more whingeing

…about how long it’s taking me to get this blasted novel done.

It’s lost the spark, and added to that I have two new stories rattling around in my brain.

Write me, they whisper. Come on, come and write me. You know you want to.

Would people stop with saying things that spark new stories in my head? On Podcastle (old episode) someone was talking about a book that gets back to the myths about elves, how they were universally regarded as evil. It’s our relatively modern mythologising that has made them the postive role models they are in LOTR and elsewhere. And that triggered a whole story, about an evil elven society where humans are the slave class, about an elven man who buys a female slave. He seems all right as an owner, until she breaks a plate (that had huge emotional value to him) and he beats her until she is close to death. The meat of the story is in how they rebuild some kind of relationship; her despairing and suicidal, him freaked out by the realisation of how violent he can be. There’s room for a meditation on slavery – she chooses not to be involved in a slave revolt, because the freedom on offer doesn’t look particularly enticing. He has always regarded himself as a progressive, until he’s forced to confront the fact that he’s absorbed beliefs about slaves that run counter to what he knows to be true…

Anyway, there’s enough there for a longish short, and I desperately want to write it, but I can’t. I have enough unfinished stories to keep me busy for a year.

And then there’s Confluence, an idea for a SF multi-part short story series, which links in to the 200 000 word novel I wrote back in the 90s. Species wars and AIs and interdimensional gates and Intelligences aaannnd it’s all getting immensely complex and interesting.

Sometimes, when people tell me they couldn’t create a story themselves, I feel like Sherlock, and have to stop myself from saying Can’t you see? Dear god, how boring it must be to exist in your heads.

Anyway.

The First Time They Met, Season of Singing and Pride and Precipitation are all creeping towards the finish line, but dear FSM, it’s like pulling teeth. And when I’ve finished those, I have the rest of Stormwatcher 3 to write, currently standing at (only) 49,000 words. TFTTM has a cover already done, as does Stormwatcher, but I’ve tried three covers for Season of Singing, and they all scream ‘self-published!’

Oh, well. Nose to the grindstone.

[cross posted to Lyssa and Me]

Reviews

After the Greek Seaman debacle, most writers are (and should be) wary of responding to, or criticising, reviews of their work. I have, however, noticed one type of review that unerringly gets on my wick is the ‘This should have been something else’ knockdown.

‘This prose poem should have been a short story’

‘This literary novel should have been a genre book’

‘This novella should have been a family saga’

Just because the reviewer would have preferred a different type of work does not, I feel justify a negative review. Saying “This is a genre book padded with pretentious description to allow it to claim it is literary” is a valid criticism. “I wanted this book to be twice as long because I wanted to know more about the characters” isn’t. It is an opinion, certainly, and it is how the reviewer felt. But criticising a book for being not what you wanted is like going to a shoe shop and complaining that they won’t sell you fish and chips.

 

What’s bugging me…

Is that I have three novels within spitting distance of completion and I can’t get any of them finished.

The only one that interests me is the one that I suspect might actually turn out to need a lot of structural work once I read the ‘completed’ MS. The other two? One just isn’t sparking, and one has two scenes to be written that I just can’t work out how to handle.

And of course, now two fresh stories are nibbling at my brain. One is another contemporary romance and again loosely focused on disability (paraplegia, blindness) and the other is a new SF story set around Confluence, a rather strange space station with a disconcerting AI….

Damn. I really can’t start anything new. Refrain and Coda is still on the back burner, as is Sickbay.

I really need some clear writing time.

A great interview with Art Spiegelman

On the 25th anniversary of Maus, The Guardian has run an excellent interview with the writer.

Parts I particularly liked:

My favourite part of the book, though, is the section in which Spiegelman reproduces the rejection letters he received when his agent, Jonathan Silverman, first sent Maus out to publishers. Oh dear. This is embarrassing. Behold New York’s literary taste-makers acting like a bunch of cowardy custards. “Thank you for letting me see Maus,” says Hilary Hinzmann, of Henry Holt. “The idea behind it is brilliant, but it never, for me, quite gets on track.” Gerald Howard, at Penguin, is a little more up front, but still, he won’t quite take all the blame for turning it down: “In part, my passing has to do with the natural nervousness one has in publishing something so very new and possibly (to some people) off-putting. But more crucially I don’t think Maus is a completely successful work, in that it seems in some way conventional.”

