Introducing: From Ship to Shelf

Happy new year, internets! Globally and politically, 2016 was a clusterfuck: some good things certainly happened, but let’s not pretend that last year was a shining beacon of kittens and glee. For me, at a purely personal level, it was a mixed bag: I had a great professional year, met some amazing people, moved internationally from Scotland back to Australia and attended Worldcon in Kansas City, which was my first ever visit to the US, but the overall experience was like grinding through a really hard video game level I’d wandered into by accident and then had to fight my way out of. Which leaves me with mixed feelings about 2017: I don’t for a second think this is going to be an easy year, especially given the ongoing political legacies we’ve all been left to deal with, but I’m determined to make it a hopeful one, in the sense of striving to do good works in whatever way I can.

And as part of that, I’d like to introduce a shiny new element to the magpie’s nest that is this blog: an ongoing feature I’m calling From Ship to Shelf.

As many of you may know by now, I’m a big proponent of fanwriting in all its forms, and particularly fanfiction. While many fanfic authors are new or amateur (in the sense of being unpaid and unprofessional) writers, there are also many who write publicly in other venues: as reviewers, as bloggers, as poets, as academics, and as creators of original fictional content. Some of us tick many such boxes, others only one or two, but as I continue to be blown away by the quality and quantity of the fic I encounter, I’m particularly interested in those writers who start out in fandom and then begin to publish original content, whether via indie, self-publishing or traditional means. From Ship to Shelf is intended to highlight such authors and their works, but will also hopefully serve as a jumping off point for more and varied discussions about the role of transformative works in shaping original content.

Ideally, From Ship to Shelf will feature: reviews of books and/or original content by fanfic authors; interviews with writers who create across multiple such mediums; discussions of the academic aspects of fanfic and fandom; the relationship of queerness, feminism and intersectionality to all these things; and anything else that feels applicable. I am open to the idea of guest posts and/or reviews from interested parties, but won’t be actively soliciting such content: if you have an idea or want to direct my attention towards a relevant work or author, please let me know – otherwise, I’m going to be making this up as I go along in time-honoured Foz tradition.

So: please welcome From Ship to Shelf! I hope to have more news for you soon; otherwise, let’s get the hell on with 2017 and try to make the most of it.

A Note On Post Deletions

So, as I’ve explained in a footnote on my Rageblogging: The Rod Rees Edition post, a thing happened today whereby, in the wake of mass criticism of Rees’s thoughts on female characters over at the Jo Fletcher Books Blog, both his original piece and a subsequent one explaining (badly, but honestly) why it was posted to begin with have been removed in their entirety, apparently without any explanatory statement along the lines of This Is What We’re Doing And Why.

And I just. OK.

I have some sympathy for Jo Fletcher Books, here.

Because, look. The fact that you publish someone’s books doesn’t mean you agree with absolutely everything they say and do as a person: you might like all of their thoughts, or most of their thoughts, or some of their thoughts, or none of their thoughts, but the bottom line is, you’re tied to them professionally because they wrote a thing you thought would sell, not necessarily because you 100% supported every single word they wrote, but because whatever amorphous combination of style, story, hook and execution they brought to the table made their story something you wanted in on*. That’s just life. We’re all different people, and most of the time, we try to live with it.

So naturally, if you run a blog associated with your publishing enterprise, and if you use it, among other things, as a platform for your authors, it makes a certain amount of sense not to meddle too deeply with regard to content. To coin a phrase, sometimes you’ve got to go along to get along, and in the context of a professional, multi-authored blog, that’s sometimes going to mean posting opinions and guest pieces that aren’t necessarily reflective of your own beliefs. I mean, that’s the whole point of having multiple authors in the first place: different opinions. Right?

Well, yes. But that also means that, of necessity, different pieces are going to get different reactions – and sooner or later, if your social media reach is strong and your contributor base varied enough, you’re going to publish something that strikes a nerve. And that means critical feedback: sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but all of it directed squarely at your little corner of the internet. Hell, this isn’t even a problem restricted to multi-author blogs or blogs with guest contributors: every time you post something, you run the risk of a big response in whatever direction, and if you’re only thinking about how to cope with positive attention beforehand, then I’m going to contend that you’re doing it wrong. Every time I finish a post, I have a little moment where I think to myself: What if I’ve fucked up? What if I’ve said something really offensive/problematic/wrong, and I get lots of abuse? How am I going to handle it? And each time, I take a deep breath and I think, Well, if I’ve genuinely done something bad like that, firstly, I want to know about it, and secondly, anyone I’ve offended is within their rights to be pissed at me. I’ve tried my best to do things right, but if I’ve failed for whatever reason and I get backlash as a result, then I’m woman enough to deal with the consequences. 

