on absences & beginnings, of a sort

I haven’t been blogging much, lately. I’ve wanted to at times – the ideas have been there, the impetus to say something – but I’ve bled it off in Twitter threads rather than coming here, because that’s felt easier. Blaming the pandemic is convenient insofar as it’s largely true, but it’s also not the whole story; I was already struggling to blog before it started, and once it did, there wasn’t much bandwidth for considering why. We’re still in the pandemic now, almost (god) three fucking years later, for a variety of reasons that make any sane person want to walk into the sea if considered too closely, and things are still bad, but they’re also a different, slightly more hopeful flavour of bad, or at least more resigned, by which I mean we can go outside now and see people and get vaccinated, but – well. Well.

Anyway, the point is that, pandemic aside, I’d been having a rough time of things re: mental and physical health since, oh, let’s say 2012, which timeline not-so-coincidentally lines up with getting pregnant and having a child, who is now five days off from turning nine (!) and is in every respect a wholly wonderful person. It’s just that, as boring and gross and as gauche as certain people think it is to mention What Pregnancy Does To The Body (and hence to the brain), it’s actually quite a lot, and when some of those people are doctors who think that discomfort and sadness are a sort of AFAB baseline to which giving birth should natively acclimate you, such that raising any medical issues without, in their eyes, an obvious cause is just a hypochondriac complaining, it’s hard to get those things diagnosed, let alone fixed.

So: let’s say you’re me, a genderqueer-leaning-slightly-more-masc-than-hitherto-realised person who, prior to pregnancy, has been keeping all those feelings in a careful mental box without ever quite acknowledging them. All of a sudden dysphoria is a Real Goddamn Thing, because even more than your body changing, you’re suddenly being publicly, consistently, insistently gendered in ways you never have been before, and you realise oh, I really don’t like that, but feeling sad and gross and confused is, again, considered a fairly normal part of pregnancy, so it takes a couple of years to sort that all out, and in the interim, you contract a nasty viral infection postpartum that leaves you feeling shitty for months – and again, you are not listened to, not about the tiredness, discomfort and not-rightness in your body and certainly not about the excruciating pain that comes with breastfeeding, except to be told that you must be doing something wrong and either way just to push through it – until you finally collapse in a fever and have to be hospitalised for a week on powerful IV antibiotics.

Eventually, on your own recognizance – because, again, no one is listening to you, or at least, no one who’s a doctor – you do some research and determine that, regarding breastfeeding, you have an atypical presentation of Raynaud’s Syndrome, which is why it feels like someone is slowly pulling a hot wire out of your nipple when you feed your child (breast is best, the nurses say repeatedly; just push through the pain, are you sure you’re latching him properly? no? well, just keep at it, don’t switch to formula). You take this finding to a doctor who, for a miracle, agrees to prescribe you the relevant medication, and the pain goes away for a blissful week before you get a plugged duct and are once more in agony, at which point you switch to formula and, finally, are able to relax.

But your body still doesn’t feel right. You’re fatigued, not just tired but bone-pressingly exhausted all the time, so that some days you can’t get out of bed; it feels like there’s a giant hand physically pressing into the mattress, insisting that you need to lie down even when you already are. Your back starts to hurt. You explain this to doctors, but the best they can do is shrug and suggest it’s purely a mental health issue, as though your depression is making you hurt and tired instead of your hurt and tiredness making you depressed, and you don’t think that’s right, but you have to try something. So you go on antidepressants – a mild dose, of a drug you later find out is being discontinued in places because of its many unpleasant side-effects, with which you soon become intimately acquainted. They help a little, but the fatigue remains. Everything is hard.

You do more research. After a while, you wonder if the viral infection fritzed your immune system on its way out, as sometimes happens, making you more prone to inflammation. Tentatively, you ask your doctor to prescribe some anti-inflammatory meds. The doctor obliges; you take one, and have more energy than you’ve had in the four years since your child was born. Briefly, beautifully, you think you’re cured. But still, the tiredness comes back, stronger and worse, and now your back is hurting all the time, and one day it just goes twang! and leaves you barely able to walk for a fortnight. You blame the terrible Ikea couch you’ve been working on and try to sit more at a desk, which is uncomfortable in a different way, and keep on doing your best.

By the time your child is six, you’ve moved from England to Scotland to Australia to America and are now thoroughly tired of being tired, to say nothing of having doctors in four countries all shrug at the apparent vagueness of your daily, life-inhibiting tiredness and say there’s nothing to be done, all while implying you’re making it up. You think, all right: either this is a weird autoimmune condition that I can’t do anything about, or it’s something really simple and obvious that we’ve somehow missed. You rack your brains and come up with a single possibility: perhaps the only dietary change you made since becoming a parent – drinking soda in place of alcohol while pregnant, which became drinking soda daily thereafter – might be responsible. It feels like a hail Mary – bourbon and coke was your go-to pub order for years; if soda was a problem, surely you’d have noticed before? – but there’s nothing else to try. So you go cold turkey on soda, have two days of dizzying withdrawl symptoms, and then –

The fatigue is gone. Absurdly, beautifully, completely, gone.

Dazed, you do some googling. Apparently, it’s relatively common for pregnancy, which has a big impact on the immune system, to leave you with new allergies that you never had before. You learn that a certain type of caffeine intolerance, while not really referred to as an allergy, nonetheless falls under this umbrella, and that it can cause fatigue, as your body no longer processes caffeine as a stimulant. You have been poisoning yourself into misery for six years without anyone realising. You are furious; you are vindicated, that it wasn’t all in your head. To celebrate your newfound energy, you spend the whole day cleaning the house, bend slightly to look out the window at the end of it, and slip a disc in your lower back. The next day, you can’t walk and have to be stretchered down from your third-floor bedroom to a waiting ambulance – stretchered upright, because the stairs are too narrow for you to lie down. The pain is worse than childbirth. You go straight to hospital. It’s a week before you can walk again.

Recovery is slow. There is physical therapy. Months pass. You’re in pain every day, but (you think) manageable pain. By the start of 2020, you’re ready to go to the gym again, and have just gotten into the habit of it when the pandemic hits. The pandemic is all-encompassing and terrible; your child is in first grade when virtual learning starts and in third grade before he returns to a physical classroom. In 2021, both you and your husband suffer the loss of a parent and are unable to travel to be with family because Australia’s borders are closed. You watch their funerals over zoom; both times, the internet briefly cuts out.

Near the end of 2021 and with a newfound awareness of your mortality, it occurs to you that, two years after slipping a disc and five years after starting antidepressants, you are still in daily physical pain, while your mental health is good. You did ask for a chiropractic referral a few months back, but the doctor wouldn’t give you one: physical therapy only, they said, but the physical therapist never returned your call. The doctor who prescribed the antidepressants is in another country, while your current doctor is hard to get an appointment with even when there isn’t a pandemic. You do some research about going off your particular brand of antidepressants: the side-effects you’ve been living with are becoming steadily more pronounced, more unpleasant, and the more you research, the harder it is to understand why you were put in this particular medication in the first place, given the seeming gulf between its designated purpose and your original symptoms. The depression itself was caused and exacerbated by the now-understood fatigue, which is no longer an issue, and your dose is small enough that tapering won’t be noticeably better than going cold turkey. You decide to take the risk.

You go off antidepressants, and you use the money inherited from your father’s passing to pay for a chiropractor.

Withdrawal symptoms last just under two weeks and are mostly manageable – weird, but manageable. You brace for your mental health to crash, but it never does. Instead, your body gets stronger and your head gets clearer, and as you start to read more quickly, easily and voraciously than you have in years, you realise suddenly, angrily, that this vital part of yourself – your ability to read, to focus on words – had been badly impacted by a medication you should never have been put on in the first place; were only really prescribed because nobody was willing to figure out the source of your actual problem.