At St Martin’s Press, Bob Miller admits that he found the book “quite affecting” (hell, he even managed to read right to the end). But what on earth would he tell the sales department? “I can’t see how to advance the thing into bookstores.” Even the great Robert Gottlieb of Knopf, publisher of Catch-22, doesn’t get it. “It is clever and funny,” he writes. “But right now, we are publishing several comic strip/cartoon type books and I think it is too soon to take on another one.”

On surviving the holocaust:

But unimaginable suffering, Spiegelman wants us to understand, doesn’t make a person better; it just makes them suffer.

On ebooks:

“The books that have a right to be books make use of their bookness. Graphic novels – who knew that term would stick! – continue to do well because they use their bookness.”

On people’s response to his being a Jew:

“The only parts of Jewishness I can embrace easily are the parts that are unembraceable. In other words, I am happy being a rootless cosmopolitan, alienated in most environments that I fall into. And I’m proud of being somebody who synthesised different kinds of culture – it is a fundamental aspect of the diaspora Jew. I’m uneasy with the notion of the Jew as a fighting machine, the two-fisted Israeli.”

Go read.

Elevatorgate

Watcher in the Water (c New Line Cinema)

 

A couple of months ago a woman was presenting at a conference in a foreign (to her) city. Her talk was on feminism, and as part of it she mentioned that one of the issues women have at conferences is that many men think they are there simply to make themselves sexually available. This, unsurprisingly, is not how the women feel. She spoke of her own personal feelings – that she did not see conferences as a place for men to  hit on her, and that as a professional, she did not like or welcome such advances.

After the day’s talks were over, many of the speakers and attendees moved to the hotel bar, where conversation went on into the wee small hours. At around 4am, this woman stood up, saying thanks, people, but I’m bushed, and I really need to get some sleep, and left to go to her room.

A man followed her, a man who had been hanging around all evening, was at the conference, but had made no attempt to speak to her. He followed her into the elevator.

And when the doors were closed he said don’t take this the wrong way, but… and asked her back to his room.

She said no.

And the next day she mentioned it in her vlog about the conference. She described what happened, and said don’t do this, guys. It’s creepy.

And the internet exploded.

Because a man’s right to proposition a woman, anywhere, at any time, takes priority over the needs, feelings and wishes of a woman.

Because ‘she can always say no’. (And we know that always works, don’t we?)

Because the fact that a man can pick a less scary place than a confined space at 4am with no one else around, that he could have chosen the bar, or earlier in the day, or at breakfast the next day, doesn’t mean that he should ever consider doing so.

Because his penis Wants Satisfaction! Right Now!

And any woman saying no, this is wrong, this is inappropriate is a man hating feminazi.

And that, pretty much, was how the ‘discussion’ went. Round and round in circles, as man after man stood up to explain the primacy of the needs of his penis.

Now there were men that understood, and who tried, with many women, to bash some sense into heads with a clue by four.

We told them about Schrodinger’s rapist.

They said we were calling all men rapists.

We told them how some men cross the street at night to avoid causing a woman anxiety by walking behind her.

They said we were making unreasonable demands. (We weren’t even asking them to do this. Go figure.)

We told them that sexism was a significant problem within the sceptical/humanist/atheist community.

They said it was all in our heads, a product of our fevered pink ladybrains. (thanks, Tiger Beatdown!)

They demanded scientific evidence of male on female assaults, and when we produced it they said it wasn’t true.

They told us that no one ever got raped in an elevator, and when we produced news reports of such, they ignored them.

And then Richard Dawkins weighed in, telling us it wasn’t a problem, because we weren’t muslim women, who have real problems, and then that being propositioned in an elevator was like him standing next to someone chewing gum, ie annoying, but in no way (no, not ever ever) a threat.

And people got pissed off, because Dawkins is supposed to be one of our leaders, and he completely dismissed the idea that being propositioned in a lift, in a strange country, at 4am, is a worrying, often scary, and sometimes downright terrifying experience.

Because men don’t go around with ‘rapist’ on their foreheads. And emergency buttons stop lifts between floors. And you don’t have to rape a woman to do serious damage to her physical and/or mental health. And if he gets out on the same floor as you, do you go to your room and hope he won’t push his way in before you can get the door shut? Do you make a run for the stairs and hope he isn’t faster? Do you stay in the lift and go back down to the lobby and hope this doesn’t make him angry?

There are a lot of decent men out there. But when one lurks about without speaking to you all evening, then follows you into an enclosed space in the wee small hours, and waits until the doors are closed before propositioning you, the likelihood that he’s one of the scary ones has risen sharply.

