Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 15

Reglutening and Science

This is the end of the story, I think.  A twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan in high fettle; a Rashomon-style reframing of everything that has gone before. In order to understand where I've been, it would be best to start at the beginning, with the deglutening. You have to understand how sick I was, how desperate for help. You have to understand how transformative the deglutening was for me.

Or... how it inevitably looked that way, at least. Because I think I was wrong. The whole time, I was wrong. Gluten may have never been the problem at all. And yet the evidence was insurmountable. Every time I was a little daring, the result pointed to the one deadly culprit. How could I have been so wrong, for so long?

Vitamin D

This winter past, my mental health took a nose dive and stayed there. It was a long and brutal winter, and various personal stresses made it worse than just the weather. I made an appointment with my physician with every intention of talking to him about medication.

The day before my appointment I realized I'd been there before, exactly there. This was a familiar feeling. This was me crying in the parking lot after the endocrinologist told me that having my boyfriend take me out to dinner would solve all my problems. Oh, right, you again.

Instead of asking for benzos, I asked for him to check my Vitamin D levels. He did so, surprised at the request, but willing to humor me. My D3 was on the very low edge of normal.

I started taking ridiculous quantities of Vitamin D and was reborn. 

I've long known that many of the problems I suffered before the deglutening were the result of my appallingly low D levels. The hair loss, the anxiety, the menstrual irregularities. But celiac disease and gluten intolerance are very frequently comorbid with vitamin deficiencies -- malabsorption of vitamins, right? The course of the disease wears away at the finger-like lining of your intestines and makes it difficult for your body to absorb the nutrients in your food. (I have a long-standing B12 deficiency, too, for all that I've never been a vegan.)

So while I was aware that many of the symptoms were fixed by those lovely D3 pills and not by removing gluten from my life, the fact of the D deficiency in the first place was suggestive of a gluten problem.

And D3 couldn't explain why my stomach aches went away, right?

Surprise Abdominal Surgery

Earlier this month, I got a really, really bad stomach ache. Long story short: within four hours of onset I'm at the emergency room and on opiates en route to being admitted and having my gall bladder out. I was in the hospital for about three days, in all.

Afterward, the surgeon told me that not only was my gall bladder completely filled with stones,  the bile in it had turned white. There was a lot of scarring, to the extent that she had trouble cutting through the bile ducts to remove the damn thing. My gall bladder clearly hadn't been doing anything useful for a long, long time.

Quick biology lesson: Do you know what your gall bladder does, exactly? It stores, concentrates, and releases bile from your liver into your small intestine. Bile is the substance that allows your body to digest fat and absorb the nutrients from it. Nutrients like, oh, I don't know... vitamin D. Without bile, many unpleasant digestive things can happen to you when you eat fat. I won't spell them out for you, because it's gross, but... yeah.

Now, in the post-glutened era, my stomach aches were tremendously better than they had been, but they were never really gone. We all kind of shrugged and thought it must be Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is one of the diagnoses a doctor will give you to explain away digestive problems that don't appear to be killing you but that they aren't sure what else to do about.

I knew I'd always had problems with too much dairy fat. My mother fed me skim milk as a toddler because I couldn't tolerate full-fat, and though I love coffee with cream, I suffer for it.

The day after I came home from the hospital, gall bladder newly removed, I ate a bowl of ice cream with hot fudge. And I was fine. Huh.

Clues and Evidence

Even before the gall bladder surgery, I'd formed a theory that my gluten tolerance had improved, or, or... something. I'd eaten a few things that were known to be cross-contaminated with no apparent ill effect, and so I'd been "chancing it" in restaurants more and more. And it was OK. I also wasn't getting sick when I forgot to put foil down in the toaster oven. The theory was that my intestines had finally healed enough to tolerate some small amounts of gluten.

But then my gall bladder came out, and suddenly I had a new lens with which to look at everything that had come before. And I formed a new theory, that I will now share with you: it was never gluten at all. It was fat the whole time.

Consider what you give up when you go gluten-free. You eschew fried foods, because in a restaurant, the same oil is going to be cross-contaminated with flour from the battered chicken tenders or onion rings. Creamy sauces (thickened with flour!) are right out, as are cream-based soups. Gravies are gone, as are most desserts. When you give up gluten, you eat a lot of salad, a lot of grilled stuff. Sorbet and fruit. At home I made roasted chicken, spaghetti with corn pasta, pancakes, curry, grilled fish, rice and beans.

So I went gluten-free, and I felt a lot better right away. My first gluten challenge was the night I ate a ton of bite-sized Halloween chocolate. I felt terrible again. But it maybe wasn't the malt syrup in the candy, it was just the cocoa butter.

I tested again some months later, trying some chip dip made with Lipton's Onion Soup Mix and just a few cookies a friend had made for a party. And I felt awful for a week. But it wasn't the barley in the soup mix, it was the sour cream.

I would eat the tortilla chips from Moe's or the French fries from Wendy's and feel like death for a day or two. But maybe it wasn't the cross-contaminated oil, maybe it was the oil itself.

I felt sick after eating my own home-made gluten-free pumpkin pie. I couldn't work it out, until I realized I was using a cookbook with wheat flour still covering the pages. A-hah, cross contamination! But maybe it was the butter in the crust the whole time.

And when I felt ill after a meal at a friend's or relative's house, despite my hosts' best efforts, maybe that wasn't accidental but inevitable cross-contamination at all. Maybe it was just the richness of a celebratory spread, too much for my feeble and diseased gall bladder to tolerate.

You see how easy it was to arrive at the conclusion that it really was the gluten? You see how the evidence supports either theory equally well? This, my friends, is why science is never set in stone. Sometimes you aren't asking the right question.

Maybe it was never the gluten at all. Maybe it was always, always the fat.

Saturday night, we ordered pizza from my old favorite pizza place, the one with the most delicious chewy crust you can imagine. I followed it up with a Cinnabon roll. And I was... you know, OK. The next morning in a fit of jubilance we went to Cheesecake Factory, where I had sourdough and French toast. There has been no moderation. And I have been... you know. Fine?

I have not been suffering. After that chip dip and cookies incident, I was so sick I felt like I had the flu for a week straight. But it looks like... well, you know.

I am having a very strong emotional reaction to this turn of events.

