I can’t influence that global stage directly. But I can fix my own stage up as I like it. By changing myself I can exert forces onto the whole that are apparently more subtle and more profound. It’s me I had to fix up, not the world, not anyone else in it.

I wrote Quantum Gravity to reclaim the stage for myself and get rid of the cancer. It was my transformative process, in which I took on the endlessly resurgent, resilient, annoying powers and black humour of Deadpool. And his ability to slice up stupid memes to pieces of stinky mental sushi.

I understand from a friend that the Quantum Gravity series led some male critic to remark that at last I had shown my true colours – I wasn’t a serious SF writer after all (cos, yeah, the previous four books were suddenly miraculously transformed from intellectual hardcore to pink pony poo, right?) but a trivial scribbler of robot/elf porn.

Two things, anonymous buddy . First, I don’t think you ever saw porn if that’s what you think it is. There are stock romances on the market that make what I write look like Mills & Boon circa 1960. Second, seriously?

As an aside I note that the first book in that series has outsold the sum total of all my other book sales (that’s 9 books) by several times over.

If this situation is going to change outside me and my personal reality then it can only happen if everyone with the power to influence it changes their internal stage and accepts women (and PoC and LGBTQ and all the rest) as players of equal repute and charm. Assert that with confidence, set the scene and the rest will follow.  For something like that to happen we need to focus on transformation and creation, the widening of the possibilities for SF and its many consumers. We have to talk as if it’s already real and the field is level. That’s how we have to behave right now.

Instead of that I see lists and handwringing and statistical analysis and individuals either slogging against the meme or leaving the arena. To those holding it who hope for change I say drop the meme and walk away. Find something else to talk about, such as all these great new SF books and films you just found out about. Shake it off like Taylor Swift, because while you were being sad about the sorry state of SF publishing or whatever you could have been reading a fantastic book.

In reality SF is a set of attitudes you can choose and a ton of furniture and props. It’s alive and it’s whatever you’re writing when you think you’re writing it. It’s funny, it’s serious, it’s ludicrous, it’s your heart on a plate with your soul as a scented foam on top. It’s art like any other art. To be an artist you have to be like Deadpool, unkillable, playing your own scene regardless of the lead flying around your head, or in it.

Those seeking to define SF and make sweeping statements about it should do well to listen to the words of Anton Ego, the critic from the movie Ratatouille.  “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extra-ordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: ‘Anyone can cook.’ But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

So as my good colleague Chuck Wendig is wont to say. Art. Talk about art with love and enthusiasm and then –  Art harder, mother******s. Whoever you are.

 

Justina Robson has written seven novels. Her debut SILVER SCREEN was published by Macmillan in 1999 and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award. Justina would then write MAPPA MUNDI (2001), NATURAL HISTORY (2003) and LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE GOD OF LOVE (2005).

Justina’s most recent series is the Quantum Gravity sequence, published by Gollancz in the UK (and by Pyr in the US). It is very much a mixture of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Of this Justina says ‘[It] is, among other things, one of those kick-ass-female-protagonist-with-vampire-boyfriend things so beloved of Zeno’s own John Berlyne. Except he isn’t a vampire – he’s an elf.  She’s a machine.  The other boyfriend is a demon.  It’s exactly what you would expect from a serious SF writer. ‘ DOWN TO THE BONE, the fifth-and-final book in the series, was published in 2011 by Gollancz (UK) and Pyr (US).

Justina’s work has been shortlisted for many awards, including the Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, John W Campbell and BSFA Best Novel.  In 2001 she was joint winner of the Amazon Writer’s Bursary which led to a brief period as Writer in Residence at Queen Mary & Westfield College, London.   Her short fiction has appeared in various anthologies and collections.

In addition to writing she enjoys the occasional teaching position at The Arvon Foundation.   She has also appeared as a guest participant in the following projects: The Foresight Project,  BioCentre, and Human Futures@FACT .

She wavers between taking herself very seriously and not seriously at all.  She finds writing about herself in the third person very strange.

