I'm excited to link to Tor.com, which has reprinted my Nebula-nominated novelette "Fields of Gold!"

http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/03/fields-of-gold

Woo!

The beginning of the story as possible teaser:

When Dennis died, he found himself in another place. Dead people came at him with party hats and presents. Noise makers bleated. Confetti fell. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.

His family was there. Celebrities were there. People Dennis had never seen before in his life were there. Dennis danced under a disco ball with Cleopatra and great-grandma Flora and some dark-haired chick and cousin Joe and Alexander the Great. When he went to the buffet table for a tiny cocktail wiener in pink sauce, Dennis saw Napoleon trying to grope his Aunt Phyllis. She smacked him in the tri-corner hat with her clutch bag.

For a couple of years now, Clarisse Thorn has been interviewing and hanging out with the community of pick-up artists, a community she finds fascinating and... well, from a feminist perspective, sort of problematic, too.

There's an unbelievably compelling thing that happens when you combine one of your interests (flirting! analyzing human behavior! body language!) with that consistent prickling, nettle that's sometimes irritation and sometimes anger. I know that exploring the cognitive dissonance of horror and fascination has led to some of my more interesting obsessions. Clarisse's book captures that frenetic, obsessive feeling, as well as including a large amount of clear-eyed, sharp analysis.

CONFESSIONS OF A PICK-UP ARTIST CHASER: LONG INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

Currently $2.99 on Amazon, price to go up on March 17th.

At the goth club, one PUA was too involved in making out with his gorgeous girlfriend to talk to me. I still managed to get his number, though. He was on the scrawny end of slender, and he looked awesome in eyeliner. Five minutes of conversation showed me that he was an expert on feminism and polyamory, and he was an S&M switch just like me. His name was Brian.

A few days after the goth club outing, Brian and I started talking about meeting for drinks. We were both busy, though, and had to reschedule several times before we met. As we sized each other up, I tried to explain what drew me to PUAs like a moth to a flame.

"I don't know," I said, fumbling for words. "It's interesting from a feminist perspective, but it's more than that. It's like…." I looked away from him and thought about where else in my life I felt this intense, sexually-tinged fascination. "It's like a fetish."

He started laughing. "You're a PUA chaser!" he cried, and I had to agree.

Clarisse dissects the pick-up artist movement in a way that's easy and intuitive to read for people who aren't familiar with it, and does a good job of balancing insightful feminist critique with generosity toward her interview subjects. Readers will probably have different reactions to that balance--I fully expect this is a book which some PUAs will call irredeemably vicious and some feminists will find frustrating for its light hand. I come down somewhat more grouchy and skeptical than Clarisse Thorn does in the narrative, but I don't think that's a barrier to reading the text; in fact, I think Clarisse's generosity makes the analysis much more interesting than it would otherwise be since it creates subtle, highly finessed arguments.

Clarisse's analysis is as interesting, easy-to-follow and well-laid out as it is in all of her writing, but the most compelling thing in this book is not the analysis itself (which I was expecting), but the way in which Clarisse uses memoir to supplement her analysis. Clarisse is a brilliant sex writer with what appears to be (on the page, at least) an unflinching ability to reveal personal information. That talent is highlighted here as Clarisse fleshes out scenes that create a parallel emotional and intellectual journey, allowing the reader to travel with her through the insights and frustration of her time on the fringes of the pick-up artist community. Her intelligent writing about S&M and polyamory help establish her presence in the text as someone with a subaltern point of view, and place pick-up artistry within the context of other sexual subcultures so that the book's criticism is grounded in an almost ethnographic framework which works to keep the text from becoming sensationalist or exotifying.

I found a few nitpicks from a social justice perspective as I think is inevitable with this type of book, and I'm sure that others would find different ones. Reading with my writer's eye, I'd suggest that the book could use a 5-10% trim, particularly between the halfway point and the two thirds point. Leaving aside those points, I found this a really interesting read, and I would particularly recommend this book to anyone who has found feminist writing about the pick-up artist movement intriguing in the past.


