Reddit AMA

Back in mid-2012, I cancelled an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over on Reddit. That was an interesting few weeks. Basically, at the time, Reddit was hosting a discussion inviting rapists to tell their side of the story. My feeling was that as long as that discussion was going on, I wasn’t comfortable participating over there.

This generated a large number of comments, from people calling me an free-speech hater and an idiot who doesn’t understand how Reddit works to others thanking me for drawing attention to some of the nastiness over there. It also generated my first rape threat, though it was a rather pathetic one on the scale of things.

For that reason, I was rather torn when earlier this year, Redditor and generally awesome person Steve Drew invited me to do a Fantasy AMA again. I know there are a lot of great people at Reddit, and a lot of wonderful conversations. Steve has been wonderfully positive to work with, and he clearly loves the genre. But I wasn’t about to go back on the position I had taken two years ago…assuming I was even still welcome.

So Steve and I chatted a bit. It turns out that the rapist discussion had been taken down, though I’m not sure exactly when. And then Steve put me in touch with Reddit’s Director of Communications, Victoria Taylor. She and I exchanged a few emails, and then talked on the phone so she could listen to and respond to some of my concerns.

I was very impressed with both of these individuals. While they might not have agreed with 100% of what I thought (who does?), they were both eager to listen to those concerns, to talk about what they’d been doing over the past few years to try to improve Reddit.

Some of the things Victoria talked about were:

  • Reddit has a larger team of people monitoring and moderating the communities. They’ve also added additional reporting options for inappropriate content.
  • They’re actively working toward inclusiveness and diversity. One example she pointed to was the growth in women’s topics on Reddit, including many that focus on building support.
  • She also pointed me to a study showing the decline of hate speech at Reddit.

This doesn’t mean Reddit is perfect. You had people posting stolen celebrity nudes in a Reddit topic called “The Fappening,” which apparently earned Reddit enough money to pay for their servers for a month. On the other hand, Reddit did try to remove the individual postings, and eventually took down the entire “Fappening” topic when that failed. Was it handled perfectly? Probably not. But I believe it was handled better than it would have been 2-3 years ago.

After thinking it over, I’ve gone ahead and accepted Steve’s invite to do another AMA. I imagine there are still people who are pissed at me for what happened in 2012, and that’s fine. There may be people who think I’m caving or compromising my principles to try to sell books, and that’s fine too.

But the specific board I was objecting to is gone. A lot of people have been working to try to make Reddit a better place. And I think that’s awesome.

So we’ll see what happens, and I’ll post details once everything gets sorted and scheduled.

Spider-Butts

Some of you have already seen Milo Manara’s cover art for Spider-Woman #1, which generated a great deal of unhappiness across the internet. As io9 pointed out, she basically looks like she’s wearing body paint. One of many complaints raised was that a male superhero would never have been drawn like this.

Au contraire, says some dude on the internet, who heroically stood up to defy the “Social Police,” those “preachy, bloviating, pharisaic shit-heads,” and to explain why everyone who was upset about this cover was wrong, and it’s really a non-issue.

What his point seems to mostly come down to is the fact that J. Scott Campbell did a Spider-Man cover just like Manara’s, and you didn’t hear the Social Police converging on Tumblr for an outrage-fest then! Total double-standard and made-up non-controversy. So there!

Let’s take a look at both covers, shall we?

Spider-Butts

You can click to enlarge the comparison, and yes, there are some superficial similarities here in that…well, they’re both crawling. But where Spider-Man is clinging to a spherical mass of webbing and bad guys, Spider-Woman is perched on the edge of a rooftop, thrusting her ass at the city skyline for no particular reason.

There are some issues with Spider-Man’s artwork. For starters, what the heck is going on with his fingers? And his costume is almost as tight as Spider-Woman’s. You can see a few small wrinkles in his suit, which is a step up from hers, but they’re both wearing some serious butt-huggers.

Internet-dude’s whole rant sounds vaguely similar to the, “What about the Romance Covers?” response I got for pointing out the oversexualization of women on SF/F cover art.

So let’s take another look at these two covers.

Point 1: One of the basic rules of climbing is to keep your body/hips close to the wall. Or if you’re a superhero, to whatever surface you happen to be climbing. Which is exactly what Spider-Man is doing. He’s hugging his climbing surface. Spider-Woman, on the other hand…she’s not climbing. She’s posing.

Point 2: Look at how the two characters are drawn. Both are in skintight costumes. Spider-Man’s costume highlights his muscles. We’re seeing a physically strong character with extra finger joints. Spider-Woman, on the other hand, is drawn to highlight the curves of her body, sans muscle. It’s not about drawing a character who looks strong or powerful; it’s about drawing boner-bait for young teen boys.

Point 3: Even if both characters were equally sexualized (they aren’t), you have to consider the larger context. I have nothing against sexuality, or against characters being portrayed in sexual ways. But when we’re consistently reducing female characters to sexually appealing/inviting caricatures, regardless of whether or not it’s appropriate to the character or the story, then we have a problem. When women are being drawn time and again in ways that prioritize exaggerated sexuality at the expense of all else, we have a problem.