Find out more by visiting Justina Robson’s web site.

 

The Realities of Writing Speculative Fiction for Today’s Uncertain Market

Nobody Knew She Was There 

My thanks to Liz Williams for contributing such a frank Guest Post  in Schrodinger’s Writer, telling how it is now for many of us mid-listers, both male and female; much food for thought. My thanks also to all those of you who took time and trouble to re-blog and/or comment.

Next week on the Guest Blog, I’m looking forward to welcoming Justina Robson; do drop by soon to read her post!

Schrodinger’s Writer – Liz Williams

NOBODY KNEW SHE WAS THERE

I’m very pleased to welcome Liz Williams to the Guest Blog this week with some very pertinent thoughts about visibility.

SCHRODINGER’S WRITER

 

With this blog series and others, a consensus has been emergent for some time with respect to women who write science fiction. To summarise, this is as follows:

we’re not as visible as male writers – e.g. in the news media
we don’t tend to sell as well as male writers
we don’t feature in anthologies as much as male writers and this is in part due to the selection process (men tend to think of other men, but not of women)
there is a Highlander trend when people talk about women SF writers: the past ‘one’ is currently Ursula LeGuin, and the present ‘chosen one’ tends to vary from year to year
older/middle aged female writers get pushed off the penultimate rung of the visibility tower: when the lists of women in SF appear, most of us who are 50+ do not feature. Writers of the 70s show up, and some of the younger writers (thankfully), but we do not
lists of women SF writers achieve very little

This is on top of the usual issues of publishing, which I’ll talk about later. And this doesn’t mean that male writers are exempt from a lot of these issues either: overall they seem to fare better, but I know plenty of individual cases who are in an analogous position. I originally wrote in this post that my perception of the genre scene may be just that: a perception and I’d like to see some more stats, and then some appeared in the Guardian (written by a male editor).

A lot of people have addressed ways of dealing with all this, and they range from:

lists of women writers (see above)
actively canvassing for more women to be included in anthos (this attracts the usual arguments about positive discrimination)
recommendations for self publishing, Patreon and Kickstarters
blog posts

I think we’re now in danger of reinventing the wheel. Canvassing for anthos is working, up to a point. The Kickstarters tend to be a bit circular, in that we all end up supporting one another with limited outside input. The recent Nebula list was encouraging. It’s all ‘up to a point.’ But what I want to look at is when you have to go beyond that point, and the stage at which you quit.

When I began writing, the career model I had in my head was that of my mother, Veronica Williams, who wrote a dozen or so novels for Robert Hale in the 1970s and early 80s. Then Hale stopped focusing on Gothic fiction, and stopped publishing my mother.

When I started to write, I was reasonably young and relatively ambitious. I wanted to see my work in print, but did not expect to do so. However, because of my mother’s experience, I knew that if I did become published, my career could stop at any point – indeed, was likely to stop. If I was to retain any sense of perspective, I knew that this possibility must always be born in mind and that the balance of the Williams ego vs the publishing industry needed to be maintained.

As a novelist, my career did indeed stop some time ago. It did so because of the sales figures: editors are not, I believe, inherently prejudiced against women writers. However, the money people run the industry and there have been significant goal-post moves over the last few decades – e.g. the demise of the midlist. I think that publishers do, in fact, give novelists a half decent chance in terms of the numbers of books they commission (you usually get an initial 2 or 3, then probably a 3 book deal), but they’re one of the few industries which won’t, overall, actively promote new products. I had a better run on novels than I expected, but this was in part due to the smaller press: I think now that this was a mistake on my part, given the nature of much of that part of the industry (NewCon Press is a laudable exception, Open Road have been very good indeed, and I am grateful to Morrigan Books, too).

However, we’re living in a capitalist society and, the promotional issue notwithstanding, it is pointless in practice to complain that you ought to be published when your books aren’t selling. Publishing companies are in the business of making as much money as possible, and you know that when you go in. I also run a retail business: if something doesn’t sell, we don’t get more of it.