Looking Forward

Food isn't just food, or we'd all be happy with Soylent. Food is love, it's belonging, it's joy. Food limitations are hard, because those limits end up restricting so much more than simply how you fuel your body.

I'll be honest, I'm a little bitter about the doctor who suggested gluten-free, for all that he was my savior at the time. And bitter about the several doctors who shrugged at my vitamin deficiencies and never thought to investigate further. The ones who were disinterested in anything related to my stomach or my bowels, who actively discouraged me from investigating, some dozen years ago when I still remembered it wasn't normal.

In my three years and eight months without gluten, I was known to say at least a couple of times a month that I wished I could give food up entirely as a bad job. And you know, sometimes I pretty much did give up. At WorldCon, I ate the same nachos from the hotel bar four times in five days because it didn't kill me outright the first time and I was too afraid to chance anything else.

And I'm afraid now. I'm really, truly, super-duper afraid that I really was right the first time, and that it really was the gluten. That my gut has healed up for now, but by eating poison again, I'll abrade it away bite by bite until one day the penny will drop and I will not be fine any more. I'm afraid to hope. I'm afraid to get used to this in case it's not real.

But for now... for now, I have a corpus of data, and all I can do is interpret it the best I can, and make decisions I think I can live with.

Yesterday I realized I could have chicken nuggets from McDonald's if I wanted to, and reader, tears sprang into my eyes. As I wrote this, I suddenly realized I could have any kind of sushi I like, not just the shrimp California or the plain salmon and tuna rolls I've been reduced to. When I wrote about that bowl of ice cream I realized I can have a waffle cone again.

Ramen noodles. Soft pretzels. Bagels. So many, many sandwiches. This isn't really about food, this is about liberty.

There were some crumbs on my table this morning, and I hesitated a good long moment, then swept them into my palm to throw away.

This is going to take some getting used to. But I think I'm... fine. Better than fine. I'm free again.

I really hope it lasts.

Thank You, Anonymous Internet Trolls

We've seen an unprecedented resurgence in feminism lo these past five years. I run in some overlapping circles that have historically been very unfriendly to women -- tech and startup culture, games and gamer culture, SF/F fandom. And the conversation in every one of them has reached a roaring and broad consensus in the last two years: the way we've been treating women up until now is really not OK, and it has to stop.

Kotaku, the popular games site once best known for breathlessly covering things Japanese schoolgirls might do with their underwear, now talks about sexism as a problem. There was a time when that would've been unthinkable. In SF/F, a movement begun by John Scalzi for every convention to adopt a meaningful harrassment policy has resulted in... well... a ton of new harrassment policies going into place. Women like Sheryl Sandberg and Melissa Mayer are taking on senior roles at tech companies -- and while venture capital has a long, loooonnng way to go, the lack of equal access to funding is now widely considered a problem for VC funds to aggressively address. Companies like Undercurrent are publicly trying to remove the quiet hand of sexism from their processes and culture.

It's happening in the realm of comics. It's happening in Hollywood. It's happening in thoughtful online communities like MetaFilter. You guys, a new age of feminism is upon us. We're making real and meaningful progress. 

I think it's because of the trolls.

Invisible Sexism

Once upon a time, sexism was thought to be a genteel frame of mind; even a protective one. Society wasn't trying to limit what women could do, or so the thinking went; the structures in place were to make sure women had lesser troubles, to offset their natural greater burdens in the realms of child-rearing and the home.

You and I know that's bullshit. All that not having to worry your pretty little head about things like money came with enormous problems. Women who couldn't leave an abusive marriage because they'd starve, for example. Women who were uncredited for their work in the realms of literature, engineering, science, math, politics. (This stuff still happens, by the way.)

Gradually we weeded out some of the more overt signs of sexism in economic spaces. We could get hired. After another generation, we mostly got rid of all that ass-pinching in the office. And while pay equity hasn't happened, it's at the very least become a serious gaffe to suggest a woman doesn't need to make as much money as a man because she doesn't need to support a family -- at least in polite company.

Progress. It hurt while it was happening and it took a lot of time, but there's been a real result. Women are now in the labor force in roughly equal numbers to men. And with that, a lot of people thought sexism was over.

But a fundamentally dismissive and derogatory attitude toward woman persisted. In language, "like a girl" is a dead insult. It was a consensus opinion that women weren't good at or simply didn't do things like math, or computers, or video games. Evidence to the contrary was always marked as the rare outlier. And anything marked as the domain of women -- shopping, housekeeping, anything cute or pink or nurturing or romantic -- was widely considered to be fluffy and less important than all that SRS BZNS man stuff.

All the while, our culture continued to assume that the neutral state was always a heterosexual white man. Women in our entertainment were mostly love interests or sex objects... when they were there at all.

Representation in media matters -- both how much of it there is, and what it looks like. Don't take my word for it, there's a lot of research on the matter. The images we see in media shape how we think we should behave back in meatspace, and media was (is!) still flogging that old-fashioned idea that men are for doing things and women are for looking hot and swooning when appropriate. This has real and serious consequences for how women are treated. Not so much in business spaces -- we've legislated the hell out of that by now. But in all of the other domains of life; recreational spaces like Xbox Live, or sports, or dating. Even our own relationships with one another and how we share household chores, for example.

You can't legislate how people treat each other in social spaces, nor should you. This is a problem that requires a cultural fix, in the same way that it's easier to stamp out smoking, it turns out, by making it socially unacceptable, than by putting health warnings on the package. We really, really care what the other monkeys think.

But the media is busy telling us that the way things are is the way things should be -- and you can't blame any one piece of media, mind you, it's the cumulative effect of all of those drip-drip-drips of reinforcement about what role women should have in society. It's really super intensive hard to change a behavior when everything around you says that behavior is right.

The problem becomes effectively invisible. Why complain about the women in chain-mail bikinis when Conan isn't even wearing that much? Oh, come on, why are you whining about not enough women in movies? They aren't making films like Thelma and Louise for dudes, you know! Why, women have their own media, like Oprah's TV show and channel and magazine! See? There's stuff out there for women. Stop being so hysterical. You're too sensitive. This is ridiculous.  

It's easy for a man -- even a well-meaning, intelligent, fantastic man -- to roll their eyes at the argument for equal and diverse representation, when that doesn't intuitively matter the way that equal pay does. When they literally can't see the problem.

