Boundaries

You have the right to say no.

When I wrote that sentence, it felt absurd. Of course you have the right to say no. We all do. “Just say no!” “No means no!” And yet…

We grow up learning that “No” is rude. It’s more important to avoid hurting other people’s feelings. It’s important to be polite and accommodating. Setting boundaries and prioritizing our own comfort and safety is selfish. We push these lessons even harder on women, expecting them to be caretakers, putting everyone else’s needs above their own.

Screw that.

I think Listening Ear training – where I became a volunteer crisis and sexual assault counselor – was the first time I really started to learn about the importance of boundaries. We talked about it first in the context of sexual harassment and assault.

You have the right to set your own boundaries, to say no and to have that be respected.

It’s something my culture is really bad at. We treat “No” as a challenge, a hurdle to be overcome through pressure, alcohol, emotional manipulation, even physical force.

It’s not just sexual. Over the weekend, I was talking on Facebook about an incident where a friend offered me food. I said no, and she immediately responded with, “Oh, why not? Come on, just take one.”

A few people didn’t understand why this bothered me so much. She wasn’t trying to be mean. Why was I blowing it all out of proportion? (The phrases “drama queen” and “mountain out of a molehill” were used.)

Ironically, this led to me choosing to set another boundary, telling someone he was no longer welcome in the conversation. That boundary was ignored. He wanted to argue his point. He complained I was just upset because he didn’t agree with me. He wanted me to explain.

When someone sets a boundary, your job is to respect that. You might not understand. You might feel hurt. You might be pissed off.

It doesn’t matter.

Your confusion, your hurt feelings, the fact that you don’t like someone telling you no, none of that gives you the right to violate someone else’s boundaries.

Whether it’s someone trying to pressure you into bed or someone who keeps pushing their homemade cheesecake at you, you have the right to say no.

I’ve lost friends because I had the gall to set boundaries in my own space, online or in real life. This happened a while back with an editor I considered a friend, and I still don’t understand why things immediately went to hell when I said I wasn’t in a space to have this conversation. Maybe I wasn’t nice enough about it? Maybe I didn’t adopt the proper tone?  I don’t know.

How often do we teach people that they have the right to take care of themselves? Why don’t we teach that it’s okay to set boundaries? And why the hell don’t we teach people to respect them?

You have the right to set boundaries. You have the right to have those boundaries respected.

  • Not “You have the right to say no as long as you’re nice enough.”
  • Not “You have the right to say no but I’m gonna try to change your mind.”
  • Not “You have the right to say no unless I think you’re wrong.”
  • Not “You have the right to say no once you can give me a satisfactory explanation as to why you’re saying no.”

When someone says no, the correct response is “Okay.” If you don’t understand, that’s fine. You don’t have to understand. Maybe the other person will be willing to explain. Maybe not. But they don’t owe you an explanation.

You have the right to say no, period. And if someone can’t accept that, then the hell with them. The problem isn’t you.

Redshirts, by John Scalzi

Tor was kind enough to send me a review copy of John Scalzi‘s latest book Redshirts [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. This is one of those really annoying books that made me go, “Dang it, why didn’t I think of that??!!” I started my career writing fantasy from the point of view of the underdog monsters. Scalzi has done something similar, writing science fiction from the perspective of the expendable crew members who die in various horrible but dramatically appropriate ways every week.

That created a problem for me as a reader, because I started thinking about how I would have written the story. By the time I actually started reading, the story in my head crashed pretty hard into the story Scalzi had written.

Like everything I’ve read from John Scalzi, this is a quick-paced book with plenty of action. smart-ass dialogue, and humor. Ensign Andrew Dahl is the newest crewmember on the Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union. The rest of the crew, familiar with the redshirt phenomenon, have learned to avoid away missions at all costs. As Dahl realizes what’s happening – and his likely fate – he has to figure out why it’s happening (with the help of a mysterious yeti-haired recluse named Jenkins) and come up with a way to stop it.