Not selling obviously leaves the writer out of a job. In this case, there are a number of choices you can make, and clearly these are going to depend on individual circumstances:

do you have another source of income?
Does that income source allow you enough time to write?
Are you dependent on a family member?
Are you prepared to go into self publishing?
Do you just want your work out there, whether you get paid for it or not?

In my own case, I have other sources of income, which sometimes allow me enough time to write, but usually don’t (I’m talking about fiction – in my job, I write a lot, but it’s not public). When younger, I made time to write – middle of the night, first thing in the morning, lunchtimes – but I’m not prepared to sacrifice that time any more. I’d rather have actual lunch. My family are largely dependent on me, and self publishing has not produced anywhere near a sufficient income to sustain the way we live.  I’m not prepared to put other people through a massive downsizing, even if they agreed to it, in order to gratify what is, now, a hobby, and I’m not prepared not to be paid. I can’t see myself getting another novel contract but I feel lucky to have had such a long run, writing the rather obscure and rather odd stuff that I have. And I’m surprised that it went on for as long as it did. My work is simply not commercial enough.

So as far as novel writing is concerned, I don’t think there is anything to be gained by struggling on with it. So I’m canning it until the point when I can resume it as a secondary interest, if I decide to do so. I’m still writing short fiction, and still involved with Milford (I’m not disappearing socially, given that some of my closest friends are in genre). Some of my backlist is still available from Open Road. I’m still responding to commission requests, from anthologies, and have a number coming out in the next couple of years. (We may also run the third in the Witchcraft Diary series: because this is non-fiction, I have to live it before I can write it.)

Why am I telling you all this? Partly because writers don’t normally do this; they just fade away. I’m having to make the best of a bad job and sometimes you need to know that someone else has pulled the plug, and that pulling the plug is actually viable. Having a career fail is by no means the worst thing that can happen to you and you need not to be afraid of it.

However, having your career fold does not mean that you need to stop writing. But you need to be clear about why you’re doing it:

is it the money?
Is it the act of creativity?
Is it love of a world and your characters?
Is it fun?
Do you need to be seen as a public person in writing?
If you do need that public persona, why?

If people don’t buy your books, you won’t be published any longer, as we’ve seen. But this doesn’t erase your ability to actually write. Visibility affects your career in publishing, not the writing itself.

This is an ontological issue. Vision is a primary measure in Western culture when applied to women: how you look to others is critical. But I think – since we’re going to be erased anyway – we could viably interrogate the importance of the concept of visibility in our creative work, just as we do in response to the constant policing of our physical appearance.

I have no objection to visibility online or in the physical world, by the way: I think I have as much right to it as anyone else, although I don’t necessarily seek it out. If it’s professionally necessary, I’ll do it – but I won’t do it if it doesn’t produce significant results. I don’t need to have a public presence for the sake of it.

As writers we’re trained into craving visibility and this is important on one level. As women writers, we get very focused on being and staying in the public eye. But as I’ve asked above, why do we need to do this? From a financial perspective, as I’ve outlined above, it is clear. If we’re struggling to keep a career going because of supporting a family, or for other good reasons (I’m counting sheer determination and refusal to be squashed as one of those, also providing role models – which is very important. It can save people’s lives). But unless you have no other income, which some people don’t, it’s not our only choice.

Why do we need to be seen? Why do we care so much about the external gaze? I’m not, please note, using the term ‘male gaze’ in that sentence. That’s not a sole concern; my complete non-appearance, and that of my colleagues, in the ‘women in SF lists’ compiled by women has been a contributory factor to my decision to quit. A male friend wrote recently of the depressing experience of being omitted from the lists of the ‘unjustly disregarded.’

However, one has to take note of male + gaze when, for example, another friend was told that it didn’t matter what she wrote about feminism, because she wasn’t one of the big three bloggers who blog about feminism in SF. All of those bloggers are men (and if they didn’t blog about feminism, they’d be vilified for that, as well – the system is geared towards losing, whatever action you take).