Every time I post, this is my inner monologue. Every. Single. Time. And it’s important, especially as I’m a privileged person, because the day that I forget it – the day when I fall into the trap of thinking that my opinions are perfect and sacrosanct just because they’re mine – will most likely be the day that I put my foot so far in my mouth that my shoes leave treadmarks on my trachea. I’ve fucked up before, and will doubtless fuck up again. All I can really do is try to be prepared to learn from it, to apologise for any hurt I’ve caused, and, if possible, to fix it.

And you know what that doesn’t include – what it absolutely never fucking includes, not only because the Google cache and screencapping renders it pointless, and not just because it’s the online equivalent of packing up your toys and going home, but because it is 100% guaranteed to inflame the issue further?

Deleting the post in question.

Locking the comments, particularly if they’ve grown abusive? That’s fine, though it’s generally a good idea to include a final comment of your own explaining exactly why and when you’ve done it, and if you can include a helpful link to a place where the discussion is continuing, then so much the better. Why? Because your mistake will spawn dialogue, and dialogue is useful, and while, as the owner of your blogging space, you’re within your rights to say “regulating this conversation has become too stressful, therefore I’m closing it down”, there’s still a very real sense in which doing so is going to either constitute, or appear to constitute, a silencing tactic. You are Stopping People From Talking About That Thing You Did, and when you’re the one in the wrong, for a whole bunch of reasons it’s not a great idea to act as though you’re allergic to having this fact brought to your attention. Primarily because, you know. You fucked up, and you should own it.

Changing a particular word or phrase that someone’s taken issue with in order to fix the problem? That’s also fine – in fact, it’s something I’ve done myself on multiple occasions, several of them recently. My own rule of thumb is that flagging individual word-changes in pieces I’ve already written via an ETA or a footnote or the like is only necessary if it fundamentally alters the original meaning, or if the change is noticeable enough to raise questions from later readers. Thus: taking out problematic words from the body of the text, fixing typos and altering repetitious or poorly constructed phrases is fine unflagged, because it’s essentially just a form of editing. (Unless, of course, your use of a particular word or phrase is crucial to the argument being made against you – in which case, flagging everything is paramount. Otherwise, it looks like you’re trying to deny the problem ever existed in the first place by quietly removing the evidence, and that is Not Cool.) Changing the title or correcting an attribution, however, are flag-worthy, because they’re the sort of things that get repeated when a post goes into circulation, which makes it important to state, as clearly as possible, just why you’ve done what you’ve done.

But deleting the entire post, including all the comments? That is some salting the earth shit right there, and it is the least constructive thing you can possibly do. I can understand why people are still tempted to go there. After all, if you posted something people hated, how could anyone possibly object to your removing it? Isn’t that what your critics wanted? Well, no: what they wanted was for you not to have said it in the first place, which is a wildly different creature to pretending you never said it at all. It’s a bit like this: if I kick you in the shin, your shin is going to hurt – but if you say to me, “Hey! Ow! My shin! Why did you DO that?” and I reply “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything!”, then not only does your shin still hurt, but in addition to having caused you pain, I’m acting like I have no idea how it happened, which is an Asshole Move of the highest order. If I kick your shin and you call me on it, the correct response is an acknowledgement of my actions and an apology, even if I did by accident. If I run away with my hands over my ears screaming “La la la, CAN’T HEAR YOOOOU!”, then I am being an asshole, and deserve to be mocked accordingly.

So, yeah. As I said earlier today on Twitter, I am endlessly sick of people going this route, whereby they say or do something stupid in public, then try to make it all go away by deleting the evidence. Not only doesn’t it work (see above, re: Google cache and screencapping), but it’s an Asshole Move, because it stifles dialogue while simultaneously ducking the issue. And in the case of the Jo Fletcher Books Blog, which isn’t just someone’s personal space on the internet, but a site that’s openly affiliated with a professional institution, it becomes doubly problematic – not only because the retroactive onus on the administrators to justify why the post was allowed through to begin with is higher, but because everything that comes of the subsequent kerfuffle is necessarily associated with the organisation itself. Thus, and as I said at the outset: while I can understand the logic of a hands-off, let’s-all-agree-to-disagree policy on contributor content, there should also have been a policy in place for what to do if and when a given piece were to garner negative attention. Regardless of its content, the fact that an explanatory post was eventually produced was a good thing, because it showed that the management were, however belatedly, paying attention. The fact that both it and the original, contentious piece were deleted without comment shortly thereafter, by contrast, is a bad thing, because it shows that the management are not only indecisive, but ultimately uninterested in addressing the problem further. (And also, you know. You can find them both here.)

tl;dr – If you fuck up in public, own it, and if you’re absolutely compelled to delete something or close comments, explain your reasoning where people can see it. Otherwise, you’re just going to look like you’re sweeping the whole thing under the rug, on account of how this is exactly what you’re doing.

