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Wrote a long blog post. Torn about whether or not to post it. So for now, have a photobombing cat (source):

I’ve had several conventions ask me for Guest of Honor suggestions lately, so I figured I’d do some public brainstorming. The following are some folks I think would make excellent SF/F convention or conference guests.

• Nnedi Okorafor: Her books have won multiple awards, including the World Fantasy Award. I’ve read, loved, and reviewed several of her books here. She’s also a professor of creative writing at the University of Buffalo.
• Amal El-Mohtar: El-Mohtar is an award-winning poet, editor of Goblin Fruit, and a Nebula-nominated author of more than a dozen well-reviewed short stories. She’s a thoughtful and outspoken member of the SF/F community with a broad range of experience.
• Ken Liu: Liu has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy … basically, the dude has ALL THE AWARDS for his short fiction, and his first novel will be coming out in 2015. He also writes poetry, and has done some translation of Chinese fiction into English. I would love to see more discussion of translated fiction at conventions.
• Charles A. Tan: Tan was the associate editor for the award-nominated World SF Blog. He’s edited several collections of Phillipine speculative fiction. He’s very active in SF/F, contributing to sites such as SF Signal, Fantasy Magazine, the Shirley Jackson Awards, and more.
• Mary Robinette Kowal: I love Kowal’s fiction. (Review here.) She’s also won the Campbell Award for best new writer and the Hugo Award for best short story. In addition to fiction, she does professional audio book narration, and has a second career as a puppeteer. She was SFWA vice-president, and has served as art director for two different magazines. Having worked with her, I can confirm that she’s an excellent presenter and performer.
• Kameron Hurley: Hurley’s novels have been nominated for the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards. She’s currently on the Hugo Award ballot for her essay, We Have Always Fought, making her the first person ever (I believe) to be nominated for the Hugo for a blog post.
• Keith R. A. DeCandido: I don’t think I’ve ever attended a smaller/local-type convention that featured a tie-in writer as author guest of honor. Why is that? DeCandido has written for Starcraft, Buffy, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Farscape, Firefly, and more. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want the chance to pick this man’s brain at a convention!
• Aliette de Bodard: De Bodard has won the Nebula, Locus, BSFA, and Writers of the Future awards, and has been nominated for several others. She was a contributor to the World SF Blog, and her personal blog is on my Must Read list.
• Tansy Rayner Roberts: Roberts has at least five SF/F novels in print, and also writes crime fiction under a pseudonym. She’s won the Aurealis Award, the Ditmar, the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, and is part of the award-winning Galactic Suburbia podcast.
• Mary Anne Mohanraj: Founded Strange Horizons, one of the first pro-paying online SF/F zines. Founded the Speculative Literature Foundation. Her bibliography includes edited works, short fiction collections, novels, poetry, and more.
• Nisi Shawl: Tiptree award-winning author for her short fiction collection Filter House. Shawl is also the co-author with Cynthia Ward of Writing the Other. She also reviews SF/F for The Seattle Times, and is a board member for Clarion West.
• Charlie Jane Anders: Anders has received the Hugo, Lambda, and Emperor Norton awards. In addition to being a critically acclaimed author, she’s also co-editor of the popular site io9 and organizes the Writers With Drinks series.
• Malinda Lo: Lo writes YA science fiction and fantasy, and a number of people have noted the need for more YA guests of honor. Lo is also the cofounder of Diversity in YA, and has written many well-researched blog posts about diversity and representation.

Who else would you like to see as convention guests of honor? I’m particularly interested in suggestions for folks who — for whatever reason — might otherwise be overlooked.

I talked about representation in my keynote at Pikes Peak Writers Conference, and also participated on a panel about diversity with Chuck Wendig, Gail Carriger, and Carol Berg. One of the questions that came up during the panel and afterward was about the line between writing diverse stories and cultural appropriation, and whether there were stories and characters it’s just not okay for someone to write about?

My first response is that I hope I’m not the first person you asked. I’ve thought and read and talked about these issues a fair amount, but coming to the straight white guy for any sort of authoritative answer about appropriation is all kinds of problematic. I strongly suggest starting with resources like:

• Should White People Write About People of Color? by Malinda Lo
• Appropriate Cultural Appropriation, by Nisi Shawl
• Writing the Other, by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward
• Cultural Appropriation, by Aliette de Bodard
• On the topic of cultural appropriation in fantasy, what IS the line…? from the MedievalPOC Tumblr
• Diversity in Fantasy  Mine, by Cindy Pon
• And in a shameless plug for my authors, I’d encourage folks to check out Invisible

ETA: I’d also recommend Ada Hoffmann’s response to this post: Autism and Appropriation

I do believe stories should reflect the diversity of our world. To do otherwise suggests a lack of imagination, a barren and narrow vision. It’s lazy storytelling.

It’s important to write about characters and cultures that are different from our own. It’s even more important to do so respectfully and well, to write fully-realized characters instead of caricatures and stereotypes and tokens. That means paying attention and listening. It also means taking the risk that someone will tell you that you got it wrong. Sure, that can be hard to hear, but welcome to writing. I’ve been on the receiving end of such criticism more than once. It’s not fun, but most of the time — if I don’t let my ego and defensiveness get in the way — I come away with a better understanding than before. I come away a better writer. And shouldn’t we always be working to improve?

