And Another Thing

I meant to include this in yesterday’s roundup, but it slipped my mind.

This week I started reading Nimona, a webcomic by Noelle Stevenson about a teenager who is sidekick to a supervillain. It’s very funny and has an interesting take on both the hero/villain idea and on the villain/sidekick relationship. Go read it!

I found out about this one because I’ve been keeping my eye on a new monthly column by Hannah K Chapman on Women In Comics. Hannah’s column is also why I decided to pick up I Kill Giants, another comic I loved recently. Check out her column (March and April for more good recommendations.

Misc. Points

Various things both mine and others’, in an assorted jumble that probably doesn’t work as one post.

1.

Foz Meadows talks On Grittiness & Grimdark. Her argument in an oversimplified nutshell: Works that claim to be “more realistic” because they are gritty and dark are implicitly putting forward the idea that the other elements of the story are also realistic, when often they’re anything but. Read the full post, she says it better than I could.

2.

Everyone is already talking about Amanda Palmer’s TED speech, The Art of Asking. Here are some posts that muse on what her talk means to book-business folk:
- Chuck Wendig on The Art of Asking: For Writers and Storytellers
- Andrew Losowsky at Huffington Post Books, Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk Contains Important Lessons For Publishers

3.

Fireside Magazine is by all accounts an excellent venue for short fiction. They’re currently running a Kickstarter to fund a full year of publication, and the end date is closing in fast. If you’re interested in seeing more decent short fiction – and in a venue that pays writers better than the low standard rates – consider backing.

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And now, back to me.

4.

Writing:

- I wrote fiction this weekend. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t good, but I haven’t done it in quite some time, and lately I’ve been getting hit with the story bug. I might try to take Chuck Wendig’s writing advice, and aim for just a little each day until suddenly I’ve written a lot.

- I’ve also hit this odd point where I feel wrong and unproductive when I go a while without writing something – fiction, a review, a longer blog or forum post, anything. I haven’t got past my procrastination yet, unfortunately: this post is procrastination for writing my thoughts on Ben Peek’s Black Sheep.

5.

Reading:

- I’m falling back into my old bad habit of buying books much faster than I read them.

- I’m getting very slack on Book-A-Week, as you can tell by my blog posting lately. I want to be more relaxed about it, but not also keep falling behind.

- I am thinking of clearing a few books out of my collection that I don’t think I’ll reread. I don’t know what to do with them, however. Preferably they’d go somewhere they’d be read and enjoyed… Last time I cleared out books was the first time, and I did the wrong thing: I just allowed my sister to take away a lot of them and sell them off to some cashback website. Ugh.

6.

I’m sure I have forgotten something worth posting.

All Quiet

I’ve been trying to write something about We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, which should have been my Book-A-Week for Monday, but I’m having trouble getting started.

In the meantime, here’s an entirely unrelated short animated film.

(It did stick out to me that almost every woman in that film is there as a sex object, but it’s pretty enjoyable & clever otherwise.)

Things

Since I’ve been quiet lately:

1.
Book-A-Week – Last week’s read was Seized by Lynne Cantwell. This is the first book I’ve not chosen myself – it was chosen by the folks taking part in the tiny little book club I started over on Kevin’s Watch. I skipped writing a Book-A-Week post about this one. I just didn’t have a lot to say about it.

2.
John Scalzi: Solving My Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit Problem – Click that link to see how author John Scalzi responds when a bigoted writer takes to regularly insulting him and stirring up people into posting hate-filled comments. Every time the blogger in question mentions Scalzi in a post in 2013, he’s going to add $5 to a fund to donate to several organisations that promote equal rights for women, homosexuals, and people of colour, up to a maximum of $1000 – and lots of people are pledging to match that donation. At the time I write this, up to $36,000 has been pledged.

3.
Criminal Minds – I’ve spent a lot of time this past week watching the seventh season of Criminal Minds. Apart from an execrable season opener (seriously, it was awful, but I suspect its only purpose was to restore the status quo then move on), it’s a pretty solid season – the show is chugging along and its usual standard.

I noticed that these days almost none of the episodes involve any kind of mystery about who the unsub is; they’re always about how and/or why. Which is playing to the show’s strengths, I guess, but I kind of missed having a little of that element. In this season instead you get to follow along with most of these killers and see what they’re doing as it unfolds, which can be fun. Some excellent guest stars in this one.

4.
Loncon3 – I finally went ahead and bought myself attending membership for Loncon3, the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). Unless something else pops up, this will be my first convention. It’s a year and a half away and I’m already nervous.