Back to the ‘why’ of the need to be seen. Do we need it because current thinking tells us that invisibility erases us? But invisibility in terms of the publishing industry doesn’t do that literally – obviously. It just means we don’t have a particular social status: we may retain others. I am currently working full-time in a cutting-edge area. Can we reframe, and see invisibility as empowering? If nobody knows she is there – well, hell, she can get up to all sorts. And why is the writer’s own activity not sufficient unto herself? Because someone’s telling her that’s not good enough? The message from the culture is that it’s not enough to do things in private. You have to be seen.

But you don’t. You’re not Schrodinger’s writer. Your work is not dependent on whether others observe it or not, and in this case we’re a lot luckier than actors, for example. My mother has been writing all these years. She hasn’t shown it to anyone; she’s just been getting on with it for over three decades, creating worlds. The reason for writing, for her as for me, is in doing the thing itself, for the sake of the creative impetus. I have a lot of ideas and I keep on having them: I like the process of jotting them down, mixing them up, spinning a story. If it doesn’t get seen, well, so what, it doesn’t get seen. The lack of gaze cannot uncreate it, cannot rob me of the process of creation. So from that point of view, I am not Schrodinger’s writer either: I shall continue, whether or not I am seen to do so.

 

Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply business. She has been published by Bantam Spectra (US) and Tor Macmillan (UK), also Night Shade Press and appears regularly in Asimov’s and other magazines. She is the secretary of the Milford SF Writers’ Workshop, and also teaches creative writing.

Novels are: THE GHOST SISTER (Bantam Spectra), EMPIRE OF BONES, THE POISON MASTER, NINE LAYERS OF SKY, BANNER OF SOULS (Bantam Spectra – US, Tor Macmillan – UK), DARKLAND, BLOODMIND (Tor Macmillan UK), SNAKE AGENT, THE DEMON AND THE CITY, PRECIOUS DRAGON, THE SHADOW PAVILION (Night Shade Press) WINTERSTRIKE (Tor Macmillan) and THE IRON KHAN (Morrigan Press) and WORLDSOUL (Prime). The Chen series is currently being published by Open Road.

Her first short story collection THE BANQUET OF THE LORDS OF NIGHT was also published by Night Shade Press, and her second, A GLASS OF SHADOW, is published by New Con Press.

The Witchcraft Shop Diaries (1 and 2) are published by New Con Press.

Her novel BANNER OF SOULS has been nominated for the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, along with 3 previous novels, and the Arthur C Clarke Award.

Liz writes a regular CIF column for the Guardian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women who Write Excellent SFF…

My thanks again to Cora Buhlert for her sharing her fascinating experiences of becoming a SFF writer – and in another language, too! – on Nobody Knew She Was There. 

And I’m looking forward to welcoming the next contributor: multi-faceted SFF author Liz Williams with a clear-eyed and highly pertinent reflection on the realities of sustaining a writing career in the current fickle market. Check out her upcoming post SCHRODINGER’S WRITER from 23.05.16 onward.

Nobody Knew She Was There – Cora Buhlert’s Guest Post

I’m delighted to welcome Cora Buhlert to the blog with a fascinatingly different perspective: the joys of reading and writing in another language (English) and some of the obstacles that she’s encountered  along the way.

 

 

It’s something of a truism that the further a writer deviates from an imagined default of white, male, straight, cisgender and English-speaking, preferably American, the more challenges they will face. In this respect, I’m doubly handicapped, because I’m a woman writer from a non-anglophone country.

I have been an SFF fan pretty much my entire life. Growing up in Germany, I was told (yes, told, not read) fairytales as bedtime stories – and not the defused Disney versions either, but the bloody originals where uppity women (and they inevitably were women) inevitably met a grisly fate. Of course, fairytales had fallen out of fashion by the 1970s along with anything fantastic and were deemed too violent, and too remote from children’s life experiences. But thankfully, my mother did not care and so I was exposed to fairytales by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Wilhelm Hauff as well as to children’s fantasy in the works of Astrid Lindgren, Ellis Kaut, Max Kruse, Otfried Preußler and Michael Ende and of course the gorgeously illustrated picture books chronicling the fantastic journeys of Mecki, the hedgehog.