And then you go to the chiropractor, who takes one look at your spine, x-rays you to be sure, and shows you how, when you were pregnant, your pelvis twisted within your body, tilting up and back like a crooked bow-tie, steadily imbalancing your whole body. This is why your lower back has been hurting for years; why you slipped a disc so badly; why, even though you did everything your physical therapist asked of you, the pain never went away. You almost break down in tears in the chiropractor’s office, but manage to save them for when you get home. You begin a schedule of adjustments to put your bones back where they should be.

A week into 2022 – a month before your son’s 9th birthday – you wake up without a lancing pain in your hip for the first time since 2019.

It’s been nearly a decade since I first fell pregnant. My health has been impacted by it every day since then, both mentally and physically. I’m coming out of it now, I think – I hope – but I’ve thought that before, and each time, there’s been some other issue lurking in the woodwork. I love my son dearly; I am furious at the broader medical establishment for leaving me to fumble around in the dark, alone, because my quality of life was not held to be important if the symptoms impacting it didn’t have a quick, obvious, commonplace solution. I have been reticent to talk about going off antidepressants on my own as a positive thing, because even when they’re working properly and perfectly prescribed, they can still have unpleasant side-effects, and it’s easy to think you’re better when you’re not, and it’s always better to consult a medical professional, and and and – but still, I was prescribed a medication for a condition I did not have, in lieu of trying to determine what I did have, and it briefly helped the symptoms without touching the cause, and made my life miserable and hard to an extent I’m only fully realising in its absence, and I can read again now, without feeling like I’m forcing my eyes through glue, and I need to be able to say so.

The fact that I achieved anything professionally during this period is, the more I think about it, miraculous, or perhaps a testament to my own bloody-minded reliance on fiction in general and fantasy in particular to carry me through life. I want to blog more, and hopefully will do so, but I find that I’m having to unlearn a habit of flinching from my own ambitions. For so long, I’ve had to curate specific conditions in which to read, to write, to work, because if I attempted to do so otherwise, I’d run up against a wall of exhaustion and fail, and that sense of failure – of wanting to do a thing I love, but finding myself unable to – has left me inhibited, like a crocodile stunted to fit the undersized pool in which it’s kept. There are so many books I’ve picked up and struggled to read in the last few years, not due to any fault in the writing, but because my brain has been lagging, muddled; I want to read them now, but still, there’s this terrible, paralysing fear whenever I reach for one that the fog will come back, an invisible wall to smack me out of my progress. I feel the same about writing, especially here – but I’m trying. I’m going to keep trying.

My next book is coming out this year – my first since 2017 – and I’m terrified. I love this book; it’s just that I’ve got all this leftover terror of being too tired, too far away, too not-enough, and that makes it hard to remember that somehow, amidst all the terrible everything of the last half-decade, I managed to not only write a thing that I love, but get it on track to be published. Part of me is paranoid it’ll all somehow be taken away before it ever hits shelves, which I know is irrational, but I’m working on that, too.

Anyway. This is all to say that, while I haven’t been blogging much for a while now, I’m still here, and I’m trying, and I’m hopefully getting better, which is really the most that any of us can aspire to. It’s about to be the lunar year of the tiger, which is my year and therefore exciting, and frankly at this point, I can use all the positive omens I can find, so I’m leaning into it, mentally. And whoever’s reading this, I hope you have – or are having – a good new year, too. We could all do with one.

Lost In A Haunted Wood

I have a lot of thoughts right now, and I’m not sure how to express them. There’s so much going wrong in the world that on one level, it feels insincere or trivial to focus on anything other than the worst, most visceral horrors; but on another, there’s a point past which grief and fury becoming numbing. The angriest part of of me wants to wade into the wrench of things and wrangle sense from chaos, but my rational brain knows it’s impossible. I hate that I know it’s impossible, because what else but this do the people who could really change things think, to justify their inaction? I have words, and they feel empty. The world is full of indifferent walls and the tyrants who seek to build more of them; words, no matter how loudly intoned, bounce off them and fade into echoes.

Our governments are torturing children.

I could write essays detailing why particular policies and rhetoric being favoured by Australia, the UK and the US right now are inhumane, but I don’t have the strength for it. Some actions are so clearly evil that the prospect of explaining why to people claiming confusion about the matter makes me want to walk into the sea. I can’t go online without encountering adults who want to split hairs over why, in their view, it’s completely justifiable to steal the children of refugees and incarcerate them away from the parents they mean to deport, because even though they don’t want adult refugees they see no contradiction in keeping their babies indefinitely, in conditions that are proven to cause severe psychological damage, because – why? What the fuck is the end-game, here? People don’t seek asylum on a goddamn whim; they’re fleeing violence and terror, persecution and war and destruction; yet somehow the powers that be think that word of stolen kids will pass through some non-existent refugee grapevine and stop people coming in future? And even if it did, which it manifestly can’t and won’t, what the fuck do they plan to do with the ones they’ve taken?

Our governments are torturing children.

Refugees caged on Manus Island are committing suicide, their families left to learn of their deaths through the media. Disabled people of all ages are dying and will continue to die in the UK of gross neglect. None of this is conscionable; none of it need happen. Billionaires are privately funding enterprises that ought to be public because they can’t conceive of a better use for that much money while workers employed by their companies die sleeping in cars or collapse on the job from gross overwork or subsist on food stamps.

I want to say that the world can’t continue like this, but I know it can. It has before; we’re at a familiar crossroads, and the path down which we’re headed is slick with history’s blood. That’s why it’s so goddamn terrifying.

Please, let this be the turning point. Let’s fix this before it’s too late.

Our governments are torturing children.

A Personal Note

A common gag in comedy – and, sometimes, in drama – goes like this: Person A asks Person B to explain a particular thing, then cuts them off or ignores them when they do. Invariably, the point is that Person A is varying degrees of rude, overbearing and oblivious, and/or that Person B is boring, bullied or inept. It’s a cruel bit of humour, and while it can occasionally be employed with a light, teasing touch among characters who are and remain friends, the most common usage highlights the casual ease with which egotists silence others.

For Person B, it’s never a joke, even if the script requires them to shrug it off and keep going. For Person B, there’s no point asserting themselves in the face of Person A’s rudeness, because Person A doesn’t care.

And right now, I’ve been made into Person B.

Rationally, I know there’s no point in arguing with a stranger who declares himself an expert on my life, but who pointedly won’t listen to or engage with anything I say. Any testimony I make, no matter how truthful or heartfelt, can’t possibly sway him: he’s as convinced of his own unassailable rightness as he is my mendacity. Whatever I do or fail to do next, this person will see it as proof of his own intelligence. If I fail to respond, he’ll say I’m afraid of hearing the truth; if I do respond, he’ll claim my defensiveness proves his point. That being so, if I’m damned in his eyes no matter what, the only sane choice is to please myself and speak, not to this Person A, but to our mutual audience, in the hope they prove more receptive to sense than he.

As I mentioned in my last post, various men in the Sad Puppy camp have recently started claiming that my husband Toby is the anti-Puppy blogger Camestros Felapton. I have already stated, for the record, that he is not, as has Camestros: nonetheless, Brad Torgersen, Lou Antonelli and Dave Freer, none of whom I’ve ever met in person, refuse to believe either one of us.

By the public admission of both Freer and Antonelli, the “evidence” they have is circumstantial: they have an IP address they know belongs to Camestros and an identical IP they claim belongs to my husband – though on what basis, they’ve never said; certainly, my husband has never had just one IP in the entire time I’ve known him, and almost never comments online outside Facebook – and have thus concluded that they must be the same person. Apparently, “Australian with a philosophy background and a connection to SFF who’s recently lived in the UK” is such a weird, specific category of person as to defy any possibility of coincidence otherwise.

The fact that tens of thousands of people travel between Australia and the UK each year and that a large number of them must necessarily have similar interests is, to their mindset, irrelevant. Likewise, the fairly substantial overlap between philosophers and SFF fans, a commonality which has been a personal source of many enduring friendships, has seemingly not occurred to them. Back in 2015, I even reviewedPhilosophy and Terry Pratchett, a collection of academic essays about Pratchett’s work; a fact I mention, not because I expect the Puppies to agree with my analysis, but because the existence of such a book should serve as some proof, at least, that fantasy-loving philosophers aren’t an anomaly.