Studies show that 1/60 men are rapists. If there are more than sixty men at a conference, and one of them behaves like this, the chances that he’s that one in sixty start to look pretty good.

Remind me again why this wasn’t creepy?

 

But now we get to the worst part, and the reason for that picture at the top of this post.

What happened to Rebecca Watson was like Pippin throwing stones into the lake. Remember how Aravir grasps his wrist, telling him that some things are better left undisturbed? Over the last year or so, women have been saying that something isn’t right in the sceptical movement. That many of them feel sidelined, patronised and as if they’re there simply to be sexually available to the men.

And a lot of men told us it was all in our fluffy pink ladybrains, and to stop making a fuss, and to concentrate on important things (read: things that men think are important).

And then Rebecca threw the rock into the lake.

And the thing that had been there all along, the thing that had been our ‘imaginations’, rose up from the deep. An ugly thing. A very, very scary thing.

The realisation that for a significant proportion of men in this community, we are only sexual objects. That if we demand more, then we can just fuck off. That if we’re not attractive enough to be a sexual object, we can just fuck off. That men know far better than us how to interpret these issues, and if we have an opinion, we can fuck off. That it’s not sexism, because nothing is sexism until a man says it is. Oh, and fuck off anyway, because girls don’t do science properly.

And it hasn’t stopped.

That isn’t to say that the clue-by-four didn’t work on some men – and some women, too. But the hard core of misogynists remains, enabled by a series of bloggers, which inevitably includes at least one woman.

And it gets worse.

The woman who said guys, don’t do this, is still receiving hate mail. Whole blogs have been devoted to hatred of her. Men are campaigning to have her removed from any role as a speaker within the sceptical movement. She has been threatened with rape. She has had death threats.

They write lists of her negative characteristics, the kind of thing familiar to anyone who has met a man who’s furious that his boss is a woman.

It all boils down to things like this:

She gossips (because men discuss)

She’s arrogant (because men know their own value)

She’s argumentative (because men hold their own)

And so on, and so on, ad nauseum.

All because she said guys, don’t do this.

 

And all I want to say is Rebecca, you’re fantastic. And you’re absolutely right. You saw this long before most of the rest of us did. You spoke up, and you brought the haters, the slime at the bottom of the lake, roaring into view. You gave us a litmus test for who is truly part of this community, and who is threatened, or furious, or disgusted at the idea that women are demanding to have an equal part of it.

Feminism is the astonishing idea that women are human beings.

You, and PZ, and Phil, and Greg, and the Pharyngulites, and countless people too many to name are on your side, because it’s our side, and our community, and our future.

I give you:

Rebecca Watson

There was a great deal of discussion on Pharyngula, and much smacking down of trolls and MRAs. It’s well worth reading; I’ll summarise some of the best comments in another post.

Links:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/always_name_names.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/the_decent_human_beings_guide.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/oh_no_not_againonce_more_unto.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/gynofascists_are_invading_the.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/go_read_jennifer_ouellette_rig.php

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/09/27/atheism-has-a-sexism-problem.php

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/09/29/haters-gotta-hate.php

Why I hate September

I loathe September. Hate it with a passion that is quite unusual for me.

The last two years, September has brought massive storms, bringing down trees by the dozen across my property, crushing fences, tearing out soil, leaving great gouges in the tracks and knocking branches off my precious, 100-year oak trees.

So, as the end of the month approached I thought we would get away with it. I’ve been watching the forecasts, relieved when none of them mention winds greater than 30kph. I thought it would be all right, I really did.

And today, the weather forecast was for rain, up to 10mm.

10mm.

Oh, I really hate September.