The problem here isn’t one cover. The problem is one more cover. One more woman reduced to a sexual object. One more woman portrayed in a way that de-emphasizes any strength she might have — because women can only be strong up to a certain point, and only if they’re also sexually submissive to the male reader/viewer.

Are there exceptions? Of course. Are guys sometimes sexualized? Absolutely. But don’t try to pretend that the sexualization of men occurs on the same scale as that of women, or that men are sexualized in ways that rob them of strength and agency the way women so often are.

Or to put it another way? Double standard my ass.

Related:

Writer’s Ink: Sean Williams

Today’s episode of Writer’s Ink features Sean Williams, an Australian author with a Whole Lot of published fiction, including the #1 New York Times bestselling The Force Unleashed. One of his latest books is Twinmaker [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], “set in a future where “d-mat” technology, which allows for cheap teleportation and item replication, has created a seeming utopia of plenty.”

Here’s Sean showing off his ink:

WI-Williams2

In his words:

My plan is to get one tattoo for every book I have published. Unfortunately, because I’ve had trouble coming up with designs, I’ve fallen a bit behind. I currently have one tattoo. My forty-seventh book comes out in November.

I didn’t get my one and only tattoo until I turned thirty, after a string of failed romances. I was feeling pretty glum and needed to do something for myself, something defining and privately declarative, and eventually I came up with the perfect design for a place that normally only someone close to me would ever see. This was way back in the dawn of time, before everyone had a Chinese character on their upper shoulder.

The design comes from the I Ching. Hexagram 23, “Splitting Apart”, is usually associated with disintegration and decay, which seemed appropriate after all that heartbreak. It has a deeper meaning, though, as all hexagrams do, and it is this meaning that I wanted to be permanently etched into me. It goes something like this:

You have a cherry tree. It’s diseased and dying, which is obviously bad. But as long as there’s one cherry left on it with a viable seed, you can start over. You can grow a new, healthy tree from scratch to replace the old tree.

Repeat.

My tattoo is the character associated with that hexagram, since hexagrams themselves are hard to tattoo well and tend to warp with age. I may have got it wrong, it may mean “massive prat” if you say it the wrong way, but the story behind it has got me through some very difficult times in my personal and professional life. I’m glad it’s there.

My next two tattoos will be an infinity symbol and the outline of Mr Mischievous’s grin. All I have to do now is figure out where to put them. Decisions, decisions.

I told him that if he decided to catch up on those 46 other tattoos all at once, I’d be happy to have him back for a special edition of Writer’s Ink. But in the meantime, here’s a close-up of his tattoo:

Sean Williams Tatto

Spider Goddess Update

I tend to get a bit obsessed with new projects sometimes. On the bright side, I’ve decided to go ahead and do a print edition of Rise of the Spider Goddess, to go along with the ebook. Yay! I’ve also been looking into cover art options, finishing up the annotations, and thinking about the best way to publish and promote this sucker.

This is what I think the text of the print version will look like:

Sample Page

I’ve also been messing around with cover font possibilities:

Font Ideas

None of this is final yet. (And that particular color combination is giving me a weird Law & Order vibe…) But I’m having a great deal of fun.

It will probably be at least December before this is available, but I’ll keep y’all updated 🙂

The Tribe Series by Ambelin Kwaymullina

Ambelin Kwaymullina was the other Guest of Honor at Continuum earlier this year. She’s a delightful, intelligent, and all-around wonderful human being. Ambelin is an Aboriginal writer and illustrator from the Palyku people, and is the author of a number of award-winning picture books as well as a YA dystopian series.

She was kind enough to give my daughter the first book in that series as a gift. I picked up the second at the convention. Having read them both, I am now waiting Very Impatiently for the third and final book to come out!

Book one is The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. Book two is The Disappearance of Ember Crow, and doesn’t appear to be out in the U.S. yet. I’m not seeing it from Book Depository, either. Grumble.

Here’s the description in the author’s own words:

The Tribe is a three-book dystopian series set on a future earth where the world was ripped apart by an environmental cataclysm known as ‘the Reckoning’. The survivors of the Reckoning live in an ecotopia where they strive to protect the Balance of the world, the inherent harmony between all life. But anyone born with an ability – Firestarters who control fire, Rumblers who can cause quakes, Boomers who make things explode – is viewed as a threat to the Balance. Any child or teenager found to have such a power is labeled an ‘Illegal’ and locked away in detention centres by the government.

Except for the ones who run.

Sixteen year old Ashala Wolf leads a band of rebels who she names her Tribe. Sheltered by the mighty tuart trees of the Firstwood and the legendary saurs who inhabit the grasslands at the forest’s edge, the Tribe has been left alone – until now. A new detention centre is being built near the forest, and when The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf begins, Ashala has been captured by the government and is on her way to interrogation…

I loved these books.

