feminist blogs

Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife Now blog has two very exciting guest writers this week–Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.

Nisi and Cynthia are the authors of Writing the Other, a practical text aimed at helping authors write characters unlike them. The book is an excellent teaching tool, full of practical advice, and supplemented with exercises. VanderMeer writes:

I love Writing the Other because it espouses in a very specific and detailed way what I’ve always thought about writing characters, and even about writing minor characters: you need to fully inhabit them. Which is to say, if your characters aren’t going to just be carbon copies of you and your own experience of the world, you need to be able to see clearly through other people’s eyes.

Ward and Shawl teach workshops on the subject, though I haven’t yet had the privilege of taking one. The second best thing is reading what these smart women have to say.

Check out Nisi and Cynthia’s bios, and read their first post on The Unmarked State.

(Comments at Big Other or Booklife Now)

I still have no idea who this guy is, but the made Steven Colbert happy, and he’s Russian.

Via Chris Bodenner

Those of you who’ve been meandering around the interweb for a while will be familiar with the blogger Jon Swift, the mock-conservative who declared that he received his news through unbiased sources like Rush Limbaugh, and who said of the economic downturn, “At a time when Wall Street executives are being forced to give up their private planes, limousines, bathroom renovations and multimillion dollar bonuses, the idea that a homeless man has been allowed to hold on to his cellphone while others are making sacrifices is more than we can take.”

The writer behind Swift was Al Weisel. And sadly, Al Weisel has died:

Al was on his way to his father’s funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke.

I didn’t know Al personally, only through his writing. But his writing was superlative, the sort of satire his cognomen’s namesake would have heartily approved. My heart and thoughts are with the Weisel family, which is having to face far too much loss in too short a time.

N. K. Jemisin (who sometimes posts here via the Angry Black Woman as Nojojojo) discusses her excellent debut epic fantasy novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, in the Big Idea feature at John Scalzi’s blog.

his week, in my copious free time, I’m reading Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It’s basically a dissection of the history that most US citizens learned in school, and some of its core fallacies — like the idea that the New World was an undeveloped, sparsely-populated wilderness before Europeans arrived. In reality, Mann explains, the pre-Columbian Americas had a population to match that of Europe — much of it concentrated in sprawling urban-centric empires like those of ancient Rome. And like ancient Rome, these New World civilizations thoroughly engineered the landscape, building aqueducts and roads and planting forests to optimize hunting, fishing, flooding, and commerce. (Did you know there’s a “Great Wall of Peru”? I didn’t.) It’s a fascinating book, though obviously not without controversy, and it seems well-researched and well-written. I’m not done with it yet, but I’m enjoying what I’ve read so far.

Why am I talking about somebody else’s book when I should be talking about mine? Because this is the kind of thing that really gets me going: hidden truths. History is written by the victors, after all — which means that beneath many historical “facts” lie counter-facts and conflicting events, illogical assumptions and unrealized motivations, all of which would shake us to our foundations if we ever found out the truth. Maybe. Because there are always those who have reason to keep the truth alive, often at great personal risk, even if only via whispered tales and half-remembered songs. And yes, via a few lies too, told maliciously or through ignorance. One person’s truth is always someone else’s heresy. This is what I decided to write an epic fantasy about.

Read the whole thing.

First up: “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors” by Moxy Fruvous:

“We’ve been living in hovels / spending all our money on / brand new novels.”

And via Ann Leckie, “Sensitive Artist” by King Missile:

“I stay home, reading books that are beneath me, and working on my work, which no one understands.”

Comment at Big Other.

The first book I ever read by Howard Zinn was SNCC: The New Abolitionists. I’ve read a lot of his writing since then, and I think it’s his most powerful book.

Howard Zinn wrote an essay The Optimism of Uncertainty. He argued that history should give us hope, not because it guaranteed that the powerless would win (it really doesn’t), but because it showed extraordinary, unpredictable change is possible. The Civil Rights Movement, particularly SNCC, is an example of the unpredictability of hope. On the 1st of February 1960, Ezell A. Blair Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain, sat down at the counter of their local Woolworth’s and refused to be served. Nobody could have predicted what would grow out of that action.

There have been so many attempts to hide the history of collective resistance, including the reduction of the the freedom movement SNCC was part of to someone sitting down on a bus and someone else giving a great speech. Howard Zinn wrote history like it mattered, because he wanted to cultivate the hope that history brings.

