So apparently Jim C. Hines didn’t like my response to Tor.com’s blogger wanting to end the default to binary gender. http://www.jimchines.com/2014/01/fiskception/ Jim is one of those noble crusaders, best known for raising awareness and protecting authors from the evils of having attractive women on book covers (you know, that stuff the marketing department does in order to try and get people interested enough to pick up our product in stores long enough to read the back cover blurb, to try and better sell our books).

If you want this to make sense, make sure you read this first. http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/ending-binary-gender-in-fiction-or-how-to-murder-your-writing-career/

I’m unfamiliar with Hines’ work. I think I might have been on a panel with him at a con once because it sounds familiar. I actually thought he was the new SFWA president, but that’s somebody else. I looked him up on Wikipedia. We’re the same age. He has an eight year head start on me for being published, so he’s been around. We’ve even written the same number of books.

Interesting. He wrote a “rape awareness novel”… I taught hundreds of women how to shoot rapists while certifying them to carry concealed firearms. I’m sure me and Jim will get along super good.

So let’s have some fun.

Since it is very confusing for the readers to fisk the fisk of a fisking, I’m just going to have me and Him here, and I’m not going to quote my entire original response.  My comments are in bold. Hines are in italics.

This is gonna be a long one.

Not really. He mostly hits and runs and does some check listing. I’m the long winded one.

The backstory: Author Alex Dally MacFarlane wrote an article called Post-Binary Gender in SF: An Introduction over at Tor.com, calling for “an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.”

One week later, author Larry Correia wrote a response to MacFarlane’s piece, called Ending Binary Gender in Fiction, or How to Murder Your Writing Career. (Side note: you’ll probably want to avoid the comments on that one.)

That last part is very interesting. You’ll probably want to avoid the comments… Why? Because I don’t edit them in anyway or “massage” them? Between the blog post and the corresponding Facebook post, I’ve got a few hundred comments. Of those, there are a handful that are very mean (this is the internet) but most of them are reasonable, and interestingly enough I’ve also got homosexuals and transsexuals who posted in the comments who thought the original Tor blog post was as ham fisted as I did.

I tried to ignore it. There’s no way I’m going to change Correia’s mind about this stuff, any more than his post changed my thinking. But of course, there are a lot of other people lurking and participating in the conversation,

He’s correct. Arguing is a spectator sport. You don’t waste your time on the already decided, you convince the undecided, and give ammo to your side. If there isn’t an audience, don’t waste your time.

and while I know this is going to do bad things to my blood pressure, I think it’s a conversation worth having.

Heh… My blood pressure is fine. Arguing with lefties on the internet is what I do to relax.

In my last fisk, I talked about how the blog post was angsty emo bullshit.

I wonder which is more angsty … an author calling for our genre to move beyond binary gender, or another author spending 4000+ words about how people like MacFarlane are symbolic of everything that’s wrong with the genre, and are destroying fun.

The original. Obviously.  Nice check listing though. I wrote lots of words, ergo, that’s angsty… Or it could just be that I’m a WRITER who averages 3k of paying fiction a day, I threw that thing together while I was waiting for the matinee of I Frankenstein to start. Considering half of those words were a cut and paste of the original Tor article… Man… That means Jim Hines just wrote SIX THOUSAND WORDS to respond! Holy shit. That’s hard core!

PROTIP: Your editor does not like to pay you for the words you cut and paste from other people’s blogs. 🙂

Destroying fun?  Quite the contrary. If you’d bothered to read the comments then you know my readers have had a whole lot of fun with this. Oh! You mean destroying the fun of reading sci-fi and killing off our slowly dwindling genre. Well, yeah. That’s sort of the point. 

I wrote my post for the aspiring authors who might read Tor.com and think that Ending Binary Gender in Sci-Fi was good advice. I pointed out that when you write with the goal of checking boxes to satisfy the cause of the day, your writing will probably suck.

I agree that if you’re writing a story with the kind of checklist Correia describes, you’re probably going to get a bad story.

Yep. But I said it in a mean way that hurt their delicate lilac scented feelings.

But what exactly are the suggestions Correia objects to? MacFarlane never says all writers must now include at least one non-binary character. She says only that she wants readers to be aware of non-binary texts, and wants writers to stop defaulting to them. Not that authors should never write cismale or cisfemale characters. Just be aware that there are other choices, and make conscious choices about your writing.

Uh… No. That’s not what she said. For example, from the original:

– I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.

—I want to never again read entire anthologies of SF stories or large-cast novels where every character is binary-gendered

I then went through why that was really dumb from a business perspective.

Jim then cherry picks through hundreds of comments to find the following super offensive hatey-hate monger, which proves that not only am I a bad person for allowing this hate speech, but my readers are knuckle dragging Klan members. 

From the comments to Correia’s piece:

• “I am so tired of these pretentious twats. Err, dicks.      Err… pre-op alternative genitals.”

That was an attempt at humor, as in I want to call you a name, but I’m not sure what the proper post binary gender acceptable genitalia are. 

• “The hilarious thing is my books are filled with      characters who are non-white, non-male, non-straight, occasionally trans      and from a mixmaster of genetic and cultural backgrounds … But I don’t      write books for leftist pussies so they’ve never read my books.”

Ah, interesting. I notice you cherry picked this one and left out the fact it was written by well known and successful science fiction author Michael Z. Williamson, whose books actually have tons of homosexual and transgender main characters, including the primary PoV in a few, yet the SFWA crowd you hang out with actually despise him even more than they dislike me, because as a libertarian and an immigrant, he argues against big government and statists.

• “If this is the level of education of the typical      WorldCon voter, it’s no wonder the GOOD writers don’t win awards. These      loonies wouldn’t recognize good writing if Earl Harbinger yanked out their      guts and used the intestines to piece out quotes from Jane Austen.”

Yep. Somebody said something mean on the internet. Holy shit. How will you live?

Do we really want to start arguing about what one’s commenters say about one’s audience?

Why, yes. Let’s do exactly that.

From those same comments Hines warns people not to read:

1. Aaaand once again the LGBTWTFBBQ community I refuse to participate in does not cease to disappoint. As a transgendered Iraq-war Veteran enjoying the GI Bill benefits awarded by my beautiful country I have plenty of time to read again, and I own everything Grimnoir, Monster Hunter, or Lorenzo-related (coolest character I’ve read yet Mr. Correria, please do it again, and take more of my money), I think I derive a special amount of amusement from this exchange.

Because you see, in the end, Alex MacFarlane doesn’t give half a shit about me, any more than she does about the ozone or whatever. She simply, today, finds me to be a convenient bludgeon with which to cow all the lesser unenlightened beings into her groupthink, including me. (Confusing logistics there, but yes, that’s how the LGBTWTFBBQ community treats any non-card carrying socialist.) Tomorrow she may not, she may decide to throw me under the bus for polar bears or food stamps soaked in methadone or whatever.

Whereas the kind Mr. Correia just wants to sell me books. In these books, monsters are fought (both the creature and man types) by badasses I want to drink with.

Or this:

1. Good lord. I’m an active member of a number of liberal groups, I regularly have discussions on cultural gender norms and sexuality, I actually think a study of historical gender narratives might be kind of interesting, and this kind of crap makes me want to vote Republican just to spite this person. Writing a character as non/alternative-gendered because you wanted to increase the diversity of the cast, instead of because said identity fit the character, means you’re writing backward.

For those of you who are decrying liberals as a group, keep in mind that this person is about as representative of the average liberal as actual racists are of the average conservative, or Alex Jones is of the average gun owner

 

Wow. Feel the hatey-hate mongery of the Monster Hunter Nation.

As for that first one where you play the humorless finger shaking card, here is the rest of the joke you left out:

Let’s not be Cisgendered Gendernormative Fascists. They’re obviously “twicks” and “dats”. Except for the ones that excrete eggs/and or sperm, and please, not on the rug. . .

And

How dare you be so domainist! Think of all the plants, fungi, molds, and plankton you are discriminating against! You should also be including seeds, spores, and mitosis in your post-binary gender message lit.

How dare people make jokes about such a super important topic? Don’t they realize the internet is for serious business? 

I pointed out several of my posters on Facebook said their polite and disagreeing comments on the Tor.com site had been deleted.

If Tor.com is deleting comments for disagreement, then that’s a serious problem. But skimming through the 100+ comments on the article, I find plenty that disagree with MacFarlane, or argue with what she’s saying. Tor.com does have a moderation policy, so I’d expect comments that violated that policy to get booted. Beyond that, I don’t know the details of the allegedly polite commenters who claim to have been booted for not cheerleading enough,

He doesn’t know the details, so good thing he warned his readers not to read those details from my readers in my comments.

so there’s not much more for me to say about this one.

Except for when he does again later.

Hines obviously doesn’t get most of the running jokes here on MHN, so he’s totally oblivious why I talked about the Typical WorldCon Voter, but luckily you guy know how to combat the scourge of Puppy Related Sadness. 

Because calling for an awareness that not all people fit into a simple binary gender system = KILL ALL THE SCIENCE FICTION!!!

Already pointed out, so we all know that’s not what she said. 

What’s killing all the science fiction is the preponderance of boring ass message fic turning off readers and causing the genre’s sales numbers to shrink.

In other news, I believe we should do something about racism in this country, which actually means I WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA!1!!!1!

Well, Jim, that depends on what that “something” you want to do about racism is. If it is throwing more tax money at failed bullshit social programs that have destroyed the nuclear family in America’s inner cities, equal opportunity nonsense, race baiting, or the other typical divisive nonsense the democrats use to keep Americans divided into easily managed voting blocks, then I would have to say that is bad for America.  

Now, if you want to bring up racial issues in your fiction, and do it as a compelling part of the story, awesome. I’ve done that, repeatedly. If you want to write some heavy handed message fic, then it will probably fail miserably. That was sort of my point that you insist on missing.

Adding a cut-tag here, because I am a merciful blogger…

Not really, because what follows is a confusing mishmash of the original, my response, and Jim’s response to my response. Mercy would be taking the original behind the barn and giving it the Old Yellar treatment.

How dare people want things! How ridiculous that people want things I don’t personally agree with! You empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction.

I suspect Jim is new at fisking.

Then I mistakenly referred to the original author as a he, and even put in that I wasn’t aware what sex Alex was. 

1. 1.     Alex MacFarlane is female.

Hines pounces like a cat!

2. You ask what the default is that she wants to end. She answers that in the following paragraph. Which doesn’t seem to stop you from running off to declare gender = chromosomal/biological sex.

Don’t you just hate when words have definitions and stuff?

Cismale gendernomrative fascist? Whatever.