Did I notice that women didn’t fare well in these stories, that they were either damsels to be rescued or villainesses to be destroyed? Did I notice that Mecki the hedgehog’s wife Micki was conspicuously absent from his adventures, even though she had her own toy? I’m not sure, though I remember that, when I re-enacted those stories with my toys, I had Micki fighting pirates alongside her husband Mecki, while my princesses frequently rescued themselves.

I discovered science fiction a little later, not through books, but via movies and television. I eagerly devoured Star Trek, Space 1999, Time Tunnel, the original Battlestar Galactica, the anime version of Edmund Hamilton’s Captain Future and of course Raumpatrouille Orion, often called Germany’s answer to Star Trek (though it’s not – both shows premiered within two weeks of each other on different continents). I also desperately tried to persuade my parents to take me to see this new movie called Star Wars, which looked absolutely fascinating in the clips I glimpsed on TV.

These movies and TV shows offered not just the requisite sense of wonder, but also some pretty impressive female characters: Princess Leia, Joan Randall, Dr. Helena Russell, Maya, Sheba, Athena, Uhura and the other mini-skirted, beehived women of Star Trek and of course, Tamara Jagellowsk, security officer aboard the space cruiser Orion, who not just reins in the dashing but overly impulsive Commander Cliff Allister McLane, but also responds to a kiss from said dashing commander with “Well, now I’m relieved, cause that was a very average kiss” (They eventually get together and subsequent kisses are much better than average). These women were my role models, the women I wanted to be when I grew up, because they got to have adventures, they wore gorgeous clothes and had great hair (the elaborate hair-dos of Princess Leia and the women of Star Trek were a big part of the appeal, because as a young child, I was made to wear my hair cropped short, which I hated) and they always got the guy on their own terms.

When I was about fifteen, I discovered that science fiction was not just a filmic genre, but that there were books just like those movies I loved. Like so many others, I started out reading Star Wars tie-ins and eventually branched out to the other novels in the spinner rack labelled science fiction and fantasy. I bought whatever sounded good and discovered the male luminaries of the genre – Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert and Burroughs – but also women like Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, C.J. Cherryh, Barbara Hambly, Carol Nelson Douglas or Janny Wurts. My reading was determined by whatever was available on the limited English language SFF bookshelves at my local bookstore, but nonetheless I always found plenty of good books to read. Somewhere around this time, I also started writing down the stories I had been making up for as long as I could remember. And of course, most of those stories were science fiction or fantasy, often strongly influenced by whatever I’d read and watched at the time.

I both wrote and read in English, because Germany was rather hostile to any sort of fiction that was not realistic. There was some translated SFF, often published in shoddy editions, and of course the long-running pulp magazine adventures of space hero Perry Rhodan and Ghosthunter John Sinclair, but reading those was frowned upon, because the pulps were deemed harmful for young readers by the same educators who also looked down on fairytales. However, I quickly realised that all the things that were bad for you, when you read them in German – SFF, pulp magazines, comics – were suddenly a lot more acceptable, not to mention beneficial for your language development, when read in English.

As for writing, it was only natural that I would start to write in the language I read in. Besides, I had subconsciously figured out that German SFF writers had a hard time getting published, unless they wrote children’s books or pulp magazine stories. Because German publishers were and continue to be unwilling to take a chance on a German unknown, when translating a foreign bestseller with a proven track record is so much cheaper. Besides, German SFF supposedly does not sell – a self-fulfilling prophecy, if there ever was one. And so even the creators of pulp heroes Perry Rhodan and John Sinclair had to write under faux American pen names and make their heroes American and British respectively.

I found plenty of new books and authors to read, first via Starlog, SFX Magazine and the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction and later via the Internet, and also filled in the gaps in my SFF reading by seeking out those classics that I had missed. I also attended creative writing classes at university and became the sales manager for the university literary magazine, even though my genre stories often left my teachers and fellow students baffled. I even fought both to be allowed to do my MA thesis on science fiction and to incorporate the perspective of a writer as well as that of a scholar of literature.