*Which is, among many other reasons, why I get incandescently shitty at people who go around saying things like, “If you’ve ever negatively reviewed a book I agented/published/edited or which was written by someone I like, or whatever the fuck combination of those things applies in context, then I’m never going to blurb you/hire you/edit you/publish you, because YOU WERE MEAN TO MY FRIEND AND HATE EVERYTHING I LOVE AND OUR TASTE IS INCOMPATIBLE FOREVER.” Because, dude. The Venn diagram of “things I like” versus “things you like” is not required by law to be a perfect fucking circle in order for us to have some seriously awesome common ground. I mean, yes: if someone disses a thing you love, you are not required to like them, or their work, or whatever. Some things are more important to us than other things. I get it. But if your base level of artistic interaction at a professional level is to try and recruit only people who like absolutely everything you like – or rather, given the statistical impossibility of this, only people who are sufficiently afraid of censure and/or nice to the point of stifling their own critical opinions to keep from expressing any, whether publicly or privately – then that, to me, is exactly the kind of mentality that leads to the mass publication of problematic, unoriginal, samey-samey stories that are pretty soon forgotten. If all you want is an echo-chamber for your own opinions, go shout them loudly in a tiled bathroom. But for the love of dog, quit pretending that people can’t have meaningful critical differences in taste and still have artistic commonalities, strong friendships, or positive working relationships.

3 July 2013, ETA: With no explanation, both posts are now back up at the Jo Fletcher Books Blog. So, there’s that.

Speculative Fiction 2012

Three days ago, the Speculative Fiction 2012 anthology was released. Edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin, it’s a collection of fifty fascinating SFFnal essays, reviews and blogrants that all appeared online last year, containing pieces from, among others, Kate Elliott, N. K. Jemisin, Aishwarya Subramanian, Abigail Nussbaum, Lavie Tidhar and Tansy Rayner Roberts. And also – to my absolute pride and astonishment – me.

This WordPress site isn’t my first ever blog. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been writing and ranting across various online platforms with varying degrees of skill and vitriol, but this was the first one to earn me a readership – or at least, a readership not consisting solely of schoolfriends, partners and family members. It’s also the first blog I ever wrote openly, under my own name, and therefore represents my first real attempt to take myself seriously as a writer. That was way back in May 2008, almost two years before I first became a published author, and if you’d asked me at the time how important my blogging would become to me, I never could’ve guessed the answer.

So, yeah: Speculative Fiction 2012. It’s an amazing collection of essays, and I’m honoured to be a part of it.

Litfic, Feminism, Genre & Subgenre

I’ve just been reading this interesting post over at Katharine Kerr’s blog about trying to define what constitutes a work of literary fiction, as opposed to a work of genre fiction. She also talks about the dangers of arguing against litfic and the literary establishment by way of derogatory strawman arguments, not only because this is exactly the kind of negative pigeonholing SFF fans and writers have always railed against when it’s turned our way, but also because it’s unhelpful in trying to understand what literary fiction actually is. It’s an interesting question, but in trying to answer it, I ended up in quite a different place to where I started. Rather than hijack the conversation, therefore, I’m going to take the comment I left as a starting point for answering a slightly different question: how might a lack of named literary subgenres be impeding the success of women literary writers?

As a casual glance at the blogsphere will reveal, there’s been considerable recent debate in SFF quarters about the feminisation of epic fantasy and the nihilism of gritty fantasy, conversations that have been in no small part facilitated by our ability to distinguish between the different SFF subgenres. We know that Tolkien is the Mitochondrial Eve of fantasy writers: one way or another, all our works descend from his. But as with the human race, things have grown more and more diverse with successive generations, such that trying to use fantasy as an exclusive, catch-all terminology has become, except in the most general sense, both useless and inaccurate. Without a language of subgenre terms with which to discuss these differences, it seems inevitable that SFF writing would automatically default to using Tolkien as a blueprint for all new stories – and indeed, up until very recently, we can see that this was the case. Only when writers started trying to break new ground did an alternate language spring up to try and describe their efforts. Partly, it must be admitted, this happened as a means of distancing such heretical works from their canonical predecessors, but also because it was suddenly necessary to look back over everything that had happened since Tolkien and ask whether fantasy could – or should – be more than just the same old Eurocentric, medieval vision of elves, dwarves, men and halflings fighting a succession of ultimate Dark Lords over and over again.