Jim wasn’t around for that part. See, as a writer who doesn’t “massage” his comments in any way other than deleting spam and the occasional crazy person death threat, I will often have people who disagree, and sometimes even really hate my guts, show up to argue with me, and holy crap, I actually LET THEM. (liberal bloggers just gasped) Somebody called me that term as an insult. I had to look it up. It made me laugh, so I’ve been using it ever since. (it means man born as a man who still identifies himself as a man and thinks men are usually men and women are usually women, and fascist) We’ve been laughing about it for a year now.

Because if you use the word cismale or gendernormative in a regular conversation and you’re not being ironic, odds are you are a pretentious douche with a gender studies degree. 

What Correia is displaying here is his awareness that he’s making an assumption, his awareness that the assumption might be wrong, and his unwillingness to do 30 seconds of research to verify his assumption. Either because he’s lazy, or because he doesn’t see any need to treat people he disagrees with respectfully. Or both.

I didn’t look up the author’s sex and mistakenly referred to her as a she. Of course, I don’t actually give a shit what sex Alex is, because I’m going to judge an idea on its merits rather than the sex, race, national origin, orientation, or religious beliefs of its creator, and this was a dumb idea, but hey, hate monger or something. 

But if Jim had read the comments, he’d know that one of my smart readers pointed out I was simply paying homage to Left Hand of Darkness with the Him pronoun. 🙂

As for me being the lazy writer… In 5 years I’ve published 10 novels, a couple dozen short stories, 1 novella, several hundred blog posts, and for most of that time I still had my day job as the finance manager of Utah’s small business of the year, where I managed millions of dollars worth of complex military contracts and government auditing. So safe money is on I just don’t give a shit. 

I talked about what Tor.com wanted us to do. Hines disagrees with my assessment.

Read more carefully. The Western cultural norm is to genders; that doesn’t mean two genders is exclusively a Western cultural norm. See also, nickels are coins, but not all coins are nickels.

And yes, male and female are cultural norms in pretty much every human society EVER! Except Mesopotamia, India, Siberia, Illiniwek, Olmec, Aztec, Maya, Thailand, Lakota, Blackfoot, Indonesia, Swahili, Azande, and all of the other cultures that historically or currently acknowledge the existence of more than two genders.

Wait a minute… Other than the long dead obscure ones, I’m actually familiar with a few of those cultures and I call bullshit. Now, I’m not a gender studies major (my degree is in accounting, because I like not living on food stamps while begging my local college for a guest lecturer position) but I think in most of those he’s trying to cite like India and Thailand there was a small contingent of the population that was gelded, served as sex toys, or other corner cases, but even then, the norms in each of those would be male and female. And a couple of those he cites have to be a wild ass guess, because anthropologists know dick (or whatever the acceptable post binary genitalia is) about some of those civilizations.

But even if true, pointless, since I’m giving advice to aspiring writers, and unless they’re trying to sell books to the Olmecs or ancient Mesopotamia, then everything I said about sticking to story first and foremost rather than message of the day stands. 

I said: Also, nitpick. Gender was a grammar term for how you referred to the different sexes. Being male or female is your Sex. Or at least, that’s what the word meant until colleges invented the Gender Studies major for those students who found Liberal Arts way too academically grueling.

Paraphrase: “Ha, ha. People who disagree with me are dumb!”

If you got a student loan in order to get a college degree that barely qualifies you to work at Starbucks the rest of your life, then pretty much. Please, gender studies masters who are living in their parent’s basement, go occupy some street somewhere and demand a bailout for your student loans.

Hmmm… You might be sensing Larry Correia doesn’t have much respect for the soft degrees. YOU THINK?!

I then said that I think story comes first. Never message. Story. I explained why this article was bad advice, in depth, repeatedly.

I … actually, I pretty much agree with him here.

Because I am totally correct. They know it. However, a mean right winger said hurtful things and interrupted the circle jerk of like-minded people telling each other how brilliant they are, so the wagons must be circled.

People read for story, not for checklists or quotas or lectures. I see nothing in MakFarlane’s article to suggest she believes any differently.

Except for the parts where she did.

Calling for authors to be more thoughtful about their craft doesn’t mean you’re telling authors to abandon story for MESSAGE.

And Jim does as much disservice missing the original’s point as he does missing mine, so now Jim is trying to re-explain what Alex meant. Good thing that poor young woman has this brave white guy to come in and explain what she REALLY meant to say.

But you know, readers also tend to enjoy stories where they can find characters like themselves. Which is easy if you’re a straight white dude, and gets progressively more difficult the further you stray from that default.

Oh, bullshit. Let’s analyze this for a second… Readers want to enjoy stories where they can find characters like themselves, but to libs like Hines, that always comes down to race and sex, or whatever convenient little box you can put people in. Fuck that. My average reader is probably a white male in his thirties, (judging by my sales and fan base I meet on tour, straight white males are the biggest single group, but really my fans are actually very diverse, but run with it for right now) yet my main series characters are a half-Polynesian mutt, a teenage Okie girl, and a man who grew up in foster care and is of indeterminate genetic heritage (who passes at different times for Hispanic, Indian, or Qatari).

Only my readers do find something of these characters like themselves, only it isn’t race. Owen’s culture is “military brat” and “gun nut” and “has issues with authority”. The first group of fans that “find characters like themselves” with my first main character were Libertarians.  Faye is a homicidal maniac with a good heart. Lorenzo is a snarky asshole. They’re all people who get shit done. That appeals to readers who like the concept of get shit done.

Second, from a purely nuts and bolts writing perspective, if what Hines is saying is true (which thankfully it isn’t) then if you actually want to make lots of money, you would write your books with whatever demographic it appeals to, which would mean even less diversity in characters (which they supposedly want) or if you wanted to write about transgender people, you’d be limiting yourself to one tiny market.

Luckily, Jim is full of shit, so we can basically write about whatever type of character we want to, and if it is entertaining enough, we can sell that story. If what Jim said was true, then who would read about Miles Vorksogian? What’s wrong with all those white males who love Honor Harrington? Could it be that character is far more important than checking a box on an EEOC form? Unpossible.

Maybe if we want to write enjoyable stories, we should try looking beyond the same old default that’s been done again and again throughout the history of the genre.

You know what they call something that has been done again and again and again? A trope. Do you know why tropes show up so often that there is a hilarious webpage that chronicles how many times different tropes show up in different things? Because tropes WORK. If they didn’t work, writers wouldn’t keep using them.

In fact, I then very carefully explained that there is nothing wrong with using diverse or oddball or unique characters, cited some of the grandmasters of sci-fi who pulled it off, and then pointed out that when it was pulled off, it was because they were story first, message WAY later.

Yep. Putting message before story will tend to bore your reader.

No shit.

Now, if the only way you can imagine including a “non-default” character in your story is to make it a Message Story, then guess what — you’re probably a shitty writer. You can have gay characters in a story without making it a Gay Story. Austistic characters without having to write an Autism Story. Black characters without having to write a Race Story.

So what the fuck is his problem? Oh, wait. I’m not a fucking cheerleader for stupid shit that tends to produce bad writing.

It’s a pretty big world out there. Why are we so scared to write about more than a limited, narrow piece of it?

Duh. We’re not. Only those of us who are actually making a living at this are going to write whatever character we find the most compelling for that situation, rather than suck up the special interest group of the week.

I then pointed out that transgender types are a tiny group within the human population.

Oh, yay. We’re back to quotas and checklists.

Because if somebody insists we cram them into every story, that isn’t realistic or truthful to what humans are.

Ignoring the uncited and inaccurate statistics here, let’s flip this around.

What? I said that about 1 in every 50,000 people have a sex change. That was based on a couple seconds of cursory Google searching, and the best answer I could find was some wild ass guesses, and since I threw this together between breakfast and leaving for the movie theater, I’m sorry I didn’t cite it like a fucking college paper, professor.

As for my only other stat, if you’d read those comments that you warned people away from, somebody brought up the extremely rare Klinefelter Syndrome and its 47^th chromosome, and I even had a roommate with that so I’m pretty damn familiar with it. But only a small percentage of men with the extra chromosome show any symptoms, but if it makes you feel better you can pull of one of those .99s.

How many musclebound manly white men do I have to write about in my stories in order to convince people like Correia that it’s not a secret subversive left-wing liberal Message?

Interesting. Where in everything that I wrote did I ever say you need to write “musclebound manly white men” or imply anything even sort of similar to that? In all of my fiction, and all of my main PoV characters, I’ve got only one character that fits that description. But Jake Sullivan would still think you are a subversive left-wing pussy, but he thought the same thing about FDR. 🙂

How many big-busted blonde women need to throw themselves on my hero’s penis to satisfy his insecurities that non-white, non-male people might start to have an actual voice?

Again with the wildly incorrect guesses about what I write, with some really strange race baiting going on as well. Do you think it would upset Jim to know that I’m legally considered a Latino, and I grew up in a poor immigrant community? Probably not, because any diversity that thinks liberals are full of shit is the wrong kind of diversity.

But let’s humor Jim and think that bit of nonsense through. An author writes a manly white male protagonist who has sex with beautiful busty women. Yes. I too appreciate Captain Kirk. But wait… if readers choose to purchase this book, how does that harm some other author who wants to write about Hir Schmister Captain Fluffy Von Rainbow Tear and the Starship ElfSparkle? You see, writing isn’t a pie. If somebody else gets a bigger piece of the pie, that doesn’t suddenly make your piece of the pie smaller. (libs also struggle with concept when it comes to wealth) When you produce a product you take it to the market. If your product is appealing, then people will purchase it. The more people it appeals to, the more people who will give you money. If somebody else produces product also, and people buy that product instead because they like it better, that’s their choice. You can demand that this other author no longer write about Kirk, and instead write about Captain Von Sparkle Tear, but why the fuck would they listen to you? They’ve got pie.

 I said that someone will bring up that gay people make up 1-4% of the population, but that’s irrelevant, because most of them still identify themselves as the sex they were born with.

Right, so you’re throwing bad statistics out about a made-up argument that you acknowledge MacFarlane didn’t even bring up.

First. Not a bad stat. http://www.gallup.com/poll/6961/what-percentage-population-gay.aspx That’s from Gallup. Second, I talked about lots of stuff the original article didn’t bring up, because this is my blog and I’ll talk about whatever I feel like, and I’ve had this particular argument with the literati twaddle-peddlers before, so forgive me if it bleeds over into the next one.

I think you’re wrong, because kitties are cuter than puppies.

Wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGKlOkQsxY

Which has nothing to do with anything Correia actually said, but that seems to be how we’re playing the game now.

Says the man bringing up big breasted white women throwing themselves on penises…

Language

Fragment? I think he started to type something and then got distracted.

In talking to readers, I find that most of them assume SF/F books will portray worlds dominated by straight white folks. Not exclusively, mind you, but the representation in our genre is most certainly not that close to the world we currently live in.