Dystopia is popular these days, as is dark, gritty, often hopeless fiction. While these books certainly have a dark and dystopic setup, there’s also hope and joy and life and love. You read the books and you don’t walk away thinking, “Well, the world sucks, and everything is hopeless.” You walk away thinking, “Humanity sure screws things up sometimes, but we will survive, and we will make things better in the end.”

The characters are wonderful. Heroes and villains, humans and [spoilers]. There’s such a range of powers and personalities, and it all just works. I particularly like that we see a similar range in the government and elsewhere. There are no monolithic blocks of good or evil people. You get a sense of the larger struggle playing out throughout the world.

You wouldn’t think a book about an interrogation would be such a page-turner, but I lost several nights’ sleep to these books.

I did feel like book two stumbled a little at the beginning. When Disappearance begins, Ashala has retreated from the Tribe after accidentally injuring someone she cares about with her power. This part didn’t quite work for me, but that might be because I’m 40 years old, and I forget that Ashala Wolf and the rest of the Tribe are still kids. Regardless, once we moved past that part, the story once again sucked me in and wouldn’t let go.

Book two expands the scope and the worldbuilding in wonderful and completely unexpected-but-consistent ways. It’s a book about love and despair and history and family and religion and hope and evil and so much more.

So here’s the deal:

  • You need to go pick up book one and read it.
  • Candlewick Press needs to hurry up and release book two so I can push all of my U.S. readers to get it.
  • Ambelin Kwaymullina needs to magically make book three be out now so I can read it and see how everything comes together.

Any questions?

Writer’s Ink: Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is the award-winning author of a whole bunch of stuff! How’s that for specific? Her most recent book is One-Eyed Jack [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], one of her Promethean Age novels. She’s part of SF Squeecast, co-created the Shadow Unit web serial, and has taught at a number of different SF/F writing programs and workshops.

She also has a spider on her arm, which she explains thusly:

As you can see, my body doesn’t have much use for colored ink, especially red. So much for permanence!

I got this after I moved back to New England. The spider is a local wall-crawler: I’ve always had a fondness for spiders, and they’re a bit totemic for rock climbers, which happens to be my sport. And the sugar maple leaf is a reminder of home: this is the place I have always been happiest, and autumn is my favorite season. I actually brought in a particularly spectacular maple leaf for the tattoo artist, Steve Gabriel of Guide Line Tattoo in East Hartford, CT, to copy.

WI-Bear

I definitely recommend clicking to enlarge the picture and see the details. The one on the left is when the tattoo was brand new. The one on the right was taken a few days ago for this post. My theory is that the spider has been waking up at night and feeding on the red ink. Makes me wonder what it will eat when it runs out…

ApolloCon GoH & SF Signal Mind Meld

Announcement the First: I’m very excited to announce I’ll be the author guest of honor at ApolloCon in June 2015. I’ve never been to Houston before, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve heard a lot of good things about this convention.

#

Announcement the Other: I’m part of the latest SF Signal Mind Meld, talking about disabilities in SF/F. I talked about my love of the movie How to Train Your Dragon, which I’ve also blogged about before. David Gillon also raises some good points in his comment at the SF Signal post.

New Project: Rise of the Spider Goddess

A few weeks ago, I got an idea. I got a wonderful, terrible idea…

Almost twenty years ago, when I was a sophomore in college, I started writing the adventures of my D&D character after the end of a campaign. It was bad. Really bad. But it was this 50K novel that made me seriously consider the possibility of becoming an author.

I read an excerpt of this story as part of a fundraiser in January of last year, and people told me it made them laugh — both the story itself, and my editorial asides. A few people even said they were interested in hearing what happened next…

…you’re probably starting to see where this is going.

I’m thinking about publishing an annotated version of that 20-year-old book. The prose itself would be unedited. That’s right, every paragraph of purple prose, every time a character takes a drawn-out infodump, every adjective and adverb stacked up like a linguistic Jenga tower, it would all be there for your amusement.

My thinking on this is threefold.

  1. Giving my own bad fiction the MST3000 treatment could be entertaining.
  2. For writers, this could be a helpful tool, both to show that even “successful” authors had to start somewhere, and by highlighting my various mistakes so others will learn what not to do.
  3. Truly completist fans might get a kick out of having my very first book. Plus you’ll see a few ideas that showed up in later, published books.

It would probably be a $3.99 ebook. I’m dubious about a print edition, but we’ll see. I’d probably do the formatting like so:

“Time, as we understand it, is an illusion. It is not a line, but an intricate web in which all events are interlaced. Creation and destruction—they are one and the same.”

—Taken from the Journal of Averlon Lan’thar

Every book should open with a pseudo-deep and utterly
meaningless quote from a character we know nothing about.
Also, gratuitous apostrophe abuse should be punishable
by Taser.

I haven’t come up with an official title yet. A few ideas:

  • Rise of the Spider Goddess
  • Curse of a Fallen Goddess Drunken Muse
  • Godslayer and Prosekiller

What do you think? Does it sound like the kind of thing you’d be interested in checking out?

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