Suddenly, fantasy ceased to be a universal term, and once we started talking and thinking in subgenres, it became easier to understand why new types of story were arising; to pinpoint the tropes their authors wanted to address or change, and for what reasons. True, it also became harder to classify individual works, and the need to fit each and every book into a particular box is something we’re all still arguing about. But the fact is that language is important. Naming a thing allows us greater control over it, and that’s true regardless of whether we’re talking about the magic of Earthsea or the politics of Earth. Consider, for instance, this article by feminist philosopher Jennifer Saul, wherein she talks about the significance of language in feminism. To quote:

“Languages may also lack words for things that matter a great deal to women. This sort of gap is another way that a language can be seen as encoding a male worldview. The term ‘sexual harassment’, for example, is a recent feminist innovation. Women’s discussion of their experiences led them to see a certain common element to many of their problems, and as a result they invented the term ‘sexual harassment’. Once the problem was named, it became much easier to fight sexual harassment, both legally and by educating people about it.”

Which brings me to the matter of the Orange Prize – or rather, to the recent suggestion that an equivalent award is necessary to combat sexism in the Australian literary scene. It’s none too encouraging a sign when women take steps to set themselves apart from men, not because they want or ought to, but because discrimination has left them with no other means of achieving success. For an intelligent and comprehensive rundown on the issue, I highly recommend this excellent piece by writer Benjamin Law, wherein he says, among other things:

“If you take Brookner’s insistence that a meritocracy exists, what are you supposed to make of the raw figures? Books written by women are reviewed less. Women win fewer literary prizes. If that is a meritocracy, then you have to buy into the argument that books by women must be inherently inferior. I can’t accept that. The danger on relying on meritocracy is assuming one actually exists.”

But what, I hear you cry, does any of this have to do with SFF subgenres? Only that women SFF writers seem to have a stronger platform from which to argue their case for equality, simply because their dialogue about content, bias and narrative is so much more linguistically robust than in the literary community. This is not to say that the problems outlined by the recent VIDA statistics on the representation of women vs men in literary reviews are absent in SFF; indeed, it has been demonstrably proven that they aren’t. But when it comes to the question of awards, it doesn’t seem unduly optimistic to say that change is in the air. The Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel in 2011, for instance, are all, with one exception, women, and the situation is identical when it comes to the Nebula. The 2010 Campbell Award was won by a woman, Seanan McGuire, and for the purposes of my argument about subgenre, it doesn’t strike me as irrelevant to note that McGuire’s debut novel, Rosemary and Rue, was the first work of urban fantasy to win its author the Campbell, nor that it did so in competition with another female-authored UF novel: Gail Carriger’s Soulless.

So much of the debate I’ve seen about the disenfranchisement of women literary writers centers on anger at the perception of women’s novels as being “domestic” (where such a label is pejorative) compared to those written by men, which naturally deal with Big Themes and Important Issues. What has always struck me about this complaint – aside from the fact that it appears to be correct, both intuitively and in terms of critical perception – is the difficulty these writers seem to have articulating the problem. They talk about literature and literary fiction as a single entity, grasping after a magical phrase that will allow them to explain simultaneously why women might indeed be more prone to writing about domestic topics, why this is not a bad thing, and why it still counts as literature. Because such amorphous justifications are exactly what subgenre terminology exists to prevent, allowing us to acknowledge that two different types of storytelling are related to one another, that they share a common ancestry and ultimately a common genre, but that their conventions and approaches may nonetheless be very, very different. As in the case of last year’s Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel, it allows us to put vastly different works like China Mieville’s The City & The City, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest on the same ballot, despite the fact that the first is heavily noir/New Weird, the second is dystopian SF, and the third is urban fantasy/mythpunk.

It also puts the SFF community in an excellent position to discuss tropes and archetypes. A communal, cultural resource like TV Tropes provides a go-to lexicon for discussing narrative structure in shorthand, with many such terms finding their way into the mainstream dialogue as a matter of course. Perhaps it’s because the origins and inspirations of SFF are so heavily rooted in jargon-heavy areas like mythology, science, linguistics, pop culture and folklore that the community has taken so readily to isolating and naming its parts; alternatively, it seems reasonable to assume that any group of people who spend a significant proportion of their intellectual lives reading made-up languages, interpreting new cultures and memorising invented systems of magic will inevitably come to appreciate the deep precision and relevance of language. Whatever it is, the literary community doesn’t seem to share it – or if it does, then to nowhere near the same extent.

As more than one would-be inventor of slanguage has come to realise, there’s no telling which new terms will enter our collective vocabularies or die a series of quick deaths. But as corny and New Age as it might seem, it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won’t go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we’re determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen.

