Coming Out #7: Brit Mandelo on Beyond Binary and We Wuz Pushed May 2, 2012
Posted by juliarios in : Coming Out, publications , 3commentsWelcome to Coming Out #7! Coming Out is a series of guest posts in which creators talk about specific newly available works. We based this loosely on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series, except, since we’re The Outer Alliance, you can expect all the projects to involve QUILTBAG people and/or content. Our guest poster this time is Brit Mandelo, editor of We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling and Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction.
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Coming Out #6: Sigrid Ellis on Chicks Dig Comics April 6, 2012
Posted by juliarios in : Coming Out, publications , 9commentsWelcome to Coming Out #6! Coming Out is a series of guest posts in which creators talk about specific newly available works. We based this loosely on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series, except, since we’re The Outer Alliance, you can expect all the projects to involve QUILTBAG people and/or content. Our guest poster this time is Sigrid Ellis, co-editor of Chicks Dig Comics.
Chicks Dig Comics follows the same format of the Hugo winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, co-edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea, but (as the astute reader may have guessed) the topic of this volume is comics. SF authors, comics creators, and artists share their experiences, analyze characters, and generally celebrate the awesomeness of comics. To whet your appetite, Sigrid Ellis offers her contribution to the collection.
Scheherazade’s Facade Excerpt by David Sklar April 3, 2012
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, publications , add a commentScheherazade’s Facade, an anthology of gender-bending fantasy stories, is in the last leg of a fundraising drive. It’s met its original Kickstarter goal and will be published! Hurray! Now they’re hoping to get up to $10,000 so they can produce a second volume of gender-bending science fiction stories. If you think this is a super idea, you can donate to the Kickstarter fund here until the 16th of April. At the $10 level, you’ll get an e-book copy of the first anthology. At the $25 level, you’ll get a trade paperback edition.
In case you’re curious about what sorts of things you can expect in the anthology, contributing author, David Sklar offers an excerpt of his story, “Lady Marmalade’s Special Place in Hell”. This is actually the second excerpt he’s offering. You can read the first excerpt on his LiveJournal, where he has also posted several entries about the story’s creation and long road to publication. And now for the OA exclusive second excerpt!
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Lady Marmalade’s Special Place in Hell (excerpt)
by David Sklar
I had pictures of Princess Buttercup, as a girl and as a boy, that I developed from my memories. When there were no other tormentors around, I showed these pictures to the people I met in Hell, but mostly I had to rely on my own eyes. I visited bearers of false witness and bearers of false coin; dealers of drugs, dealers of blackjack, and people who could not deal with themselves. And at last I came to the place in Hell for those who cast out their own children, where a middle-aged man with an angry face looked at Buttercup’s picture and said, “That freak? You won’t find him here.”
“So you know her?”
“Not as well as I thought.” I swear, I was afraid that scowl would cut the laces on my corset.
“No,” I answered wistfully—and more honestly than I should have—”Me neither, now that I think of it.”
“Were you one of Jonah’s fruity friends?” There was a scathing accusation in his voice, and I realized suddenly who I was talking to.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m a regular piña colada. But it seems to me, if you’re in Hell and she isn’t, you might want to rethink your attitude.”
“I don’t know how that faggot cheated the Devil,” he snapped.
Then I snapped too.
Now understand: when I made my way across Hell, I had to whip some people who didn’t really want it. I was where I was and I did what I had to do. But Princess Buttercup’s father was the first person I truly delighted in torturing.
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To read the rest of this story, plus stories by Sunny Moraine, Tanith Lee, Aliette de Bodard and others, make a Kickstarter pledge!
Coming Out #5: Trish Wooldridge & Kate Kaynak on UnCONventional March 19, 2012
Posted by juliarios in : Coming Out, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 1 comment so farWelcome to Coming Out #5! Coming Out is a series of guest posts in which creators talk about specific newly available works. We based this loosely on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series, except, since we’re The Outer Alliance, you can expect all the projects to involve QUILTBAG people and/or content. Our guest posters this time are Trisha Wooldridge and Kate Kaynak, editors of UnCONventional.
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When it comes to our idea behind the anthology, UnCONventional, Kate and I like to blame the Green Fairy at Arisia 2011. No, we didn’t attend the absinthe tasting, but this one woman’s beautiful costume got us thinking about worlds where conventions were just a cover for something more… supernatural. Something weird… okay, weirder than your usual SF/F/H… or even mundane convention or conference.
As I was trying to figure out what to write for our Coming Out blog, it struck me that there was this sense of an incidental sense of being “different” through all the stories, whether or not a QUILTBAG character was in them. For someone in each story, their idea of “normal” did not match with their surrounding culture’s idea of “normal,” nor even the definition of “normal” at each story’s event.