Wait… So now you’re saying that statistics and quotas should match the world we live in? I thought that was bad before when I pointed out transgender people are a tiny minority and if they showed up in books as often as they show up in real life, we’d never see them at all?

Meanwhile, all the hatey-hate mongers like Mike Williamson, John Ringo, and Sarah Hoyt are pushing all sorts of odd human boundaries in their sci-fi. Maybe those Typical WorldCon Voters you’re talking to should actually read stuff from the people they’re supposed to hate?

I talked about how if you change up a character, it should only be done for a good reason.

I agree. When you make a choice about character, you should have a reason for that choice.

Again. He agrees all my nuts and bolts writing advice is correct, but I’m bad, because of diversity or tolerance or whatever the buzzword of the day is.

Making a character male or female is a choice. Making a character white is a choice. Making a character straight is a choice. But it’s a choice often made because these are the default, and the writer is lazy.

Uh huh… Hear that writers? If your character is white or straight, or you didn’t make the choices that the super tolerant Jim C. Hines made, that’s just because you’re lazy… and totally not because that was the best fit for that particular character.

I talked about how check box diversity for check box diversity’s sake is tiresome and compared it to a little kid trying to blow your mind with how tall his Lego tower is for the 50^th time.

I’m not sure what sci-fi he’s referring to, and I’m a little skeptical about how much of it he’s actually read, given his arguments.

Remember earlier, when I was making fun of gender studies majors? The difference between me and Jim is that when I insult somebody, I’m not a big pussy about it. I think he’s trying to imply that I’m not well read. Not only does Jim know that I’m a white guy who writes sexy white on white action, he knows how many books I’ve read. (sure, poor kid with nothing better to do than go to the library, who then put himself through college working at a bookstore, who then taught himself how to write fiction through read other people’s books, obviously hasn’t read much) Of course, we talk about various message fic done wrong and right in the different comment threads, but he warned you not to read those, because you might be exposed to hate or something. 

But I find stories that explore a more diverse world, that present different characters and stories I haven’t read a thousand times before, to be much more interesting. There’s comfort and enjoyment in reading the same-old genre tropes and tales too, but Correia sounds a lot like he’s bashing a genre you’ve never read.

I never said you couldn’t explore a diverse world or have different types of characters, and in fact, explicitly stated repeatedly the opposite, but it is easier for Jim when the scarecrows he’s arguing with are wearing white hoods.

Also, screw you. My LEGO tower is AWESOME.

Sorry? What was that? I got so fucking bored that I fell asleep and hit my head on my desk.

And then I wrote more that pretty much goes exactly against what Jim is accusing me of.

ProTip 2: If the only reason you can think of to include characters who aren’t the default is because MESSAGE, you’re a shitty writer. You might be a popular writer, because there are certainly plenty of people who want to devour books that don’t challenge them in any way, but that doesn’t make you a good writer. That’s probably an argument best saved for another blog post, though.

Wonderful. I’d love to hear Jim’s take on what makes somebody a *real* writer. I like the disdain for popular (it was deserving of an underline!) I might not care for Twilight, but she’s a real writer. You might not like Harry Potter, but she’s a real writer. Basically, if somebody is willing to give you money for your stuff, you are an honest to goodness professional.

Note how judgmental Jim is here about what he deems to be “good”. People read books that don’t challenge them? How dare people enjoy themselves in a manner you don’t deem appropriate! Because once again, people like Jim are all about diversity as long as you agree with them.

It’s so much easier to argue with people if I deliberately misinterpret and oversimplify what they’re saying, isn’t it?

BWA HA HA HAAW HAW! Snort. 

Then I’ve got 4 paragraphs giving advice, and how writers should use whatever character best accomplishes the task, and if some particular type of person doesn’t show up, if any reader cares enough to think about it (which they won’t) they can just assume that those people exist but didn’t show up in your book.

 “Those People exist in my stories. They’re just not important enough to have speaking parts in this book. Or those other books. Or the majority of the books in our field.”

Heh… Pot. Kettle. Because of course, there aren’t any diverse or interesting types of characters in speculative fiction, a genre which includes stuff like shape shifters, and beings of pure energy, and psychic space dolphins… Yet earlier, Jim accused me of not being well read in a genre that has gender bending authors Robert Heinlein, Piers Anthony, Spider Robinson in it… Go figure.

I discovered that the original author was in her mid-twenties, and made a joke about it, because I know when I want advice about my writing career, I want if from somebody who just got out of college.

 “MacFarlane is wrong because I’m older than her!”

No. She’s wrong because her wish to end default binary gender in sci-fi is foolish. I’m sure relative inexperience helped her come to that conclusion, but then again, that doesn’t explain the Typical WorldCon Voter who feels the same way, and their average age is one hundred and four.

More straw-manning.

Heh… Jim is new to this “internets” thing.

Yay. But yes, there are in fact people who think that maybe — just maybe — we should have stories that are more than mindless fluff perpetuating the same tired stereotypes.

Good. I’ve said repeatedly that writers should write whatever they feel like. This should also work both ways though, so when a writer chooses to write something you don’t like or you don’t approve of, even if it is big breasted white women jumping on manly penises, maybe you should just let that artist express themself, rather than sneering at them for not checking the proper box on your Liberal Butt Hurt Form.

There are also people who recognize that all stories carry certain assumptions and messages and “truths.” Good Triumphs Over Evil.

I didn’t know you guys still believe in those concepts. Oh wait, you’re being ironic.

Freedom Is the Bestest Thing in the Universe.

You want to know why I sell tons of books compared to most of you statists? That actually is my standard message. 🙂

Intellectual Arrogance Will Destroy You.

Okay, that one made me giggle. One note though, disagreeing with you assholes doesn’t make somebody anti-intellectual, because that assumes you deserve the title. Intellectual my ass. Judging by all my fans I’ve visited at NASA and Rocket City recently, we’re all laughing at your humanities degree. 

If Correia thinks his own personal bullshit doesn’t shape the stories he writes, then he’s a fool.

Again, in the very post he’s flailing about trying to fisk, I clearly said we all put messages into our stories, only you need to concentrate on the story first if you want to make it as a professional, and lay off the heavy handed message fic until you’ve got the skills to pull it off.

Also, damn. Bitter, much?

BOOM! Internet Arguing Checklist FTW! #2 Disqualify That Opinion, subcategory: You Must Be Angry.

But yeah, when I watch my favorite genre shrinking, and I see fewer and fewer Americans reading because they’ve been turned off or they’re tired of being insulted or preached at by their entertainment, and I watch people like you trying to shove political correctness down new writer’s throats, it makes me biter. I’ve seen skilled and talented young writers come along and damage their careers while trying to incorporate all the liberal angst box checking into their fiction. I’ve seen the SFWA types rundown people they disagree with, or actively campaign against some writers because they fall into some category of diversity that it is okay to hate. I watch no talent hacks attack grandmasters like Mike Resnick for sinning against the proper groupthink, even when the Resnicks of the world have done more to promote sci-fi and fantasy to the masses than a hundred Scalzis or Hines or Jesmins or Haydens or whichever activist it is out there railing against the proper cause of the day, and telling our customer base how stupid, backwards, racist, and hate filled they are.

Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be another panel at WorldCon called “Why is Sci-Fi Readership Shrinking?” and then the answer will be shit like ending binary gender. 

I said something similar in the last post, about message fic being boring and turning off readers. (what would I know, I’ve just got hundreds of comments from fans who’d given up on reading for these exact reasons, before being drawn back by something they actually enjoyed).

You know what’s boring? Yet another book about manly straight white dudes doing manly straight white things.

Pause with me, gentle reader, and think about who is really the one filled with bias and hate here… Manly straight white dudes, doing manly straight white things? Like what? If Hines is bitching about popular books that people actually purchase, then I’d assume those “manly white” things would include things like having adventure, exploring new worlds, fighting for their beliefs, and having a really good story. You know, stuff readers actually like to purchase. I’m not the one saying that other races, sexes, and orientations can’t make awesome characters, he’s the one implying readers are all stupid and you just want WHITE MAN SMASH!

As much as Jim has tried to take me to task, he’s only really helped demonstrate exactly what I’ve been talking about.

You can’t preach about how boring conformity is bad for the genre, then spend 4000 words arguing with someone trying to challenge a piece of that genre conformity.

Like I said, cut and paste, but I’m assuming Jim doesn’t come from a STEM background.

And again, characters? Write whatever tells the best story. The only boring conformity I’m against is this bland politically correct leftism masquerading as intellectual thought.

Okay, obviously you can do that, but I think it’s rather silly.

Apparently I’ve got thousands of readers who disagree with you, but we’ve already established you think they’re all hateful and stupid.

I made fun of university humanities speak.

Writing should be simple and basic. “Invisible prose.” Because Conformity. Or something.

Yep. A standard liberal SFWA member is lecturing one of the handful of outspoken conservative sci-fi/fantasy writers about conformity.   

You realize that’s what El-Mohtar is saying, right? That we need to stop recognizing women writers as curiosities, noteworthy because, “Hey look, a woman wrote something good!” That we need to move past the assumption that all of the great works of literature were written by men. That we need to stop ignoring women’s accomplishments just because they’re women.

So, the guy hung up on forced diversity, angry at white people doing white things, is lecturing me, the person that doesn’t give a shit what equipment the writer has, about recognizing people’s accomplishments… But don’t worry, the brave sensitive white male champion has swooped in to explain what the female minority author REALLY meant to say. 🙂 (oh, how that irks them so).

Because nothing is going to make an author successful like copying things that were unpopular before.

MacFarlane: “I want to talk about these books and stories that don’t get a lot of attention, and expand the kind of stories we read and create.”

Correia: “Copying unpopular stuff will make you unsuccessful!”

Hines: “Huh???”

Good thing Hines is such a more eloquent communicator than the original author to clear that up.

Bored now. I hope Correia moves on to something new and interesting soon. The same old misreading and straw-manning is getting dull.

As usual, I’ll leave the relative entertainment value up to the audience to decide. 🙂 

I then got into the nitty gritty of making it as a professional author, and how that requires quality over message. I also pointed out that most of the beloved message fic stuff isn’t commercially viable. It is a good way to get praised by the popular kids at SFWA while making very little money.

I went into the report for the Guardian that revealed most published authors don’t make very much. Contrary to the image many aspiring authors have, most of us don’t make enough to live on. Most of us keep our day jobs and write on the side as a second job, or we’re supported while our spouse works. The average makes somewhere around $30k a year (if I recall correctly it was like $28K).  Only the top 1% makes over 100k.

I’ve done very well for myself. I’m financially blessed and successful. I’m well into that 1% now. Part of that is luck and being at the right place at the right time, but most of it is from hard work, being analytical about my market and how to grow my fan base, being a self-promoting machine, but most of all, trying to tell an entertaining story that will make my fans happy.