5.
Neil Gaiman: Down Among the Dead Men – And finally, here’s an animated short story by Neil Gaiman. Enjoy.

Kickstarter: Electric Velocipede

I’ve just been made aware that Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds. I was a subscriber to EV back at the tail end of university; I allowed the subscription to lapse because I just wasn’t finding the time to read short fiction, but I enjoyed what I read of it a lot – John Klima has published some excellent fiction through it.

Since the last time I looked, it appears the magazine has gone online, offering up the content for free on its website. The current campaign, where they hope to raise $5000, will allow them to continue publishing for another year – producing 4 issues – and rewards for backers include ebook subscriptions to these future issues.

Check out the site. Read some of the stories. If you like what you see, consider backing the campaign to keep the magazine going.

Link Post

So here are some links I saved of things I’ve seen online over the last week or so.

First up, when I read Stepan Chapman’s The Troika back in November I mentioned how it’s a shame the book’s so hard to find; Jeff VanderMeer helpfully showed up in the comments to say they’d be publishing it as an ebook soon. Well, soon is now: The Troika is now available in ebook form. I was lucky enough to get a hard copy for Christmas a few years back (my parents tracked it down from some online seller in Germany, I believe), but people have been missing out on this excellent Philip K. Dick Award-winning surreal novel while it has been out of print. Go get it!
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Over on his blog, John Scalzi talked about how his book Redshirts got to be a New York Times bestseller – and why it isn’t an example for how any writer can have a bestseller.
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Be sure to check out these great posts on writing female characters:
- Alex Dally MacFarlane wants to see more realistic female friendships in fiction, and
- Rose Lemberg follows up with what makes a good feminist character – and how overuse of the “Warrior Woman” archetype can be ultimately harmful.
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Here’s a link for book lovers that is strangely captivating: Bookshelf Porn (safe for work!). Enjoy.
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On the other end of the scale, however, is Buzzfeed’s 25 Depressing Portraits of Closed Bookstores. The book selling business is being hit from a lot of sides: Online purchasing, ebooks, the financial crisis, and the general decline of the high street. A few of these images struck quite a chord.
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As if we needed reminding there is still hate and bigotry in the world, we have these responses when Oreo decided to show support for gay pride with a picture of a rainbow-coloured cookie. We still have a long way to go.
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Monday’s edition of webcomic a softer world seems appropriate at this point.
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In case those last few links were a little too depressing, I’ll leave you with this.

Pay Attention. This Stuff Matters.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Feminist Frequency, the web video series by Anita Sarkeesian, and her (still ongoing) Kickstarter project to fund a series on “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games”. Since then, it turns out a whole shitstorm of harrassment and Wikipedia vandalism has been stirred up around the project (at least partly driven by those geniuses at 4chan).

Anita gives a sample of the harrassment in Youtube comments and talks about the Wikipedia vandalism campaign here and here.

I caught myself about to type “it goes without saying that this stuff is just terrible”. But then I thought about that for half a second. No, it doesn’t go without saying. If it went without saying, this wouldn’t be happening, so I’ll say it:

This is terrible. No one should be treated like this.

And we need to keep saying it until people start to get it into their heads, and stop being hateful, racist, homophobic, misogynistic assholes.

Anita has also been sharing some of the media response to the hate campaign on her @FemFreq Twitter feed, and they’re worth reading (though, as always, watch out for the comments. Especially on Kotaku) -

Becky Chambers at TheMarySue sums up the whole situation better than I could (and offers some suggestions on what to do about online harrassment, in short: don’t sit there and take it, SPEAK UP):

Whether or not you like Sarkeesian’s work is utterly moot. You might disagree with some of her points. You might disagree with all of her points. You might even vehemently disagree. That’s not the issue here. The issue lies in this: A woman declared her intent to publicly voice her opinions about video games. For that, she was called a bitch, a whore, a slut, a cunt, a dyke, and a baffling assortment of racial slurs. She was threatened with violence, rape, and death. She was told to shut her mouth, get back in the kitchen, and die of cancer. Her video was repeatedly flagged for terrorism in an effort to get YouTube to pull it. Her Wikipedia page was defaced with pornography and profanity. All for the crime of being a woman talking about women in video games. No, not for being a woman talking about video games. For being a woman who had announced that she would, at some point in the future, be talking about video games.

Alex at The Border House on “This Week in Harrassment” (again: SPEAK UP!)

Helen Lewis at the New Statesman: “Dear The Internet, This Is Why You Can’t Have Anything Nice”

And finally Kotaku, along the same lines while demonstrating the problem itself pretty well in the comments. (Par for the course for comments on Kotaku.)

 
UPDATE: It seems the attackers have now taken http://www.feministfrequency.com offline.