The many facets of difference and self-identity all made some amazing characters that caught the hearts of Kate and me, yet no matter how unusual certain traits of characters were to the reading audience, these were inherent to the character–and they didn’t necessarily even drive the plot of the story.
With the three short stories that did feature QUILTBAG characters, all three feature “incidental gayness.” None of us made our non-heteronormative traits an issue of the plot. They just were.
When I wrote “Photo of a Mermaid,” I already knew Rose and Hunter, my lesbian couple. They showed up as side characters in my novel-in-progress, Kelpie, and despite their brief on-page time, my writing group wanted to know more about them. So, when Kate invited me to work on UnCONventional with her, I had an idea in my head that I would tell one of their adventures.
Hunter is a photographer, a recovering alcoholic, and a witch. Rose is an award-winning actress that just happens to be part of a family with a lot of unexpected run-ins with the Faerie realm. Those particular character traits are what affect the unfolding plot at a photojournalism conference cruise in the Bahamas… that has a problematic incident with mermaids.
While Hunter and Rose’s love for each other is a prominent part of their characters – as is the love between their newfound friends Gary and Colin, their love and desire to keep each other safe is no different than any other spouse’s. And it’s that love that motivates the characters’ actions and how they deal with the sea fey.
Kimberly Long-Ewing’s short story, “M.U.S.E.,” has two QUILTBAG characters. One is Ben, a gay writer with a ” a fair balance of masculine and feminine traits.” The other character is Sappho, a freelance muse. Kim explains, “The Greeks portrayed the muses as all women. In my updated take on them, I decided that they would take on whatever appearance happened to inspire their writers and artists. So, Sappho flows from one gender presentation to another. She is a shape shifter. Sappho also blends masculine and feminine traits as needed. When she is ‘herself’, she is androgynous.”
Kim’s Sappho is gender fluid because she believes people are very much like that; the muse is just more extreme. “While I think that our gender identity is fairly stable over time in that we will consistently say, ‘I am this or that’, there are fluctuations in our expression of that identity, the specific masculine and feminine traits we express across situations, days, and years. Studies have shown that we become more androgynous with age; that is, the traits we select as describing ourselves become more of a mixture of masculine and feminine over time. I wanted to explore this idea with Sappho.”
The fact that Ben is gay is not central to the plot, which is something that Kim also likes because she has problems with heteronormative assumptions. “Why does he have to be heterosexual if I’m not making the story about homosexuality? I think it is important to represent minorities in stories without making that difference the central theme. We are a very diverse society and readers of speculative fiction are also a very diverse group.”
Danielle LeFevre’s “The Sirens,” features Olive, a lesbian who seems to be a side character but is critical to the story not just as motivation to the main character Saorise, but because she is “the first character who already knows who she is.” Kelly, the other secondary character, knows himself, but his purpose is to help Saorise figure out how to defeat the sirens who have arrived to bring chaos and death to a music festival in the desert. “Olive, despite her antics, is really in control of her own life, and thus can be a good friend to Saorise while she goes through this journey of self discovery.”
Olive’s sexuality is only mentioned briefly in the story, but it’s clearly a part of her character. Danielle is “one of those ‘voodoo’ character builders (as Nancy Kress calls us). When I’m ready to start a story, I have to really work at the plot and description, but characters come to me, already formed. Olive is no exception. I knew her past, her future, forwards and backwards as soon as I put the first words on the page. She’s spoiled, very used to getting her way, but also dependent on Saorise. […] Olive has pretty much known her whole life that she was different, and that was a good thing. She always wore crazy outfits that, later on, became fashion forward. And she always knew she didn’t like boys the way they liked her.”
Kate and I were thrilled with how many of our UnCONventional stories dealt with questioning people’s assumptions of “reality” and “normal.” We decided to turn the idea of the inherent weirdness of conferences/conventions on its head and found ourselves exploring as many facets of our own world as supernatural or alien ones.
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UnCONventional, edited by Kate Kaynak and Trisha Wooldridge, is published by Spencer Hill Press and available in trade paperback and ebook form. Find out more about the anthology and press, which welcomes QUILTBAG characters and submissions, at www.spencerhillpress.com.