I pointed out that you could either take the advice of somebody who is making it as a professional writer, or you could take the advice of somebody who just got out of college.    

Correia makes more money than you. Therefore he’s right.

On the topic of making a living as a writer, damn right I am.

I’ll certainly grant that Larry Correia is a successful writer.

And oh how that infuriates some folks. 🙂 

Therefore you should do what he does.

Concentrate on story first, and message way down the list. Yes, yes you should.

So is Ursula LeGuin. Who wrote an amazing novel about non-binary gender that’s still popular today. Therefore you should do what she does.

Ah, but if you read the comments that you tried to warn people away from, you’d see the part where LeGuin went and spoke at a university and explained that Left Hand of Darkness wasn’t ever intended to be message fic, she put STORY FIRST, and wrote what she was interested in at the time… Which is what I’ve been saying the whole time.

Look, NOBODY IS SAYING THAT STORY ISN’T IMPORTANT, or that you shouldn’t put story first.

Except for when you insult other authors for their character choices, or call them lazy for not doing what you want them to do? Or that you need to end the norm? Or that you never want to read another book with gender norms again? But that’s totally not telling people what to do! You’re just guiding them so that we can all be diverse in the exact same way!

That bullshit may work on the new writers who don’t know any better, or the squishy headed ones forever interested in appeasing the cool kids or someday joining the cool kid’s clique, but those of us who’ve been through this grinder and who understand how to write and just want to make a living can safely tell you to go fuck yourself (in whatever post binary gender manner you choose to go fuck yourself in) then we write what we want.

What they’re saying is that there are more stories out there, and more characters, and more possibilities to explore.

Set that straw on fire!  You know a crazy possibility to explore? A future where consumers still purchase science fiction novels because leftists suck wads have failed to drive everyone away.

She said she wanted a conversation, I said just not in the blog comments…

 [Citation needed]

Oh for fuck sakes, how about reading the blog and Facebook comments you warned everyone not to read, where people have reposted their comments that were removed? Wait. I forgot. I’m talking to a leftist, where eyewitness testimony is anecdote not evidence. Now, if that testimony was quoted in Salon or Mother Jones, that’s evidence.

Yep. How dare she wish for books to more accurately reflect the diversity of the real world…

Wish in one hand… I’ve already explained that repeatedly, and if your speculative fiction did accurately reflect the real world, and it took place anywhere other than Space Berkley, you probably wouldn’t have any transgender characters anyway. Luckily, your fiction can reflect whatever reality you choose to build, so you can write whatever you want.

Characters who are not straight or white or cisgendered male or whatever Larry Correia and most of the rest of the world thinks of as the default have a reason to be included in the story. (Fortunately, white dudes like me don’t need a reason to exist. We’re the normal ones, you see. We’re supposed to be here.)

Can’t you just feel the white guilt oozing through the page? Jim Hines is extremely sorry that human beings have been mean to each other in the past, and he is genetically responsible for all of your suffering. How dare you not have a rainbow of fruit flavor in every book! You are keeping your imaginary people down!

It is okay, Jim, we Warm Beige People forgive you. (for the record, that’s what these Home Depot paint chips say I am. I’m the same color as Cheech Marin).  Though I’m pretty sure my badass conquistador ancestors would still think you’re a pussy.

Back to the nuts and bolts of writing, EVERY character needs a reason to exist. If you have a character in your story, why are they there? What purpose do they serve? That guilty white people stuff is just bullshit. If it makes sense for a character to be white, or black, or gay, or a space whale, or a leprechaun, write it. Worry about making your readers happy first, because no matter what, you’ll never make the Jim Hines and tor.com bloggers of the world happy, and you should probably still feel guilty about something. 

Here’s a reason: because people other than your narrow-minded “default” exist in the world. Because if you want to write a story that’s in any way reflective of the real world, you have to acknowledge that fact.

Sigh… Note how they’ve gone from END THE BINARY GENDER DEFAULT to the much milder acknowledge people are different. That’s all bullshit though, because as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, sci-fi has no problem acknowledging and exploring how people are different, but no matter what the activist outragers will find some new thing to get outraged about. Remember, to a liberal, being a victim gives you super powers. 

I talked about some of my characters that deviated from the norm.

“See, I wrote about a gay cross dresser, so you can’t accuse me of being homophobic!”

Correction. I’m not homophobic because I’m not particularly scared of gay people. I wrote about a badass motherfucker in a setting that is all about badass motherfuckers murdering the shit out of each other, and giving this particular supporting character this one trait made the narrative more interesting and allowed for some fun lines like “I’ve never met a transvestite I couldn’t take in a knife fight.”

Just not the ones that disagree in the blog comments.

Again, try reading the comments. Also, you seem to be accusing MacFarlane of deleting comments, when I suspect it’s the Tor.com staff who are responsible for moderating. I’m not 100% sure on that, but I suspect you’ve got your snark crossed here.

Holy shit… Yes, Jim, I really did think that the website of a massive publishing house which has its own in house moderators was having their guest blogger manage the website. If my snark is crossed, your snark sleeps in a helmet.

And back to the mockery and criticizing the author’s age rather than her ideas.

That part wasn’t even about her age. It was about the whole attitude about how sci-fi is all about dropping truth bombs and rocking the reader’s bourgeois little worlds.

#

Well that was fun. My congratulations to anyone who read this far.

Why? Do you normally have a problem with readers finishing your writing? I don’t have that problem.

As a reminder, I do moderate comments here, because I’m a freedom-hating commie because I don’t have time or interest in trolls, name-calling, threats, etc.

Meanwhile, over on the right wing hatey hate monger’s various feeds, we leave up pretty much everything because we actually believe in free speech.

You’re welcome to comment, but as Wil Wheaton says, don’t be a dick.

And since Will Wheaton is a hypocrite that doesn’t seem to mind being a dick to Republicans, the Tea Party, the NRA, or anybody who makes up the half of the country who agrees with those groups, I wouldn’t put too much faith in that. But maybe that’s just because I fondly remember how Will Wheaton likes to blame the people most likely to prevent mass shootings for all the mass shootings.

So anyways, my whole point is don’t pay attention to the cause of the day types urging you to cram Special Topic X into your book. Even if you do, they’ll find something new to be outraged about tomorrow. Write whatever you want to write.  Have fun. Get paid.

 

EDIT: Just check Facebook and Twitter. So it turns out in typical statist fashion that the proper goodthinkers are petitioning my publishing house, Baen Books, that they need to distance themselves from their awful authors like me, Williamson, Ringo, and Kratman (as in a bunch of their bestselling authors) before we tarnish Baen’s image. So… threats of boycott against a publishing house they already don’t like, to not purchase books by authors they already hate… Yep. That’s the free speech I know and love from the lefties. Thanks, Concern Trolls!

This was sent to me on Facebook the other day. I made some comments there, but then I got to thinking about it and decided this thing was such a good example of how modern sci-fi publishing has its head stuck up its ass that it really deserved its own blog post. My response is really directed toward the aspiring writers in the crowd who want to make a living as writers, but really it works for anybody who likes to read, or who is just tired of angsty emo bullshit.

First off, just here is the original blog post. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/01/post-binary-gender-in-sf-introduction?utm_source=exacttarget&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term=tordotcom&utm_content=-na_continuereading_blogpost&utm_campaign=tordotcombookcoverage

Okay, aspiring author types, you will see lots of things like this, and part of you may think you need to incorporate these helpful suggestions into your work. After all, this is on Tor.com so it must be legit.  Just don’t. When you write with the goal of checking off boxes, it is usually crap. This article is great advice for writers who want to win awards but never actually be read by anyone.

Now do yourself a favor and read the comments… I’ll wait… Yeah… You know how when my Sad Puppies posts talk about the “typical WorldCon voter”? Those comments are a good snapshot of one subtype right there.

I also know from that Facebook thread that a lot of people tried to comment and disagree for various reasons, but their posts were deleted. (and some of them even swore that they were polite!). But like most modern lefty crusades, disagreement, in fact, anything less than cheerleading, is “intolerance” and won’t be tolerated. Meanwhile, my FB thread had lots of comments and an actual intelligent discussion of the pros and cons from both sides (and even transsexual communists who actually like to enjoy their fiction thought this Tor.com post was silly), so remember that the next time a snooty troll calls my fans a “right wing echo chamber.”

If you can’t stomach the comments long enough to hear what a typical WorldCon voter sounds like, let me paraphrase: “Fantastic! I’m so sick of people actually enjoying books that are fun! Let’s shove more message fiction down their throats! My cause comes before their enjoyment! Diversity! Gay polar bears are being murdered by greedy corporations! Only smart people who think correct thoughts like I do should read books and I won’t be happy until my genre dies a horrible death! Yay!”  (and if there is beeping noise in the background, that’s because they’re backing up their mobility scooter).

So let’s break this pile of Gender Studies 101 mush down into its component bits and see just why some sci-fi writers won’t be happy until their genre dies completely. Like my usual Fisking, the original article is in italics and my comments are in bold.

Post-Binary Gender in SF: Introduction

Alex Dally MacFarlane

I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.

I want lots of things too, doesn’t mean I can have them. Right out the gate that’s a pretty bold statement. And by bold, I mean ridiculous.

What is this “default of binary gender” he wants to end? It is that crazy old fashioned idea that most (as in the vast majority) of mammals, including humans, can be grouped into male and female based upon whether they’ve got XX or XY chromosomes. Sure, that’s medically true something like 99.999% of the time, which would sort of make it the default.

Oh, and “default” means that is your assumed baseline.

So that whole thing where people are male or female except for some tiny exceptions and that is kind of the assumption until proven otherwise is standard, so this guy wants to end that. (I’m assuming Alex is a dude, but then again, that is just me displaying my cismale gendernomrative fascism)

What do I mean by “post-binary gender”? It’s a term that has already been used to mean multiple things, so I will set out my definition:

Post-binary gender in SF is the acknowledgement that gender is more complex than the Western cultural norm of two genders (female and male): that there are more genders than two, that gender can be fluid, that gender exists in many forms.

Wait… male and female are Western Cultural Norms? Uh… No. That is a biological norm for all the higher life forms on Earth so that species can replicate themselves (keep in mind, this is SCIENCE fiction he wants to change). I like how Western Culture is the root of all that’s evil though, even though male and female are cultural norms in pretty much every human society there has ever been.

Also, nitpick. Gender was a grammar term for how you referred to the different sexes. Being male or female is your Sex. Or at least, that’s what the word meant until colleges invented the Gender Studies major for those students who found Liberal Arts way too academically grueling. 