**

Speaking of writing about sex and relationships, Clarisse Thorn is the Sex + Relationships Section Editor for Role/Reboot, a website devoted to investigating the modern upheaval in gender/sex roles. A few months, she invited me to write something for them which I finally got around to; the result was posted last week.

THE STORY OF LEAH AND VANESSA:

We were all in college together, 19 years old and naïve as hell (call it equal parts ignorant and innocent) when our friend Leah met this girl.

This older girl.

“She’s how old?” we asked.

Presumably, some individual one of us asked, but it’s not worth distinguishing; our incredulity was unanimous.

She fidgeted uncomfortably. “35.”

“Thirty-five? Vanessa is 35? And you made out with her?”

“I thought she was 30!” she protested. “She told me she was 30. Then we made out. Then she admitted she was really 35.”

We narrowed our eyes at Leah and glared. Vanessa lied about her age was not making it seem like Leah’s new love affair was a better idea than we’d previously thought.

The full article is at the link.

A response to Lou Antonelli's single-word platform of "diversity":

Lou, given that the word diversity is usually used to talk about people's identities along axes of oppression--to talk about the fact that white men are usually the majority and people who aren't white men are usually underrepresented--can you understand why it's offensive to me when you indicate that I don't bring any "diversity of outlook" to the board?

I understand that you may not be particularly aware of a lot of my attributes. You may not know I'm ethnically Jewish or that I'm the only person under 30 running for one of the four "executive" posts. You don't know that I'm queer. It's okay that you don't know these things, but the way you've framed your campaign implies that they either don't exist or that they don't matter.

Lumping me in with John and Mary--and they're wonderful! but they're not my identical twins--erases a number of facets of my person and my fullness as a human being. It erases a lot of theirs, too.

You may be the only Baptist, but as far as I know, I'm the only queer person (ETA: running for an executive position). You may be different as a writer because you're the person with the fewest sales, but I'm different as a writer because I'm the person with the most experience of writing within literary and experimental communities. We both bring perspectives that other candidates don't share. The way you're framing your candidacy as one that increases diversity, and explicitly stating that mine is one that doesn't, is inaccurate.

Hey y'all,

I think people already know that I'm running for SFWA vice president, but I thought I'd drop my platform here in case it's of interest.

Dear SFWA Members:

I am running for vice president of SFWA.

I support the work that the current administration has done toward strengthening SFWA’s foundation, and I hope to participate in the ongoing efforts to run the organization in an efficient, cooperative, business-like manner. I hope to continue their practices of acting from near-consensus and constructively resolving conflicts with an assumption of good faith.

I joined SFWA in 2008. From then until the membership committee was dissolved, I worked as a liaison between said committee and those writers and editors who had questions about short story eligibility.

I’ve worked as both a writer and an editor. I spent two years editing a reprint market, and recently co-edited an anthology from Prime Books. I’ve published more than fifty short stories since 2006, in venues including Subterranean Magazine, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld. My short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the Million Writers Award. In 2011, my novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” won the Nebula Award.

As a board officer, I would come to the organization with certain interests and priorities. For instance:

1. As Scalzi says, many SFWA members “have come of age professionally using the Internet and its precursors.” This is true literally as well as professionally; writers from the millennial generation—of which I am on the oldest fringe—are taking part in the copyright conversation as content creators. In aggregate, SFWA represents a wealth of knowledge about navigating technology and copyright concerns. It’s important for the organization to have a conversation about those issues, and to make the collective’s knowledge available to all its members, allowing writers to make informed choices about how to handle copyright violations and the vulnerabilities (as well as the benefits) of new media.

2. As a writer who is (barely) from the millennial generation, I am in a good position to address the concerns of the up-and-coming writers who share my experiences but have chosen not to join SFWA. Recruitment is up, but it could always be higher. I’m positioned well to help increase recruits from that demographic.