To say nothing of philosophy-loving fantasists, either: off the top of my head, I can think of multiple SFF authors with a more than passing relationship to philosophy and its associated disciplines, most notably Jo Walton and China Mieville. Indeed, I’m hard-pressed to think of any really good SFF author who doesn’t, at some point in their writing, employ at least a basic level of philosophical musing. The whole of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is basically one long, comic-philosophic ramble, and while Douglas Adams was – and remains – a truly unique individual, it’s impossible to claim that his writing has had no impact on the genre.

The point being, “SFF-reading Australian who knows some philosophy and has travelled to the UK” is not exactly an elite, exclusive category of person, and once you acknowledge this fact, it’s pretty much impossible to justify concluding that the few, superficial similarities between Camestros and my husband negate any possibility of coincidence.

Let’s be brutally honest, here: the only reason the Puppies think that Toby is Camestros is because he’s my husband. If Toby Meadows, philosopher, was a person with no connection to Foz Meadows, would Freer, Antonelli and Torgersen still be so goddamn certain that he was Camestros? Even if they’d managed to find some tweet or public comment of Toby’s to validate his interest in SFF – and he does enjoy some SFF, though his tastes are often different to mine – I doubt they’d have been as certain as they profess to be now. It’s my name that’s their smoking gun, and as such, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that they’ve taken me as their starting point and worked backwards from there. Toby, as mentioned, has a fairly small internet footprint beyond his professional life, and as none of the Puppies are academic logicians, the chance that they’d have heard of him in that capacity seems remote. No: instead, they remembered that I have a philosopher husband – a fact I’ve never kept secret – and decided to look for clues that fit him into their theory.

Or rather, Dave Freer did, and the others followed him. In all this mess, it now seems pretty clear that Freer is the key instigator of the Toby Is Camestros theory, and having already doubled down on that front, he has now constructed a second tier to his beautifully crafted argument (to steal a phrase from the late, great John Clarke) to explain why neither I nor Camestros has rushed to confirm his suspicions.

That theory? Oh, simple: I’m out as genderqueer, therefore Toby is gay, our marriage is a sham, and we don’t want people in the SFF community to ask questions about our relationship because we’re afraid of being compared to child predators Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Yeah. That’s literally Freer’s argument. Note: “Fieldsy” is his name for Toby, who he thinks is Camestros, because Meadows = fields, obviously. You can read the whole screed for yourself at the link, but here’s the salient section:

And it’s here that we reach the point where Freer has well and truly made me Person B to his Person A. This entire theory hinges on his unhinged, offensive and deeply homophobic assessment of my life, identity and marriage, but I already know that Freer doesn’t care to hear from me, nor will he believe whatever I have to say for myself. So what I say now, I don’t say for him, nor do I say it for Lou Antonelli or Brad Torgersen. I say it for myself, for the truth of the record, and for the benefit of anyone else who cares to view me as a more reliable source of information about myself, my husband and our lives than a man who has never met us and who demonstrably disdains what he thinks we are.

So:

I didn’t know I was genderqueer until after my son was born, and even then, it was hardly a straightforward realisation. At the time, I no more had a context for the dysphoria pregnancy gave me than my childhood self had understood why I often wanted to pass as a boy, or why I split my room into gendered halves, or why, in my teenage years, I sometimes wanted to rip off my skin when my clothes and body felt wrong. I didn’t have a word for what I was, let alone a framework to help me ask the right questions about it. I knew I wasn’t straight – I figured out I was bi in my teens – but gender identity remained beyond me for years.

I’ve been with my husband for a little over eleven years, and married to him for ten. He’s always known I was bi, and when I finally worked up the courage to tell him I’d realised I was genderqueer, he supported me, even though it was something he hadn’t expected. He supports me still, and I love him for that, and for a great many other reasons besides. My husband is straight, but I am not – and that’s not an oddity, either. I could make a list of SFF authors who are straight with a bi or genderqueer partner, or who are bi or genderqueer themselves with a straight partner, but I’d rather not subject anyone else in the queer SFF community to Freer’s toxic searchlight. Sufficed to say, we’re far from being the only ones, and if Freer thinks that my relationship merits a comparison to that of child abusers just because of my queerness, then I’m not the only person he’s thus insulted.

And it is an insult, regardless of Freer’s claims that he’s only saying what anyone might think. It is also uniquely hurtful – and again, I say this with no expectation that Freer himself cares for my feelings. Manifestly, he does not, and will doubtless rejoice to know that he’s upset me. Nonetheless, I am upset. I’ve tried to pretend that I’m not, but I am, and having admitted as much to myself, I feel no shame in admitting it here. Before all this, I’d never heard of Freer at all, and while I’m aware that the public nature of my life online means that I am, in a sense, accessible to strangers, there’s a great deal of difference between having someone object to my writing, and having them construct malicious falsehoods about my personal life.

In the past few days, at least one person has asked me if I’m really sure that Toby isn’t Camestros; that maybe he’s doing it all behind my back. Freer, Torgersen and Antonelli have laughed at the idea that, if Camestros isn’t Toby, then surely I must be grateful for their alerting me to the presence of a stalker-impersonator – as though they aren’t the ones rifling through my marriage in pursuit of a link that is not, was never, there.

I am, in many ways, a privileged person. In certain others, I’m not. It’s no exaggeration to say that the last five years nearly killed me: I’ve been physically sick since my son was born, debilitated by a postpartum infection whose consequences went medically undetected until late last year, playing merry hob with my immune system and mental health all the while. Even unaware of the physical side of my illness, I was still fighting Seasonal Affective Disorder, postpartum depression, gender dysphoria and the situational depression of being trapped in a cold, isolated part of the world with a new baby. It took years of desperate, difficult work to get to a point where my mental illness was addressed sufficiently for the physical symptoms, always omnipresent, to finally stand out as having a separate root cause, rather than being purely a side-effect of everything else. I was not okay for a long time, and I’m only now just starting to get really, truly better.

Which means that, for most of the past few years, in ways both large and small, my husband has been my carer. When I was debilitated, unable to get out of bed,  he was the one who dressed, fed and drove our son to childcare in the mornings, taking on innumerable domestic duties far beyond his usual half share, all while maintaining a full-time job as a lecturer and researcher. The fact that he has been superlative at his work in this time is a credit to his skill. He has published original papers in top-tier journals for his field, won prestigious grants and been invited to speak at multiple institutions in the UK, Australia and Europe, all while teaching a full courseload, and if you know anything about academia, you know that takes an enormous amount of effort.

My husband works harder than anyone else I know. Whatever he does, he does to 100% of his capability, and – which is even rarer – while constantly self-reflecting on his methods. The fact that he has achieved so much while frequently looking after our son – and after me – is a testament to his dedication. The idea that, amidst all the strife of the last five years, on top of everything else, he somehow found time to run a secret SFF blog that keeps more abreast of the Puppies than I’ve ever cared to be – that he found time to read novels, watch films and binge TV shows with which I’m unfamiliar, and that he did this all without my knowledge? Pull the other one.

From my perspective, the whole thing is absurd. I know who I am and who Toby is, and that ought to be good enough for anyone.

Except that, right now, I’ve been declared unqualified to speak truthfully about my own life. In the eyes of Freer, Antonelli and Torgersen, I’m too biased to be trusted. The idea that they have biases of their own – that they want Camestros to be Toby; that they want me to be lying – doesn’t rate a mention. So, yes: I’m upset that anyone would use my gender identity as a reason to try and invalidate my marriage, or to compare either me or my husband to predators, and I’m tired and highly irritated at having to spend precious time rebuking such obvious bigotry.

