Swan Tower

10:57 am - any sociologists out there?

Apparently I'm developing this thing for arguing with mind-melds.

In this instance, SF Signal is taking on gender imbalance in spec fic publishing. Lots of food for thought in there, but I'm at the point where my single overwhelming thought is this:

Is there, anywhere out there, a sociologist with both the necessary interest in genre fiction and the necessary methodological rigor to get us some actual data?

Because until somebody does that study, we're arguing from evidence that is 98% anecdotes and gut feeling. Some magazines (Strange Horizons, Fantasy) openly discuss the gender breakdown of their submissions and publications; Broad Universe has scraped data from issue runs of some more. But where's the data for novels? First novels, bestseller novels, big contracts, broken down by (admittedly fuzzy) categories of sub-genre, maybe even weighted for type of narrative if our hypothetical sociologist is good enough. Reviews, awards, hardcover versus trade paper versus mmpb publication. In a dream world we'd know the submission stats, too -- but good luck getting those. Even without them, it would be a start.

It makes me regret my exit from academia, but truth is, I could never do this study. You really need a sociologist, not an anthropologist; this is not participant-observation work.

Some things we do know: that the people who say "I just buy/read good work, regardless of who wrote it" are naive. It's well-established, in fields ranging from biology to symphony orchestras, that the perceived gender of individuals affects their reception: the percentage of women in orchestras went up after musicians began auditioning behind a curtain, with a carpet laid down so high-heeled shoes wouldn't click on the floor. Swap the names on journal articles, and readers will rate higher the one they think is written by a man. Very few editors or readers out there are actively hating on women writers; the real problem is the inactive prejudice.

But we need data before we can get to the deeper questions of "why," let alone "what do we do about it?" The relative absence of women in science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) no doubt arises from many factors, ranging from fewer women with the educational background to write hard SF, to less free time on their hands for the writing of it, to a reluctance to submit to markets they perceive as unfriendly to them, to editorial bias, to reader bias, and so around the merry-go-round. The relative presence of women in the current paranormal romance/urban fantasy borderland arises from a different set of factors. I don't think anecdotes and gut feeling are without their use, but we might get farther if we had actual concrete information.

11:43 am - an odd reaction in fandom

By now, everybody's heard that Dumbledore is gay. That is not, I promise, what this post is about -- just the inciting cause of the post.

To entertain myself, I took a brief look at Fandom Wank, wondering what kinds of reactions they were rounding up. (Answer: pretty much the ones you'd expect.) The only link I really followed was one to westeros.org, where they were discussing the issue of "interview canon." And there I found an attitude that really raised my eyebrows.

I'm paraphrasing here, because several posts I saw raised this point, each one phrasing it differently. But the reaction was something to the effect of, "Authors shouldn't create canon in their interviews; it should all be in the books."

Um.

Step back for a moment and look at that. Authors shouldn't create canon . . . .

Imagine you are a non-fanfic-writing-individual. An author you like gives an interview. They reveal -- in response to someone's question -- a detail about the story you didn't know before, be it that so-and-so is gay, so-and-so grew up in a home with seventeen cats, so-and-so really likes mint chocolate chip ice cream. What is your reaction? Me, I'd think, "oh, that's interesting," and enjoy the sense that there's a real world the author is writing about, that exists beyond the simple words on the pages of the books.

Now imagine that author answering such questions with "Eh, I don't know." Makes the world look like those old Hollywood facades, doesn't it? A pretty front with nothing behind it. What you see is what you get. Kind of boring, really.

Authors shouldn't create canon in their interviews.

That statement contains a giant roaring assumption that just boggles me: that fanfiction is some how an end goal for what an author does. That authors should be taking the desires of fanficcers into account when writing their books, when talking about their books, when answering the questions of fans. Why? Because apparently it makes things more complicated for the fanficcers, having to track what got said when and whether or not it should count as canon.

If the comments had been phrased in the vein of, "man, now we have to debate whether or not to count that as canon," I wouldn't mind. It's a problem for the people writing fanfic; let them decide how to handle it. But the accusatory tone I saw in some of the comments . . . how inconsiderate of J.K. Rowling, to create canon in her interviews. Apparently she makes a habit of this. The nerve! To know more about her characters than she wrote into the books! To share that information with people when they ask!