Critical Criticisms

‘Duty Calls’, xkcd 386

Ever since I became a published author, I’ve been struggling with the necessary tensions of belonging to the community whose output I most want to critique. Internally, the questions I’ve been asking myself have ranged from Should I write paid reviews to supplement my income? to What’s the best response to a book that enrages me? I’ve said before that total self-censorship is not an option I feel comfortable with – at least, not at this point in my life. After all, I’m still new to the authoring game; old habits are hard to break, and if I’ve been writing stories for longer than I’ve been reviewing or thinking critically about them, then it’s not much longer. To phrase the scenario as crudely as possible, I comprehend the wisdom of not shitting where one eats, but at the same time, I feel deeply uneasy with the idea that being an author means I’m no longer allowed to be moved by books, to be angered or disgusted or made quizzical by books – or rather, that I can be all these things, but only on the proviso that I’m secretive about it, as though my native reactions to narrative have somehow become shameful.

This is a difficult tightrope to walk. Stories of authors reacting to criticism on the internet abound, and are seldom remembered in a positive light (though frankly, I think we’re all on Neil Gaiman’s side when it comes to the whole pencil-necked weasel thing). Then there’s the mafia issue – which, for all it exaggerates the power of individual authors to affect someone else’s career, is nonetheless a salient footnote on the etiquette of criticism, regardless of which side of the fence you’re on. Way back in the mists of time (2008) when I started this blog, my second ever post was on editorialising in the media: the creeping intrusion of personal opinion into factual content, such that the two are now almost irreversibly blurred. I said then, and maintain now, that a large portion of the blame for the current state of our news media can be fairly apportioned to a public thirst for sensationalism – or rather, to the perceived public thirst for sensationalism. I mention this because, while artistic opinions of any kind are always going to be subjective, certain regions of the internet have developed a taste for snarky, pejorative book reviews, which I’m coming to think of as being inimical to good criticism in the same way that editorialising is inimical to facts.

That’s not to say I don’t read snarky reviews. I’m not even claiming never to have enjoyed them, however guiltily. But I am saying that the general inability of readers, reviewers and writers to distinguish between critical reviews, humorous reviews and pejorative reviews  is becoming a genuine problem, particularly in a culture where blogging, social media outlets and review sites like Goodreads are all so deeply interconnected as to constitute a single hivemind. Anything you say in public is both easily attributable to you and, as such, open to yet more criticism. This can become something of a viscious circle, and while many disputes are tiny storms in tinier teacups, the blogosphere itself is a super-sized coffee mug as broad across as the internet is deep, its viscous contents routinely stirred by a combination of citykilling typhoons and the sorts of electrical disturbance usually found in Star Trek nebulae.

Or, to put it another way: shit you say on the internet gets read. Possibly only by that one guy who found your blog by accident that one time, and possibly by every adherent of every major online publication after the guano is flung at the rotating turbine. Anonymity is only the default right up until it isn’t, and the important thing to take away here is that you don’t get to choose what piece gets noticed. As John Scalzi so succinctly put it, the failure mode of clever is asshole, and as alluded to by xkcd, someone is pretty much always wrong on the internet. (For extra credit, refer to: Rule 34, Dante’s Internet, Godwin’s Law, The 18 Types of Internet Troll, and any site involving fanon, slashfic or religion, particularly if it combines all three.)

So, for the purposes of attempting to enable a happier, safer, more constructive internet, here is a rough dissemination of the difference between critical reviews, humorous reviews and pejorative reviews, respectively:

1. Critical Reviews

Contrary to what you might think, critical reviews are not necessarily negative. Rather, they involve an awareness of literary conventions (pacing, writing style, structure, plotting), a demonstrable familiarity with the genre in question, and a knowledge of standard tropes and plot conventions. As much as possible, they endeavour to be written in the spirit of informative objectivity. By which I mean: no personal vendettas, no ad hominem attacks, no profanity (exceptions made in the case of positive usage, i.e: this book is fucking brilliant), and no snide remarks. Given the native imperfection of human beings, a cultural preference for humour and the fact that sometimes, in our honest opinion, a book just doesn’t work, your mileage may vary when it comes to enforcing these points; at the very least, our own views frequently lead us to be more lenient or strict with a particular review depending on the extent to which we agree (or disagree) with its conclusion. Note, too, that while I certainly think reviews of this kind are important, they can also be somewhat bloodless, especially when it comes to books we actually like. Thus, while critical reviews as characterised here can certainly be either positive or negative, I’ve chosen my guidelines with negativity in mind, if only because there’s a world of difference between laughing with and laughing at. Which leads us to:

2. Humorous Reviews

Ranging from gentle, tongue-in-cheek send-ups to gleeful mockery, humorous reviews are generally written with mirth in mind. This doesn’t prevent them from containing critical insights, however – they’re only couched differently. For me, the most successful humorous reviews are positive in tone. The best books infect us. Like viruses, they mutate our cells and turn us into replicators, instilling the urge to go forth and infect yet more people. Humour is an excellent means of transmitting this enthusiasm precisely because it overwhelms our objectivity with laughter and story-greed. When used in more negative reviews, it can serve the purpose of attracting readers, not to the book in question, but to the reviewer, displaying their personality and particular taste while still providing critical feedback on a novel’s pros and cons. Though sometimes verging into snarkish, schadenfreude territory (see above, re: your mileage may vary), a funny-yet-critical review will support its jibes with reasoned analysis and, where appropriate, balance the tone with lighthearted humour, ensuring that the end result doesn’t read wholly as a joke at the book’s expense. For all that I’m a fan of critical reviews, I tend to prefer them as one-off reads, or as tie-breaker votes when other, more subjective sources disagree. But when it comes to choosing a regular reviewer, humour is what wins out for me: not only because it affords a greater sense of who the reviewer actually is, but because even a negative review can still make me curious about a particular book – and if there’s one thing I don’t want a reviewer to do as a matter of course, it’s make me feel like a cretin for enjoying something they disliked. Which leads us to:

3. Pejorative Reviews

Often, pejorative reviews are based on adversarial reading by a hostile audience. Maybe the reviewer just doesn’t like the author, or the genre, or the voice. Maybe they think the premise sounds ludicrous. Whatever the reason, unless they’re willing to be talked into a full face heel turn, there’s a good chance that the outcome will be just what they expected – and, finding this to be so, they’ll be even angrier at the end than they were at the outset. Alternatively, they’ve gone in as hopeful, willing readers, and had that trust betrayed: their berserk button is pressed, and the result is an irate, shouty review full of capslock and swearing. Note that this is not, of itself, an inappropriate reaction, nor does it automatically make for a bad review. Sometimes, issues are important enough to get angry about, particularly when we feel our perspective is otherwise being ignored. But while such pejorative might be objectively understandable, it can also undermine its own critical significance, simply because of the difficulties inherent in disentangling venom from facts. So often when something makes us angry, we don’t slow down to explain why that anger is justified – or at least, not in a way that’s comprehensible to someone who hasn’t already read the book. This can lead virgin readers to assume incompetence on behalf of the reviewer – and if we want our views to be taken seriously, this is clearly a disadvantage. A further consequence of adversarial reading is the snowball effect: past a certain point, being reasonably annoyed with several things in particular easily leads to being irrationally irked by many things in general. For instance: while I might be perfectly willing to overlook one or two small typos in a brilliant book, their presence in a lesser story suddenly becomes a noteworthy factor in my judging it as such. Combine this with attacks on the author and an openly disparaging attitude to anyone who disagrees, and even the most eloquent vitriol is still tarred with the brush of being, well, vitriol. We might seek it out when a book disappoints us, desperate to know that we weren’t the only ones to feel that way, but overall, pejorative reviews tend to be of the least help, both to readers and to the wider literary community.

So! It is now late, and I have done my blogging duty for another day. Internets, what do you think about reviewing?

Festival Conventions

So, as you may or may not be aware, the Melbourne Writers Festival starts this weekend. The keynote address, delivered by Joss Whedon, is on tomorrow night. The fact that I’m attending is an ongoing source of glee – as is the fact that, courtesy of the Book Show on Radio National, I have a media pass to ten events over the weekend, which I’ll be blogging about in due course. Not here, though – I’ll be over at the Book Show Blog itself, playing in the big girl sandpit and trying to keep my bubblegum outta my pigtails.

Did I mention that Worldcon is also on between 2 and 6 September? And that I’m going? And that I’m blogging about it for the Book Show, too? And that I’m going to be on actual panels with actual awesome authors (see above re: big girl sandpit) and basically Getting My Geek On? For five whole days?

Dude.

Awesomeness is imminent.

Very soon, I’ll be posting my Worldcon schedule and linking to my Book Show blogs. But until then: SQUEE!

Trail-Gathering

Growing up in the 90s, I learned to use the internet at the same time I was entering adolescence. Arguably, the internet was also entering its teenage years: that awkward, teeming period when modems ceased to be the exclusive perview of geeks and big business and started finding find their way into private homes. After listening to the ludicrous crrrk bing-bong! bing-bong! ksssssshk of 56k dial-up, I’d log in to MSN Chat, check my various Hotmail accounts, surf poetry forums, look at fantasy pictures, type search queries into Yahoo: all the preoccupations of my thirteen-year-old Gen-Y self. Then as now, there were legion free sites and services to join, which I, glorying in the creative freedom of multiple online handles, was only too happy to test-drive, only rarely contributing under my own name. The internet being what it is, many of those sites no longer exist, the accounts I created and any content published thereon long since vanished into the electronic ether. But twelve years later, despite the myriad accounts I’ve let lapse, a handful still remain.