But what really infuriates me – what makes this all feel so viscerally personal – is the extent to which the theory that Toby is Camestros utterly dismisses, ignores and invalidates the lived reality of everything my husband and I have struggled through together. The past five years have contained a lot of individual wonder, but they’ve also been hellish. We’ve seen our son grow from infancy to school-age. We’ve moved from Bristol to Aberdeen to Brisbane. We’ve battled illness and mental health issues and the UK Visa Authority; we’ve thrown every spare scrap of energy into parenting, into furthering our careers, into helping each other through it all, and damned if it hasn’t been difficult.

It’s been so fucking hard, in the way that everyday life is hard: there are no trophies for getting out of bed when you want to die, no prizes for calming down after the umpteenth unnecessary argument or finally agreeing to try therapy. There’s just a new list of things to do, a new set of obstacles to overcome, and little moments in between where your child says I love you and paints dinosaur pictures that you stick on the fridge, and bigger moments strung throughout of friends and family, friends and family, shoring you up through the storm of your life like a levee.

I don’t owe anyone an interior view on my identity, my marriage or my health, but what I’ve offered here, I’ve offered for myself, because I’m angry and hurt and tired, and I want to react like a person. It’s human to be upset when someone lies about you, and if you have to pile conspiracy on conspiracy to explain why that isn’t actually true – why normal human reactions are really signs of Treachery – then maybe, just maybe, you’re not as rational as you thought.

Midyear Writing News!

We appear to be halfway through 2017 already, which is surely some sort of cosmic accounting error. To compensate, here is some writing news.

I’m thrilled to have won the 2017 Ditmar Award for Best Fan Writer in my third year of nomination. I didn’t write as much last year as I would’ve liked, all things considered, but I was proud of what I did produce, and especially now that I’m back in Australia, I’m honoured to have something like this to show for it.

As of April this year, I’m now a semi-regular contributor to the awesome Geek Girl Riot podcast. My segment is called Foz Rants, which is fairly self-explanatory, and covers whatever I feel like yelling about at the time. The whole podcast is pretty spectacular, so give it a look!

I have a new essay out in The Book Smugglers’ Quarterly Almanac: Volume 4. It’s on slipfic and the definition of genre, and contains some thinky-thoughts I’ve been trying to pin down for a while.

Finally, I’m extremely excited to have three short stories in Issue 3 of The Fantastist Magazine – ‘Letters Sweet as Honey,’ ‘Mnemosyne’ and ‘The Song of Savi’. Though different in terms of style and genre, they’re loosely thematically linked, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they’re received both individually and as a sort of triptych.

And with that, back to the studio!

What Depression Is

The thing about depression is that even though you know – or hope you know, when your thinking moves beyond reason – that there’s a difference between it and you, it’s very, very good at persuading you otherwise.

Depression is insidious, laying quiet siege to the deepest foundations of brain chemistry – mood, motivation, memory – and steadily repurposing them as weapons against yourself.

Depression is a one-two punch, first making you feel incapable of enjoying the many things you love, then branding your fear at trying them (lest the fear prove true) as laziness: a self-fault, rather than yet another symptom.

Depression is a weight on your chest from the moment you first wake up, pinning you to the mattress with the realisation that nothing you could do today will possibly matter or make you happy, so why not just stay where you are?

Depression is sleeping either fourteen hours or four out of every twenty-four, and still feeling equally tired.

Depression is struggling to distinguish between apathy, selfishness and self-care while knowing they’re sometimes the same.

Depression is not so much wanting to die as wanting to press a button that makes everything stop, but there’s only one button that does one thing, and the more you hurt, the harder is it to remember that pressing it can only take your pain at the gross expense of transferring it to everyone you love.

Depression is an all-encompassing fear of failure: fear that your success is either insufficient, meaningless or fundamentally invalid; fear that there’s no point in trying; fear that you’re incapable of doing anything at all, and always were, and always will be.

Depression is thinking you might not be a real person, after all.

Depression is an absence of emotional object permanence – if your friends and family aren’t expressing affection right now, then they must feel none – coupled with a deep discomfort whenever you’re offered praise and reassurance (as you clearly don’t deserve it).

Depression is telling your child, “Mummy’s sick today.”

Depression means looking for tiny victories: taking a shower, making lunch, laughing.

Depression means walking each day as if across fragile, cracking ice that covers a roiling dark.

Depression means finding your own purpose in impermanent things and states of being, over and over again.

Depression means hanging on.

Depression means hanging on.

Depression means that every day doesn’t have to be a good one, but perhaps today might be.

Depression means moving a mountain when you throw off the covers, running a gauntlet to get dressed, a marathon to get outside.

Depression means breaking your heart, your resolve and your limits in the hope that, like a fighter’s knuckles, the microfractures will steadily heal you stronger.

Depression means a signal beaten back by noise, but your brain is a broken radio and your heart is the hand on the dial, turning and tuning for music in static, for bursts of speech that say I’m here, I’m still here.

The thing about depression is that I have so many words in me, so many wants and so much will, but my body is broken, my brain is part of my body but I am my brain in a way I’m not my stomach or elbows or aching ribs, and my brain is broken, my brain is trying to fix itself, my body is trying to heal a wound that isn’t a wound because my pre-installed virus scanner reports that there isn’t an injury here, just an old, inferior floor model; my body will not execute the commands I can’t route through my broken brain: there’s a barrier there, a pane of glass between me and the way I ought to feel about books and fish and Wednesdays and the smell of petrol; there’s a barrier between how I ought to feel about the way I’m feeling and how I’m feeling; I’m ripping away at my mental lantana almost as fast as it grows back, but the deficit is full of thorns and weeds running riot in overgrown places; I wish I could riot; I wish I could convert the way I feel in dreams to the suffocated waking hours spent with my eyes cracked open and stinging like two spoiled oysters, but the thing about depression is that it’s a civil war where you’re fighting both fronts in the battlefield of your broken body: each backfired nerve is a gunshot, and I don’t want to salt and burn the earth like a demon’s grave or an enemy farm, but what does that make me afterwards? I ought to lie down, depression says, but darling, these white bones were sown in bloody soil from dragons’ teeth, and though the marrow aches at night, at least

I can still feel.

 

An Apology

One of the perils of being an innately contrary, frequently combative person is that you sometimes find yourself backed into a corner entirely of your own making, attacking in defence for no better reason than that it doesn’t occur to you to do otherwise. My psyche is friable of late; that doesn’t excuse bad behaviour.

Yesterday evening, I put up a thread of tweets about my editorial experience with my forthcoming book, A Tyranny of Queens. My comments were made in response to a different thread about fellow genderqueer author JY Yang’s difficulties in having the singular they accepted in their work. The thread struck a powerful chord with me: I felt moved to reply, and did so, as I often do in such instances.

The issue itself is important; vitally so. But the approach I took in broaching it was not.

In writing the thread, I made an early factual error: the editor in question, Amanda Rutter, was my structural editor, not my CE. That distinction is an obvious and crucial one to other, more experienced writers and professionals, but I am still a journeyman in that respect; I apologise for the confusion. I also erred in assuming that, because I hadn’t named Amanda directly, I’d somehow left her out of it; that I was discussing her editing in, not exactly a vacuum, but a context where her identity was both ambiguous and beside the point. I thought – inasmuch as it occurred to me to think – that, even assuming someone did realise who I was talking about, it wouldn’t actually matter, because the actual issue was a wider one.

As a social media veteran, I should have known better. I should have thought better, and I’m very sorry that I didn’t.

In referencing Amanda as clearly as I did – in citing her comments without first giving her warning or recourse to response; in letting my personal upset colour my discussion of an issue that exists beyond me – I behaved both badly and unprofessionally. My sincere apologies to Amanda for doing this; she deserved better of me.