Fandom wankery, indeed.

10:46 pm - Okay, I've got it.

Okay, I have my thoughts in order now. For those of you just tuning in, this is about an anonymous comment left on my journal, which I feel to be very wrong-headed, but against which I was having a difficult time assembling my arguments. I can't promise conciseness, exactly, but I'm aiming for coherence, which is what I was lacking before. And thank you to everyone who commented, often making points along these same lines, which helped me go "yeah, that's what I was after."

To recap:

It seems to me that a lot of books these days throw in a mixed cast for the hell of it, to be PC, to try to please everybody. Some stories are just Man Stories; some are just Women Stories. Could you imagine a random female having been thrown into, say, DELIVERANCE? The whole idea is silly. I say you should write a story as it is--if it's male adventure, then that's what it is; throwing in a woman won't make it different or better.

10:28 am - commentary invited

Normally I wouldn't single out a commenter on this journal for public (and communal) rebuttal. But in this case, the comment was posted anonymously. Now, maybe the person in question just doesn't have an LJ account, and didn't realize that it's generally appreciated for such people to sign their comments. On the other hand, maybe not.

The comment was posted in response to my issues with The Lies of Locke Lamora. Here it is, in its entirety.

It seems to me that a lot of books these days throw in a mixed cast for the hell of it, to be PC, to try to please everybody. Some stories are just Man Stories; some are just Women Stories. Could you imagine a random female having been thrown into, say, DELIVERANCE? The whole idea is silly. I say you should write a story as it is--if it's male adventure, then that's what it is; throwing in a woman won't make it different or better.

05:23 pm - e-mail

I can't decide which Herculean labor is the right metaphor for the battle I've been waging for several days now, against the backlog in all of my major e-mail accounts.

Candidate A: Cerberus. There are three accounts, after all, so it's kind of like dealing with a three-headed monster.

Candidate B: the Hydra. Because every time I think I've made progress toward defeating one of the accounts, it sprouts new heads/new e-mails to attack me again.

Candidate C: the Augean Stables. Shoveling endless mounds of shit, and feeling like I'll never be done.


This post brought to you by the forty or so e-mails I dealt with yesterday, and the fact that today's schedule has prevented me from dealing with any more, which just ensures that tomorrow's battle will be harder.

10:44 am

Totally random gripe, but you know what? I'm not actually a fan of the way the web is getting more multimedia. (This gripe brought to you by the Onion, which has too much video and audio content these days for my taste. I miss when it was mostly text.)

Why does this irritate me? Because 95% of the time I'm at the computer, I'm listening to music. My own music. If a website loads up some song (MySpace, I'm looking at you) or I click on an innocuous-looking link and find a video starting to play, I have to go pause my music -- or, as I more often do, just back up to the previous page and go find something else that won't interrupt me. Also, I can read text at my own pace, whereas a video makes me go at its pace -- and when it's seven minutes long, I generally decide I don't care enough about whatever it is, and I go do something else.

Which is not to say I never want to watch videos. I just want to know that's what's coming. A lot of people these days put a (pdf) warning when a link leads to an Adobe file, since many of us dislike having Adobe launch out of nowhere, and don't always remember to check the url we're being pointed at before we click on it. I'd love to see a similar thing for videos, so I don't get ambushed by them. Then I can decide whether I want to go watch a video right now or not. Also? Don't just link saying "This is awesome" or some such. If you do that to a webpage, I can skim the content briefly and decide whether it's something that interests me. If I don't know what a video's about, I'm not going to sit around and wait to find out, then decide whether I, too, think it's awesome. (It usually isn't anyway.)

I also don't follow any video podcasting on blogs. I'd follow audio podcasting if I could be bothered to put it on my iPod (and video too, maybe, if I had an iPod that supported it), but not watching or listening on my computer. Again with the wanting to move at my own pace thing. And being able to skim over the stuff that doesn't interest me.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not an epic problem; I'm far more concerned with writing my novel and catching up on my e-mail and what our legislators will do about the White House thumbing its nose at them. But it's a minor irritant, and I thought y'all might like a post that isn't about MNC.

So warn folks when you're linking to a video, and give some sense of what the video is. Or Angry Kitten will come after you.