SPOILERS AHEAD

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Copyright/Trademark Facepalms

About a month ago, scribd.com informed me that they had removed the sample chapter of Goblin Quest I had posted because it violated the rights of the copyright holder. As the copyright holder, I found that odd. It’s possible my publisher sent a takedown notice, thinking it was a copy of the entire book instead of just one chapter. Or it might be a flawed program that recognized textual similarities between the sample and the full book and flagged it automatically. I decided to let it go, because I didn’t have the time or energy to worry about it.

This week, Zazzle.com e-mailed to let me know that the image on my Muse T-shirt violated the rights of the intellectual property owner.

That would be this image, which I created in April of 2011?

Call me goofy, but I figured that having created the image, I was the intellectual property owner. I wrote to them, asking for clarification. They responded promptly, and I give them points for that. Points which I promptly take away again for their response, in which they explain my shirt was removed:

…because it featured a design that does not meet Zazzle’s Acceptable Content Guidelines. Specifically, your product contained a trademark-protected text “Muse”, United States Patent and Trademark Office serial number 75773735.

Zazzle has been contacted by legal representatives from Maggy London International, Ltd., and at their request, to removed designs that may infringe upon their rights from the Zazzle Marketplace.

That would be this trademark record, which I presume was registered as part of Maggy London’s Muse division, which sells things like this:

At first I could almost understand. The product was listed as “Muse T-shirt,” which could conceivably be taken as suggesting this was from the Muse brand of clothing. But Zazzle’s response stated it was removed because the design violated someone else’s trademark. In other words, they’re claiming I’m not allowed to use the word “Muse” in a stick figure comic shirt.

I believe my response is best expressed in animated gif form.

Look, I get it. I make a significant part of my living as a writer. I appreciate that copyright law helps me to do that. If someone decides to make a Goblin Quest movie without my permission, I like that I can open up a can of legal whoopass on them.

I get that the internet complicates things. Like pretty much every other author out there, I’ve seen my books go up on various pirate sites. Trying to find a way to protect copyright holders’ interests without stomping all over internet freedom is complicated. Make it supereasy to demand a website take down your stuff, and you’ll probably create a system that’s easy to abuse. Make it too hard and convoluted, and you protect copyright infringement at the expense of the rights holders. And remember that copyright law varies from one country to the next…

But what we have right now? It’s a bit of a mess.

  • As a writer, even if I wanted to send DMCA takedown notices to every infringing site, it’s impossible. There aren’t that many hours in the day.
  • At the same time, as a content creator, I get to see my work yanked down from websites on the flimsiest of claims by anyone who can afford a lawyer to send out random cease & desist notices, shotgun style. I could almost certainly fight this … but once again, it requires time and a lot of hoop-jumping.

I don’t have that kind of time, people! I’m far too busy writing blog posts and searching for animated Naked Gun gifs![1. Which I think qualifies as fair use/derivative work, but I’m not sure. Like I said, it’s messy.]

I don’t have a solution. I’m not that smart. I just feel like copyright should be something that helps content creators instead of hurting them.

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Hugo Novelettes

Most of the Hugo-nominated novelettes are available online, and I’ve linked to them where I could. Attending and supporting members of Worldcon can read them all through the Hugo Voters Packet.

My thoughts on the short story ballot are here, along with links to the stories.

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Six Months, Three Days by Charlie Jane Anders. The opening line is, “The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.” I really like this setup, and the conflict it creates between the man who sees a fixed, unavoidable future and the woman who believes she has free will to choose from various possibilities. I love how Anders presents the characters, both of whom have known for a long time that this relationship was coming and how it would go, but who still stumble through the same awkwardness as the rest of us. I loved the details, like the game Judy plays with her friend, picking random destinations and predicting what would happen if they packed up and went there that very day. Anders’ characters are so very human, and the conflict between them — is the future really fixed (Doug), or can you choose your future (Judy)? — is thoughtfully explored.