Fat, Ugly or Slutty

Which brings us to the dawn of our new age of feminism. Women have known all along that when we're alone in a public space, without the covering presence of a man, bad things can happen. Catcalls and wolf whistles, yeah, and a sort of baseline dismissiveness that you maybe don't even notice because that's just the way it's always been.

The time I asked my 8th-grade English teacher if I could be placed in a more advanced class and he told me I had pretty eyes. The MUD I stopped playing because the wizards found out I was a real girl and wouldn't stop giving me stuff. The guys on IRC trying to get me to sex them up because I had a femme-looking name. The skeevy dude who sat next to me on the subway trying to persuade me, for the entirety of my twenty-minute ride, to leave my fiancé and go out with him. The one who helpfully told me my ass was too fat while driving past me at an ATM, and the one who told me to "get a tan, you fucking albino" for daring to have pale skin at the beach. The salesman at the car dealership who gave my husband the answers to the questions I'd just asked. Everyone at any of several conferences who just assumed I was a booth babe when I was there as technical staff, and wouldn't look me in the eye. The dude who insinuated that I must be having an affair with a colleague and friend because we sat together at a conference. 

Reader, that's getting off easy.

I've literally never talked about most of this in a public venue because it's just, you know, what being a woman in the world is like. Who goes around talking about how angry they are that everything gets wet when it rains?

An invisible problem. And if you talked about it, well, it's easy to write off any one story as a bad experience. An outlier. Outside the norm. Hey, it happens, nobody's life is all sunshine and alicorns.

A funny thing happened, though. Women started talking about it on the internet anyway. Sharing experiences; describing what the world was like for them. The first notable example, for me, was Fat, Ugly or Slutty. This site takes a problem that every woman in gamer culture already knew about, named it as a problem and not just the weather, and proved it existed to men. Not just as an outlier. Not one bad seed, not a handful of immature tween boys. Mountains upon mountains of vitriol that most men had never even dreamed was out there.

There was the outrageous backlash against Anita Sarkeesian for simply wanting to talk about how women are represented in games. Or more recently, the one against Janelle Asselin for disapproving of a comic book cover. There's a nowhere-near-complete timeline of various appalling incidents in the Geek Feminism Wiki.

We're talking death and rape threats, here, too, not just gentlemanly disagreement. And this, I think, has been an epic and long-needed awakening for many, many men who don't want to be sexist but simply never saw the problem before, and for many, many women who never spoke up because they didn't realize that maybe we could make it stop.

It's easy to say nothing is such a big deal for men and women alike if it's just the one side saying "less cleavage please." But when the response is an avalanche of abuse -- and all the women are nodding their heads and saying yeah, that's about what you'd expect -- suddenly those trolls have thrown a bucket of paint on the previously undetectable situation. The well-meaning, intelligent majority can see the shape of what we're up against. And now everyone is starting to get on the same page about exactly what's going on and precisely how really, really not OK it all us.

It's easy to despair and think that the problem of misogyny is worse because we're seeing so much more about it now than we ever used to. But we're seeing more of it because we're talking about it. And we're talking about it because finally, finally, we have hard evidence of what it's like out there for women. And things are changing for the better.

So thank you, internet trolls. With every threat, every piece of casual abuse you put into writing, every one-off not-so-funny drive-by comment, you are minting new allies. You're proving that sexism is not, in fact, over. We have our necessary precondition for change -- anyone can see the problem, and consensus grows greater with every passing day that it's time to take care of it. Seriously, thank you. We could never have come this far without you.

Lists

I can predict without fail whether a working day will be an exceptional one or not based solely on whether I make a list in the morning.  

I cut my teeth on the old Franklin planners, back before they were Franklin-Covey. I've tried moving to electronic task lists a dozen times since then, using any number of tools. The Handspring Visor, Tiddlywiki, Reminders, Things.app, Remember the Milk. Probably a dozen more that I abandoned and forgot within two weeks. I had a long, successful run with Entourage, which managed intermittently recurring tasks with a brilliance I've not seen since, but my calendaring and email needs have brought me elsewhere over the last decade. 

Yet I always come back to pen and paper. Maybe a pretty notebook, with thick, creamy paper; maybe a grungy Moleskine with stickers on it. And pens! Gel pens, mostly, or my beloved Waterman Audace fountain pen, one of my most well-loved possessions. Smudgy pencils only as a last resort.

For years, I've tried to explain to myself why paper works when digital fails me. It's not like me. I'm an early adopter. A technophile. A full-on digital native. And yet every electronic task system falls short for me, cluttered up with things I no longer intend to do, or things I can't possibly get to until next week, or simply ignored until the shame of restarting becomes too heavy to bear.

But with paper, every day is a fresh start, if I need one. Just... turn the page. Coffee, pen, paper, ten minutes for contemplation of time and energy and deadlines.

And not just one list; I have many. One of all my active projects, so I remember all the flaming swords I'm juggling. One for things I want to remember to do, so I don't lose track of them, but don't mean to get to today. And one, carefully curated, spelling out the shape of this today. Big things: writing a thousand words, a conference call, read and sign a contract. Smaller things: shower, water the plants, paint my daughter's toenails.

There are days, weeks, months where I don't make any lists at all. I get some stuff done in that time, surely I do. It might even be about the same amount of stuff, to be honest. I can't know. But those times are a bleak and hazy wasteland in memory. Those are the days I'm tired, the days I fritter away, the days I stay where I am instead of moving toward what I want.  

But even knowing this, knowing how important a list can be, how it can make or break a day, I don't always make a list. I mean to, of course, but sometimes I just can't bear to, I don't have it inside me to write one. A chicken/egg paradox, it would seem.

I've come to realize that my lists aren't about productivity or planning. Not really. To me, my lists are a signifier of intent and potential, and that is why I can't move to digital. Glancing at a screen pre-populated with the stuff I thought today should be for, all chosen sometime last week? This isn't the same fundamental action. It's the making the list that's important, not merely having a list.

Making a list is creating an arcane focus for the mind. It's an act requiring a summoning of will in the moment. It's not really that a list makes a better day, I think. It's that it's only on a good day that I'm capable of making a list.

Why Diversity in Fantasy Matters

A good friend of mine showed me a work of fantasy in progress not long ago. There's a character in it who was introduced as a feminine man; maybe gay, maybe genderqueer or ambiguously gendered; but certainly someone with a nonconforming gender presentation. And a particular word was used, not just to describe this character, but to describe what kind of human being that character is in this world. For our purposes, let's say it's "Pansy."