3. I hold an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop where I was fortunate enough to teach creative writing for two years. I instructed students who have gone on to publish in semi-pro and professional venues and even join SFWA. As the founding editor of the audio reprint market, PodCastle, I had the opportunity to present stories to people who don’t often read in print format. I am particularly interested in fostering new writers and in engaging in community outreach. I’m excited by the prospect of doing this work through SFWA. In his candidacy statement, Scalzi outlines the ways in which the Nebulas and the Grand Master awards help establish the importance of genre in the broader American culture. I endorse these things, but I’m also interested in doing more work in the vein of the readings series that Mary Robinette Kowal has begun in Portland and Seattle. I’d like to see SFWA increase the hands-on interactions between members, new writers, and readers.

Nevertheless, while I do have particular areas of interest, I envision my role as vice president being primarily one of support. I’m excited to help the new president of SFWA carry out his or her goals as efficiently and competently as possible. SFWA is standing on a more–or-less solid foundation these days; it’s time to start building higher. I have some ideas for the imaginary parapets, but I’m happy to spend my term laying pragmatic and utilitarian—if not especially glamorous—bricks.

Thank you,

Rachel Swirsky

A few months ago, I had the privilege of being approached by Nightshade Books to blurb THE EMPEROR'S KNIFE by Mazarkis Williams. I blurbed it thus:

Mazarkis Williams creates a world in which magic is written in an alphabet of triangles, circles, crescents; inscribed on skin; spelled out in blood and bodies. Likewise, his epic story is written on the blood and bodies of his characters, swept up in grand designs in which they are merely letters. In Williams’ decadent empire, everyone—even the emperor—is subject to the constraining hands of fate and tradition. A royal can only be imprisoned by silk, but in Williams’ world, silk does not yield easily. Even as their options narrow, his characters struggle to fulfill their desires. It’s easy for someone with a thousand freedoms to choose heroic paths, but Williams renders characters who must strive to do their best even as the path they tread tapers to a fine line. They are revealed in the way they navigate the impassable and the impossible.

A fascinating magic system, a decadent empire, secret paths, hidden princes, dust and silk and horses: THE EMPEROR’S KNIFE considers the humanity of the standard fantasy set pieces, especially those men who were initiated by blood and who rule by blood, and the ways in which their actions are both unforgivable and bound by strings they didn’t create and don’t entirely understand. Sarmin is forbidden to leave his lonely tower; Beyon’s throne is soaked in the blood of his loved ones; a little girl in the Maze falls under her father’s strike. None of them could control the circumstances that put them there—the fathers who turned the key and guided the Knife and wielded the cleaver—but unlike the dead child, Sarmin and Beyon have the fortune and power to change what happens next.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the book. Because I am reviewing as well as blurbing in this context, I'll add some of my criticisms as well. The pacing in the book is uneven so there are moments when it moves slowly and moments when I would say that it moves too quickly. (This is not, in my experience, unusual for long fantasy novels.) There are points where it seems to want to be Guy Gavriel Kay, but isn't, where the emotional energy of the scene could use a bit more finessing so that it creates the same emotion in the reader as it does in the characters (again, in my experience, not unusual for long fantasy novels).

My largest complaint about the book, though, is that the evil characters are a Bit Too Evil. There were points where I wanted much more ambiguity--from the protagonists, sometimes, but definitely from the villains--then the book was willing to provide me. Since there's a lot of delicate work in the background of the novel, it felt weird for unsubtle villainous elements to drop in; it felt like they were working against the intricacy elsewhere.

One thing I really like about the book, though, which I didn't know when I blurbed it, is that this is a book that grew on me. I find that very few books stay static in my memory from the time I read them. Some grow; others diminish. EMPEROR'S KNIFE is a book that increases in richness for me and has left a strong impression of mood and images. I credit this to Williams' world-building. A lot of the books in Nightshade's recent line seem to emphasize worldbuilding--Kameron Hurley's GOD'S WAR, Courtney Schafer's WHITEFIRE CROSSING, even Stina Leicht's BLOOD AND HONEY which is very careful about building its world even though it takes place on boring old Earth (which isn't boring as she writes it).

I think at Nightshade, the editors may subscribe to the philosophy that Kameron Hurley describes in her recent blog entry "The Dirty Little Secret of Imaginative Worldbuilding"--" I got tired of reading unimaginative fiction that claimed to be fantastic. If I just wanted a story about people who lived and loved, I’d read more lit fiction. I come to the SF/F for the worldbuilding, for the ways things can be different."