Like salmon returning upstream to spawn, I find myself revisiting these earlier haunts. To my now twentysomething self, they are cringeworthy reminders of my teenage years: that penchant for writing everything in lowercase, the often-bad poetry, the meaningless rants and banal social commentaries. But rather than abandoning these realms altogether, I find myself logging back in, culling the crap and instating new, up-to-date bios. Partly, it’s because of the book: I’ve worked long and hard to become a published author, and am therefore unable to resist shouting my triumph across every available server. It’s also a kind of catharsis, closing off the old efforts my younger self made towards the goal I’ve subsequently achieved: validating her efforts, even though she-then, as distinct from me-now, will never see it. Mostly, though, I feel a kind of allegiance to these places. I owe them the honesty of an up-to-date status, even if it’s only to proclaim the reason for my absence. Call it a strange, personal scrap of netiquette, but I find it disquieting when someone I’m following online in whatever capacity suddenly stops updating without any mention of why. It’s like holding a phone conversation in which the line abruptly goes dead at the other end. To delete the account, rather than locking it into explanatory stasis, would be like pretending the conversation never took place at all.

I still sign up for things and forget about them, of course. Everyone does. By and large, it’s harmless. Either the site is large enough that you can eventually come back and unsubscribe, or small enough that when it dies, there’s nothing left hanging about for unwary friends to find.

Unless, of course, you wrote an ill-informed, poorly constructed rant at age eleven and posted it to a site which, though many years dead, is still Googleable, left to drift eternally through the seas of Internet like some Goddamn Marie Celeste of prepubescent idiocy. Of course.

Talking ‘Bout A Revolution

First, some links:

Clay Shirky on the collapse of traditional newspapers and the need to find alternative means of journalism;

Natalia Morar, who organised an anti-government flashmob on Twitter and is now hiding from arrest;

Oprah and other celebrities battling to be the first on Twitter with a million followers; and

SR7,  a company for hire that specialises in digging up dirt on employees for other companies.

Now, some thoughts, in no particular order:

 1. Journalism is essential. People both like and need to know what’s going on. However, journalism is not a naturally occuring resource. People must go out, obtain information, then analyse, write and relay it, a time-consuming process traditionally deemed deserving of monetary compensation. No matter how easy it is to copy an existing source online, that source first needs to come from somewhere; and before that, someone must decide that the source itself is newsworthy.

2. As has always been true of all creative endeavours (singing, painting, dancing), there are vastly more people who participate in these activities than are paid to do so. Largely, this is a question of enjoyment, creative expression and ease. Blogs have tapped into this in a big way. Most bloggers make no money. Many blogs are read by only a tiny handful of people known to the writer, or not at all. And yet, they are prolific, because even without monetary compensation, the vast majority of people simply enjoy writing them. Many readers employ a similar logic.

3. Despite having been around for a number of years, Twitter has only just hit the collective journalistic hivemind. Recent weeks have seen an explosion of articles on how it is being used, why it is damaging people, whether the concept is utterly pointless, and the implications of its ongoing development. Diverse examples of all these include:

– the now-notorious #amazonfail incident and its aftermath;

– the Times bemoaning Twitter as a ‘rolling news service of the ego’ and then promptly signing up;

– a warning that social networking sites are damaging kids’ brains at the same time Twitter is being added to the Brittish school curriculum; and

– the use of Twitter in both the Mumbai bombings and hyperlocal news sites.

4. Writing on the collapse of newspapers as we know them, Clay Shirky sums up the process of social revolutions thusly: “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.” He concludes by saying that what we need is a “collection of new experiments” to help us figure out how journalism – as distinct from newspapers – can keep working.

5. TV news isn’t going anywhere. Neither is radio, which has survived bigger technological upheavals. Print journalism is failing because the internet has ruined its monopoly on exclusive media. Unlike free-to-air radio and television, which have always had to contend with the notion that a majority of listeners won’t be paying directly for their content, newspapers have thrived as a one-to-one exchange: a set amount of money per customer per paper, with very few exceptions. It’s not that the internet devalues the written word, or that making journalism freely available is inimical to notions of profit: it’s that, without being able to charge on that one-to-one basis, newspapers cannot command anything like their previous volume of revenue. They’ve simply never had to compete with a medium that could do the same thing, better, for a fraction of the cost. And now they’re floundering.

6.  Spare a moment to consider the notion of Digital Rights Management – DRM – and its relationship to the newspaper fiasco. Although concerned parimarily with digital music copyright, the ongoing debate about encryption for games and, with the advent of the Kindle and other such devices, the pirateability of digital books and audiobook rights, the underlying problem is the same in both instances: defining notions of ownership for both users and creators in an era where digital copies are readily available. Books in particular have always been subject to the whims of borrowing and lending without falling apart, but might their new digital formats change that? Or are they an exception to the rule? For long stints of time, it’s nicer to read on a page than a screen, but what if screens are improved, or some other technology developed that is just as comfortable to use as paper? Will we still crave tactile connections? 