The answer Anders gives to that conflict is simultaneously tragic and scary and hopeful, and felt right for the story. This is the first story I’ve read by Anders, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Fields of Gold by Rachel Swirsky. “When Dennis died, he found himself in another place.” While exploring the possibilities of the afterlife isn’t exactly new (really, what is?), I like a lot of what Swirsky did here. Structurally, the things Dennis did and didn’t accomplish on his various lists of goals worked well, giving insight into his life and character. I particularly loved the celebrities who showed up, not as actual dead famous people, but as collective manifestations of the mundanes.

Overall though, the story didn’t work for me as well as it might have, because I didn’t really like the characters. They tended to be a bit too unpleasant for me. It’s a stylistically interesting and well-written story, but purely as a matter of personal taste, not my favorite.

The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell. Instead of giving you the opening line, I’m going to jump to this bit about Isaac Newton:

“[O]ld Isaac’s in his garden, an apple falls on his head, he picks it up and sees this tiny worm crawling across its surface, and so he starts thinking about the very small…”

I read this as a key to the alternate history Cornell presents, one with carriages exploring the solar system, spies manipulating what act like tiny wormholes, and a very different and well-detailed present-day (I think?) world. Jonathan Hamilton is a spy who encounters a woman named Lustre Saint Clair, a woman he knew fifteen years ago…who appears no older than eighteen years of age.

This draws Hamilton into a plot involving twin arms dealers who have been exploring space, discovered the relativistic effects of near-light-speed travel, and made not-so-successful contact with aliens. (Though the ending calls all of this into question.)

I believe this is the third of Cornell’s stories about Jonathan Hamilton. I’ve not read the others, which might account for some of my disorientation. I love the ideas and the worldbuilding, but I felt a bit disconnected from the story. I may reread this one if I have time, to see if that helps.

Ray of Light ($1.49 on Kindle) by Brad Torgersen. “My crew boss Jake was waiting for me at the sealock door.” Max Leighton is one of the thousands of surviving humans who fled to the ocean bottom after aliens blotted out the sun for reasons we never knew. His daughter is part of the first generation to grow up never having seen the sky.

I liked the classic SF feel of this one. Torgersen does a nice job with mood, conveying the sense of desperation and desolation on the sea bottom. And I thought the idea of the children developing their own religion/cult, and setting out on a possibly suicidal mission to the surface ice, made for a good story.

But it wasn’t a great story. I think my main complaint was that it felt a little too easy. I didn’t feel the urgency, and the reward at the end of the story felt … unearned, if that makes sense. The weight of the setup didn’t match the weight of the resolution.

What We Found by Geoff Ryman. This story won the Nebula award for Best Novelette. Set in Makurdi, Nigeria, it presents two intertwined narrative threads. One of Patrick and his family, which includes a schizophrenic father, an abusive grandmother, and a brother I’d describe as a bit of a trickster. The other story shows Patrick as a researcher who discovers that stress and trauma are passed down from father to son. But over time, other researchers lose the ability to duplicate his results, leading to another revelation:

“Simply put, science found the truth and by finding it, changed it … Some day the theory of evolution will be untrue and the law of conservation of energy will no longer work … Atoms will take only 50 more years to disappear.”

The science is a fascinating game of “What if?” and also presents an interesting lens with which to examine family, whether we inherit the flaws and pain of our ancestors, whether recognition could give freedom from such inevitabilities.

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Having read through the short stories and novelettes, I have a lot of respect for the ambitious stories, and for authors who push to explore new ideas and possibilities, even if the end result isn’t perfect.

For those of you who’ve read them, what did you think?

New Collection: Sister of the Hedge

Years ago, I did a series of LOL Book covers, which some folks found amusing. They were mentioned on Facebook over the weekend, and I figured I’d share the LOL Book archives for anyone who wanted a dose of book cover silliness on their Monday morning.

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I had originally intended to launch Sister of the Hedge & Other Stories by the end of April.

I had 90% of the work done. But that final 10% kept getting postponed until this past Friday, when I ended up home sick with my son. He played Lego Pirates of the Caribbean and I went through the final file preparation and cleanup and validation.