To be honest, the first part of that statement drives me kind of nuts because I think there's lots of fantasy & sci fi that's not dependent on world-based differences and still is strong fantasy & sci fi. I'd better think that given what I write. But ignoring that, I think Nightshade is publishing writers who are doing interesting work with creating worlds that are unusual.

Readers who are interested in gender/sex/stuff may be interested to know that Mazarkis Williams is writing from a gender neutral persona. This is of particular interest to me because I automatically gendered Williams male as you can see from the above blurb. I'm not sure if that's because, in the absence of cues, my brain went "hey, Williams is a male name"--but it wasn't until I contacted the author to talk about doing a short review of the book that I realized, "Wait. On what basis am I assuming this person is male?"

I think the gender neutral persona is fascinating from a marketing perspective, but it also makes the text interesting meta-fictionally. It would be super-interesting to see how differently people read the book based on whether they unintentionally gendered the author male or female. It would also be interesting to see how many people did not come to a conclusion regarding the author's gender, assuming that they're readers who are interacting with author-as-presence-in-the-text (which may just be a feature of the way that writers read, or at least of how this writer reads, I dunno).

Also, it's just kind of cool. Because it's unusual. And it means hir avatar on the Nightshade site is a silhouette with glasses.

Mazarkis was kind enough to do a brief interview with me to supplement my ramblings and explain more about hirself and the book.

Mazarkis Wiliams on THE EMPEROR'S KNIFE

RS. Your book seems similar to several of the other recently published Nightshade texts I’ve read over the past few years in that there’s a heavy emphasis on building a sweeping setting that fits easily within the traditional fantasy oeuvre, but distinguishes itself with an inventive magic system. How did you approach working with the magic and setting in this book? Was it your intent to comment on other kinds of magic systems? Was either the magic or the setting part of your primary inspiration when you started writing?

MW. I am surprised and pleased to fit right into the Night Shade catalogue.

The first thing you should know is that I lack imagination. When I first wrote about the marks on the skin, I was thinking of bubonic plague. And from there, thinking about biological warfare, how infecting a population can precede an invasion. But of course, that’s not magical. That’s not fantasy. So the infection had to be a magical one.

After the book was written I began to see a number of stories in which marks on the skin, or tattoos, conferred some sort of magical benefit or disability. I was not attempting to comment on these or any other magic systems. I usually don’t pay a lot of attention to the magic systems in other books. I see them as elements of the more important themes.

For example, in WHITEFIRE CROSSING, there is a predatory element to the magic (I don’t want to give too much away here). I'm interested in the guy who has magical ability but also carries a great deal of guilt. The magic contributes to the bigger story of how he will balance his talent and his conscience.

Fantasy novels often turn upon a choice or sacrifice made by a character in relation to the magic. And it’s the character I care about, his journey, his struggle.

The story of TEK began with Sarmin, in a room. It started with a character.

RS. THE EMPEROR'S KNIFE follows a number of characters through intense plotlines. What was it like to juggle so many characters and events? Did you start out knowing how they'd intersect? Were some of the characters/plotlines more comfortable for you, and did you ever have trouble moving from one to the other?

MW. It was fairly difficult. I did have an idea how they would intersect; that part was easy, because of the paths laid for each character. I was impatient for them all to get together, and when they finally were, it was a hair-pulling adventure to bring all the storylines to a close. I’m trying to be smarter with the second one, but it doesn’t look as if it will be any easier.

I did find, and do find, it difficult to move from character to character. I get into one character’s head and want only to write about her or him. It sometimes takes a great effort of will to say to myself, ‘No, it’s time to write about the next person.’ Once I’ve adjusted I’d say I have the same comfort level with any of them, except for a new POV in book two. I feel extremely comfortable with that POV compared to the others.

RS. What about the book gives you the most joy?

MW. Well, there are two things. Sometimes I create a turn of phrase and then read it back and think, ‘That sounds really great!’ I can’t believe I’m really doing this, that it’s me.