And suddenly, something strange happened. The more critically acclaimed and highly recommended SFF books I read, the less I enjoyed my chosen genre. Because apparently, I had been doing SFF all wrong. I’d been reading the wrong books by the wrong authors and completely managed to miss the cutting edge of science fiction. What is more, I’d overdosed on SFF criticism as a result of my MA thesis, which left me frustrated with both the genre and its noisier critics.

My writing suffered as well. Because by that point, I’d read plenty of articles, essays  and blog posts about how “real” science fiction writers worked (and of course, those “real” science fiction writers were inevitably men). I’d read that “real” science fiction writers created every last detail of their fictional worlds before penning a single word and that they mined science articles for story ideas. So I started reading science articles and found that they not just failed to spark story ideas, but that I actually had to force myself to read those articles all the way through, because they bored me to death.

What I should have realised is that I am simply a different type of writer. My stories don’t start with a big scientific idea, they start with character or a scene. Only then do I build the world and do the necessary research to match the story. However, the conclusion to which I came was, “I suck. All this time, I read the wrong books by the wrong authors and didn’t even realise they were bad. And since I cannot appreciate the right authors, I apparently was never really a science fiction fan at all and I’m clearly not meant to be an SFF writer either.”

So I gradually drifted away from science fiction and fantasy, both as a reader and a writer, and turned to other genres. Eventually, I also came back to my first love science fiction and fantasy in a roundabout way via science fiction romance, paranormal romance and urban fantasy. To my amazement, I realised that all this time, there had been this huge subgenre of SFF written by women right under my nose, books that I’d never even realised existed, books with actual characterisation and no seventeen page infodumps about starship propulsion systems.

By now, I had a bit of success as a writer, selling historical adventure stories as well as the occasional literary crime short to magazines. Once the self-publishing revolution started, I republished these old stories in e-book form. But so far I’d been beating my head against the inboxes of science fiction magazines and anthologies in vain.

It is well known that women have a harder time getting and staying published, getting reviews, getting recognition. However, by this point I was also beginning to suspect something that had never occurred to me before, namely that my nationality might be a strike against me. Because the ugly truth is that anybody from a non-anglophone country who writes in English inevitably has to deal with the insinuation that their language skills aren’t quite up to scratch. Most of us have heard comments along those lines – my personal highlight was when a reasonably successful fantasy author (male, of course) claimed that not only couldn’t he possibly be mistaken about English grammar (“He was working” is not actually passive voice), but that he also knew the meaning of German words better than I did.

Another problem facing international writers is more subtle. For in a market – whether indie or traditional –that is still dominated by American tastes and expectations, our stories often fail to hit those expectations. Because even though we have consumed more than our share of American cultural products – books, films, comics, television – we nonetheless aren’t Americans. Our history and culture, not to mention our experiences and influences, are different. In fact, you may have noticed that I mentioned a lot of works above that few people outside Germany have ever heard of. So the stories that rise out of the stew pot of our subconscious are quite different from what an American writer would produce, even if they are nominally part of the same genre. In fact, it took me a long time to realise that a lot of what I perceived as bugs in the fiction I consumed, were actually features to the American audience those works were aimed at.

IF

The desire to be finally able to tell the stories I wanted to tell without banging my head against American editors and their genre expectations was a large part of what prompted me to go indie. But of course, it’s not all roses and sunshine in the indie world either. Because as an indie writer, a large part of your success depends on how well you manage to satisfy the tastes and expectations of Amazon’s customers – a customer base which is largely American. As a result, a lot of successful indie SFF adheres to formulas that are much more rigid than anything traditional publishing ever demanded. And so it becomes accepted wisdom, peddled by bestselling indie authors, that space opera of course requires a male protagonist and must have plenty of action featuring manly space marines doing manly things in space, because that’s what the market supposedly wants.