Now, before we continue I need to establish something about my personal writing philosophy. Science Fiction is SPECULATIVE FICTION. That means we can make up all sorts of crazy stuff and we can twist existing reality to do interesting new things in order to tell the story we want to tell. I’m not against having a story where there are sexes other than male and female or neuters or schmes or hirs or WTF ever or that they flip back and forth or shit… robot sex. Hell, I don’t know. Write whatever tells your story.

But the important thing there is STORY. Not the cause of the day. STORY.

Because readers buy STORIES they enjoy and when readers buy our stuff, authors GET PAID.

Robert Heinlein had stories where technology allowed switching sex. Great. That’s actually a pretty normal sci-fi trope where in the future, there’s some tech that allows people to change shape/sex, whatever, and we’ve got grandmasters of sci-fi who have pulled off humans evolving into psychic space dolphins or beings of pure energy. If that fits into the story you want to tell and you want to explore that, awesome for you. I’ve read plenty of stories where that was part of that universe. If your space whales that live inside the sun have three sexes, awesome (that one was my novella push on Sad Puppies 1).

But this post wasn’t about, hey write whatever mind expanding sci-fi ideas you want, nope, it want to end the norm in order to push a message. Post like this are all the same. You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader. 

People who do not fit comfortably into the gender binary exist in our present, have existed in our past, and will exist in our futures. So too do people who are binary-gendered but are often ignored, such as trans* people who identify as binary-gendered.

Will exist in the future? Probably. Should they be the default for your story? No way. Ignored? Hardly. Is that denying reality? Okay, so I write a book, and let’s say that it has 20 characters in it. What is the acceptable percentage of them that should be transgender? How many boxes must I check in order to salve a blogger’s liberal angst? Let’s see… Only like 1 in 50,000 people have sex changes performed. So at 20 characters a book… If I have one character who has had a sex change show up every 2,500 books I write, I’d be statistically accurate.

Oh, but now you’re going to tell me that gay people make up anywhere from 1-4% of the population. Fantastic. Except gay people are still the same sex they were born with. Gay dudes are still men and gay chicks are still women.  This blogger didn’t say he wanted an end to default sexual orientation, he wants an end to default binary sex. If you think sci-fi doesn’t have people who don’t swing both ways, you’ve not read much sci-fi.

Now, if I’m writing a sci-fi story set in Space Berkley or the Tenderloin District of the Future, then I’d probably have plenty of Hirs and Shmisters or whatever. Whatever fits the story, but until then how about not trying to enforce Equal Opportunity against our imaginary people?

(and if you really want to get crazy in the speculative fiction department, what with all this BS with made up pronouns to get rid of Him and Her, what the hell are romance languages supposed to do? Latino. Latina. Latinu? Latinsexyrobot?) 

Here’s the problem. From a nuts and bolts story telling perspective, your readers are going to assume that everything in your book is similar to the world they currently live in, until demonstrated otherwise. Unless you say that in the future everybody has been genetically modified to have 3 legs, they are going to assume that all your human characters have two legs. If you are going to demonstrate that something is different, then there needs to be a reason for it. So if you say all humans have 3 legs, but it doesn’t play into the story at all, then why bother? And every time you change something to be different from the expected, there had better be a reason for it or you will quickly just annoy your reader.

Reading sci-fi like that grows tiresome. It is like listening to an inexperienced little kid saying “Look, I can do THIS! And now I can do THIS! Isn’t that the neatest thing EVAR!?” And your response is “Yeah, yeah, that’s special…” when you’re really bored as shit and don’t care how tall their Lego tower is the 50^th time.

If your story is about exploring sexual identity, awesome. Write that story. But only a fool is going to come along and tell you that you need to end the default of all your characters having ten fingers, because there are people in the world born with twelve and how could you be so insensitive to those who have lost fingers? Because awareness. 

So if humans having 5 or 6 sexes in the future is part of your story, write it. If it isn’t part of the story, why would you waste words on it? Oh, that’s right, because MESSAGE.

ProTip: Focusing on message rather than story is a wonderful way for writers to continue working at Starbucks for the rest of their lives.

I am not interested in discussions about the existence of these gender identities: we might as well discuss the existence of women or men. Gender complexity exists. SF that presents a rigid, unquestioned gender binary is false and absurd.

Yes. Topic of the Day X exists! You know what else exists? Child abuse. So I’d better make sure I put that in every book I write. Because readers love that. If I’m telling a story about rocket ships, readers love it when your characters pause to have a discussion about animal cruelty, pollution, the dangers of over prescribing psychotropic drugs, or how we need to be sensitive to people with peanut allergies too. Readers are totally into being preached at about author’s favorite causes.

Have you ever gone into Barnes and Noble, went to the clerk at the info desk, and said “Hey, I really want to purchase with my money a science fiction novel which will increase my AWARENESS of troubling social issues.”? No?  This is my shocked face.

Not that you can’t get a cause into your story, as long as you do it with skill. But the minute you destroy the default just to destroy the default, congratulations, you just annoyed the shit out of the reader. You want to slip in a message and not annoy your customers, that takes skill, so until you have developed your skills, don’t beat people over the head with your personal hang ups.

How about if my story isn’t in any way, shape, or form concerned with sexual identity (or whatever some reviewer’s personal hang up is today) I don’t waste words writing about it, and readers who want to can just assume that those people exist in the universe but they don’t happen to have speaking parts in this particular novel, if they care enough to think about it at all, which they probably won’t.

I intend to use this column to examine post-binary SF texts, both positively and critically, as well as for discussions of points surrounding this subject.

And I intend to use this column to go beyond Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

Read that a long time ago among the thousands of books I read as a kid. Vaguely remember it. Thought it was good, if I recall correctly.

Kameron Hurley wrote several years ago about the frustration of The Left Hand of Darkness being the go-to book for mind-blowing gender in SF, despite being written in 1968. Nothing written in the decades since has got the same traction in mainstream SF discourse—

Maybe that’s because Le Guin told a story that happened to have this blogger’s pet topic in it, that was still a story readers found interesting, as opposed to crafting a message fic manifesto, that readers found boring and forgettable?

and texts have been written. For a bit of context, 1968 is almost twenty years before I was born, and I’m hardly a child.

HARDLY! Well, there you go. I know when I’m looking for professional advice about how to succeed as a professional writer, I’m going to listen to somebody in their mid-twenties.

Hey, you’d better listen up. I’m betting this blogger went to COLLEGE!

One of the reasons Hurley considers for this situation (raised by someone on a mailing list she belonged to) is that:

“…perhaps Le Guin’s book was so popular because it wasn’t actually as radical as we might think. It was very safe. The hetero male protagonist doesn’t have sex with any of the planet’s inhabitants, no matter their current gender. We go off on a boys’ own adventure story, on a planet entirely populated by people referred to as ‘he,’ no matter their gender. Le Guin is a natural storyteller, and she concentrates on the story. It’s not overly didactic. It’s engaging and entertaining.”

Holy shit… Wait… You mean this story has stuck around because “she concentrates on the story”?  Engaging and entertaining? Blasphemy!

Yet, people like this don’t get why message fic books win piles of awards, yet totally fail in the market. See, the problem the modern literati twaddle peddlers run into isn’t that readers are insensitive rubes who don’t understand the plight of whatever their liberal cause of the day is, it is because they want to enjoy what they read. Their entertainment time and money is limited. Why spend it being preached at?

The next few paragraphs are very interesting, because they give you a glimpse into the mind of the modern literati. 

The Left Hand of Darkness certainly has been radical, as Hurley says, in its time, in the subsequent years and in the present. I have spoken to several people who found The Left Hand of Darkness immensely important: it provided their first glimpse of the possibility of non-binary gender. The impact that it has had on people’s realisations about their own gender is not something I want to diminish, nor anyone else’s growth in understanding.

However, I do think it can be very palatable for people who haven’t done a lot of thinking about gender. It is, as Hurley says earlier in her post, the kind of story that eases the reader in gently before dropping the gender bombs, and those bombs are not discomfiting for all readers. Of course they’re not. How can one text be expected to radicalise every reader?

I don’t want to cast The Left Hand of Darkness aside. It’s an important part of this conversation. What I do want to do is demonstrate how big that conversation truly is. Other texts have been published besides The Left Hand of Darkness, many of them oft-overlooked—many of them out of print. Some of them are profoundly problematic, but still provide interesting questions. Some of them are incredible and deserve to be considered classics of the genre. Some of them are being published right now, in 2014.

Fascinating. To the literati, books are all about dropping truth bombs. (as long as the truth agrees with their predetermined notions, obviously) This one is about sex, but you could swap that out for the evils of capitalism, or whatever bullshit they’re hung up on today. And of course, since publishing is an insular little industry based in the Manhattan echo chamber of proper goodthink, all the message fic that gets pumped out is stuff that just annoys the regular reading public.

You want a truth bomb? Readers hate being preached at. Period. Even when you agree with the message, if it is ham fisted and shoved in your face, it turns you off. Message fic for message fic’s sake makes for tedious reading. Yet, as this stuff has become more and more prevalent, sci-fi has become increasingly dull, and readership has shrank.

Of course, the literati won’t be happy until everything is boring ass message fic and nobody reads sci-fi anymore, because then they’ll be super special snowflakes.  

Amal El-Mohtar wrote a piece about the process of finding—having to find—a pioneering woman writer, Naomi Mitchison, and followed it up with a post where she said:

“It breaks my heart that we are always rediscovering great women, excavating them from the relentless soil of homogenizing histories, seeing them forever as exceptions to a rule of sediment and placing them in museums, remarkable more for their gender than for their work.”

Ah, pseudo-intellectual university humanities department speak… How I have missed you.

Yes. Because you shouldn’t elevate a book because you thought it was good and you want to share it with others, you should elevate a book because the sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, or personal philosophy of the author checks a box on the liberal angst/white guilt checklist.

The typical WorldCon voter, when presented with 5 nominees for a category, and their clique’s personal favorite writer isn’t on there, and not having actually read any of the works, will go through the authors and rank them according to the order that best assuages their hang ups. Oooh, a paraplegic transsexual lesbian minority abortion doctor with AIDS who writes for Mother Jones?  You’d need a wheelbarrow to carry all the Hugos.

Quality? Popularity? Staying power? Influence? Isn’t that what makes something a classic? Not to the modern literati. We have to elevate works by people according to what they checked on their EEOC form. Meanwhile, hatey-McHatertons like me read books and like them, even when we don’t know anything about the author. I didn’t know what sex Lois Bujold or Wen Spencer where the first time I read one of their books, but I knew the writing was good. I couldn’t tell you what writers are gay or like to cross dress either, but I can tell you who I enjoy reading.  