In the course of this character introduction, the point of view character shows contempt for the Pansy. So of course I flagged it as problematic.

My friend was horrified at the thought. After all, my writer friend is not a homophobe, quite the contrary! Would never want to offend anybody at all! The character is quite cunning, and uses this contempt to his advantage later in the work, plays upon how society views him, and is very clever all around! It's just how that society is, that's all. And that point of view character is morally ambiguous, anyway -- so surely we can't take their opinions as gospel!

And it's true -- this friend is a fine and decent human being and would never intentionally set out to hurt someone. And when I set about trying to think about how to explain why I felt this particular character was problematic and how I would prefer to see this handled, I realized I have so much to say that it's a whole blog post of its own.

So here you go!

Throw the Book at the Wall

There are elements you can put into a story that are dead showstoppers for some readers. Killing animals. Child abuse. Rape. This is one of those showstoppers.

If I had purchased that book and came across that piece of text implying the existence of an inferior Pansy class of people in this society, I would quietly stop reading the book. I would never recommend it to a friend. I would never purchase a work by this author again. I might begin some angry Tweeting and blogging, if I were in a ranty frame of mind.

I wouldn't actually throw the book at the wall, but there are people who would. Because the book has started out the introduction of this topic in what appears to be a show of bad faith.

When a man on the street makes kissing sounds at me and tells me all about the vulgar thing he'd like to do to my ladyparts, I'm not going to move on to getting his phone number and going out to dinner to see if he'll prove to be a nice guy. Show's over. I don't need more information to reach my conclusion.

Likewise, if a book introduces its sole gay or genderqueer character framed as a figure worthy of disgust, I don't need more information to conclude that this isn't likely to be a friendly, affirming book in its implicit opinions about such folks. It doesn't matter if that idea is subverted later. The damage has already been done, and some share of your potential audience already stopped reading, and maybe have been hurt by their interaction with your work.

A Fantasy Society Is Of Your Own Making

Now let's address the idea that this is simply how the fantasy society feels about non-straight or non-gender-conforming characters. An immutable factor.

When I teach transmedia workshops, I often talk about load-bearing plot points. These carry the weight of the story and can't be changed without the whole thing collapsing on your head. Usually the things that matter most are character motivations and relationships. If Sonja needs to be in a bad mood going into a meeting so she says something undiplomatic, there are a lot of things that can do that. Spilled her coffee on her suit. Dented her fender on the mailbox. Found out the hot UPS guy is already dating someone else. Doesn't matter how Sonja got mad, only matters that she is.

Being able to separate the stuff that you need to keep the clockwork of the story running from the stuff that's just color is a very important skill for a writer to have. You need to know what creative decisions you're making, and sometimes you're making creative decisions without realizing you've made a conscious choice at all.

In this particular case, the important thing is that the society feels contempt or dismissiveness for this character. That's a load-bearing plot point. But there are lots of other things that could do that work just as well, and this just happens to be the one the writer chose on this occasion. It could just as easily have been bestiality or pedophilia. It could've been adherence to an unpalatable religious cult with foul-smelling practices. Coprophagy. Smoking or gambling. Addiction to an exotic drug. It doesn't have to be anything to do with gender or sexuality; that's a choice they've made.

 So look, if you're dead set on the gay or genderqueer people in your fantasy setting being vilified or seen as distasteful, it behooves you to examine why you made that precise creative choice. You are the god of that universe. You can change that society to suit yourself. And plausibility or historical accuracy just don't cut it -- certainly not all pre-industrial societies have had the same views on these topics.

You probably didn't make any choices because you're a bad person. Odds are that you, like my friend, are a fine and decent human being! But maybe you didn't realize you were making a creative decision at all, and that it could've gone another way. And once you know... you should stop and think about how else you could accomplish that same result. Dig deeper.

Homophobia, Racism, and Sexism, Oh My

And here's our icing. These same kinds of justifications are used to dismiss or excuse equally problematic treatments of women, people of color, people with disabilities, and more in fantasy and in other genres of fiction. "Historically correct." "I'm subverting the trope." "It's just how that society is structured." As if these things weren't entirely a construct of the mind of the writer to begin with.

And look, if you introduce your first female character to me with a show of breasts and giggling, I'm going to have a hard time turning the next page. If your dark-skinned characters are beast-like, illiterate savages, same-same. Don't ask me to sympathize with a rapist, and yes, Stephen Donaldson, I am looking at you.

This isn't just an exercise in political correctness for its own sake, either. This is a matter of not alienating potential readers, for one thing. Finding success as a writer isn't so very easy that it's a great idea to go around offending people who might otherwise be super into your work, you know?

But the responsibility here is much larger and heavier than it looks at first glance. Just a story, right? Just entertainment. No big.

Listen. Every story we tell becomes a part of our consensus culture. Another brick in the edifice of society. Stories are our way of telling one another how to be human, how to understand the world. We tell ourselves that crime doesn't pay, love conquers all, heroism can be found in anybody.

But we also use stories to reinforce some awful messages: men are inferior parents, brown people are terrorists, no doesn't always really mean no. We hear these messages again and again, and we start to believe them. In a sense, every story we tell is true. They become true, like it or not. 

Going a little out of your way to make your work reflect a more compassionate and varied world is definitely an act of self-interest. But this isn't just about sales and markets and alienating subsets of readers. Writing about a world where people of all stripes are visible, are represented, are richer and deeper than a grab bag of tired-out archetypes, is just plain the right and decent thing to do.

You're not just making a better story. You're making a better world.

Patreon Policies for SFWA-Qualifying Markets

As previously discussed, Patreon is a great new thing where fans of a creator can directly fund an artist's output, be it writing, podcasts or videos, poetry, music, essays, blogging... anything, really. It's an interesting model, and one I'm taking for a test-drive my own self. (Hey, maybe join my Patreon? $1/month for a short story! It's a good time, I promise!)

For writers, this raises an interesting question regarding rights. If you've posted something on Patreon, does it count as a first sale? Would a short story market ever consider something that had been previously posted on Patreon?

I decided to find out. I collected some contact information from the short story markets I care about most -- the ones that qualify you to get into SFWA. (Ambitions, I have them.) I omitted a few markets, mainly those that were invite-only, plus Highlights because it was impossible to find contact information. And then I send out this email on April 10:

Hi!

