Nonviolent and Feminist Science Fiction
Here’s an interesting article. Under stress, human beings can have a flight or fight response, but they can also become more compassionate and more likely to make sacrifices for the well-being of others.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_transform_stress_courage_connection
Sometimes someone else’s essay is so awesome that there’s nothing left for me to do but link to it. I love those essays. Especially when I’m on a deadline. Below is the iconic cartoon about the mental load of household work. It’s always worth a revisit.
Wow, that didn’t take at all longer than I thought it would. Nope. I have not in any way, shape, or form encountered the phenomenon that literally everyone who is not a first-time author warns about. About that length of time it takes to make revisions… I would like to blame caring for a three-year-old during indefinite quarantine, but that honestly only added a month or two.
At any rate, completely ripping apart the first draft, adding a second point of view, substantially revising the themes, and actually… you know… doing some series planing is now done. Next up is shipping it off to editors. At which point I, with my new found humility, estimate that revisions will take a very long time. I’m still hoping to have pre-order links up this year. Now that I have also looked into the lead time needed to market a book, I have a tough time seeing this coming out before 2021. However, I promise it will make it into print eventually!
How many of us can imagine ourselves responding the way the owner of a family restaurant in Minneapolis did when his restaurant burned to the ground during the riots triggered by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police? “Let my building burn,” he said. “Justice needs to be served. Put those officers in jail.” His daughter, telling the story in the Washington Post, adds, “If this is what it takes to get justice, then it will have been worth it.”
Continue reading “Who Pays for Justice?”As a sci-fi author, I wrote a world of characters who disagree with each other about what gender is, but all think that our gender binary is illogical. This drives some real world cisgender people wild. “But isn’t dividing into men vs. women natural?” they argue. “Humans only have two reproductive roles. Defining gender based on who has a penis versus who has a vagina just makes sense!” (Pointing out the existence of intersex people makes a remarkably small dent in this logic. Instead, intersex people get shuffled off as a minor exception to an otherwise logical system grounded in the fundamental facts of reproductive biology.) Many trans activists and theorists have countered this argument far more eloquently than I. However, I would like to take a moment to respond to this argument purely from within the experience of a cisgender straight person. Even the cis people most wedded to conventional divisions of gender fail to take those professed beliefs seriously. From the standpoint of its own professed logic, the gender binary is incoherent.
Continue reading “The Biology (or Lack Thereof) of Gender”The curtain opens on a darkened office. One lamp casts light onto the face of the White Author, who is sitting at a desk hunched over a laptop looking at Twitter. Whispers start. At first, the words are too faint to make out, but gradually occasional whispers become audible, making it clear that the White Author is reading comments about their recently published book. The word “racist” is heard with greater and greater frequency. The White Author straightens and starts typing frantically.
WHITE AUTHOR: What! How dare you say my book is racist! I’m not racist! You’re racist!
The White Author raises their hand, about to strike the “Enter” key angrily. Behind them, Ghost 1, a semi-transparent white man wearing a top hat and coat, materializes.
GHOST 1: Wait!
WHITE AUTHOR: (turning and lowering hand) Who are you?
GHOST 1: The Ghost of Racism Past.
Continue reading “A Christmas Carol: For White Authors Who Don’t Want to be Scrooge”Huh. I appear to have accidentally made myself a book cover.
Honest, I was trying to get over my extreme tendency to do everything myself. I really and truly intended to hire a professional for this. I still do. But I was playing around with some concept art for the cover and it kept being almost right, so I kept tweaking it, and before you know it… three days of no writing and bam, a book cover. The control freak in me says, “YES! ALL THE EDITING POWER IS MINE!!!!” The part of me that is attempting to learn that getting help from other people frequently makes for a better product is retrenching at editors. Negotiations continue.
Credit to Gianella Castro, Anne Nygard, and Vinicius Amano on Unsplash for the images used.
Getting official author photos done is also known as… time to haul out my favorite dress I ever sewed! This is one of the things I miss about teaching. Chaperoning prom is one of the only opportunities for adults to wear super fancy dresses. I had a blast getting these done.
Finally! The expanded outline to turn the first draft of Through The Mirror into a full series is done! It even meets in the middle, which is always a plus. Below is a picture of the initial stage of the outline.
As a child, I gave little thought to Mary’s birth experience in the Christmas story that I heard. She shows up on the donkey, beds down in the manger for the night, pops out the Savior, and shortly thereafter kneels in a neat and tidy manger scene wearing white without a hair out of place.
It was not until I gave birth to my own child that I came to appreciate the audacity that this telling of the Christmas story displays. In a holiday where childbirth is literally the main event, the actual labor and delivery is erased. After going through one of the better childbirth experiences myself – thirty-two hours of no sleep, waiting impatiently until the contractions finally became unspeakably painful so I could go to the hospital for actual labor, six hours of excruciating physical exertion, the usual amount of tearing and stitching, and the standard several weeks of postpartum bleeding – I had a few questions about the details of this story.
Continue reading “Childbirth and the christmas story”