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TOTAL RAISED: $15,430

Long ago (in internet terms), I posted a series of pictures in which I attempted to duplicate the cover poses of various fantasy heroines. This quickly became my most-viewed blog post ever. Later, in response to various calls of, “But men are objectified too!” I did a follow-up, posing like the men in order to illustrate the difference in how men and women are portrayed.

Since then, I regularly get emails and Tweets pointing me to genderswapped Avengers, men posing like car wash cheerleaders, and more. (I now have a better understanding of how John Scalzi must feel as the internet’s unofficial Emperor of All Things Bacon.)12/16/12

The other thing I get are requests to pose like various covers, whether it’s the Catwoman comic or the latest spinally-challenged urban fantasy heroine. At one point, a friend on Twitter said they’d pay $5 to see me try a particular pose. And that gave me an idea…

Welcome to the first annual Cover Pose Fundraiser

I spent a while trying to decide what cause I wanted to support. And then something happened. One of my high school classmates Jen posted on Facebook that she needed a ride to the hospital. Her eleven-year-old daughter Madison was in the hospital as a result of complications from a rare condition known as Aicardi Syndrome. It was the first time I had seen Jen in ages.

Madison died a few days later.

I had learned about Aicardi several years earlier, from my friends Michael and Lynne Thomas, both of whom are active in the SF/F community. Michael is an author as well as Managing Editor at Apex Magazine, and has been an Associate Editor for Mad Norwegian Press. Lynne is a curator, editor, podcaster, and two-time Hugo winner.

Their daughter Caitlin has Aicardi Syndrome. I felt fortunate to be able to introduce Jen to Michael when Madison was first diagnosed, trying to connect her to a source of information and support.

This is a condition which affects 1 in 105,000 girls born in the U.S. It causes brain malformation, visual problems, seizures, developmental delays, and other medical complications. Most research puts the life expectancy for people with Aicardi between 8 and 16 years.

I can’t imagine what these families go through trying to care for their children. It’s one thing to have a child with a known condition, like diabetes. (I swear, I can’t throw a cupcake without hitting another diabetic.) It’s hard, but diabetes is treatable. It’s better known. There are others who can ease your fears and help you through.

Aicardi Syndrome is incurable. It’s hard to diagnose. It’s scary and overwhelming, and most people have never heard of it.

The Aicardi Syndrome Foundation is pretty much the only source in the United States for funding into research on this condition. The foundation also funds a family conference every two years, paying for hotel rooms, flying in researchers, and even covering many of the meals. It unites families fighting this disease, connecting them to a network of support they might otherwise never find.

I’m asking people to donate to the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation. In exchange, I will give you what the internet has deemed my most important contribution to society: ridiculous cover poses. All you have to do is email me at ASF@jimchines.com letting me know how much you donated. If you give more than $25, please include a copy of your receipt from the foundation.

I’ll pick donors at random to suggest covers for me to try to duplicate. My only rule is that it has to be PG-13 or less.

As an added bonus, if we hit $1000, I’ll challenge award-winning and bestselling author John Scalzi to a competitive pose-off.

Targets at which you get new cover poses are:

• $100 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Tangled Threads, by Jennifer Estep.
• $250 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Man of my Dreams, by Johanna Lindsey.
• $500 – Goal reached! Cover posted: At Grave’s End, by Jeaniene Frost.
• $750 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Catwoman Vol. 1: The Game (The New 52).
• $1000 – Pose-off with John Scalzi! – Challenge posted, and it is GLORIOUS! Vicki Pettersson’s The Taste of Night.
• $1500 – Goal reached! Pose coming soon: The Dragon Variation, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.
• $2000 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Summoning, by Carol Wolf.
• $2500 – Pose-off with Scalzi, Round Two. Scalzi has challenged me to a Christmas-themed rematch! Challenge Posted: Christopher Bennett’s Only Superhuman.
  