7. People might not like to pay for content, but as Wikipedia, YouTube and Linus Torvalds have already proven, many are ready, willing and able to create content for free. Open source principles clearly predate the current revolution, and consciously or not, they’re informing it. Remove money from the equation (or at least, give it a drastically reduced emphasis) and gaze anew at the crisis of print journalism. Blogs, tweets, viral news: many of the new news staples are ungoverned, unruly, disparate products of the hivemind – flashmobs, crowdsourcing – but that doesn’t mean they go utterly unpoliced or work without change or criticism. Hey, it’s a revolution, folks. We’re breaking and making at the speed of thought. Give us time to learn the ropes.

8. Way back in 1995,  Major Motoko Kusanagi once mused, “And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.” In 2006, she reaffirmed the sentiment. We’re not yet ghosts in the shell, but let’s keep an open mind. The future rests in us.

Authonomy: Kicking the Heart

After the first flush of reading  – and enthusing – about Authonomy, I’m ready to calm down, put on my serious glasses and give it a long, hard stare. Since first consciously deciding to Be A Writer at age twelve, I’ve maintained a cynical wariness about putting any novel-in-progress online, due largely to paranoid fears of plagiarism or concept-theft. Though I’ve posted dozens of poems and the occasional short story on various sites since then, I’ve always remained firm on the Magnum Opus rule. Good thinking! I tell my younger self, and through the veil of years she grins wearily back at me, slugging her way through pages of dross, half-oblivious to the few sweet embers strewn within. She’s like that.

As an unpublished writer, news from a publisher – any news – is like a kick to the heart. It doesn’t matter how old you are. The impenetrability of the publishing industry is there for a reason, we know; and yet the act of pounding desperately on theose heavy doors can’t help but instil the conviction of being wrongfully locked out; as though some lofty guardian need only peer over the ramparts, gasp, and let us through at once, a kinsman found. The unreality of this scenario does nothing to diminish its potency – more often, in fact, the reverse is true, with each successive rejection only increasing the perceived likelihood that next time, doors will open. So imagine, then, the collective heart-kick generated by hundreds of authors hearing about Authonomy! Small wonder they were gripped.

And yet now, it seems, even as published works are being announced, that old enemy of amateur authors, Print On Demand, has reared its head – at least according to one Authonomy member. HarperCollins have been swift to point out that POD will become a voluntary feature of the site, and not their primary mode of publication for Authonomy members; nonetheless, feathers have been ruffled. That kick to the heart is a traitor, methinks: the tug of hope over experience.

Still, the venture remains far from solely negative. Authonomy represents the efforts of a major publishing house to embrace the digital age and do something different for unpublished authors. If there’s a complaint to be levelled, it should be at the ‘greasy pole’ approach of rewarding the most-read books with an editorial glance. Realistically, this was never going to be more than a dangling carrot: apart from the fact that any editor can peruse the site at whim and select a worthwhile morsel off their own bat, the participants themselves have actively diluted the system. In fairness, it was easy to dilute, but it’s a simple thing to acknowledge that a you-back-my-book, I’ll-back-yours approach has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with networking – exactly the kind of scenario that most members, at least on the surface, purport to loathe. Small wonder, then, that HarperCollins hasn’t asked for more.

To this effect, there’s been ongoing debate between contributors, interested parties, and those being published as to Authonomy’s real agenda. (Ironically, in this particular instance, the forum is the Authonomy blog, arguably one of the concept’s most pleasing features.) With the rosy lenses still on, I’d even considered submitting my own manuscript, assuming it gets rejected again; but in a more sobering light, I’m inclined to believe that my adolescent self had the right idea. We unpublished authors might not like it, but the great filtration mechanisms of the publishing industry – selective submission, literary agents, slushpiles – are set in place to keep bad writing out. Peer-to-peer review is undoubtably good, but it’s not a useful arbiter of what is or isn’t publishable, while the egotism requried to continually get back on the horse is frequently ill-suited for objective self-assessment.

I still maintain that the Authonomy interface is a positive step forward, particulary if adapted by smaller houses or used as a means to promote genre publishing and less mainstream titles. Similarly, as an avenue for critical feedback, no matter how flawed, it beats having no such avenue at all. That doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t be improved upon – and at this juncture, it might behoove the collective interwebnological consciousness to remember that, as fast as things move in cyberspace, Authonomy is firmly rooted in the real world, weighted down by the terrible Slow Zone gravity of an actual corporation. It’s still a new venture. Give it a break.

 And HarperCollins? The bloggers are watching you. Kick softly.

Jingo Bells

Behold! – my latest column, Jingo Bells, is now available at Halo 17 for your intellectual and viewing pleasure.  This week, I detail the trials and travails of patriotism. Come one, come all!