I'm conducting a poll of SFWA-qualifying short fiction markets to find out their policy on works previously sent to an audience through Patreon. I'm planning on collating the responses I receive into a blog post so that information is out there in the public domain.

Patreon is a fairly new online service that allows your audience to directly support your work with an ongoing pledge. So for example, my patrons can pledge $1 for each short story I write and send to them. Someone else might use the Patreon service for podcasts, videos, critical essays, comics, etc. It's a little like Kickstarter, except the fundraising is ongoing rather than one-time.

Patreon posts can be locked, so pieces aren't really published for a general audience. But there is a monetary transaction in place, so it's not precisely the same thing as posting to Critters.org or Absolute Write for a beta read, either.

My questions for you are:

Does a short story sent to Patreon backers count as a previously published story for your purposes, and would you accept such a submission?

Do stories have to be locked to patrons only for you to consider a piece? (I'd assume so, but it's worth asking!)

Is there a particular cutoff line after which a Patreon story is considered published in your eyes? What if there were only five Patreon backers, or ten? What if there were a thousand?

Does this policy also apply to other works, like poetry or illustrations?

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions, and do let me know if you need any clarification or other information before responding. I look forward to hearing from you!

I figure two weeks is long enough to wait for answers to come in, and by now I have a fair number of them. The result is mostly no, though a few markets will consider a Patreon-released story as a reprint. Here are the market-by-market responses:

Apex Magazine: No. Says Cameron Salisbury: "Considering that the author has been paid by their patrons for rights to read the story, first rights have been relinquished. It doesn't matter if 1 person paid for the story or 1000. We require first rights. So we're not paying 6 cents a word because the story has been previously published.

"Stories published to online locked groups like Critters are not considered previously published. 

"These policies also apply to poetry and nonfiction."

Buzzymag: Yes, as a reprint. "It would be deemed as published and we do accept previously published work, subject to the rules we have posted for such work."

Beyond Ceaseless Skies: No. Scott Andrews says: "Yes, to me, a story sent to Patreon backers would count as previously published.  No, I would not accept it at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, because we don't publish reprints.

"To me, it's not that money might have been paid, or the number of Patreon backers who received it; it is that the story was presented to an audience.  That to me makes it published.  (On Critters.org, the difference to me is that that is presenting the story not to an audience but to beta-readers.)"

Clarkesworld: No. Neil Clarke says: "Quite familiar with Patreon. We're using them ourselves. ... I'd call that published and the end of your first rights."

Cosmos: Yes, but don't submit. Cat Sparks says: "Cosmos is not currently accepting unsolicited fiction submissions. I was not aware of Patreon & will have to give it further thought, but theoretically if a story was locked to patrons only I would not consider it to have been previously published."

Grantville Gazette: Yes. Says Rick Boatright: "Policy is  simple, we don't care."

Lightspeed: Yes, but as a reprint. Such a post would have to be previously locked to viewership for patrons. Says John Joseph Adams: "Even if I'd just be considering it as a reprint. If it was freely available online elsewhere I probably wouldn't be interested in reprinting it in Lightspeed. (I wouldn't mind that for an anthology, but since Lightspeed is a digital magazine with an online component I tend to avoid reprinting works that are already freely available online elsewhere.)"

Nature: No. Says Colin Sullivan: "I think the idea of Patreon is interesting, but at the moment I can only view it as another potential publication outlet for a story. As that boils down to another "place submit" a story, I feel that if a piece appears through Patreon that constitutes "previous publication", which means such a story would not be eligible under our present submission rules."

Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show: No. Edmund Schubert says: "I'd have to say that anything that appeared online, in any way, at any time, would be considered published, and would not be of interest to IGMS."

Strange Horizons: Yes, provided it was locked to patrons. An Owomoyela says: "In general, we're interested in first publication, not first payment – distribution to a closed group, as with a password-protected website or a restricted mailing list, doesn't count as publication for our purposes.  So, we would accept a submission for a story originally distributed to a closed Patreon list." But also note that poetry policy may be different, and: "As of now, we don't have any policy in place to define publication through a platform like Patreon. We may find ourselves refining a position in the future, especially as platforms like Patreon become more established, but practically, so far, it hasn't come up."

Tor dot com: No. Irene Gallo says: "I would say that falls under self-publishing and would disqualify it as an original story for us. 

"I'll add that each of our stories, while free on the site, are also available whenever ebooks are sold, globally.  So our authors are making royalties from them above the initial flat fee. (Because the stories are free online, we do not consider the initial fee an advance, they begin collecting royalties right away.)"

So there you have it! If more responses come in, I'll update this post to reflect it. And meanwhile, if you run a market, please do feel free to comment here to lay out what your own Patreon policy is -- any genre welcome.

I'll just add one more thing -- as a Patreon creator, I'm up to $104 per story in fairly short order. That's already competitive with any market paying a semi-pro rate. I'd love the wider readership and chance at acclaim that come with publishing in a magazine like Apex or Lightspeed, don't get me wrong! But it's entirely possible that by this time next year, submitting to a market that pays even full pro rates would net less dollars in my pocket than Patreon does. It's going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out in the next couple of years, huh?

Self-Publishing 101

This introduction to self-publishing originated as an email to a friend wanting to step into the self-pub ocean. But I think other people might enjoy it, too!

So: Self-publishing is hard, in that it involves a lot of tiny details to manage, and all of those details actually matter. But it's not hard in that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to work your way through it, just... a lot of diligence.

Let's assume you've already written what you want to publish, so your first step is quality control -- getting the material edited. If you're reasonably literate you might be able to skip this step, but it's always best practice to get another set of eyes on the material. I've been a professional editor and I still hire someone else to read behind me, because you can't always see your own mistakes.

Then you need a cover. Cover art is your #1 most important marketing tool, so you're going to need something that looks great, has a feeling in keeping with the genre of book you're putting out there, and is legible and eye-catching even at thumbnail size. Here's some cover design advice ...but unless you are yourself a designer already, you're best off shelling out some money to someone else to make one for you. Find one through your friends or through a service like Bibliocrunch.