• $3000 – Goal reached! Cover posted: A Brush of Darkness, by Allison Pang.
• $3500 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Fear Itself: The Fearless, Volume 1 #12.
• $4000 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold.
• $5000 – Goal reached! Behold the group cover pose for Young Flandry, starring yours truly, along with John Scalzi, Pat Rothfuss, Charles Stross, and Mary Robinette Kowal!
• $6000 – Goal reached! Pose coming soon: Green, by Jay Lake.
• $7000 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Alien Diplomacy, by Gini Koch.
• $8000 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Bitten, by Kelley Armstrong (HC edition).
• $9000 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Fangs for the Mammaries, edited by Esther Friesner.
• $10,000 – Goal reached, thanks to a very generous donation by Joe Posner. Joe asked for a recreation of Kevin Bolk’s Avengers Booty Assemble pic, which brings a whole new level of meta-parody to this thing. I’m still thinking about how best to do this one.
• $12,500 – Goal reached! Cover posted: Phoenix Rising, by Pip Ballentine & Tee Morris. (See also Tee and Pip’s awesome response here!)
• $15,000 – Holy crap. Goal reached! Looks like I’m going into the calendar business! I’m thinking I’ll probably aim for a 2014 calendar to give me time to do this right. I’ll try to do both downloadable wallpapers and a printed calendar. Thank you all so much!!!

So there you have it. I’ll keep the fundraiser open through the end of the year, and will update regularly with the total raised and with links to the cover poses as we hit our goals.

Thank you.

My thanks to everyone who contributed links and suggestions for posts about inclusion in fandom and SF/F. There were a lot of suggestions, far more than I could squeeze into a single blog post. Which means 1) I’ll have to try to come back and do a Part II to this, and 2) I found myself in the position of having to pick and choose.

I’m not happy about #2. As a member of the most included groups in SF/F, it’s uncomfortable to feel like I’m filtering what people should read about diversity and inclusiveness in our community. But I’ve done my best. For anyone who wants more, all of the suggested links are in the comments of the original post on my site and LiveJournal.

It’s Amazing the Things We Know, that are Actually Wrong, by Kate Elliot. “How unrealistic a more “diverse” story will seem to a reader or writer whose views of the past are mired in these sorts of errors. How flawed, even though it actually isn’t. Attempts to add “diversity” into such a scenario then remain trapped in the same box, regardless of the axis of diversity: The “diversity” becomes an ornamental or utilitarian element being forced onto the “real” underpinnings of the world (which remain in such a case as the default male, white, Western, straight, whatever), rather than being an intrinsic part of the creation.”

Octavia Butler’s Descendants: Diversity in Science Fiction (Video), by Nalo Hopkinson. Ironically, the introduction text opens by talking about how science fiction and fantasy is “about as inclusive as it comes,” before transitioning into Hopkinson’s argument about racial and gender diversity.

Oh, Fandom and Your “Inclusiveness,” by SL Huang. On geek cred, geek girls, and why all of the anger and vitriol about “fake” geeks seems to be directed at women…

Inclusivity and Exclusivity in Fiction: Aliette de Bodard on Crossing Over. “It’s all but inevitable that someone within a group will perceive it in different terms than someone outside a group: it’s what I call ‘insider’ writing vs ‘outsider’ writer. There are two different problems: who is writing this, and for whom it is intended.”

Read These Before Engaging. A collection of links about race and privilege and diversity and unexamined assumptions.

The Hotel Rant, by Mari Ness. Some commenters asked or talked about what conventions should be looking at in terms of choosing accessible hotels for disabled attendees. Read this post. Also, you might want to follow http://access-fandom.dreamwidth.org/

What About When Something is Offensive AND Amusing? by Renee Martin. “It is commonplace to argue that “that’s not funny” because it’s offensive (now, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s just plain vile, or sometimes we’re just so outraged and sickened by it that the very idea of it being funny is boggling to us). And it’s awkward because sometimes we use it even when we don’t believe it – even when we are tempted to crack a smile. Because we have an idea that somehow, if it is funny, it is not offensive…”

Radical Inclusiveness: or, Why Hufflepuff is the Best House, by Nightsky. Talking about inclusiveness in Harry Potter and Doctor Who both. And this is one of the reasons I love fandom. (The entire Doctor Her site was also recommended on general principles.)

The “Fannish Enough” Question, by Cheryl Morgan. “Why can’t it be the case that people who are ‘not fannish enough’ are not those who fail to adhere to any particular narrow definition of what fans should be, but rather people who fail to accept that fandom is a diverse and wonderful community, in which we all have a place?”

Women Are Geeks, Too, by Sylvia Sybil. Examining many of the ways women are made to feel excluded from fandom, as well as providing links to examples of inclusiveness as well.