The second joy is that I love my characters. Even the bad ones. Like a parent, I don’t differentiate.

RS. Do you have any upcoming projects? Are you working on a sequel to this, something else in this world, or another kind of text entirely?

MW. I am working on the sequel to The Emperor’s Knife. It’s called Knifesworn. It’s in the same world. TEK does come to a satisfying end, but there are a few loose threads that can be followed. That’s what Knifesworn does.

I've got a couple writing and reading assignments that have me busy right now, but I'll be doing a post on the first few months of Asimovs and F&SF in 2012 as soon as I can get to it.

In the meantime, I wanted to post a quick short story recommendation.

I've been following Matthew Herreshoff for several years now, ever since I stumbled onto one of his stories on the Online Writing Workshop. I invited him to join a private workshop after that where I enjoyed more of his stories. It had long mystified me why he wasn't published. In my more outre moments, I imagined that he was in fact an industry professional who was working under a sly psuedonym. I mean, he's just fucking good.

Anyway! He has at last broken that publication boundary. His first published short story came out in Pedestal Magazine a couple of months ago. It's strange, post-apocalyptic fiction, which I always think of as sort of his ballywick. (He's got a wonderful story about cockroaches which had better find publication one of these days.) He writes about industry, and post-industrial societies, and decay, and that sense of eerieness those things bring when they're rusting and empty. Sort of Ballardian in the way that he interacts with the mechanical in the post-human world.

This story is a more human-centered post-apocalypse.

Peace by Matthew Herreshoff:

We were bunkered-up in the old cold-storage plant when they brought the Mary in. "Look what we found," Baby Bird said, all smiley and proud of hisself.

You never knew what you'd find when you went out foraging. We'd found canned goods, even chocolate, a storeroom full of Pampers, a cache of iodized salt. But this was the first time we'd found a live person. And a Mary! I hadn't seen a Mary since before the draft-man came. She was bone-thin and wore coveralls, torn and streaked with dirt. And she clutched a bundle in her arms. A baby!

I'm reviewing stories at Last Short Story now. I've done my first roundup, reviewing the stories from the eight online magazines I'm planning to follow this year, from Jan 1st through Feb 15th.

Here's my favorite:

"Aftermath" by Joy Kennedy-O'Neill (Strange Horizons) - This extremely affecting story features zombies--which you're probably sick of (I am)--but it looks at them through the lends of reconciliation. How do people move on after a civil war, an apartheid, a genocide, a zombie attack--where neighbors kill each other and subsequently have to live side by side? The emotional and character work here is very skillful. I found it hard to read; it made me cry.

Click through to see other cool stories.

That's what you just did, project runway all-stars.

It's like instead of writing down numbers to score the looks, all the judges wrote down squiggles, and then the judging came out as a divide by cucumber error.

It wasn't even wrong so much (although it was wrong) as "did you accidentally leave your eyes at home and then the cat chased your eyes under the couch and they got covered in dust and then you swallowed a parakeet that twittered random phrases whenever you opened your mouth at panel?"

Just wanted to register on the 'net that it's a bad pain week.

Things that need to be mailed, or need concentration to answer, or so on, should get out this weekend.

Trigger warning for me possibly being a clueless, transphobic douche. I’m trying to work something out and generally throwing out some ideas for people who are cooler than me to react to. But they may be stupid, stupid ideas, and if you just don’t to deal with a cis person being stupid, you should probably skip this.

So, I have this thing in my head where when I’m thinking about “who here is a man,” I include cis men and trans men. If I’m thinking about “who here is a woman” and I’m thinking about something that doesn’t have to do with issues around gender and sex as experienced by sociological minorities, then I include cis women and trans women.

But if I’m thinking about “who here is a woman” and I’m thinking about something that *does* have to do with issues around gender and sex as experienced by sociological minorities–such as “how do we measure the gender bias in this engineering department by looking at the test scores of men and women?”–then I include cis women, trans women, and trans *men.*

I’m talking about auto-inclusion here. The measurements the back of my brain makes before I stop it and go, “Knock that off, trans men are men,” and correct myself.