Next comes figuring out how to get that into an ebook format. All you need these days is an .epub file. Kindle sells .mobi, but you upload to them as .epub. Apple have their own proprietary format, but if you work with an aggregator like Smashwords or Draft2Digital, you provide them with an epub and they'll do the conversion. Epub is all you need.

There are a bunch of ways to convert. Pay attention to formatting paragraphs and chapter headings the way you want them to look, but less formatting is better than more. You CAN insert art as custom scene breaks and so on, but images make the file size bigger, and Amazon in particular sometimes charges you bandwidth fees for image-heavy books. Including art or photography inside your book is advanced stuff and not recommended.

Remember to put in a cover page, copyright notice, a dedication if you want one, a table of contents, an about-the-author section, and links to anything you'd like to cross promote (website, social media, mailing list, other work). 

I like to use Scrivener to export my epubs, because it's easy and mostly foolproof. Instructions on how to do that are here. You can also Google around to find instructions for MS Word and so on. But Scrivener is rad and you should give it a try anyway.

Next, you choose where you want to publish and your pricing strategy. You have to be on KDP, which is Kindle Direct Publishing, which is Amazon. The lion's share of self-publishing sales come from there. There are other stores, too, most notably B&N, Kobo, iBooks, Google Play. There are also a few genre-specific publishers, though the only ones I'm aware of are for romance and erotica. 

If you want, you can open an account and publish to each of these stores directly, but that becomes a huge pain in the neck to manage. You can also use an aggregator like Smashwords or Draft2Digital and manage everything from one account. Smashwords has very onerous formatting requirements for their books and I've never been able to figure them out, so I use Draft2Digital and have been very happy with the service. Note that an aggregator takes a small percentage of your royalties, above and beyond what the store takes as their share. Decide if it's worth your time to make those extra couple of cents per sale by setting up multiple distribution accounts. Lots of people split the difference by having an account on Amazon for KDP only and then an aggregator elsewhere.

It's ALSO a good idea to provide a venue for readers to buy from you directly. There are a number of services that let you do this, like Gumroad and Payhip. The benefit here is you keep a much higher proportion of the money that you would through any store. Some writers I know actually do the bulk of their sales direct-to-reader in this way.

You should also know about KDP Select. This is a program Amazon runs for publishers who promise them exclusivity. In return, you get the ability to run a couple of kinds of promotions -- like putting your book up for free or at a discount for a few days each quarter. This used to be GREAT for producing a sales spike but isn't really worth it anymore; Amazon has changed its ranking algorithm, so free book offers tend to result in less-flattering reviews and no additional sales. And the opportunity cost for the sales you're not making through other channels is too high.

On the other hand, there's Kindle Lending. This is something you can opt into or out of. It's a very, very good idea; the royalty you get from a borrowed copy is historically much higher than the royalty you get from a direct sale, so it's a win all around. Opt into that like whoa.

On to pricing strategy! Many of the ebook stores require you to give them the lowest available price, so it's best practice to just use the same price everywhere. But what should that price be? Note that Amazon gives you a 70% royalty on books above $2.99, but only a 30% royalty for lower price points. So $2.99 for a full-length book is probably your basement. On the other hand, $7.99 should probably be your ceiling; I'd probably price a full-length book at $5.99 to split the difference. (On the other hand, novellas and short stories can do booming business at .99 and 1.99). 

Cheaper is not necessarily better for sales, believe it or not! Readers have become very cautious of poor-quality, cheap ebooks. Be confident in your pricing strategy!

Once you send everything up live, be sure to get your friends and family to leave reviews for your work! The biggest obstacle to sales is obscurity, and the more reviews and sales a book has, the more visible it's going to be on Amazon.

There are other issues you need to also be aware of, or at least look into: marketing and promotion, making and selling physical books, and if you're lucky enough to sell well, self-employment taxes. But each of these is an enormous topic in its own right, annnnnnd I think that's about enough for one day. Good luck to you, and many happy sales to come!

I'm on Patreon!

I'm trying another new thing!

In the spirit of relentless and bold experimentation, I've started up a Patreon. "Wait, what?" you ask. "What's that? And why do I care?" I will tell you!

I'm posting my very first story to Patreon late this evening on April 1; likely around 8pm Eastern time, child obligations permitting. (I know, I know, but no foolin'). If you'd like to read that first story, chip in your dollar while the gettin' is good. Not so sure? Let me give you a piece of the first story. A taste test, if you will, so you know if you're getting broccoli or pie.

For one shining moment on her two hundred seventy eighth birthday, Neria Ciao was the most important person in the world. That was the day her level-500 Seelie Huntress ascended into the Keep of Eternal Silence to do battle with Zirnitra, the Black Dragon of Sorcery. 

It was a difficult fight; she used every hard-won trick and trophy she'd ever earned, spent all her potions and salves, used up her last precious Wish and cracked her lone Egg of Eritanus. Her heart beat faster; her muscles burned; sweat trickled down her ribs from beneath her breasts. She nearly died four times, saved only by luck, timing, and an incredibly rich supply of Sacred Essence of Golden Lotus.

In the end, it was all worth it. Zirnitra went down thrashing and wailing. It fluttered its wings once, twice, struggled back onto its hind legs. It collapsed again. Spears of light pierced through the spaces between its scales and then consumed its husk from the inside out.

Neria Ciao was the first to ever defeat it.

She posted the video of the fight before the dragon could even respawn. Predictably, her views and comments went wild. "Incredible!" "Great work!" "Never thought I'd see someone take down old Zirny!"

She even got a personal congratulations from The Vanished Lands dev team in Finland, who, it turned out, had checked in to watch her battle as soon as Zirnitra's health dropped below thirty percent. That had only happened twice before. 

By the time she went out to treat herself to birthday cake, she'd received three hundred million views, forty thousand messages and comments, nine hundred interview requests, and alerts that her name had appeared in four hundred news articles.

Not all of this feedback was positive, of course. Usually her systems would filter out the worst of it — the vitriol for its own sake, the jealous rage, the troublemakers looking for any soft target. 

One, from a stranger, slipped through her filters because it wasn't offensive. Not… exactly. It troubled her all the same. "You have all eternity before you," it said, "and this is how you choose to spend it?"

I'd be super thrilled if you decided to support my Patreon. Thanks so much for your time!

Let He Who Is Without Sin

Let's talk about Jonathan Ross and the Hugos. He was announced as the host of the Hugos at Loncon3, there was a Twitter uproar, and then he stepped down, all over the course of a few hours. This incident has left many people uncomfortable, and I'm one of them. 