Laser Pointer

Excerpt: A Season of Singing

‘Well,’ the bishop said, sinking into an armchair, ‘how have they been looking after you at St Cuthbert’s?’
The grizzled hair at his temples and his small brown eyes gave him the air of a badger, though the only badgers Mark had ever seen had been dead on the verges of the B485.
‘They’ve been very kind to me.’
‘Too kind, perhaps?’
He shifted, trying to find a comfortable position on the overstuffed seat. The last two times he’d spoken, albeit briefly, to the bishop, he’d been in pyjamas. It didn’t help. And the question was dangerous. Agree, hoping to flatter the man’s insight, or disagree and avoid a trap. His thoughts were sluggish, and he couldn’t be sure that they hadn’t always been that way. ‘I needed to start doing things for myself. I hope they don’t feel I’m ungrateful.’
‘I don’t think so.’ The bishop smiled and Mark relaxed, the trap avoided. ‘But people are apt to get their feathers a bit ruffled when their good offices are declined.’
Mark bowed his head. ‘I’ll try and behave with more…grace.’
‘I hope that won’t be necessary.’ He picked up another file. ‘I understand the medical board has passed you as fit to return to ministry?’
Don’t show any uncertainty. ‘They have.’
‘They’ve also made some recommendations.’ There was a pause while the bishop read. He let the paper drop back onto the table at his side with a breath of irritation. ‘I think the medical profession—may the Lord guide them—has little belief in our ability to see what is known colloquially as the bleeding obvious.’
‘Perhaps they just didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.’
‘Ever the peacemaker, Mark?’ The words were mild, but somehow it didn’t sound like a compliment. ‘Still, there is a benefice just become vacant which should fulfil their recommendations.’ He lavished irony on the final word. ‘It’s rural, two churches, no more than three services a week. I sent someone to have a look at the rectory, as it’s one of the old ones. A couple of minor alterations, and you should be able to manage.’
‘Two churches? I can’t drive.’
‘I’m sure we can find someone on the parish council to help there. You could,’ he added with ponderous humour, ‘get yourself a donkey.’
The interview concluded, Mark hauled himself to his feet, grateful to escape the embrace of a chair that appeared designed to inflict maximum discomfort. He forced a brisk pace while he was still in sight of the bishop; hearing the door close behind him he stopped and leaned against the nearest wall. Somewhere two floors down was the young ordinand assigned to escorting him, as if left to his own devices he’d either fall on his face or throw his walking stick away and make a run for it. In reality he’d probably achieve both simultaneously.
But only another week and he’d leave St Cuthbert’s for ever. He could endure another week. The board had been amused by his eagerness to take up his ministry again. Sometimes he was able to admit to himself that it was closer to desperation.
Ever the peacemaker. Was I? Was that how I was seen? He could remember the past, but much of it was a silent film, emotionless, an unknown actor hijacking his memories.
Wincing, he straightened and made his slow way to the stairs.
Halfway down the second flight the ordinand rushed up and took his arm. Resisting the desire to snap at him, Mark allowed himself to be helped down the last few steps and out to the St Cuthbert’s minibus. The loathing of this innocent vehicle had become automatic; the disabled stickers in its windows, the boxes of latex gloves and tissues always to hand, the lift at the back for wheelchairs, in and out of which he’d been ignominiously carted for months. And always, at the same time, the apologetic internal litany of how this hate didn’t extend to the disabled, that his compassion for them was clear and absolute, that he would be honoured to minister to them.
He settled into his seat, and before he could object, the ordinand reached across and belted him in.
‘There,’ the young man said, smiling benignly. ‘All ready to go?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
Grace, Lord, please give me grace.