Which is great, if that’s your thing – it just doesn’t happen to be mine. So I was forced to make a choice. I could either write what the market supposedly wants – manly space marines doing manly things in space, farmboys finding out they were in fact the heir to the throne and destined to overthrow the dark lord, billionaire alpha werewolf bikers falling in love with plump women who may or may not be their stepsisters – or I could write the stories I really wanted to write, even if they have more conversation than action and feature women who are more than damsels and prizes, men who are not macho stereotypes, LGBT characters and characters of colour and settings that aren’t just suburban America in space (though I write about American suburbia, too, usually to have flying saucers and monsters thoroughly trash it).

Because I can only tell my own stories and hope that someone out there wants to read them.

 

 

 

Author bio:

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently working towards her PhD.

Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres. When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher.

Visit her on the web at www.corabuhlert.com or follow her on Twitter under @CoraBuhlert.

 

Another Fascinating Perspective on Writing SFF – Cora Buhlert

Nobody Knew She Was There…

My thanks to Kari Sperring for her astute and thought-provoking reflections last week on what it means to be a genre writer – a women writer – today. Much to relate to and to think about…

Next week, I’ll be welcoming Cora Buhlert to the Guest Blog.

Unreal: Kari Sperring writes for Nobody Knew She Was There

Unreal

Kari Sperring

 

I’m not sure about being noticeable: I never have been. It’s not comfortable, being looked at by people you don’t know, and being looked at by people you do know can be highly disorienting. Which is perhaps a long-winded way of saying that when it comes down to it, I quite like being obscure. It lets me get on with things, get on with my everyday life. It lets me feel I have room to breathe. And a lot of the time, it makes me feel less unsafe, because being visible, being noticed, is a hazard and risk and a danger, and I am not good with any of that triad.

I can dimly remember, as a child, daydreaming of being a famous ballet dancer, or perhaps a famous actor. But my conception of both of these were less about being seen and more about being like favourite characters in stories. Posy and Pauline Fossil (in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes) leave the stage of the novel at the point their fame begins. I didn’t like Streatfeild’s later book Gemma, which dealt more with the actuality of fame. What I was drawn to in Posy and Pauline was their talent, their competence. And to me, at 6 and 7 and 8, being ‘famous’ meant being known for being good at what you do. I didn’t want Gemma’s life, with all the unwanted attention, the restrictions, the distance from normality.

I still don’t. It’s often said that there is a curious contradiction at the heart of the modern writing world.  Writing is essentially a solitary pastime. To write consistently and well, you need blocks of quiet time in which to think, to plan, and to get the words down. But once a book is published, these days, writers are expected to put themselves out there in public and publicise their work. We are asked to make ourselves noticeable, and more than noticeable. We are asked to be loud and pushy and determined, all things at which I am bad.

They are also all things which I have always been told not to do, not to be. I don’t know how much of this is generational, how much is gendered, how much is class-based, but I know I am not alone in this feeling that there is something inherently wrong in drawing attention to myself or to my achievements. My culture, my society, my upbringing all taught me not to show off. And here I am, years beyond childhood, hating to take any of the steps that might bring my books more attention. Here I am, caught in the contradiction, happy to be unnoticed because it makes me feel safe, but required to become noticeable in order to further my writing career.

As a culture, we are far more forgiving of men drawing attention to themselves than women.  White men in particular stand at the top of the social pyramid, encouraged to succeed, and supported to self-promote. We internalise these social hierarchies from an early age and act according to them. I hear my inner voice judging other writers sometimes. I roll my eyes at some of the men talking up their books day after day, but mostly I just accept it as background noise.  But the women… I have actively to fight down the impulse that judges, that sees pushiness and intrusiveness, because I was educated to believe that women should be self-effacing.  As women,  we may feel obliged always to give way to others – male others first, of course, but also other women, because good girls don’t push.