I recently blitzed through a number of short stories so that I could finalize the short story portion of my Nebula ballot. I wanted to post about the ones I decided to nominate, and also some of the other excellent ones I encountered in my reading. I hope people will check out these stories, possibly for award consideration, but mostly because they’re cool.

I have a post up at Ecstatic Days explaining my methodology for creating a reading list, and a few other points about what went into creating my list of nominees and recommendations.

Here are the nominees and recommendations themselves.

My short story nominations
“Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh, Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Remembrance is Something Like a House” by Will Ludwigsen, Interfictions 2
“The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo, Clarkesworld
“The Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert, Interzone
“Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin, Clarkesworld

Highly Recommended Stories
“Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts” by Benjamin Francisco, Realms of Fantasy*
“Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman, Strange Horizons**
“Reading by Numbers” by Aidan Doyle, Fantasy Magazine
“Spar” by Kij Johnson, Clarkesworld
“Marsh Gods” by Ann Leckie, Strange Horizons**
“Suphero Girl” by Jessica Lee, Fantasy Magazine**

Recommended Stories
“Turning the Apples” by Tina Connolly, Strange Horizons
“The Score” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Interfictions 2
“A Song to Greet the Sun” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Fantasy Magazine
“Endangered Camp” by Ann Leckie, Clockwork Phoenix 2
“…That Has Such People In It” by Jennifer Pelland, Apex Digest
“Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut” by Cat Rambo, Strange Horizons
“Water Museum” by Nisi Shawl, Filter House
“The Moon Over Tokyo through Leaves in the Fall” by Jerome Stueart, Fantasy Magazine
“Light on the Water” by Genevieve Valentine, Fantasy Magazine
“Bespoke” by Genevieve Valentine, Strange Horizons
“The Olverung” by Steven Woodworth, Realms of Fantasy**

Tiptree Nominated Stories
I also nominated three of these stories for the Tiptree — “The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo (Clarkesworld), “Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert (Interzone), and “A Song to Greet the Sun” by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Fantasy Magazine)

—
*This story would have been one of my five nominees except for the conflict of interest created by its appearance on PodCastle during my tenure as editor.
**These stories also appeared in PodCastle during my tenure as editor.

–

“The Mathematics of Faith” by Jonathan Wood, Beneath Ceaseless Skies — deleted from a previous version of this list because it is a novelette.

I am looking for a recommendation of a book or article that will give me background on what the situation was like for gay women in the decade or so before Stonewall. Non-fiction preferred to fiction, but I’m happy with material that’s available online and material that isn’t.

New post at Big Other:

I am writing some Mad Hatter-March Hare slash, which I fully intend to parade past every respectable magazine I can find when I finish. Among the delights of this project, of which there are many, I have been having an excellent time looking up bizarre old-fashioned misconceptions, sifting through internet answers to why ravens resemble writing desks, and delving into the delightfully ridiculous depths of Victorian slang.

My dear nug, would you like to tip the velvet? Cram your arbor vitae down the red tunnel, perhaps, or go to bedfordshire with a wagtail where you can bury your whore’s pipe and your tiddle-diddles between cupid’s kettle drums before shoving Nebuchadnezzer through the roundmouth — unless you’re piss-proud. If you’re kinky, play the brother starling. Mandrakes might prefer to play the back gammon or visit the red tunnel. If you’re a dark cully, then you deserve the flap dragon — and keep your gaying instrument well away from me.

Now, I am willing to entertain the suggestion that this is faked or poorly researched — but I really don’t mind if it is. For I have been thoroughly entertained.

Comment over there.

Elsewhere, Nancy Lebovitz wrote:

I’ve been into Ayn Rand (details if you like about what I do and don’t agree with from her)[1], and how I still don’t see the emotional stench that’s obvious to a lot of people from her writing… [1]She’s the only writer I can think of who put a woman character in charge of a huge piece of infrastructure– one that was part of the larger society. Signy Mallory (captain of a big spaceship) doesn’t have the same emotional effect, I’d say.

I replied:

…the only writer? can you qualify that in some way (timespan, political writings only, etc) because, er, if you’re somehow suggesting no other writer has ever done this, that’s a very strange claim.

Suggestions of other depictions welcome here.