I woke up one fine Saturday morning to discover that Farah Mendlesohn, a member of the Loncon committee, had resigned because a misogynist, racist, all around offensive fellow had been tapped to host the Hugos. (That would be Jonathan Ross.) I read her post (which has since been removed). I did a bit of light double-checking. I saw his controversies section in Wikipedia. I saw the Mirror article of his top ten most controversial moments.

Now here's the thing: when this began, I didn't know Jonathan Ross from Adam. I'd never heard of him before and had zero cultural context for understanding just how controversial he might be. Given the outcry, I assumed that must be pretty awful. I prepared to join that general outcry.

From the sound of it, the Hugos being hosted by Jonathan Ross is pretty much like their being hosted by British Howard Stern, yes?

— Andrea Phillips (@andrhia) March 1, 2014

Within moments, my friend Naomi Alderman reacted to this question with utter bafflement. She's in the UK herself, and familiar with that media landscape. She's also as staunch a feminist as I know; indeed, she's habitually more sensitive to these issues in media than am I, and can't watch or read some things I enjoy because of their misogyny. Other UK friends soon corroborated: Ross was not a controversial figure in the UK, no more than Jay Leno. 

I found myself searching for reasons to defend the outcry. He must be an inappropriate choice, I thought. The internet had told me so. A bad fit for the event. Nothing to do with genre. We didn't need yet another white dude. And anyway look at how pissed off he is at all of these people calling him a sexist douchebag! Nail in the coffin!

It's important to recognize what happened in my head right there, and probably in others' as well. I, having no direct knowledge of the merits of the matter at hand, heard an accusation that appealed to my politics and sense of justice. And I leapt to a conclusion. I was willing to go to the mat for that conclusion. It turns out I might've been wrong.

Ross is married to a Hugo winner, so I'm thinking he knows the magnitude of the award. He's spoken at other genre events before. He's a steady advocate for SF/F in the mainstream. He's said some off-color stuff from time to time, to be sure, but looking at the grand arc of his career, it doesn't appear to be characterized by raunchy humor and exploitation.

People make mistakes, and the truth is often more complicated than something as straightforward as "Ross is a misogynist, homophobic, racist jerk." Ross has spent a lot of time in public life. He's going to screw up and say the wrong thing from time to time. I can't help but notice that most of those wrong things he's said happened several years ago.

For lo these many moons, we in SF/F circles have been fighting the good fight against all of the -isms. And we've made great progress, I think. As a community, we've become much more sensitive to offering perceived affront. Our literature is becoming more diverse, more representative, and richer and broader for it. It's been a good and necessary effort.

But meanwhile... I've seen a lot of discomfort from the SF/F men in my Twitter stream the past few days, a reluctance to talk about this issue in public.

I can't blame them. Suddenly we've created an environment where a high-profile individual saying the wrong thing at the wrong time risks being devoured alive, with no judge or jury. No benefit of the doubt. No pause to step back and measure the magnitude of the offense. Forget the ridiculous Truesdale petition about censorship -- but there is a real chilling effect going on here. People are afraid to disagree with what happened.

Fear doesn't make for good discourse.

Even saying "Hey, I think the accusations against Ross were overblown and ultimately wrong, we should chill out a little bit," could risk a dude losing friends or fans because suddenly they can be cast in the light of anti-feminism. Even good men, strong allies, active feminists. 

But you know what? I think the Ross-Loncon3 situation is a sign to us that maybe we should chill out a little bit.

...Because this isn't how I want my community to be. The shift from "this person is doing something objectionable right now and we have to stop it," to "this person said some objectionable things some years in the past and so he's not welcome among us," is one that gives me great pause. You know who else has said some objectionable things in the past? Me. You know who else? You.

I'd like to be in a community that practices forgiveness, that educates instead of excoriates. A community that gives second chances. That says, "Hey, that was wrong, you should apologize and this is how you can do it better next time," and not, "Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out." 

I'd especially not like to be in a community that says "You've screwed up before, so you're definitely gonna screw up again next time. Get lost, asshole." Which looks to me like what ultimately happened in the Ross situation.

I am by no means suggesting we stop advocating for equality, for representation, for moderation in public venues. I want these things to continue, and in spades. We want to create a safe space for all people. We want to discourage hateful speech and action. 

But we can't demand perfection. There are no perfect people. If we can't allow room within our community for people to screw up and get better, or for people to thoughtfully disagree, then eventually all the flawed people will be gone. And nobody will be left at all.

Juvenile Glaucoma, Health Insurance, and the New New Year

When we rang in 2014, it wasn't a fresh and optimistic start like one might hope. I had two big problems that needed immediate attention. First, as of Jan. 1 we were switching to a new insurance plan, and we didn't have membership cards or even numbers yet. When we called the new insurance company to try to get that information ourselves, they'd never even heard of us. We were functionally uninsured.

Second? A routine optometrist visit the day after Christmas had ended with an urgent referral to take my younger daughter to the ophthalmologist. She showed some concerning signs of juvenile glaucoma.

Glaucoma is a progressive disease; it slowly steals the sight from your peripheral vision, hair by hair, until you see the world through a tiny window. One day, even that window closes. It's slow but relentless. The vision glaucoma takes can never be recovered.

So for a short time early this year, I got some firsthand experience with the terror of knowing your child requires immediate medical care, but not knowing how to pay for it. Our choices were: wait until the insurance issue was sorted out -- which could take weeks -- or pay for a visit to the ophthalmologist out of our own pocket and cross our fingers that it might one day be reimbursed. That would be $250, the office staff told us.

They urged us not to delay.

Our insurance was held up by paperwork; the insurance broker hadn't submitted our enrollment in time, or maybe the enrollment hadn't been processed fast enough by the insurer. Nothing to be done, it was an act of god and government.

We were by no means alone. With the ACA coming into effect, insurance companies were overwhelmed with a glut of new enrollments, but we would be covered retroactively. In theory, anyway; in practice, the inability to get an insurer-approved referral from a primary doctor might nix the chances of reimbursement. And the process of actually getting that money back could take as much as six months.

We're very fortunate that in this case, we could afford the financial hit and see the ophthalmologist anyway. Even so, the days before that appointment were harrowing.