I’m happy to say the book is now available on Amazon and B&N. It includes the following stories:

SISTER OF THE HEDGE
IN THE LINE OF DUTY
HEART OF ASH
BLOODLINES
IMAGES OF DEATH
OURS TO FIGHT FOR

These are some of my darker and more serious stories. “Sister of the Hedge” is the only thing I’ve written to ever make the preliminary Nebula ballot, which was pretty cool. “Heart of Ash” will give you a preview of some of the ideas I’m playing with for the dryad character in Libriomancer. “In the Line of Duty” … well, I’ll let you read the author’s note to find out where that one came from 🙂

I’ll be working to get it posted on other sites as well. I’m thinking about trying Smashwords this time. More updates as they happen.

New Cat

I’m home sick with my son, who was nice enough to share his cold with me. Since my brain is snot-clogged, I’m just gonna share a picture of our new addition. My wife brought two kittens home from a friend at work a while back, and we took care of them for a few weeks as a trial run. One failed the trial by picking on our older cat and shredding my arm to the bone when I tried to trim his claws, but Taz has a much nicer temperament.

Almost too nice. Like when he comes in for snuggles in the middle of the night, purring in your ear or licking your arm. Or when he positions himself directly where you want to walk and rolls onto his back for belly rubs.

He’s a soft, friendly, playful little beast. I’m just disappointed I didn’t get a picture of when he rolled over and fell off the chair.

Yeah, he ought to fit in just fine.

Facts II: Reality Strikes Back

This is a follow-up to my Facts Are Cool post, which was a follow-up to John Scalzi’s post on the SWM Setting in the Game of Life. Because sometimes blogging is all recursive and meta and stuff.

My post generated a fair amount of discussion, much of it thoughtful, some of it not so much. My favorite is the individual who tried to argue that the whole post was despicable because trying to attach morality to skin color (which isn’t what anyone was doing) caused the holocaust. Yeah, that comment got banhammered into next week. But there were other comments and arguments I wanted to respond to.

Don’t your facts show that straight/white/male culture is superior? Well, no. The facts are what they are. How you interpret those facts is another matter. You could try to use them to make an argument that straight white men are somehow superior to other groups, but I think that would be a poor argument.

For example, the fact that LGBT youth are up to seven times more likely to attempt suicide — if you think that’s because straight kids are inherently stronger than LGBT kids, as opposed to being due to bullying, threats, and hatred specifically directed at LGBT kids, then you’ve got your blinders on. Likewise, it’s rather absurd to argue that blacks receive longer jail sentences than whites for the same crimes, with the same criminal history and backgrounds, because whites are somehow superior.

Statistics and facts aren’t the be all and end all of the discussion. They’re one part of the discussion. However, it looks to me like the facts tend to support Scalzi’s argument about SWM being an easier setting, at least in my society.

Race is irrelevant. It’s all about class! Nobody said class wasn’t important. The fact that race, gender, and sexual orientation are all factors in the challenges people face (or don’t have to face) doesn’t mean they’re the only factors. Disability. Geography. Education. Lots of things intersect. Life is messy.

Asians have lower dropout rates and are more likely to earn a degree in four years. Shouldn’t we be talking about Asian privilege? The studies I cited showed that Asian/Pacific Islanders had slightly lower dropout rates (by .4%) and were slightly more likely to earn a degree in four years (by 3.5%). Of course, I also pointed out that Asian Americans were more likely to live in poverty (by 3.1%) and were severely underrepresented in Congress. Why the differences? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m going to repeat my previous point: a lot of things intersect. While racism against Asian Americans is still going strong, it’s not the only factor.

I don’t actually know what all of those factors are, but it’s something I plan to read up on and try to understand better.

By focusing on these things, you’re perpetuating the problem! We should be blind to race, gender, orientation, etc! You know what perpetuates a problem? Silence. Not talking about it. Turning our backs, plugging our ears, and pretending it doesn’t exist. As for ignoring race, gender, orientation … there’s a much larger conversation here, but in brief, these things are part of who we are. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations is a good thing, and I’d rather celebrate diversity than ignore it.