Things People Need to Understand, issue 223.2, by N. K. Jemisin. “We have to shed this idea that SFF is somehow special. That it is perfect. That it is in any way better than the mainstream society from which it derives. It isn’t. And in fact, SFF’s manifest unwillingness to examine itself is one of the things that makes it worse than the mainstream.  I and people I care about keep getting accused of having some kind of agenda, whenever we express a demand for some kind of positive change. So OK. You know what it is? Lean close. Here’s the secret. Here’s the goal of the big shadow conspiracy…”

Today I’ll be driving my wife to the hospital for knee replacement surgery. This should be fairly straightforward, and will hopefully alleviate at least one piece of the pain she’s been dealing with. (Eventually I suspect we’ll be going back to do the other knee. You’ve got have symmetry, right?)

Also, it’s one step closer to her becoming a cyborg, which is pretty cool.

So please don’t expect much online activity from my little corner of the Internet for a few days.

A week or so back, I talked about inclusiveness in fandom and the SF/F community, trying to separate perception from reality.

In the comments, author Ekaterina Sedia pointed out that many people who feel excluded in one way or another have been blogging and talking about this issue for a while, but that the response tends to be pretty minimal. (Whereas when the straight white male geek blogs about it, he ends up with close to 100 comments.

Running with a suggestion from netmouse, I’d like to collect and share some of those less-trafficked blog posts. If you’ve written or read about the issue of inclusiveness in our community, please share the link in the comments. My plan, depending on how many links we get, is to summarize and organize the list in a future post. (LJ Note: LiveJournal has been sending more comments with links into the spam folder. If this happens to you, don’t worry about it. I’ll unspam that as soon as I catch it.)

Short version: If we’re going to have this conversation, let’s try to get more attention to a broader range of voices.

Thanks!

The Election Day Giveaway was, I believe, the most popular giveaway I’ve ever done, with close to 600 entries across my various blogs. Congratulations to Kari, who was selected at random as the winner. You should have gotten an email asking how you’d like the book signed and where to send it. And thank you everyone who voted last week.

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Seanan McGuire is doing a giveaway of her new collection Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots (which just happens to include an introduction by me).

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Thinking back to the election, to everything leading up to it and the aftermath from all sides, what struck me was the importance of story. Facts are nice and all, but what really mattered was the story you told. The story of your candidate. The story of your opponent.

I see two problems right off the bat.

1. These stories involve what we in the business call “unreliable narrators.”[1. And that there was what we call an understatement.]
2. It’s not just that the election is all about stories; it’s that they’re really bad stories.

I mean, come on. One of the basic lessons of writing is that your antagonist should be more than a cardboard caricature, a mustache-twirling villain who kicks homeless puppies for fun. Every villain is the hero of his/her own story, and I believe it’s important to understand the villain’s motivations, even if you don’t agree with them. It usually makes for a much better story. These campaigns need to go take Remedial Creative Writing at their local community college.

Think about how many candidates try to portray themselves as Washington outsiders. That’s storytelling! They want to be the orphaned hero: Luke Skywalker going up against the Empire! Frodo Baggins marching into Mordor!

And like any series, the storytellers have to keep raising the stakes to keep their audiences invested. “My opponent is a Death-Eater and a sparkling zombie werewolf who intends to enslave you all!”

Of course, the other part of storytelling is that your story is supposed to be believable. A member of the House Committee on Science proclaiming that woman have magic pregnancy-blocking vaginas to protect them in cases of rape? Oh, please. Suspension of disbelief is important, and you just catapulted me right out of the story with that one.

The silver lining to all of this is that it provides a lucrative opportunity for us writers. We’ve been so busy freaking out about the state of publishing that we’ve missed the obvious: We should be the ones pulling the strings of the elections, not those silly billionaires.

All those billions of dollars candidates spent campaigning? Send that money to those of us who know how to craft a decent story. We’ll spin you a tale of tragedy and triumph, with a likable hero, just the right amount of humor, a sympathetic backstory, and page-turning action that will actually make you want to care about politics.

You want people going to the polls? Look at how many people rushed out to buy the last Harry Potter novel, because they just had to know how the story would end.

Oh, yeah. That’s the power of story.

Candidates for 2016 can start sending their checks to my P.O. box.

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I had a “Duh” moment at ICON last weekend. We were talking about conventions and fandom and such during a panel – maybe the gaming panel? – and someone in the audience commented that overall, fandom tended to be pretty accepting and inclusive.

It’s a claim I’ve heard a lot, and I think we as a community tend to pride ourselves on our inclusiveness. Heck, I mentioned in my speech at Worldcon how finding fandom felt like coming home, how I felt accepted and valued here in a way I never did back in high school.

And therein lies the logical flaw, which hadn’t quite crystallized in my mind until that conversation at ICON. Because fandom is not a utopia of acceptance and tolerance. True, it’s a place where I found acceptance. But the fact that I as a straight white male geek feel accepted and relatively safe here does not therefore prove that this is a safe or accepting community.