I would also like to apologise to my publisher, Angry Robot, and to all the amazing people there who’ve worked with me, especially Marc Gascoigne and Phil Jordan. A Tyranny of Queens is a book which I’m immensely proud to have written, and the final product would be nowhere near as strong without the feedback, help and encouragement I’ve received from the AR team. Though hindsight renders the conviction both naïve and ridiculous, I can say with utter sincerity that I never intended any criticism of Angry Robot, whom I’ve always felt honoured to work with, and I’m furious with myself for slighting them in any way. I’m deeply sorry for this.

I’m sorry for putting my agency, Red Sofa Literary, in a position where they had to deal with my unprofessionalism, and I’m sorry for letting my actions detract from a very serious and necessary conversation, one I should have had the sense to contribute to in a far more productive manner.

It has long been my position that deleting things you said on the internet as a belated form of takebacks is a bad idea. For one thing, screenshots and retweets exist: removing the originals doesn’t ever stop their circulation, but rather tends to increase it, as the act of retraction makes more people eager to see and preserve what was (intemperately or wrongly) said. For another, and with very few exceptions, it strikes me as a gross way of pretending that the conversation never actually took place, like a form of self-distancing. This is why I’m leaving the thread itself intact: other conversations more useful than the original have sprung up from it and within it, and in a forum like Twitter, deleting any retweeted content is rather akin to shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. I said these things, and now I have apologised for them, and I hope that a more productive conversation will subsequently come from it.

I am sorry.

Mancunicon 2016 – Program Items

For those who didn’t already know, I’m going to be at Mancunicon – which is to say, Eastercon 2016 – in Manchester, from March 25th – 28th. This will likely be my last UK con for some time, as I’m moving back home from Aberdeen, Scotland to Brisbane, Australia at the start of April. As such, I’m delighted to say that I’ll be appearing on three separate panels. Namely:

Shipping the End of the World

Saturday 10:00 – 11:00, Room 8&9 (Hilton Deansgate)

The Hunger Games, Insurgent, The 100, The Walking Dead, and countless other TV shows, films, novels, and comics are set at the end of the world or in a post-apocalyptic environment. Many of these have huge and enthusiastic fanbases that often all but ignore the apocalypse in favour of shipping multiple characters. In fandoms not set at the end of the world, it is common for AUs to do just that. The zombie apocalypse being particularly common. In this session we enjoy the delights of the apocalypse and question its appeal as a setting among shippers.

The nature of this session may result in adult themes being discussed.

Participants: Lexin (M), Emily January, Foz Meadows, Ms Kate Wood, Louise Dennis.

Read My Enemy

Monday 10:00 – 11:00, Room 8&9 (Hilton Deansgate)

The relationship between art and politics is not straightforward, and the political status of great art is always contested. This can go beyond liking works with problematic elements: which books, films, TV shows or other artworks do you profoundly disagree with at their core, and yet adore nonetheless? How do you process that disjunction? The devil is said to have all the best tunes: might he also write the best stories?

Participants: Nick Larter (M), Roz Kaveney, Foz Meadows, Peadar Ó Guilín, Tom Toner.

Radical Worldbuilding

Monday 14:30 – 15:30, Room 6 (Hilton Deansgate)

From the anarchist society in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic The Dispossessed to the multiple cultures of Kameron Hurley’s Worldbreaker Chronicles, some SF societies have always been constructed to challenge what at least some of their readers might consider plausible. What are the advantages and disadvantages of showcasing radical alternatives in this way — as opposed to, say, starting with something that looks familiar and then breaking it? Who are such stories for: the readers who will be challenged, or those who will be delighted? Is “plausibility” actually a meaningful or useful goal? Is there a limit to how much writers can change in one story, and if so why, or why not?

Participants: Kate Wood (M), E.G. Cosh, Foz Meadows, Taj Hayer, Graham Sleight.

Hope to see you there!

Uprooted: Abuse & Ragequitting

Trigger warning: discussion of rape/sexual assault, spoilers for Uprooted.

Recently, I contributed to a tumblr thread about our unfortunate cultural habit of romanticising abusive behaviour in stories meant primarily for teenage girls, and how this can have a very real, very negative impact on their ability to accurately identify abuse in other contexts. I highly recommend reading the other responses in the thread, as many women shared their own, similar experiences of being confused on this point as teens, while Cora Buhlert also wrote an excellent follow-up post about the conversation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past year or so, not only because I’m interested in feminism within SFF, but also because of my own personal history.

As a teenager, I didn’t understand consent the way I do now, because nobody ever explained it to me in anything beyond the most basic, Rape-Is-A-Masked-Man-In-The-Bushes way. I watched a lot of TV shows where young women were raped and murdered by men who were, overwhelmingly, strangers, and I read a lot of books – quite a horrifying number, in hindsight – where the abuse and coercion of women was incorporated as a normative aspect of fantasy worldbuilding, but very seldom interrogated. It’s not as if I was consciously expecting these stories to provide me with guidance about my then-fledgling sex life, but at the same time, it’s not as if there was a surplus of knowledgeable, approachable, non-judgemental adults lining up to advise me, either. My brain was a sponge: I learned without meaning to learn, in a vacuum of intention to either teach or critique. Sex ed at school meant a basic knowledge of STDs and contraceptives, a basic knowledge of anatomy, and some truly horrendous Behold Yon Horrible Consequences videos filmed in the 1980s about the dangers of teen pregnancy. I don’t think the word consent was ever used, even when we talked about rape: the binary question, rather, was whether you should say yes or no at a given time, and why drinking at parties was a bad idea because you’d be more likely to say yes and regret it later.

The idea that anyone who coaxed that drunken yes from you might be guilty of rape or assault was never mentioned. If it had been, I might have made some very different choices as a teenager. Or maybe I’d have done the exact same thing, but understood immediately what it meant, instead of locking up for an hour nearly fourteen years later, covered in cold sweat at the belated realisation: oh. Oh. Naively, I’d thought I was done with such bleak epiphanies the first time I backdated my earliest forays into internet chatrooms and realised that actually, yes: those men were, in all probability, paedophiles. The teacher in his thirties who praised my thirteen-year-old “maturity” was not just an adult wanting to be my friend, and the men aged eighteen and over who’d ask for cybersex certainly weren’t.

Culturally, we have a lot of sexist baggage about women turning thirty and what it’s supposed to mean, but nowhere in all that baggage have I ever seen mentioned the likelihood of looking back on my early sexual experiences and realising, all too late, like a brutal, cascading suckerpunch, how fucked-up most of them were. That I would, at twenty-nine, rediscover a poem I wrote at sixteen – a poem I’d read multiple times since then, had showed to multiple adults since then, had always held up internally as an example of my early skill – and almost fucking vomit to realise how clearly it described a sexual assault. I was crying when I wrote it, raw and blank in the aftermath of the event itself, and – I remember this vividly – utterly confused, because I didn’t know what had happened. How can you be nearly thirty before you understand a thing like that?

I am, I’ve come to understand, a peculiarly repressive person. I hide things from myself. For all my ferocious introspection, I can be singularly self-deceptive. I wonder at the trait: was I always that way? Is it learned or innate? What quirk of blood or history encapsulates this appalling, unuseful talent? It feels like such an incongruous thing, especially given the strength of my memories. But perhaps that’s the problem: at the time, the things that appal me now weren’t appalling at all. They might have been unpleasant, even ugly or frightening, but they were also, in the context, normal, and as such, I didn’t question them. I remembered them as acceptable, as things that just happened, and even when the feelings underlying those verdicts were – are – turbulent, a second, more intelligent ruling is nonetheless hard to make. I was depressed as a teenager, and inasmuch as a facet of that depression was situational, I thought I understood the whole, both then and afterwards. Instead, that sadness – that very real, rooted sadness, both temporal and ephemeral – acted as a masking agent for other, more particular injuries. At the time, there was no need to wonder why sex could leave me heartsick; I felt that way often enough as it was to see nothing extraordinary in the confluence.

(Oh, young thing, no. Don’t boast of the bruises you didn’t want. Your loneliness ached, I know, but less than their acquisition.)