Excerpt: The First Time They Met

April 17th

Jack wandered through to the crew room. Roger was on the sofa with Selina, poring over the rota, Hots, in an armchair with his feet on the coffee table and a tea towel over his face, appeared to be asleep. Lyssa sat at the table, writing.
‘Anyone else want a coffee?’ he said.
Selina and Roger indicated half-full mugs. Hots didn’t reply, but Lyssa glanced over her shoulder, said, ‘Yes, if you’re making one. Milk, no sugar, thanks.’ She went back to her writing.
It was only instant; Jack had put up with it for a couple of months then, a few days ago, he’d found a plunger in a cupboard. He’d widened his search, thinking that even three-month-old ground coffee would be better than the dusty-tasting sludge that came in one-kilo tins. But he’d come up empty, and that afternoon he’d ordered an espresso machine online, with a couple of kilos of beans.
The tin was empty; he should have had the machine couriered over.
‘I’ve got some more in my locker.’ Lyssa got up from the table. ‘Emergency supply. Put that tin in the recycling bin.’ She hurried out.
As soon as the door had shut behind her, Roger got to his feet.
‘Watch this,’ he said with a sly grin.
He stepped across to the work surface, unplugged the toaster and kettle, and swapped them round. Then, as Lyssa’s footsteps became audible in the corridor again, he trotted back to the armchair, sat down and opened a newspaper, but not far enough that he couldn’t still catch Jack’s eye.
Lyssa walked back in, a bag of coffee in one hand, a pack of biscuits in the other. She put both down on the work surface, reached for the kettle.
‘Oh.’
She stared at the toaster, as if it were some alien being, squatting, ready to leap at her. She started to glance back over her shoulder, and then seemed to change her mind. Robert was grinning widely. Trying to catch Jack’s eye, giving him an odd sense of déjà vu.
It was like school, the way when someone was being humiliated, everyone else looked at each other and shared the joke in silent amusement. He’d done it himself, for a while, until he’d realised that he didn’t really like the people he was exchanging glances with, and even more that he didn’t like what they were doing. He remembered his one-time friend, Rob, wilting under a barrage of abuse, the other boys laughing. At least, they’d laughed until he stepped up, put a hand on Rob’s shoulder, and the two of them walked away together. There’d been a bit of name-calling, but he’d given them the finger, and they’d shut up. Under his hand, Rob had been shaking. That was the first time he’d realised how much that cruelty hurt, how frightened someone could be.
He got up, walked over. ‘Sorry. I spilled something, earlier. I must have put everything back wrong after I wiped up.’
‘N—no, it’s all right.’ She rubbed her palms on her thighs.
He unplugged the heavy steel toaster, picked it up. ‘Here, shove the kettle back. Before I drop this.’ She did so, and he could see her relax. He didn’t bother looking at Roger. ‘Where did you get your coffee?’
The rest of her tension dissolved in a discussion of the relative merits of several coffee suppliers, as she made brimming mugs for them both.
‘I think you know as much about how to pick good coffee as how to pick good wine,’ he said after he’d taken a mouthful.
She flushed a little, unable to meet his eyes. ‘Not really, I just tell them to give me something that tastes like it’s been stirred with a burnt stick, and might possibly dissolve the spoon.’
‘Alternatively, you could probably tell them you’re a doctor, and they’d give you much the same.’ He sat at the table with her. ‘What are you writing?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, at the same time Hots from under the tea towel said loudly, ‘Poetry.’
She twisted round in her chair to glare at the pilot, but as the tea towel remained draped over his face, it didn’t have any effect.
‘She’s a published poet,’ Hots added, ‘didn’t she tell you?’
‘Why would I?’ Lyssa said crossly.
Hots lifted one corner of the tea towel. ‘Over there,’ he nodded at the bookshelves in the far corner of the room. ‘There’s a copy of her book. It’s the third copy—the other two just vanished. Very strange, but I think the thief knows that if this one disappears, we’ll just buy another one.’
Lyssa sighed and picked up her coffee, drank it without looking at any of them.
Jack wandered over to the bookshelf, sorted through the piles of three-year-old celebrity magazines, medical journals, out-of-date textbooks, copies of Dan Brown and Wilbur Smith, and found a small, hardback volume, titled heavy air, and with a picture of the London skyline on its cover.
‘May I borrow it?’ he said.
Lyssa didn’t reply.
Hots said, ‘Of course,’ dropped the corner of the tea towel, and went back to sleep.

Publishing update

So.

The Painting is up on Amazon, Smashwords and Lulu, and is selling at a steady rate. All ebooks so far, no paperbacks, although I think the paperback royalties take longer to appear on the statement.

Stormwatcher 1 is up in both ppb and ebook versions, and Stormwatcher 2 as an ebook (just finishing the adjustments to the proof – more on that later)

Sense and Celebrity is up in ebook and ppb.

I’m back to working on A Season of Singing. I’m on the last few thousand words, wriggle room I leave myself in the final edits as I tend to underwrite and have to go back and do a lot of filling in between events, foreshadowing, making sure motivations are realistic, that kind of thing.

I never really thought about how much I write about disability until now. I assumed it was because I’m a doctor, but now I no longer think that’s the reason. I suppose it’s that firstly, I prefer to write about people who are disenfranchised in some way – gay men in Nazi Germany, for instance. In Pride and Precipitation (spoilers!) Stephen Rowan ends up the most seriously injured among a small group of people; not a role he has ever envisaged himself in, nor one he’s particularly well equipped to cope with.

Season of Singing follows a deeply religious man who’s the victim of a vicious, mistakenly homophobic attack, from which it has taken him a year and a half to return to independent living. He believes everything that happens has a purpose, but cannot square this with what he’s experienced.

And lastly, The First Time They Met, the most challenging (for me) book I’ve yet written. One character has a lifelong disability, the other has acquired permanent spinal injuries as a result of his own recklessness. One has had it all, and thrown it away, while the other has struggled to be normal, struggled to achieve and yet is still the outsider in her own life.

I’ve suddenly realised that I would find it hard to write without tackling these kinds of issues. I can’t imagine writing a book where all the characters are healthy, privileged people. I’ve often felt guilty about not including more POC, but maybe that’s just not my bag. And if any group of people needs a fictional voice that speaks of them as being fully human, then we certainly do.