It seems to me that there’s a similar process for post-binary texts: they exist, but each reader must discover them anew amid a narrative that says they are unusual, they are rare, they sit outside the standard set of stories. This, at least, has been my experience. I want to dismantle the sediment—to not only talk about post-binary texts and bring them to attention of more readers, but to do away with the default narrative.

Because nothing is going to make an author successful like copying things that were unpopular before.

That process of (re)discovery is probably inescapable. A bookshop, a library or a friend’s/family member’s bookshelves can’t contain every book ever published, so new readers will always have to actively seek out stories beyond the first ones they encounter. What if, El-Mohtar wonders, the first books often included Naomi Mitchison? What if the first books often included multiple post-binary texts as well?

Wait… So the purpose of reading is to get people to accept non-binary gender? Well, huh… All this time I’ve been under the impression people primarily read for enjoyment. So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong!

The English professor says: “For young people and new readers, wouldn’t it be nice if we shoved IMPORTANT WORKS about Special Topic X down their throats rather than something they might enjoy? Now I wonder why most Americans don’t read for fun anymore after we beat them over the head through their entire education and forced them to read tedious classics until reading was seen as a chore… Odd.”

And for the small and dwindling percentage of us that still actually like to buy and read books, what I’m getting from this blogger is that they’re thinking “Let’s get this mind blowing stuff out there. Yeah, that’ll rock their little bourgeois world!” Okay, dude… They’re SCIENCE FICTION readers. You’re probably not going to stun them with your big shocking ideas. You really want to shock a sci-fi reader with your book nowadays? Actually entertain them.

As an interesting side note, the Guardian just did a report that revealed how much published authors really make. For most of us, it isn’t that much. I think the average was like 30k. The majority of published writers still have their day jobs. Only the top 1% made six figures. 

I am the 1%.

So aspiring authors, if you want to actually make a living doing this, you can either listen to me and put story first, or you can listen to the grad student and focus on the pet message of the day.

Regular readers will know that I always say writers should have GET PAID in their mission statement, the reason I do that is because most of us DON’T.

Conversations about gender in SF have been taking place for a long time. I want to join in.

Judging by how they’ve been “grooming” the comments there, when they say conversations they mean shut up and listen while they lecture you about something.

I want more readers to be aware of texts old and new, and seek them out, and talk about them. I want more writers to stop defaulting to binary gender in their SF—I want to never again read entire anthologies of SF stories or large-cast novels where every character is binary-gendered. I want this conversation to be louder.

Read that paragraph again and think about it… Think about it really hard. Nuts and bolts. Every single SF book, he wants to default to something other than what your audience thinks is normal. I want more people to seek out not just great books, or mind bending books, but books. Period.

Speaking of great sci-fi, wouldn’t Firefly have been so much better if Captain Mal had been a pre-op transsexual? And just think of the hilarious banter they could have about Jayne not being a girl’s name… never mind, because in the future that is insensitive.

Of course, good writers will just write their characters so that they’re interesting and compelling, rather than to check a box to make a special interest group happy. If I’m writing a story and it would make the story better to have some character be something other than the default, then I can put that in. If it doesn’t have a point, then it is a distraction to the reader.

Except even then, a Hatey McHaterton like me will still probably do it wrong. There was a bad guy in Swords of Exodus named Diego. This guy was an enforcer for an international crime syndicate. He participated in underground knife fighting arenas against Yakuza and Russian Mafia members for fun. Diego could match Lorenzo in a fight. He was also a gay cross dresser who made a very convincing Celine Dion, so obviously, I got a review that talked about how I hate gay people… Even though in a book where almost all of the characters, including the protagonists, are some degree of bad guy, obviously this character is a demonstration of my homophobic hatey hate mongering.

Then there’s Big Eddie, but really, you can’t think of Eddie that way. His sexual orientation was Hurt People. If you were to give him a psych evaluation to see what his “gender identity” was, he’d check all the boxes, then burn the test and stab the psychologist.

As far as a character’s proclivities, for all you know my books are filled with pre-op transsexuals, only I’m not going to stop and talk about them and what they do off screen. In fact, the only time I talk about a character’s feelings on any topic in a book are when that helps flesh out that character in a manner that helps tell the story I want to tell.

To that end, I’ll be running this column: posting every two weeks, with discussions of books and short stories, as well as interviews and roundtables with other writers and readers of post-binary SF,

Oh good. Because this topic really needs to be beaten home. I hear that there are actually some consumers out there who still actually read sci-fi, and we will never rest until this genre becomes so incredibly boring that we drive everyone away!

because I strongly believe it’s important to hear multiple voices.

Just not the ones that disagree in the blog comments.

I’m particularly interested in science fiction at the moment, but I expect I’ll cross genres as I run the column.

Yeah. I can’t wait until he gets to urban fantasy. Yay.

I hope you’ll join me in making the default increasingly unstable.

Wow. Yeah. I’ll show you, Dad! You can’t tell me what do! Down with your cismale gendernormative fascism!

EDIT:  This saga continues when Social Justice Warrior and crusading sensitive white man Jim Hines swoops in to save the day: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/5687/

And for one shining moment, I become more hated by the SFWA crowd than Orson Scott Card. Achievement unlocked. 🙂

Several people sent me this article on Facebook yesterday. I supposed I kept getting tagged because everybody knows I’m Mormon and my writing has such a “sunny outlook”.  Then I saw a few other Mormon authors making fun of this on Twitter.

At first I just laughed at the article because it is the usual pretentious New York Times piece written by somebody remarkably clueless about the subject (and as a gun rights activist I’m fairly used to that), but the more I thought about this article, the more it pissed me off. It just hit too many of my pet peeve buttons: “you’re not a *real* writer”, academic self-righteous posturing, and cultural/religious ignorance based on stereotypes masquerading as unbiased reporting.

The original article is here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/us/mormons-offer-cautionary-lesson-on-sunny-outlook-vs-literary-greatness.html?_r=1&

As usual the original article is in italics and my additional comments are in bold.

Note. I don’t normally post about my religious beliefs on the internet. I am in no way a spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, because I really struggle with all those important love and forgiveness parts of the gospel, so anything religious I say after this is strictly from my point of view, hence the casual swearing and complete lack of patience for idiots.

MORMONS OFFER CAUTIONARY LESSON ON SUNNY OUTLOOK VS. LITERARY GREATNESS

BY MARK OPPENHEIMER

The title offers a great look into Mark’s predetermined world view. Normally “cautionary lessons” are learned when somebody fails so badly that their only purpose in life is to serve as an example to others. So our “sunny outlook” has caused us to fail at achieving “literary greatness”. Like most NYT*** articles, we’re going to learn a lot more about the author than their subject.

In 1888, speaking about the possibility of Mormon literature, the church leader Orson F. Whitney made an audacious promise to his fellow Mormons: “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.” Yet 125 years later, there is no Mormon Milton. There is no Mormon Milosz, no Mormon Munro.

That’s fantastic. 125 years later and we don’t have 3 copies of three dead guys, two of whom are so famous and widely read still that I had to look them up on Wikipedia. But what makes someone a literary great? That’s the big question. Well, Milosz won a Nobel Prize in 1980. And as everybody knows, if it doesn’t win the Nobel Prize it is crap.

Mormons are, on average, better educated than most Americans,

Yep. And we tend to be disproportionately successful in a bunch of different careers as well, but I’ll get back to that. 

and they have written popular fiction.

Understatement of the year, but I’ll get to that too.

But Mormon authors tend to cluster in genre fiction, like fantasy, science fiction, and children’s and young adult literature.

You mean we tend to cluster in the areas of fiction that are the most popular and widely read, rather writing *real literature* where we will only be read by a handful of college English classes and have to supplement our income by being a guest lecturer or barista at Starbucks. Go figure.

Orson Scott Card, who wrote “Ender’s Game,” the sci-fi novel on which the country’s current top-grossing movie is based, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So is Stephenie Meyer, author of the “Twilight” series.

Sure, Card is one of the best selling authors of all time, who wrote one of the most pivotal works in sci-fi ever, and who has entertained millions and millions of people over the last three decades, but where’s his Nobel Prize? Huh?  Okay, he was probably collecting about fifty grand in royalties a month before the movie, but who cares about success, money, and popularity if some douchenozzle with a PhD doesn’t like you?

Yep. Stephanie Meyer is Mormon too, and though I personally hate her writing style, she’s entertained millions of people. You can’t deny that she is very successful. She sleeps on a giant pile of money inside her house made of gold bars.

In the United States, Jews, blacks and South Asians, while they have produced no Milton or Shakespeare — who has, lately? — have all had literary renaissances.

Well, if it isn’t the soft racism of the left rearing its ugly head. Because you know, Jews, blacks, and South Asians are all the same. They are a perfectly homogenous group with no individuality, just like Mormons!  

And the fact that he keeps bringing up Shakespeare (the original popular *genre* author) to mock authors who write popular stuff in order to get paid, is very ironic. If Shakespeare was alive today, is anyone stupid enough to think that the guy who specialized in writing entertaining plays for the masses would be writing stuffy, pretentious dreck for what works out to be $3 an hour in the hopes of winning a prestigious literary award? Hell no! We’d all be watching William Shakespeare presents Star Wars vs. The Avengers III: The Jedi Hulkening this summer, and it would be awesome, and the NYT would hate it.

“Ye olde mission statement readest thus, deadlines loom, find they gonads within thy trousers, place thy ass upon the seat, set quil to parchement, and get paid, bitches.”

And Milton? He’s mostly famous for an epic poem involving a civil war with angels and devils and monsters, interdimensional portals, with the devil as the big bad, and on the side he was a snarky political blogger. Oh, and like all writers you’ve actually heard of, he liked getting paid. Maybe in 300 years I’ll be considered a *real* author too.  

Mormons are more likely to produce work that gets shelved in niche sections of the bookstore.

Niche… In most of the country that means the big part of the store where people actually purchase things. Romance and thrillers are *genre*. They’re not *real* writers either. Guess what sells the most? It sure as hell isn’t lit fic unless it ends up on
Oprah’s Book Club or something like that.

Let’s put it this way. I live in a new 4,500 square foot house on a mountainside across from a ski resort paid for by my *genre* writing. My wife doesn’t have to work to support me like most *real* writers. I don’t have to beg for patrons. I don’t have to kiss ass at my local university for a guest lecturer position to make enough that my car won’t get repossessed. 

If you want to actually make a living as a writer, you will focus on writing things that people will actually give you money for. If you want to focus on highbrow writing have fun, and yes, I would like fries with that. 

Think of it this way, thinking that *real* writing is the correct way to be a writer, is exactly the same as people thinking it is better to go to college for 6 years and getting $200k in debt so you can have a masters in gender studies and then be unemployed and living in your parent’s basement, but still looking down your nose at the debt free guy who makes $30 an hour welding or fixing diesel engines.