When I was speaking about diversity and appropriation at the conference, one of the things that came to mind was Kevin Smith’s movie Chasing Amy. I remember years ago talking to a bisexual friend who was upset by the movie. Among other things, she said, “He’s trying to tell our stories.”

In Chasing Amy, our protagonist Holden falls for a woman named Alyssa, who is identified as a lesbian. She ends up falling for him, and the movie tells the story of their relationship, including Alyssa’s conflicts over Holden, and backlash from other lesbians. When I first watched the movie, I saw it as entertainment. My friend saw her life and experiences and identity being misunderstood and  misrepresented by a man who wasn’t a part of that community.

It’s the difference between “I want to include you in my stories” and “I want to tell your stories.”

Another facet of the conversation: when talking about autism in fiction, the titles I see people recommending again and again are often written by neurotypical authors. I wouldn’t say that automatically means these authors are appropriating the stories of people with autism. Some of those stories are very thoughtful and well-researched. But it troubles me to see whose voices are being promoted, and whose are being ignored. And while some of those stories may be well-researched, others are not. They portray a shallow understanding of autism, reinforcing myths and cliches for the entertainment and consumption of neurotypical readers.

That’s another piece of what appropriation means to me. Appropriation is when I take a part of your identity, your culture, your history, and I use it to create a story that isn’t for you.

In Boy Scouts, we had a service group called the Order of the Arrow, which was supposed to be based on Native American ceremonies and cultures. We dressed in headdresses and regalia, we donned face paint, we performed our own ceremonies… Not once can I recall seeing a Native American at an Order of the Arrow event. Not once did we really stop to talk about the cultures whose trappings we were playing with, or the meaning of those trappings.

I think most of us took OA seriously, and the group did a lot of good service work. But we also appropriated aspects of Native American cultures and wore them like costumes from a Halloween store.

We’ve all read stories that do the same thing. They play with the “shiny bits” of a culture without respect or understanding. They perpetuate the exoticization and fetishization of the other.

I don’t have any easy answers, but I think it’s on all of us to continually work to do better. For authors, that means writing honestly and respectfully about the world. It means doing our research. It also means listening, and not just to me. If you’ve read this entire post, thank you, but please don’t stop here.

And if you have additional resources or thoughts, please feel free to share them in the comments. Thank you.

Dani Colman has an article called The Problem with False Feminism, in which she talks about the movie Frozen and why 1) she hated it and 2) it isn’t a “feminist” movie. It’s a long, well-researched article, and Colman makes some valid points. While I don’t agree with all of what she says — particularly when it comes to her description of Anna and Elsa, which feels like victim-blaming to me — I think some of the things she points out are worth thinking about.

There’s one particular point I want to talk about, though. Colman discusses the praise being heaped on Frozen, and responds to it point by point. Toward the end, she gets to the following:

We get to hear the words, “You can’t marry a man you just met!”

Oh, and do we ever. It’s actually one of the few moments in the film I enjoyed: when Anna falls over herself with enthusiasm for her whirlwind engagement to Hans, and Elsa reacts with unfettered horror. We’ve established that Anna is an idiot, but at least the voice of reason is somewhere in the room. We later hear the same words echoed by Kristoff — a lot — and, in a different form, by Hans himself when he reveals his true colours.

It’s a lambasting of the Disney princess tradition, and theoretically a fairly incisive one. You shouldn’t marry a man you just met. It’s unquestionably stupid, and poking fun at the fact that Disney has been not-so-subtly encouraging that approach for decades is a smart move. I mean, come on: how many Disney princesses or leading ladies have fallen in love at first sight with a man they barely know?

Four. That’s how many. Rather than boring you with more tables, I’ll just name them: Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora and Ariel. Disney ladies actually tend towards quite extended courtships, and the men are more likely to fall in love at first sight than the women are…

Fair enough. But there’s another message here, and it isn’t just about falling for a man you just met. It’s about the fact that the charming fellow you just met — the man who flatters you, says all the right things, and makes you feel so amazing — turns out to be flat-out evil.

Welcome to the reality of domestic violence. Unlike most Disney villains, batterers don’t come with their own foreboding soundtrack. They don’t sneer like Scar and Gaston, or twirl their mustaches like Jafar. They’re not openly slimy like Clayton.

They’re charming. They’ve learned how to don that mask, how to flatter and manipulate and say just the right thing. They look completely normal. They deliberately seek out victims they think they can control … and what better target than socially awkward, isolated, hopeful Anna?

It’s no coincidence that “Quick Involvement” is one of the potential characteristics of an abusive relationship. This does not mean everyone who had a whirlwind romance is in an abusive relationship, by the way. Only that this tends to be one aspect of such relationships. It’s one of many tactics and strategies batterers use.

I’ve been talking lately about the power and importance of story. Story is how we relate to and understand the world. Whatever else Disney did or didn’t do in Frozen, they provided a story to help understand how what starts out as a perfect relationship can turn into a nightmare. How someone like Hans can be so cruel behind closed doors, but play the perfect gentleman as soon as he sets foot in public.

Whatever else the movie did or didn’t get right, I’m grateful for that story.