But there are definitely circumstances in which I think of cis men as one group and cis women, trans women, and trans men as another. For instance, when I meet someone new (and I know their cis/trans and gender status), I have the same basal level of comfort talking to people about issues of sex and gender if they are cis women, trans women, or trans men. And that’s not something I have an inclination to correct the way I correct my brain when it’s wrong about statistics. (Maybe I should, though. That’s part of what I’m trying to work out.)

I suspect my problem is that my brain actually has two schemas which it uses the word “woman” to label. One is the traditional schema: people who are gendered female. The other includes most people who have experience being gendered (or wanting to be gendered if they are pre-transition) as female by society. This would include female-bodied genderqueer or agendered people, or male-bodied genderqueer or agendered people if they are or have been read as female on a regular enough basis for it to affect them as far as sociological measures are concerned.

Probably there should be fine-tuning of what I just said to make it include all the people I mean to include and exclude all the people I don’t, but I think that’s the best marshaling of vocabulary I can handle right now.

So there’s the one schema I have in my brain that’s labeled “woman” which is, I think, the consensus definition of woman. And then there’s another schema in my head labeled “woman” (and the fact that it’s labeled woman may be inherently transphobic) that is a nameless category that includes the bunch of people mentioned above.

If there is a name for this category, I don’t now it. Queer doesn’t cover it; that includes cis men. Genderqueer doesn’t cover it; that excludes cis women.

Now I don’t mean to say that cis women, trans women, and trans men (and the other aforementeioned groups) have all experienced being socially gendered female in the same way. I understand, for instance, that many trans men will have experienced being gendered female differently than cis women since they are not actually gendered female. And obviously all three groups are capable of having horrible, douchey ideas about sex and gender.

Sometimes, though, I think the groups often do go together. Like, as I mentioned above, when I’m calculating the risk of talking to someone I don’t know very well about sex and gender issues. Or when science fiction writers are measuring “how many women writers are there in this table of contents?” I often think that it’s a less revealing measure than “how many people inhabiting marginalized gender spaces are in this table of contents?”

Or, here’s another example where my brain ends up with something other than the consensus position, and I’m not sure if I’m seeing something real or being a douche–when people are discussing safe spaces for women, and they talk about how much it sucks that trans women can’t get in, I’m totally onboard. That is suck pants with suck shoes. I also am totally onboard when they talk about how much that position is revealed as even more scarily transphobic when trans men are allowed but trans women aren’t. But the further argument that allowing trans men into women-only spaces *at all* is inherently delegitimizing their gender identity–well, on the one hand, I do understand it, because trans men are men. But on the other hand, when I’m invoking women-only safe space, I think I want to be invoking the other schema, the nameless schema, the schema that says the reason this space needs to be exclusionary is because of the shared experience of sexism by people who have been sociologically gendered female, and most trans men have as much right to lay claim to that as cis women or trans women.

One reason I want to settle this for myself is that I’m pretty sure my mind swaps fluidly back and forth between the consensus term “woman” and my private, broader term “woman.” Because I use the same word for both, I fail to always make the distinction between when I’ve moved from one category to the other. A lot of times I can catch and correct myself before I speak. But sometimes, I don’t. And in the interest of making sure I say less stupid, cissexist shit without thinking, it would be good for me to clarify what’s going on in my brain, articulate it, understand it, and then fix it, whether that means mentally eradicating my second mental category or relabeling it.

So I guess some of the things I’m chewing on and that I’m interested in other people’s perspective on, include:

*Is the concept behind my second, nameless schema inherently transphobic?

*If yes, then ignore the rest of the questions, obviously, but assuming no, is there an existing name for it that I haven’t run into? Is there an intuitive name for it that’s not in use?

*Again assuming no, does it seem sociologically useful (as I intuitively think it is) to measure some things by how they affect people with experience inhabiting the marginalized binary gender, rather than just measuring how they affect people who fit the traditional “woman” schema?

I’m going to go ahead and limit the comments on this post to only people who believe in equality between trans and cis folks on both a legal and moral level.