The past, as they say, is a foreign country. I did things differently there.

*

Tonight, I started reading Naomi Novik’s Uprooted. It was a novel about which I’d heard only good things from people I trust; a novel I was hoping would break me out of my current reading slump, wherein I’ve started a great many books, but am struggling to finish any of them. To borrow the parlance of memes, cannot tell if too depressed to read or just fed up with exclusionary, derivative bullshit – or, alternatively, if reading so much fanfiction has utterly wrecked my internal yardstick for length, structure and content. Yesterday – partly to test this hypothesis, and partly because I just wanted to – I embarked on my third reading of Katherine Addision’s The Goblin Emperor, a novel which, both stylistically and structurally, is utterly removed from fanfic’s conventions, but which is similarly subversive of genre.

Given that I devoured it, thrilled and rapturous, in a single sitting, I’m inclined to think the problem is other people.

I hate not finishing books, but lately, I’m all out of fucks to give for stories that don’t include me in the narrative. After struggling with Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, I started reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s River of Stars in parallel, hoping to find enough thematic points to compare and contrast that the one might jumpstart my interest in the other. And part of me wants, really wants, to read them both – not just dutifully, but because I don’t feel fully entitled to discuss them otherwise. But god, god, where are the rest of the women, and why are the few we see surrounded by men? Where is the queerness hiding, and why do I have to sift for it like some unlucky prospector stranded at the ass end of the gold rush? Why, Mr Kay, are you taking me away from your (thus far) single female POV character to show me what her would-be assassin thinks of his attempt on her life, even and especially when he dies at the end of the chapter? All his exposition did was silence hers, and as she’s apparently The Kind Of Woman Other Women Hate, I’m holding out little hope that the next fucktillionty pages are any better.

And thus, Uprooted. I wanted to root for it. (Heh.) Every ten years, Agnieszka’s village has to give a girl to the Dragon, the wizard who protects their valley. After a decade in his service, the girls come back, unharmed but changed, only to be replaced by a new apprentice. And this year, everyone thinks that Kasia, Agnieszka’s beautiful, clever best friend, is the one he’ll choose – only for Agnieszka herself to be taken instead. The writing is lovely, the pacing fluid, and we’ve already been reassured that the Dragon doesn’t assault the girls he takes, that he leaves them dowered and educated and self-possessed, and oh, I was so ready for this to be a story I loved –

But it’s not. It can’t be. The Dragon is an abuser – is grossly, violatingly abusive – and yet the narrative blooms with cues that he’s meant to be Agnieszka’s love interest, burning touches and flashing eyes, and of course, of course he’s centuries old and handsome in a young man’s body (you’re so mature for your age!) and no, this is not what I wanted – is, in fact, the exact fucking opposite of what I wanted – but what if I’m the problem? What if the novel is going to interrogate these tropes, this awful problematic idea of abuse as a prelude to romance, and I bow out too early?

I went to the internet, source of my current wisdom and early folly. Internet, I said, speaking as if to a magic mirror (wireless, wireless in the wall, who’s the truthiest of all?) – internet, does Agnieszka end up with the Dragon?

And lo, did the internet answer: pretty much, yeah. Sorry.

Now, I love Naomi Novik, and YA, and romances, though it took me a good long while to really admit the latter, and thanks to the aforementioned years of narrative conditioning, I have a pretty high tolerance for Partner A initially treating Parter B terribly Because Misunderstanding or some other reason, even though it sets my teeth on edge. By which I mean, I hate it intellectually, but there’s still a firmly-established emotional bedrock for pushing through regardless, on the offchance that we eventually get to a half-decent explanation. It’s actually not as weirdly hypocritical as it sounds: a lot of us have grown up feeling conflicted about the toxic tropes of our youth, as compelled by their unhealthy hold on our formative memories as we are repulsed by our subsequent understanding of them, and as such, it’s not uncommon to see them being… de-escalated, seems the best word for it. We know they’re fucked up, but we kinda want to use them anyway, because all the intellectualism in the world can’t make us rip out even the most diseased aortal tissue wholesale; it hurts too much, for one thing, and for another, it won’t grow back. And so, instead, we try our best to manage their perpetuation carefully: to sand off the worst, most unforgivable elements and mitigate the rest through lovingly tailored contexts. You can just about graph it, sometimes, the way those old tropes change from book to book, as newer authors learn their lore from newer permutations. It’s a form of literary evolution not unlike the Belyaev fox experiment: each new generation of readers learns to love the least-aggressive tropes from a litter of mixed novels until, one day, a thing that once bit savagely will whine and roll over for belly rubs.

Uprooted, though – Uprooted retains its teeth. And even knowing why, by this selfsame logic, other readers were able to skritch it happily behind the ears and carry on, I don’t think I can be one of them.

When the Dragon brings Agnieszka to his castle, he doesn’t tell her why he picked her. For the first few days, he barely speaks to her at all. When he touches her, he grabs her, hard. He insults her, viciously and constantly, berating her as stupid and ugly and useless, though he doesn’t stop to explain what it is he wants from her, or why she needs to learn. He forces her to dress in clothes she finds uncomfortable, expects her to cook his meals for him, but insults her efforts. And Agnieszka, right from the outset, is frightened that he’ll rape her – in fact, she doubts the safety of the girls in his care from the very first page:

He doesn’t devour them really; it only feels that way. He takes a girl to his tower, and ten years later he lets her go, but by then she’s someone different. Her clothes are too fine and she talks like a courtier and she’s been living alone with a man for ten years, so of course she’s ruined, even though the girls all say he never puts a hand on them. What else could they say?

We see her doubts again, on page sixteen:

Kasia had always said she believed the women who came back, that the Dragon didn’t put a hand on them. “He’s taken girls for a hundred years now,” she said firmly. “One of them would have admitted it, and word would have got out.”

But a few weeks ago, she’d asked my mother, privately, to tell her how it happened when a girl was married – to tell her what her own mother would have, the night before she was wed. I’d overheard them through the window, while I was coming back from the woods, and I’d stood there next to the window and listened in with hot tears running down my face, angry, so angry for Kasia’s sake.

Now that was going to be me. And I wasn’t brave – I didn’t think that I could take deep breaths, and keep from clenching up tight, like my mother had told Kasia to do so it wouldn’t hurt. I found myself imagining for one terrible moment the Dragon’s face so close to mine, even closer than when he’d inspected me at the choosing – his black eyes cold and glittering like stone, those iron-hard fingers, so strangely warm, drawing my dress away from my skin, while he smiled that sleek satisfied smile down at me. What if all of him was fever-hot like that, so I’d feel him almost glowing like an ember, all over my body, while he lay upon me and – 

I shuddered away from my thoughts and stood up.

This isn’t just a vague fear, but one the narrative makes explicit: Agnieszka is, very graphically and very, very literally, afraid of being raped. And contextually, she has every reason to be! The fact that the Dragon doesn’t take her to bed the second they get to his tower is hardly proof that he has no intention of doing so later; and certainly, it’s within his power to make her do whatever he wants.

As this scene, on page twenty-eight, makes clear:

I froze in surprise and stopped reading, my mouth hanging open. He was furiously angry: his eyes were glittering and terrible… 

He gaped at me and grew even more wildly angry; he stormed across the tiny chamber, while I belatedly tried to scramble up and back, but there was nowhere for me to go. He was on me in an instant, thrusting me flat down against my pillows.

“So,” he said, silkily, his hand pressed down upon my collarbone, pinning me easily to the bed. It felt as though my heart was thumping back and forth between my breastbone and my back…

“Agnieszka,” he murmured, bending low towards me, and I realised he meant to kiss me. I was terrified, and yet half-wanting him to do it and have it over with, so I wouldn’t have to be so afraid, and then he didn’t at all. “Tell me, dear Agnieszka, where are you really from? Did the Falcon send you? Or perhaps even the king himself?”

