Not being at Wiscon is a constant state for me – though of course it becomes quite specifically sad on that weekend every year when other people ARE at Wiscon. I always enjoy reading the con reports, speeches and so on, and later delight in ordering the Wiscon Chronicles, a fantastic project which does a very good job of making you feel like you were ALMOST there.
This year, I direct you towards the extraordinary speech from one of this year’s Tiptree Award winners, Kiini Ibura Salaam: Doing What We Can. If you are ever depressed about your writing or where you are going professionally, and the stories about people managing to write novels while also hanging upside down from a rope, juggling three children and winning Nobel Prizes for science are DEEPLY IRRITATING to you rather than inspiring, then this is the speech for you. Kiini has also written a lively con report about her Wiscon/Tiptree experience and I don’t know about the rest of you, but her blog just went straight into my RSS reader!
But let’s talk about writing advice. Normally the internet is packed from wall to wall with writing advice that makes me annoyed or angry, but this week it’s full of sensible people debunking writing advice in entertaining ways. Hooray!
Charlotte Nash talks about Project Based Writing as a sensible, flexible alternative to Do What Heinlein Did, It Worked For Him And Therefore Is Perfectly Suited To Everyone which is, let’s face it, the internet’s default advice about writing when it’s not banging on about Hemingway and adverbs.
Let’s chase that up with Tobias Buckell’s splendidly named piece, Why 90% of the Advice About Writing Is Bullshit Right Now.
If you’re feeling properly warmed up, I’d like now to usher to towards the spectacular and unapologetically ranty Judith Tarr, with her three-part blogstravaganze Escaping Stockholm. The link is to the combined piece but I recommend reading it in the original three segments as the structure is beautifully laid out. Judith has been around the book publishing business for a very long time, and is writing out of a building horror at how many new/young/midlist writers are now churning out multiple books a year under worse and worse conditions for the publishers to which they are contracted. This is a marvellous piece of writing, which shares a much longer historical perspective building up to the current state of flux the publishing industry is in, and how conditions have changed in positive and negative ways for writers. It’s fascinating. Read all of it, and send your friends/authors/students/fellow sufferers to read it too.
Random glorious internet thing of the week: kids taking part in an after school car-rebuilding-project (adapting gasoline engines to electric ones, already pretty awesome as after-school projects go) were challenged to design a car that could run on Facebook likes and Twitter re-tweets.
Now, gender stuff. It wouldn’t be a Friday Links without gender stuff, right? Ms Magazine looks at school dress codes, and the messages being sent to young girls about their bodies, the clothes they are supposed to wear, and their “responsibility” towards people who might be “distracted” by how they clothe themselves. The comments involve some interesting discussion from different perspectives, though I can’t promise it hasn’t turned into a steaming mess since I last looked at it. Tread carefully.
Kate Elliott answers the question of whether it is difficult for her to avoid using the traditions of male gaze in her fiction.
On SF Signal, an interesting thought piece in response to recent essays on gender and female warriors, from the perspective of one male writer inspired to do things differently, and how he is trying to address those issues in his work.
I also really enjoyed this love letter to Persephone Books, a publisher so awesome and stylish that I have been crushing on them from afar for some time.
Bitch Magazine looks at Three Ways Star Trek Needs To Change – which, yes. Basically, yes. If I go to an awesome explosion-heavy movie with Benedict Cumberbatch and Zoe Saldana, I don’t actually want to spend the next three days ranting about mini-skirts. I have better things to do with my time!
The big event of the week is the new Anita Sarkeesian vid, Part II of her Damsels in Distress in Videogames series. Excellent stuff, as always. The vid is the perfect medium for this kind of discussion, and I really hope they will be taken up as teaching resources, to raise discussion about gaming etc. in the classrooms. Sadly, as noted in various places, Sarkeesian continues to be harassed and her work targeted by people who don’t believe she should be allowed to talk in public.
It’s long but good! My only complaint is that I think she misrepresents the character of Calhoun from Wreck-It Ralph, suggesting that the reversal of the ‘revenge after lover dies’ gender trope is done just for comic effect. That movie is doing some very clever and subversive things about gender that we don’t normally see in kids movies, and there’s a big difference between using gender-reversal for humour, and using humour to point out gender issues in pop culture.