After all, the other place I felt accepted growing up was in the Boy Scouts…

I love this community, and I think we’ve made progress, but we have a long way to go. Most conventions I attend are still at least 95% white. Women continue to get harassed while men stand around asking why people have to make such a big deal about sexual harassment policies. Awards and “Best of” anthologies continue to be dominated by western (particularly U.S.) names. Our book covers fetishize women and whitewash or erase characters of color. And people who speak up about feeling excluded are accused of being oversensitive, searching for reasons to be offended, and being part of the PC police.

Fandom is accepting of a different subset of people than most other parts of my life, and as a member of that subset, I’m grateful. But I also think we have a lot more work to do to broaden that acceptance.

It’s Election Day here in the U.S. More importantly, tomorrow is “Thank Shadowstar, these %$*& campaign ads are finally OVER!!!!!” day.

To all eligible U.S. voters, I’m giving away an autographed copy of Libriomancer [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. All you have to do to enter is:

1. Vote
2. Leave a comment saying, “I voted.” (Or words to that effect.)

I’ll draw a winner probably this weekend.

If you already own Libriomancer, I’ll happily substitute one of my other books.

I got back home just before midnight last night, happy and utterly exhausted. Which is the goal when returning from a convention. ICON 37 was my second gig as Toastmaster, and I had a blast. I was co-toastmastering with Denny Lynch, and we ran our part of opening ceremonies as an improvised D&D session in which he had to rescue the guests of honor. I’m sorry to say that artist guest Mike Cole took an arrow to the knee. Author guest Steven Erikson chose to remain with the goblins.

There was much good programming. I got to talk about gaming and martial arts and writing, did a guest lecture for Paradise Icon, read an excerpt from Codex Born (nobody threw anything at me, so that’s a good sign), and interview our guests of honor.

But the best part was the people. From the moment when writers Cath Shaff-Stump and Shannon Ryan picked me up at the airport and whisked me out for pizza to the end when my liaisons Mark and Michelle McKibben forced me to eat yummy seafood and dessert before dropping me off, I was surrounded by wonderfully friendly SF/F geeks, and I loved it.

My favorite moment was when a ten-year-old goblin fan named Rhianna presented me with a crocheted Jig and Smudge. Smudge even has a clip so he can ride on your clothes. We talked about the goblins and conventions and books in general. She also gave me a lovely card with pictures she had drawn of the goblins.

Meeting someone who so loved a book you wrote is one of the best feelings in the world. So thank you, Rhianna, for helping to make my whole weekend.

Thanks also to Josh, Lindsay, Athena, Mark and Michelle, and everyone else who helped to make it such a fun weekend.

The downside is that as I was getting ready to board the plane, to come home, I got a message from my editor letting me know that thanks to hurricane Sandy, my plan to visit the DAW office this week wasn’t going to work out. That’s rather disappointing … though there’s a part of me that’s glad to have been able to just sleep in today, and to bum around without having to immediately hit the road again. And I’ll still be going out to speak at the library conference, which should be fun.

In conclusion, life is good, and I am sleepy.

Tomorrow morning, I’m off to Iowa for ICON 37, where I’ll be acting as co-Toastmaster. And then after I get back on Sunday night, I’ll be turning around and driving to New York to meet with my editor and agent, then speaking at the New York Library Association conference on Thursday. (At least, I hope that’s what I’ll be doing. Sending good thoughts to everyone dealing with Sandy and the aftermath out there.)

For anyone else who might be at ICON, my programming schedule looks like so. (Posting as much for my reference as yours, so I’ll have something to check when I’m trying to figure out where to go.)

• Friday, 7 p.m. – Opening Ceremonies
• Friday, 9 p.m. – Reblogging This to Signal Boost
• Saturday, 10 a.m. – Martial Arts for Writers
• Saturday, 11 a.m. – Paradise Lecture: Avoiding Stereotypes in Fantasy
• Saturday, 2 p.m. – Guest of Honor Interviews
• Saturday, 4 p.m. – …It’s How You Use It
• Saturday, 7 p.m. – Reading
• Sunday, Noon – Why Do We Game?
• Sunday, 3 p.m. – Closing Ceremonies

That ought to be enough to keep me from getting bored.

And in other long-awaited news, I’m happy to present the full video of Author Dungeons & Dragons, from ConFusion earlier this year. Just in case you felt like watching a room full of authors geek out, old school.