Finally, please read this post by Michelle Sagara: Please don’t tell me how I should feel oppressed, thanks. It’s powerful, and addresses a lot of the things that came up during the discussions, things like intersectionality and individual vs. shared experience.

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And now, a few more facts. Because as we know, facts are cool.

A study of orchestra auditions found that “blind” auditions, with no way of identifying the gender of the musician, led to a 50% increase of a woman advancing through the preliminary rounds, and increased severalfold the chances of a woman being selected in the final round. To phrase it another way, when the people in charge knew the sex of the musician, they were more likely to favor men over women than when they had to judge by skill alone. (Orchestrating Impartiality. 2000.)

“Black offenders spent a longer time in prison awaiting parole compared with white offenders, and the racial and ethnic differences are maintained net of legal and individual demographic and community characteristics.” Note: because the study was restricted to young men, the authors can’t say whether or not the results generalize to female prisoners. (The Role of Race and Ethnicity in Parole Decisions. 2008.)

In 29 states, it’s legal to fire someone for their sexual orientation. (The article refers to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. As of today, that act has not been passed.) (The Rights of Gay Employees. 2009.)

“The majority (73%) of family violence victims were female. Females were 84% of spouse abuse victims and 86% of victims of abuse at the hands of a boyfriend or girlfriend. While about three-fourths of the victims of family violence were female, about three-fourths of the persons who committed family violence were male.” (Family Violence Statistics from the U. S. Dept. of Justice. 2005.)

A study of how race is portrayed on prime-time TV for ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox found that “significantly more Latino (18%) and African American (9%) characters were portrayed as immoral compared to white (2%) characters … [and] significantly more Latino (18%) and black (9%) characters were viewed as despicable television characters, rather than admired ones, compared to white (3%) characters.” (The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television. 2010.)

Looking at the world of books, Kate Hart did an in-depth study of YA book covers in 2011. 90% featured a white character. 1.4% featured a Latino/Latina character. 1.4% featured an Asian character. 1.2% featured a black character. 10% featured a character of ambiguous race/ethnicity. Compare that to the census numbers from my previous post: “In the total [U.S.] population, whites make up 66.0%, Hispanics are 15.1%, Blacks are 12.8%, APIA (Asian and Pacific Islander American) are 5.1%, and AIAN (American Indians and Alaskan Natives) are 1.2%.” (Uncovering YA Covers 2011.)

Libriomancer Giveaway and Other Stuff

I think this exchange is rather telling about my writing. What it tells … well, that’s another matter entirely.

From Lynn Flewelling’s LJ: Today’s best typo – He took his position beside the table and wove a peeing spell on the air.

My response: I actually wrote about a spell like that in one of the princess books.

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Speaking of Lynn, her tenth book Casket of Souls [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] came out yesterday. Happy book week!!!

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There are 20 copies of Libriomancer [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] up for grabs over at Goodreads. This one is limited to U.S. residents only, but I’ll run a giveaway of my own soon, and will open that one up worldwide.

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Finally, here are two more moon pics. I got a mount that attaches to the eyepiece of my telescope and — after a few frustrating nights of trying to figure out how to get everything lined up — holds the digital camera steady. I haven’t managed to get any planetary pictures this way yet, but I really like the moon shots.

You can click the pics for larger versions, or go to my Flickr page.

Hugo Short Stories

First off, happy book day to my friend Lisa Shearin, whose book All Spell Breaks Loose [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is out today. And last week marked the release of Mira Grant’s Blackout [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy].

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This year will be my first Worldcon, and the first time I’ve voted in the Hugos. I’ve been diligently downloading and devouring the Hugo Voters Packet, starting with the short stories, because … well, they’re short!

Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue, by John Scalzi. I wonder how I’d feel if a story I wrote for an April Fool’s Day joke made the Hugo ballot. On one hand, it’s delightfully random and unexpected. At the same time, I think I’d have this nagging sense of, “Wait, what about all the stuff I wrote that wasn’t a joke?”

As a joke, this was marvelous. Tor and Scalzi went all out, including cover art, and the story was an amusing read. It’s nice to see humor on the ballot. And there’s an actual story here amidst the jokes and the over-the-top fantasy tropes. I can honestly say that when I finished reading, I wanted to know what happened next.

You could tell Scalzi was having a good old time with this one. That said, some of the humor felt a little forced. While it’s a fun read and you should check it out, I don’t see this one taking home a rocketship.

Movement by Nancy Fulda. This is a first-person SF story set in the near future about a girl named Hannah with temporal autism. Hannah’s parents are trying to decide whether to pursue a new technology which could help her integrate into society, but becoming more “normal” isn’t always a good thing. This made me think of Elizabeth Moon’s award-winning novel The Speed of Dark, which I reviewed here. Like Moon, Fulda does a very good job of capturing her protagonist’s voice, showing us the world through Hannah’s eyes. As the father of an autistic child, it’s hard for me to be entirely objective about this story, but I really appreciated it, and I thought the ending worked well.

Also, even though Hannah doesn’t think it’s terribly effective, I totally want to invest in shoulder-mounted mosquito-killing laser technology!

The Homecoming by Mike Resnick. Resnick is one of the most prolific writers in our field, and “The Homecoming” has a lot going for it. It’s an emotional story of an estranged son (Philip) coming home to visit the father who wants nothing to do with him. His mother has Alzheimer’s, and has only a few lucid minutes each day. Philip left Earth years ago, after radically redesigning his body into an alien form, in order to explore another world. His father took it as a rejection of family and humanity.

To me, it felt like a metaphor for a father unable to accept his son’s sexuality. I could be reading into it, but this is how the story resonated for me — the father mourning his lost grandchildren, hating the life his son has chosen, while the mother takes on the role of peacemaker, bringing them together despite her infirmity.

While the SFnal elements were wonderful, the ending felt too quick and easy, and didn’t really work for me. It didn’t feel true.

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu. This is, in my mind, a good example of that sense of truth I’m talking about. Jack’s mother was a mail-order bride from China. When he’s young, she makes origami animals and infuses them with life: a paper tiger purrs and prances, the tinfoil shark swims, and so on. It’s amazing and beautiful. But as Jack grows older, he rejects his Chinese heritage, wanting to fit in with his “American” peers. In doing so, he rejects his mother as well. Only after she’s gone does he learn the rest of her story.

There is no neat ending here, but there is … understanding. Movement. Regret and loss, but with a thread of connection through the story’s magical element.

One of the things I admire about this one is that it’s not overstated. Jack has little understanding or compassion for a mother who sold herself in a catalog, but there’s a line later on where he’s prepping resumes and says, “I schemed about how to lie to the corporate recruiters most effectively so that they’d offer to buy me.” It’s just one line, and Jack doesn’t see the connection, but the reader does. One line is all it takes.

This story has already won the Nebula award, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it take the Hugo as well. Yeah, it’s really good.

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu. Let me put it this way: this is a story that made wasp nests beautiful and magical in a mere two paragraphs. It’s a story of clashing civilizations, in which the wasps colonize the less powerful bees, a situation with many real-world parallels. The wasps take tribute from the bees, but offer them “the honor of watching us elevate [you] to moral and technological heights you could never imagine.”

This kind of story could become preachy, but it never does. It is what it is, unapologetic and disturbing. Yu takes advantage of the shorter insect lifespan to show the evolution of a new line of bees: anarchists who set out to create a new future.

Like Liu’s story, the ending isn’t neat or happy, but it feels right. There’s a sense of movement that feels circular even as it moves forward. There’s a lot going on in this one, and I may have to reread it to catch things I missed my first time through.

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Discussion is welcome, and since the stories are all online, you don’t even have to be registered for Worldcon to read them.

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