Listen: at this point, I don’t give a flying fuck that, for whatever reason, the Dragon seems to think Agnieszka is a spy. It doesn’t excuse his behaviour, because whoever she really is, she’s still a girl he’s got pinned to a bed, and he’s still making her feel sexually afraid of him in order to try and intimidate her into answering. The idea that his incredibly intimate rape threat is somehow justified by her potential treachery is, frankly, sickening. Never mind that, after she runs and accidentally spills a potion over herself, he leaves her frozen in stone for half a day without any explanation or apology; never mind that he physically makes her crawl around him, belittling her competence all the while. Agnieszka is so miserable and terrified that she wants to kill the Dragon, even contemplating suicide when she can’t go through with her plan. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss it moment, but to me, it felt like a slap in the face:

…I saw the tray discarded on the floor, the knife lying bare and gleaming. Oh. Oh, what a fool I’d been, even to think about it. He was my lord: if by some horrible chance I had killed him, I would surely be put to death for it, and like as not my parents along with me. Murder was no escape at all; better to just throw myself out the window.

I even turned and looked out the window, miserably…

So, to reiterate: the Dragon is treating Agnieszka in such a monstrous, abusive, bullying fashion that murder and suicide have both crossed her mind as options; she’s frightened he’ll rape her still, and he’s used that fear to try and make her comply with his wishes.

And then Prince Marek arrives, and actually tries to rape her.

To make this even more horrible, up until his assault, Agnieszka had been contemplating going to Marek for help, only keeping quiet because she’s afraid he won’t believe her. She’s heard stories of his exploits, thinks of him as a hero, and apart from anything else, he’s the only other person she’s even seen since the Dragon took her away.

Here is what happens (TW for assault):

He laughed again and kissed my throat. “Don’t worry, he can’t object,” he said, as though that was my only reason to protest…

It’s not that he was taking pleasure in overcoming me. I was still mute and my resistance was more confused batting at him, half-wondering: surely he couldn’t, Prince Marek couldn’t, the hero; surely he couldn’t even really want me. I didn’t scream, I didn’t plead, and I think he scarcely imagined that I would resist. I supposed in an ordinary noble house, some more-than-willing scullery maid would already have crept into his bedchamber and saved him the trouble of going looking. For that matter, I’d probably have been willing myself, if he’d asked me outright and given me enough time to get over my surprise and answer him: I struggled more by reflex than because I wanted to reject him.

But he did overcome me. Then I began to be really afraid, wanting only to get away; I pushed at his hands, and said, “Prince, I don’t, please, wait,” in disjointed bursts. And though he might not have wanted resistance, when he met it, he cared nothing: he only grew impatient.

“There, there; all right,” he said, as though I were a horse to be reined in and made calm, while he pinned my hand by my side. My homespun dress was tied up with a sash in a simple bow; he already had it loose, and then he dragged up my skirts.

I was trying to thrust my skirts back down, push him away, drag myself free: useless. He held me with such casual strength.

At this point, Agnieszka uses one of the few magic spells the Dragon has taught her – a spell to create clothes, the better to look pretty for him – to recover herself. Marek is so stunned that she has a chance to bash him over the head with the abandoned dinner tray, and he goes down hard, unconscious. Agnieszka, not unsurprisingly, is both frightened at the prospect of having killed a prince and shaken at having been nearly raped. So when the Dragon enters and discovers the scene, does he treat her kindly, even dispassionately, while he tries to heal the Prince? Or does he behave like a cruel, abusive, victim-blaming asshat?

Oh, yeah. Welcome to door number three.

I stood hovering anxiously over the bed, over both of them, and finally I blurted, “Will he -“

“No thanks to you,” the Dragon said, but that was good enough: I let myself sink to the ground in my heap of cream velvet, and buried my head on the bed in my arms sheathed in embroidered golden lace.

“And now you’re going to blubber, I suppose,” the Dragon said over my head. “What were you thinking? Why did you put yourself in that ludicrous dress if you didn’t want to seduce him?”

“It was better than staying in the one he tore off me!” I cried, lifting my head: not in tears at all; I had spent all my tears by then, and all I had left was anger. “I didn’t choose to be in this -“

I stopped, a heavy fold of silk caught up in my hands, staring at it. The Dragon had been nowhere near; he hadn’t worked any magic, cast any spell. “What have you done to me?” I whispered. “He said – he called me a witch. You’ve made me a witch.”

The Dragon snorted. “If I could make witches, I certainly wouldn’t choose a half-wit peasant girl as my material. I haven’t done anything to you but try and drum a few miserable cantrips into your nearly impenetrable skull.” He levered himself up off the bed with a hiss of weariness, struggling, not unlike the way I’d struggled in those terrible weeks while he – 

While he taught me magic. Still on my knees, I stared up at him, bewildered and yet unwillingly beginning to believe. “But then why would you teach me?”

“I would have been delighted to leave you moldering in your coin-sized village, but my options were painfully limited.” To my blank look, he scowled. “Those with the gift must be taught: the king’s law requires it. In any case, it would’ve been idiotic of me to leave you sitting there like a ripe plum until something came along out of the Wood and ate you, and made itself into a truly remarkable horror.”

While I flinched away appalled from this idea, he turned his scowl on the prince…

“Here,” said the Dragon. “Kalikual. It’s better than beating paramours into insensibility.”

So, to be clear: not only does the Dragon neglect, at any point, to ask if Agnieszka is all right – not only does he belittle her for defending herself, and continue to bully her intelligence – but he blames the assault on her choice of clothes, and then refers to the prince, not as her assailant or rapist, but as her paramour, a consensual term that utterly minimises what just took place. Their subsequent conversation reveals his belief that Marek, who assumes the Dragon takes women “to force them to whore for me”, would have seen bedding Agnieszka as “cuckolding” him, and therefore a sort of petty revenge. Again, this is desperately minimizing language, even in context: at no point is the attempted rape named as such, and despite the fact that Agnieszka has spent literal weeks in fear of being raped, the rest of the conversation – and, indeed, the events of the following chapter – appear to show her experiencing no emotional consequences at having that fear made manifest. Instead, the Dragon continues to bully her, and badly, when she fails to make her magic work:

He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers – “My father’s a woodcutter,” I said – “Of axe-swinging lummocks!” he snarled. But even so, I wasn’t afraid anymore. He only spluttered himself into exhaustion and then sent me away, and I didn’t mind his shouting at all, now that I knew there were no teeth in it to rend me.

I was almost sorry not to be better, for now I could tell his frustration was that of the lover of beauty and perfection. He hadn’t wanted a student, but, having been saddled with me, he wanted to make a great and skillful witch of me, to teach me his art…

It maddened him to no end, not without some justice. I know I was being foolish.

At this point, it was all I could do not to fling the book at the wall. It’s Agnieszka who’s been sexually assaulted and belittled, but the sympathy here – and worse, given in her voice! – is all for the Dragon: language that tries to excuse his abuse as the understandable frustration of a perfectionist, Agnieszka blaming herself for not being good enough, for daring to have interests and talents beyond what he expects of her, even though he’s done literally nothing to show her kindness at all. Are we meant to find it a sign of progress, that she doesn’t mind his shouting? Are we meant to feel well-disposed towards such a vile abuser, or ought we to be rooting for her escape?

My instincts were telling me one thing, and the narrative another. Which is why I went on Twitter and asked if their relationship becomes a romantic one. Universally, the response came back: they get together, it’s implied they’re still together at the end, and the Dragon’s early mistreatment of Agnieszka is never satisfactorily addressed.

And I just – no. No. I do not want to read nearly four hundred more pages only for this level of vicious cruelty to never be called what it is. I do not want to read about a sexual assault victim falling in love with an abusive rape-apologist and think about how romantic I would’ve found it all, when I was Agnieszka’s age; how romantic some other girl might find it now, who won’t know any better until she’s nearly thirty, too. I do not want to soldier on for the sake of those amazing feminist virtues I’ve been told the rest of the novel somehow, separately, embodies, because if I’m going to read a book that deals with rape and sexual assault, I would like it, please and thank you, to actually call it those things, or at least to behave as though belittling a victim of same in their immediate fucking aftermath isn’t an acceptable gateway to romance.