The Appointment

There was an examination. The doctor, whose manner with children is so playful that he's very nearly performing a standup routine, turned to me with a sober expression on his face. Her optic nerve was enlarged, just like the optometrist had said. He explained the cup-to-disc ratio to me.

"In a healthy Caucasian," he said, "it's normally 0.1 to 0.2. In an African-American, you expect 0.2 to 0.4. Your daughter's is 0.9."

He told me not to worry. It's never glaucoma, he said; in his 30-year-career, it had only turned out to be glaucoma once, and that had been effectively cured with a simple surgery. The odds were overwhelmingly in our favor. "Don't be worried," he said. "You can't be worried if I'm not worried, and do I look worried?" But his face was somber, his tone grim, and he pressed me to promise I'd wait no more than three weeks to bring her back for follow-up testing. Promise me, he said. No matter what.

Those tests would be expensive, he added. So very expensive, in fact, that insurance companies themselves will balk at paying if you perform more than one of them on the same day. I scheduled the follow-up appointments (at a potential $250 a pop, plus unknown additional fees for testing, with intimations that they'd run into the thousands of dollars.) I crossed my fingers hoping the insurance company would come through before then. What other choice did I have, after all? In a pinch, well, there's credit, or family. We could find the money. It would be OK.

Meanwhile, she needed glasses immediately. Not for her vision -- she only has a mild astigmatism -- but to protect her freakishly enlarged optic nerves from impact damage.

Even if it was glaucoma -- and it probably wasn't -- we could treat it. The equation for us was more one of managing discomfort and inconvenience than walking the line of catastrophe.

Still, these days in January were agonizing. It becomes difficult to concentrate, to sleep. In such a situation, you run through a million scenarios. What if it is glaucoma? What if one surgery doesn't do the trick? What about complications? How will she endure that? What if we really don't have insurance, and something has gone so horribly wrong that we won't be covered in time? And what if it costs so much that we can't find the money after all? 

A tightness settles into your chest. You cry more easily, you snap more easily. Perhaps you can keep it together during the day, when you're soothing worried relatives, when you're shuffling children off to school and cooking dinner and signing homework sheets. Mustn't frighten the children; they can't see you worry. 

It erodes at you, this worry. Maintaining the illusion that nothing is wrong nibbles away the edges of your ability to cope. If it keeps up long enough -- well. There are marks.

Toward the end of the month, the insurance came through, and the ophthalmologist scanned my daughter's retina with lasers. He was visibly relieved. The result was good -- so good that we moved additional follow-up testing to late May. We've since discovered that an older relative has a similar ratio, and no apparent glaucoma. So: a family congenital anomaly. No big deal. It's possible my kid has some field-of-vision problems, and she appears to have problems with color perception in one eye... but this is a hell of a lot better than surgery and looming blindness. We'll take it.

(And this isn't even including the almost-fire we had the first week of the year, which required we air the house out to eliminate smoke on the coldest night in twenty years. Which is its own blog post, in a way. Polar vortex, huh?)

Single-Payer

When I wasn't busy being scared, I thought a lot about fairness in that time. I thought about poverty and privilege and insurance. I thought about the role of government in society.

I thought about all of the families for whom it really was glaucoma (or cancer, or diabetes, or leukemia, or...) who didn't have the resources to pay out-of-pocket and damn the insurance. People who still have no insurance, or have a plan with such a high deductible as makes no difference. The ones for whom that decision would mean missing rent or missing meals.

I've always been an advocate of single-payer insurance. No family should have to weigh those factors. No child should suffer a treatable illness with permanent or fatal results because their family doesn't happen to be comfortably middle-class. Oh, sure, health care is available to everyone at an emergency room. But you know what? You can't get glaucoma (or cancer) treated in an emergency room.

In New York State, the Working Families Party is now pushing for single-payer insurance. I would urge you with all my heart to support such legislation in your own state (if you're American, anyway.)

This is not an economic issue, and it's not a public health issue. This is not a matter of controlling costs or ensuring a healthy workforce. This is a moral issue. 

The New New Year

Even with such a crisis averted, the parts worn away from you by stress take their time to regrow. I've been very fragile this year. It doesn't seem to be returning to normal as quickly as one might hope.

So on midnight going into March 1, I declared it a New New Year. It looks like 2014 has been really rough for many of us, not just me -- the relentless weather, to be sure, but there's also been a zeitgeist of uncertainty and fear. We're quick to anger. We're prone to falling victim to brain weasels. It's been a bad time.

But spring is right around the corner.

Apples, Oranges, and Author Earnings

I mentioned on Twitter last week that a recent update on Author Earnings comparing extrapolated Amazon data to Bookscan numbers is actively misleading. I thought it might bear unpacking that a little bit by way of analogy.

Imagine there is a grocery store selling both apples and oranges, and you need to figure out how many of each fruit is sold in a week (or at least which sells more than the other.) So you camp out in the store for an hour, and count how many of each fruit the customers buy. 

You're probably going to get some useful information from that, to be sure -- whether the ratio between apples and oranges is roughly comparable, for example. You can even extrapolate from that hour -- multiply by how many hours the store is open, and you might get a ballpark number for how much fruit is sold. But that number risks being wildly inaccurate, because you're relying on that single sample hour to be perfectly typical. But a store has busy hours and slow hours -- some hours nobody's buying. Some hours, maybe someone's buying fruit for a world-record-size fruit salad. Some hours, you get a run of people allergic to citrus. All you can get is a very rough idea.

You can also ask a couple of orchard owners how much they get, look at the prices in circulars, and try to work out how much money the grocery store is making off fruit. But it would be a terrible mistake to try to, say, calculate the orchards' operating income from that loose guess of yours. The picture is a lot bigger than that one hour at one store, and is influenced by a lot of other factors.

Now let's say you get your hands on another source of information -- maybe the inventory records of a competing grocery store showing how many oranges it sold that same week. That's hard data, and it's great -- you can learn a little more about the size of the orange market in town from that.

But you can't then combine those two kinds of information as if they were the same to make conclusions about, say, whether Grocery Store A sells more oranges than Grocery Store B, and certainly not about whether Sunny Orange Productions is making more money than Crisp Apple Growers.

One of them is a cobbled-together piece of data and guesswork; one is hard data, but for only part of the equation. Each one of them tells some interesting stories, to be sure, but it's just as important to know what information the data can't tell you.