And then, there’s another contradiction.  Writing is a creative activity, and, like all creative work, it is hard to place an objective value on it.  We make aesthetic judgements: this is beautiful, this is ugly; this is interesting, this is dull; this is Art, this is pulp. But they are not hard and fast: they vary from person to person, era to era, culture to culture. Creativity cannot be weighed and measured and doled out in tidy portions. Yet we live in a capitalist culture that does little but weigh and measure, and judges everything and everyone in terms of how much money can be earned. A work of fiction is appraised not on its content, on how readers experience it, on what it has to say about life and imagination, society and emotion and modernity and psychology, but on its marketability. How many copies does it sell? Does it contain tropes X and Y and Z which were in that other book which was a big seller, or is it about Q, which as a subject matter didn’t attract a lot of sales? Could it be a bestseller? An environment which values financial gain over every else, in which books are sales units, tends to prefer things which seem ‘safe’, things which are familiar, things which are like those things that already sell – and that tends to be books by white people, usually male, about a specific range of subjects, set in a specific subset of places. Some writers are comfortable with this: they value themselves and their books in these financial terms. And that’s fine. But many of us are not. Many of us struggle to make that direct a link between the value of our work in our own terms – did I achieve what I set out to in this book? What did I do well? What could I have done better? Did I convey my story, my theme, my meaning well enough – and the value placed on it by the market.

I am not a commercial writer. I’m just not wired that way, it seems. I write rather slowly, for one thing. For another, my style tends to the literary, which is of debateable value in fantasy. My plots tend to the odd. I know what’s going on in my characters heads, but I don’t always lay it out as clearly as I might. And I do not like either sentiment or consolatory endings. I am by training a historian of the early middle ages, and, well, life is not always – or indeed often – like that. (Though sometimes extremely odd things do happen in the real world. For instance, the fiancée of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd of Gwynedd really was captured by pirates on her way to their marriage.) I write, I’ve been told, difficult books. On my good days, I think they’re also okay books, but I find it hard to say – to write here in black and white – even that much about them. But I don’t know how to sell them, because, well, what do I say? They have ghosts, sometimes, and a lot of politics, and shape-shifters, and creatures from an underworld. They have printing presses and plague, a kind of elemental magic, swordfights and journeys into another realm.  They have a lot about water: as a friend once observed, I am obsessed with water and how it shapes our worlds. They are the sort of books I write: it’s possible that they could only be written by me.

I write both fiction and non-fiction, and both are creative in different ways. Both are, I suppose, a kind of contribution to our ongoing cultural conversations. I can talk quite sensibly about my non-fiction, most of the time. I have a sense of myself as a competent historian: I know I know my material. With fiction, it’s harder. My worlds about which I write are unreal: they are endlessly mutable, veiled in layers of questions and possibilities that expand far beyond the many questions and possibilities of history.  I am always searching, in my fictive worlds, for today’s revelations, today’s changes, but I know that on another day, these may be something completely different. The ground on which they stand is unreal.

Which spirals back, for me, to where I started. Because to me, being noticed is about being real. And a lot of the time, well, I just don’t know. If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody sees, was it ever really there? And, aside from those words I put down and send out to be seen, am I real, from moment to moment? There is always a now, but I can’t be truly sure of anything outside that: the past is mutable, interpretable in multiple ways. The future is never here.  Before I was published as a writer of fiction, I was never sure if I really was a writer: real writers were in print. Now… My books are real, certainly, their mutable worlds frozen into particular form. But for myself, I remain unsure. Real writers sell, says the voice of the market. Real writers put themselves out there. Real writers are noticed, noticeable, seen. Real writers write a lot, are not slow or uncomfortable with attention.

My writing is real. But for myself…. I think I may still be on some level unreal.

 

Kari Sperring grew up dreaming of joining the musketeers and saving France, only to discover that the company had been disbanded in 1776 and anyway never admitted women. Disappointed, instead she studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University. As K.L/Kari Maund she has written and published five books and many articles on Celtic and Viking history and co-authored a book on the history and real people behind her favourite novel, The Three Musketeers (with Phil Nanson). Alongside this, she went on writing fiction and began selling short fiction in 2007. She has published two novels, Living with Ghosts and The Grass King’s Concubine.