Fucking hell. I just want to read a book that doesn’t make me feel like I’m being either punched for existing, or treated as though I don’t. We’re SFF writers; we literally make up shit for a living. Why does everything have to be so brutally fucking difficult?

 

 

 

On Swords & Stubbornness

In video games, whenever I’m given the option of fighting with ranged or melee weapons, I go melee. Even in RPG and tactical combat settings, where the interface means my choice of weapon has little to no impact on the controls, I still skew strongly towards swords and knives over bows and guns, because some bizarre, lizardy part of my brain feels more vulnerable if my avatar isn’t armed for close combat. In games that let me control my character’s actions directly, my combat style is blunt and unsubtle: even if I don’t really have the stats for it, my default approach is to be a tank, running right into the thick of things and hitting stuff until it dies. Even back when I was a regular Halo player (multiplayer against friends, never campaign), the sword was always my weapon of choice, followed closely by the shotgun and plasma grenades: in an environment where guns were the default, I still gravitated towards close-range weapons, because they felt, inexplicably, both safer and more satisfying.

Inevitably in the kinds of games I play, there are particular enemies, bosses and training fields where you’re strongly encouraged to tailor your combat approach to deal with specific threats, or else suffer punitive damage. Rationally, I know this, and yet I hate doing it. It irks me to have to switch to ranged weapons because a particular creature is immune to ground attacks, or to switch in my mage as party leader because using anything other than fire magic against a certain boss will see me stalled midgame until I defeat them. Partly, this reluctance is due to stubbornness on my part – I’m an innately contrary person, and always have been – but mostly, I suspect, it’s because hacking my way through problems without having to overthink or plan my approach is something I find soothing about gameplay. In other contexts, I’m constantly having to try and adapt my metaphorical plan of attack to deal with obstacles and the actions of others, but in gamespace, I can simply repeatedly hit the thing and, even if there’s a more stat-appropriate way to minmax my way to victory, I’m still going to end up the Hero of Ferelden. I can be reckless in games, single-minded, and if that gets my avatar killed a few times, so what? They’ll always be resurrected.

But still, in games, there’s that moment where I enter a new area, or start a new fight, and realise that I’m overmatched. Maybe I haven’t levelled my party enough, or maybe it’s just that these new enemies require a specific approach, but either way, if I try to plough ahead in my usual fashion, I’m probably going to die a lot. Which leaves me with a choice: do I suffer a diminished enjoyment of gameplay by temporarily changing my tactics, or do I bash on, save repeatedly, and treat the whole thing as a training run?

Nine times out of ten, I’ll choose the latter approach. Ultimately, I’m gaming for pleasure, and that being so, I’d rather enjoy the challenge of a difficult level played on my terms than feel bored and disconnected by taking an approach which, while easier, doesn’t engage me.

Kind of like how I deal with writing.

I am, as mentioned, a stubborn, contrary person. Like many creative people, my inspiration is something of a Billygoat Gruff/Rum Tum Tugger: hypothetical projects always look more tempting than the ones to which I’ve committed myself, and no sooner have I started a thing than I want to start something else. It is, frankly, a fucking miracle that I ever finish anything at all. But I do it. I do it, because I approach my writing projects with the same blunt melee frenzy as I do my battles in Knights of the Old Republic: I run at them headlong, heedless of strength and context, until I either emerge victorious or die in the attempt. But in real life, resurrection is a trickier process than merely loading from the last save point. I have to stop and recuperate; I have to change my tactics, which means anything from giving myself a series of mental health days to forcibly setting aside the thing I most want to work on in favour of completing the one that’s due. But once I’m back to strength – even if I’m taking punitive damage; even if it means dying again more quickly than I might otherwise – inevitably, I do it all over again. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s how I work, and I’ve made my peace with that.

If my life right now was a video game, I’d be stuck in a monster-infested plateaux with minimal save points, enemies requiring the use of ranged weapons, and an under-levelled party. I owe multiple Patreon TV Roulette reviews accrued from the past two months, along with a still-incomplete novella and edits on my manuscript, to say nothing of needing to work on the sequel. I’m midway through writing an Ambush Novel I desperately want to finish, and am stalled in my updating of multiple fanfics which, while created purely for my own pleasure, are nonetheless an important sanity-check. I have five or six books waiting to be read for review, something like forty books to preferentially read for pleasure, and so many blog posts to read in my capacity, along with Mark Oshiro, as editor of the Speculative Fiction anthology 2015 (which you should totally submit to here, btw!). I’ve just taken on an extra morning’s work at my dayjob, which brings me up to four days a week – two full days, one morning and one half-day – which means I now have no days at home without my toddler, as all his childcare time falls when I’m at work. I have visa crap to deal with, which is both expensive and stressful. I have Seasonal Affective Disorder to deal with, as I live in Scotland and the Months of Endless Dark are upon us. I have so much to do, and not enough time to do it in, and not enough strength to do it with.

And yet, I’ll get it done. I’ll push through, bashing and yelling and swinging my sword, because it’s what I do, and what I’ve always done. I might have to die a couple more times in the process – am currently resurrecting myself right now, as it happens – but damned if I’ll stop fighting.

Choose your weapons, world. I’ve chosen mine.

11/11/15 – ETA the following awesome graphic, which the excellent Samantha Swords made for me. Hail!

Fantasycon Ahoy!

First up, some housekeeping: owing to having been viciously attacked by an Ambush Novel late last month, I’m currently behind on my Patreon blogging – I still owe a reward poem, my September review of Ultraviolet, plus the October instalments for both Ultraviolet and Claymore. My sincerest apologies! I’m hoping to get up to date sooner rather than later, but I hope you’ll all bear with me in either case. Because:

I’m going to Fantasycon! 

I leave for Nottingham on Thursday. I’m staying at the con hotel, which is a first for me, and I’m super excited about the whole thing. For those who might be interested, here’s my schedule:

Friday 23 October

Panel: Doing ‘It’ Right: Love, Romance & Sexy Times

Time/Venue: 8.00pm, Conference Theatre

Description: Why are we often so reticent about love in genre fiction? Conversely sex seems to be everywhere, often done badly. How do we show love in a better light and balance plot tension with sexual tension? Warning: adult references (& childish innuendo)

• the perfect sex scene: making up making out/making love
• a matter of taste: where are the ‘no-go’ areas?
• is love undervalued as a character motivation?
• how can our characters express their feelings without mawkishness?
• diversity and sexuality in genre fiction: what works and what doesn’t?
• are ‘romance’ and ‘conflict’ mutually exclusive terms?
• finding the right words: choosing appropriate vernacular

Moderator: Den Patrick
Panellists: Hal Duncan, Cassandra Khaw, Kim Lakin-Smith, Foz Meadows

Saturday 24 October

Reading: Me reading a thing Wot I Has Written

Time/Venue: 9.00pm, Reading Room

Description: I’ll either be reading an unpublished short story, or – more likely – an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, An Accident of Stars. Come along and find out!

Sunday 25 October

Panel: The Future of the Future

Time/Venue: 11.00am, Suite 1

Description: With technology regularly surpassing the boundaries of what seemed impossible only years earlier, it gets harder for writers to imagine futures by extrapolating from today’s world. This panel considers how we depict the world(s) yet to be.

• key considerations for world-building ‘tomorrow’
• does the future need to be plausible?
• must it be apocalyptic to be interesting?
• exploring the morality of science & technology
• how far can you go into the future before science fiction becomes fantasy?

Can genre fiction still ‘boldly go’ into the unknown?

Moderator: Foz Meadows
Panellists: Alex Lamb, Libby McGugan, Adam Millard, Ian Sales, Tom Toner

I intend to spend the rest of the con socialising, lurking and generally having a good time – if you see me, come say hi!