And as it turns out, Mormon authors themselves wonder if their culture militates against more highbrow writing.

Not really.

They have a range of possible explanations.

And now we will hear from somebody a lot nicer than I am.

“It is a fair thing to point out,” said Shannon Hale, a Mormon who writes young adult fiction, “that there have been very prominent Jewish writers that have received a lot of accolades, and worldwide the number of Mormons are comparable to the number of Jews, so why hasn’t that happened?”

I’ve met Shannon. She’s cool. And she does ask a good question why hasn’t that happened? Why haven’t Mormons gotten a lot of accolades?

Serious answer? There are more liberal Jews than there are liberal Mormons, and awards go to whoever checks the correct boxes.  If you are an active Mormon you are going to have some fundamental beliefs that go against the establish group think of the literati elites. Now someday they’ll find a disgruntled ex-Mormon that says all the things that makes them happy, who can also coherently string together words into sentences, and he will be showered with awards.

But more importantly, most real writers understand that accolades are fundamentally crap. Accolades don’t pay the bills. Prestigious literary awards mean absolutely nothing except that your book appealed to a one small awards jury, and since most awards juries are circle jerks of like-minded individuals patting themselves on the back about how brilliant they are, who cares?

I get my accolades every six months when I cash my gigantic royalty checks.

Yet, I’m still going to do another Sad Puppies Campaign to get a Hugo because I’m just filled with spite. 🙂

Ms. Hale’s theory is that literary fiction tends to exalt the tragic, or the gloomy,

Or in other words, lit-fic tends to be dreary navel gazing about dying polar bears where nothing interesting actually happens for hundreds of pages, and boring, unlikable people sit around talking about their problems.  

while Mormon culture prefers the sunny and optimistic.

Meaning that Mormons aren’t a bunch of whining pansies.

“When I was an English major, then getting a master’s, most of the literary fiction I read was tragedy,” said Ms. Hale, whose “Princess Academy” was a Newbery Honor book. The books she was assigned treated “decline and the ultimate destruction of the human spirit” as necessary ingredients for an honest portrayal of life.

Gee whiz. That sounds like some fun reading! No wonder lit fic is so wildly successful!

But what if Mormons do not think that way?

You mean we tend to actually go and accomplish stuff, rather than whine about it? (or wait for the government to come fix it for us, but that’s a topic for another day).

“I think Mormons tend to have hope and believe in goodness and triumph, and those portrayals can ring false in a literary world,” Ms. Hale said.

Shannon is being very diplomatic in her response. My response would be a little more direct. “Why the hell would anyone want to read dreary, pretentious, wordy bullshit, and why the hell would I want to sit in front of a computer for hundreds of hours to write that?”

If the NYT reporter actually knew jack about his topic, he’d know that Mormon history has been filled with suffering. For not being around very long, we got run out of one state, then run out of another state, and another, freezing and starving the whole time, then our homes were burned by mobs, and it was actually perfectly legal to shoot us on sight, so then we all suffered and died in the worst exodus of the last few hundred years, in order to settle in the most godforsaken bit of country available. Then we worked our asses off and turned a wretched desert into something decent through the power of our industry and the strength of our backs, and then the army invaded us.

Ask any Mormon about the Haun’s Mill Massacre. Ask us about Johnston’s Army. Or Liberty Jail. Our church was founded in hardship, grew in hardship, but we are the definition of will not quit.  We stick to our guns, stick to our principles, and now we’re 15 million badasses worth of can do attitude who won’t quit until we feel like it.

My wife is descended from those pioneers. Mormons are still super proud of our pioneer history and learn about it constantly Me? I’m a convert, but I grew up descended from surly, angry, Portuguese dairy farmers, so strangely enough I fit in great.

The reporter seems to like comparing Mormons to Jews. They’ve had a much longer history of suffering. The thing is he’s probably writing this with liberal New Yorker Jews in mind, while Mormon culture is much more in line with Israeli Jews and their “Come at me, bro” attitude. Mark sees it as sunshiny. We see it as roll up your sleeves and get stuff done.

One of our popular hymns says Put your shoulder to the wheel and push along. Do your duty with a heart full of song. We all have work. Let no one shirk. Put your shoulder to the wheel.

Writing as a career means you have to work your butt off and hustle. Mormon culture still takes pride in having a work ethic. Anybody who takes this to heart will succeed in life. It isn’t a Mormon exclusive, and not even all Mormons get it. Mike Rowe gets it. So there’s another reason Mormons succeed in writing…   

When Mark uses the word sunshiny it is code for naïve. “Oh, those quaint and foolish Mormons, out there in red state in flyover country, clinging to their guns and religion, with their absurd outdated moral values. If only they could be enlightened, like the people who think exactly like I do.”  

Rachel Ann Nunes writes in the romance, paranormal, fantasy and young people’s genres, and she founded LDS Storymakers, an organization for Mormon writers. She said that Mormon theology makes otherworldly and escapist genres natural fits for church members. “We believe that God created a lot of different worlds,” said Ms. Nunes, who also writes under the name Teyla Branton. Jesus Christ came to Earth, and to America, but “atonement stretched for all the worlds,” she said. “It’s natural for us to think that a lot more might be out there.”

There are a ton of Mormon authors. Of course we can have some philosophical explanation for it, or it could just go back to that first bit about how we’re more educated and we like to read more than average. Readers make writers. And the generation of us that is writing genre now also happens to be the generation that grew up with that stuff as our primary reading material.

Of course, many non-Mormon Christians work in genre fiction, too.

No! Really? The NYT is super good at the maths!

 J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic and C. S. Lewis a devout Anglican; Christian readers are among their biggest fans. Christianity and genre fiction both depend on Manichaean, good-versus-evil plots, and the savior motif, in which an anointed one saves the kingdom or the world, is important to sci-fi and fantasy and central to the Christian Gospel.

Well huh… All this time writing all these successful novels I thought I was depending on telling a fun and entertaining story! I never realized I needed… Manichaean… whatever. I’m sure Mark didn’t just use that word so he’d sound all sorts of smart.

Yet Mormons gravitate even more powerfully than other Christians toward genre fiction, and for reasons that have nothing to do with theology. For example, if you are a bookish young Mormon, your church role models work in genre fiction: major figures like Mr. Card and Ms. Meyer; young adult writers like Ms. Hale; and many others, like J. Lloyd Morgan and James Dashner, who work in genres within genres, like fantasy fiction for children.

Or me, or Brandon Sanderson, or Dan Wells, or Howard Tayler, or Jessica Day George, or Brandon Mull, or Richard Paul Evans, or Jason Wright, or Dave Wolverton, or John Brown, or Eric James Stone, or Steve Diamond, or Amber Argyle, or Zach Hill, or Brad Torgersen, or Rob Wells, or George Hill, or Julie Wright, or Tracy Hickman… All of those are writers who are Mormon who write for the national market, not “Mormon authors” writing for the LDS market.

Hmmm… Looking back over that list (and I know I’m missing a ton of folks since I’m just doing this off the top of my head) I see a bunch of bestsellers and really successful people. I also see a bunch of award winners. (but those awards like totally don’t count, because the NYT said so and stuff).

Success breeds success, established writers help new writers, and there are only two and a half million people in Utah. So the writing community tends to know each other, and we also tend to be a helpful bunch. It isn’t even a Mormon thing as much as it is a Utah thing (heck, look at my own Writer Nerd Game Night, Paul Genesse and Patrick Tracy are both Utah writers but not Mormons) only Utah is like 70% Mormon, so statistically it is going to work out that way.

Sure, the NYT can look for some weird philosophical underpinning that all Mormons—or blacks, Jews, or Asians—share (because you know all groups are just homogenous little voter blocks to big city liberals) but looking at that partial list above, I think it is more about strong networking in a relatively small community than anything.

But then we couldn’t have this pretentious article! 

Unsurprisingly, the heavily Mormon state of Utah has become an incubator.

Duh.

Brigham Young University, in Provo, hosts an annual Symposium on Books for Young Readers. Many members of LDS Storymakers live in Utah, where they can connect in person as well as online. The Utah-based children’s author Rick Walton runs an email list that further connects people.

“A lot of writers who might have gone another way have gone to children’s or young adult because of the strong communities,” Ms. Hale said.

So that part there hits on the nuts and bolts reality of the matter, but don’t worry…

But there is a specifically Mormon logic to the trend, too.

Because Mark quickly dismisses it in favor of his own pseudointellectual interpretation.

Realist literature for adults often includes aspects of adult life like sex and drinking, and the convention is to describe them without judgment, without moralizing.

Note that he proclaims this convention, but he doesn’t establish who it belongs to. That is a fun trick, like writing “some experts say (insert made up bullshit here)” or “FACT (insert more bullshit)”. 

I think Mark is flat out wrong on this one. I’m going to proclaim the opposite. Strong writing is going to have judgment and moralizing based upon the perspective of the Point of View character. But what do I know? I’m not a *real* writer.

Mormons don’t write about drinking? Huh? Just because I don’t drink doesn’t mean my characters won’t, and each one will have their own take on the subject. Jake Sullivan drinks, but usually only when somebody else is buying because he’s cheap. Owen Pitt doesn’t drink, but that’s because he worked as a bouncer and has zero patience for drunks. Lorenzo drinks sparingly, but only because he’s a health nut. Earl Harbinger drinks lots and lots of beer. But my record holder PoV is Francis Stuyvesant who is only outdrank by the master Raymond Chandler himself!  And come to think of it all of those guys had premarital sex, because their actions are consistent with the make-up of their character.

I’m pretty sure Dan Wells isn’t a serial killer. I don’t think John Brown serves a dark god. Brandon Sanderson, to the best of my knowledge, has never killed anybody by shooting nails with allomancy. And holy crap, some of Orson Scott Card’s short fiction is DARK. I’m talking child molester dark. So why this hackneyed nonsense about not being able to separate authors beliefs from their characters?

Because it simply isn’t true, but something being true will never hold back the New York Times!

By writing for children and young adults — or in genres popular with young people — one can avoid such topics. Mormon authors can thus have their morals and their book sales, too.

I’m a perfect example of why this isn’t true. I very specifically don’t write for kids. I write extreme levels of violence. Depending on the series, I write very realistic violence. Dead Six and Swords of Exodus were co-written with a veteran and proofed by a bunch of combat vets, and in the second book they take on the sunshiny topic of modern slavery. Or I write crazy over the top violence (I am the leading cause of Google searches for the term Snow-Go).

Personally, I don’t write sex scenes. Though I write things where you know damned good and well that sex has happened. I just tend to do the 1950’s movie style of cutting away. Why? Because of the audience I write for. Do you really think the average Correia reader, somebody searching for technically competent, two fisted action, explosion-o-rama adventure yarns wants to read a scene featuring my attempt at writing a steamy, yet totally pointless, sex scene? Hey, Tom Clancy readers, how many of you remember and cherish his few ham fisted forays in writing sex? Remember Bear and the Dragon? Yeah… Exactly.  I don’t need more descriptions of the Chinese secret agent’s magnificent wang again, thanks, Tom.

Now, if I was writing for Laurel K. Hamilton’s audience, then I’m going to sex it up. Different audiences, you give them a different product. (Gasp! He called it product! He’s not a *real* writer!) Brad Torgersen, Mormon author, who has been nominated for the Hugo/Campbell/Nebula (totally doesn’t count) is a great writer, and I know for a fact that man will go all sorts of sexy in his writing. I’ve had to make him clean up game fiction before I could put in on my blog. My kids read this page!

But of course, if I was a *real* writer, then my dreary navel gazing about the dying polar bears should be sporadically interrupted by sex scenes where afterwards everybody cries and talks about the cismale gendernormative fascism of the patriarchy and the symbolism of who was on top.    

“I’ll tell you why they write young adult,” said Ms. Nunes. “Because they don’t have to write the pages and pages of sex. They don’t want to spend a lot of time in the bedroom.”

The NYT is confusing all genre with YA, which is just one genre, and they’re also assuming that something YA can’t be sexy… Which shows that Mark hasn’t read much, because there is some R rated YA out there. YA doesn’t have straight up porn in it, but I can think of more Mormons who write adult than YA.   

In an email, Mr. Morgan added that the absence of sex in a novel can lead booksellers to pick a genre for it: “I believe that most writers who are LDS are by default labeled as ‘young adult’ writers because graphic sex scenes, graphic violence and swearing are omitted from their writing — even if the material is for a more mature audience.”

And here is another problem, one which I’ve talked about before. The entire concept of genre is fake. Genre categories exist for one reason, and one reason only, book stores need to know where to put stuff on the shelf. Period.

Look at my Grimnoir Chronicles trilogy. They are written for an adult audience, they’re well researched alternative history, but they’re fantasy with magic, only the magic is like super heroes, except the whole thing is written hard boiled noir pulp style… Yeah… I didn’t know what genre they were until Amazon assigned them to a category, but apparently they are Paranormal, because I’ve won two Audie Awards so far in that category, and in France they’re fantasy because I was a finalist for Best Fantasy there. So go figure.

But to the literati elite, what category you put a book in is everything. They don’t care about if the book is actually good, or fun, or entertaining, or uplifting, or thought provoking, or even sellable. They just care about checking boxes on a checklist. So why the hell should a bunch of college professors who’ve sold dick be the final arbiters of what is good or not?

Another factor is possible church disapproval.

This next portion is utter crap. I’ve written scenes of murder, torture, mutilation, genocide, and have brought in religious plot elements from Catholicism, Asatru, Wicca, myth, everybody’s folklore, and all of it has been heavily laced with profanity, and I’ve had one… count them one comment from a church leader in all this time, and it was “Wow. You sure do have a potty mouth” from a Bishop who then went on to read the rest of my novels.   

The novelist Brian Evenson said he was forced out of Brigham Young University for writing fiction that displeased church leaders, and in 2002 he was excommunicated.

Okay, since the vast majority of my blog readers aren’t Mormon, you probably didn’t catch that this part raises some red flags on the BS meter. Let me give you a doctrinal, nuts and bolts look behind the curtain of how my religion works.

First off, BYU is a school earned by the church, but it isn’t the church. It is our Notre Dame. When you go there you sign an agreement that you’ll follow their honor code. And personally, I think their honor code is ridiculous (and filled with a bunch of extraneous stuff that isn’t against any actual commandment in our religion, like drinking caffeine, which still drives me nuts because that is perfectly fine for the rest of us, but every time I go to a con people think I’m a bad Mormon because I’m drinking coke, thanks BYU)  I figure college students are adults with their own free agency, so they shouldn’t need the threat of getting kicked out of school to help them keep the commandments they’ve already committed to uphold. But I went to Utah State. Go Aggies.

So this dude got kicked out of BYU for writing fiction, yet I look at that list of authors above and I know that several of them went to BYU, and they’ve written all sorts of weird crap with no problems… I start to get suspicious. I’ve never heard of Brian Evenson, but 9 times out of 10 when the NYT trots out some disgruntled ex-Mormon (I swear they must keep a list) they usually have a grudge and can be counted on to reliably portray the rest of us as knuckle dragging morons.

Next, he was excommunicated in 2002. You’ve got to understand that Mormons save excommunication for serious stuff. Excommunication means we kick you out of our church entirely because your fundamental beliefs or behavior are no longer compatible. If you commit adultery or are convicted of a felony you usually only get disfellowshipped, which means you can still come to church, but you’re not allowed to hold any callings or do anything special or participate in any ordinances until you repent and get your life back in order.

Getting excommunicated means that you really pissed us off. Normally that means you murdered somebody (I’m assuming even the NYT isn’t that desperate) or you are continually preaching false doctrine which goes against the established teachings of the church. So a cursory Amazon search shows that Brian’s books are about the typical anti-Mormon BS of early church leaders murdering people in blood atonement and some weird crap about temple marriage, and having been married in the temple and knowing our doctrine rather well, from just reading just the back cover description of his book Open Curtain, uh… WTF is this crap? 

So for my non-Mormons readers, this would be like some member of your local church loudly proclaiming that he doesn’t believe any of your church’s doctrine, actively subverting what your church believes in, leading your fellow parishioners astray, and testifying that your preacher/pastor/priest has gay sex with farm animals. You don’t believe our doctrine? Fine. We’re not going to change it to suit your weird ass beliefs. Bye bye. Of course, now this person is exactly the unbiased source people should go to in order to learn about your religious beliefs.

When he was a child, he kept a journal, and his parents told him to “only record the happy things, and not the negative things.”

What a strangely useful remark from our disgruntled ex-Mormon that handily validates our reporter’s predetermined narrative!

It is the kind of instruction one cannot imagine coming from Jewish parents, or even from sin-worried evangelical Protestants.

Because remember, you all fit into neat little boxes. My kid’s journals have notes for windage and elevation adjustment clicks based on what load they are using… but I suspect they may be an anomaly.

In the Latter-day Saint culture of uplift and consensus, it somehow makes more sense. But it did not strike Mr. Evenson as being helpful for the budding artist.

Gee whiz… Yet hundreds of us have managed to sell millions of books while not being douchebags tearing down our religion! Poor Mr. Evenson. He’s quite the special snowflake.

“That kind of attitude, which is symptomatic in Mormonism as a whole, makes it very hard for some serious things to come out for Mormons,” Mr. Evenson said.

Yes. It is hard for *serious* things to come out of Mormons… Sure, we excel in science, engineering, math, finance, business, and even the arts, but we have totally failed to meet the NYT’s arbitrary and capricious standards of *real* writing… But don’t worry, the minute an active Mormon (or any other member of a group they don’t like) wins a Nobel Prize for Literature, it won’t count anymore either.

“There’s a weird pride in the limitations of the culture, and that to me is something that kills the possibility of artistic creation.”

Kiss my ass. Yeah, the way my religion says I shouldn’t beat my children while snorting cocaine off of a dead hooker is so limiting to my muse.

This is for all the aspiring authors out there who are hung up about creating art, put your big girl panties on, read this, and get to work:  http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/ask-correia-14-how-to-be-a-professional-author/

Patrick Madden, who teaches English at Brigham, says that there are Mormons who write excellent poetry — he mentioned his colleague Lance Larsen — and intellectually ambitious fiction. But he agreed that Mormon writers were comfortable with genre conventions.

This is kind of funny, because they are citing BYU as some sort of help. WRONG. They used to be good but over recent years the BYU English department has become as deluded with pretentions of literary greatness as the rest of the country. They’ve done their best to squash genre and focus on *real* writing.

One reason Utah has such a vibrant writing community is because of Dave Wolverton who writes under the penname Dave Farland. He taught BYU’s creative writing program for years, and he focused on the actual business end of writing instead of muses and dead authors nobody ever read to begin with. He had over 200 students go on to become professionals and 40 become bestsellers. That’s amazing. That’s a better success rate than any other creative writing program in the world. Brandon Sanderson, one of Dave’s former students, took over teaching Dave’s class. If an article about Mormon/Utah writers fails to note what Dave accomplished, then you know that zero research was done. And Dave did it despite BYU, not because of them.

Then there is the LTUE writing symposium. It is one of the best creative writing symposiums in the world. It was held at BYU for most of its existence. However, since BYU’s English department was hung up on *real* writing, we moved it first to UVU, and now it is being held off a college campus entirely. Thank goodness. If you want your writing to actually grow up GET OUT OF COLLEGE!

One problem with lit-fic, since it is almost impossible to make a living at it, is that it is mostly written on the side by college professors, published in prestigious literary journals (where you will be read by literally dozens—if you count the editorial staff) and then forced on students who’d rather be reading something actually entertaining. Newspapers then review it as brilliant, and socialites skim enough of it talk about it at parties. Meanwhile lit-fic ignores the rest of the world, and now we’re supposed to feel bad because those of us winning at life don’t satisfy them? Whoop-de-fricking do.   

“I think there is a pretty thriving LDS book culture,” Professor Madden said. “But a lot of it is faith-affirming and uncomplicated-type writing. Maybe that’s why there’s a pretty strong thrust of LDS genre writers. Because when you write sci-fi and so forth, things aren’t as messy as with realistic fiction.”

He sees uncomplicated. I see entertaining.

Realistic fiction… Why? If I have the ability to create whole new worlds from nothing, and populate them with fantastic characters, and then take them and do amazing things, why would I want to write “realistic” fiction? Most people read books to escape their reality. Why do I want to shove an even shittier reality in their face?

And you don’t need to be Mormon get that. You just need to exist outside the echo chamber of the literati elite and academia.

 

***One quick note while I’m bashing the NYT’s sloppy writing. I’ve had people ask how come I mock the NYT, but I’m proud to say that I’m a NYT bestseller. Fair enough. The NYT bestseller list, despite being terribly inaccurate, is still the most prestigious bestseller list in publishing mostly because everybody has heard of it. I tell somebody who isn’t even much of a reader that I’m a NYT bestselling author and that conveys a level of success. So I use it. As far as accuracy? It is crap. The list is based on a sampling of the sales of around two hundred secret bookstores, most of which are clustered in the north east, specifically New York. Nielsen Bookscan on the other hand, tracks about 75% of the book sales in the country, so it is way more accurate. And I’ve made the Nielsen list more often, ranked higher, and have stayed on it longer than I have on the NYT. Only when I say Nielsen Bookscan, the average person has never heard of it. So that’s why I use the NYTBSA bit.