Find out more about the specific authors here:
Trisha Wooldridge — www.anovelfriend.com
Kimberly Long-Ewing — www.mysticsheepstudios.com
Danielle LeFevre — www.writerling.com
Coming Out #4: Susan Jane Bigelow on Fly Into Fire February 29, 2012
Posted by juliarios in : Coming Out, publications , 1 comment so farWelcome to Coming Out #4! Coming Out is a series of guest posts in which creators talk about specific newly available works. We based this loosely on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series, except, since we’re The Outer Alliance, you can expect all the projects to involve QUILTBAG people and/or content. Our guest poster this time is Susan Jane Bigelow, author of Fly Into Fire.
Fly Into Fire is the sequel to 2011′s Broken (which received an honorable mention from Publishers Weekly for the best science fiction books of 2011), and features a trans protagonist.
Coming Out #3: T. C. Mill on A Spell of Passion or Fear February 6, 2012
Posted by juliarios in : Coming Out, publications , 2commentsWelcome to Coming Out #3! Coming Out is a series of guest posts in which creators talk about specific newly available works. We based this loosely on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series, except, since we’re The Outer Alliance, you can expect all the projects to involve QUILTBAG people and/or content. Our guest poster this time is T. C. Mill, author of A Spell of Passion or Fear.
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Describing my own stories is a skill I’m still coming into. When I talk about A Spell of Passion or Fear, frequently I stammer out “it’s steampunk” and realize too late that I’m giving the wrong impression. My conversational partner is far more likely to be envisioning Victoriana and turn-of-the-century technological fantasies than a story inspired by the work of Ancient Greek philosophers.
Not that Ancient Greece is barren soil when it comes to utopias (or dystopias) and technological wonders. Steam-powered automatons and clockwork computers, the core technologies of A Spell of Passion or Fear’s setting, weren’t unknown: Archytas of Tarentum created the world’s first automaton, a model of a bird that revolved with the help of compressed steam. More impressive ‘robots,’ if more speculative, are the statues of Daedalus and Hephaestus’s self-propelling tripods as cited in Aristotle’s Politics. And then, Plato’s Republic is the original utopia.
It is meant to be the ideal city-state. Its name, Kalliopolis, means “beautiful city.” Some aspects of it certainly sound utopian: the rulers call the people ‘providers and paymasters’ and are themselves ‘guardians,’ not masters, while each individual works at the tasks best suited to his or her natural talents and temperament—and Plato really meant ‘his or her.’ He promoted radical gender equality in his ideal city (partly thanks to incorporating this into my version of the Kalliopolis, A Spell of Passion or Fear is able to pass the Bechdel Test despite being an M/M romance, with the gender bias in protagonists that implies).
However, there are other aspects of the Kalliopolis that make it dystopian to modern eyes—censorship, deception by the rulers—for the good of the ruled, of course—and while some might approve of communal property, far fewer would enjoy the communal marriage practiced by the Guardians, where one’s partner is decided by a rigged lottery! As for same-sex relationships, while Plato doesn’t condemn attraction between men (in fact, Socrates and his companions speak at some length about the attractiveness of young men, more than I imagine is strictly necessary to convey their philosophical points…), he cautioned against the strong passions aroused by romantic and sexual love. Men and women might be ‘married’ to produce the next generation, but for same-sex couples the Kalliopolis would seek to enforce chaste, ‘Platonic’ love, and anyone who behaved otherwise would be risking degeneracy, even corruption.
In short, from the moment I discovered The Republic (in an introductory philosophy course), I knew I had a story on my hands. What’s more, it looked like the humanoid automatons marching through my head like steam-powered knights—a vision I had failed to put words to for the past two years—had found a home at last. The ideal citizens of the Kalliopolis seemed to be mechanical, going about their duties without contrary personal desires or critique of the system. And what about the less-than-ideal, the human? Plato repeatedly states that overall harmony in the Kalliopolis is more important than the happiness of individual citizens. Yet those individuals meant to live lives of sacrifice for the greater good might well decide to take their own chances at happiness.
This is the choice faced by my story’s characters: Ariston, a warrior from the last generation of human Guardians now replaced by ‘perfect’ machines, and Phaleas, born into desperate poverty but rescued by the automata and now serving them at their Citadel. Now Ariston has to fend for himself, while coming to terms with his corruption, and the opposite problem faces Phaleas: he is afraid of becoming too perfect, of losing his humanity among the Guardians. After they meet each other during an ill-fated escape attempt, their relationship itself becomes an act of rebellion. Yet oppressive as it is, the Kalliopolis remains a place of safety and order in the midst of a wasteland surrounded by enemy states, and both Phaleas and Ariston once felt at home there. They face the challenges that await anyone on the wrong side of a utopia: they want to be free of it even as they love its ideals, and they’re afraid of losing themselves to it while also fearing the unknown world beyond.
That’s the conflict at the core of A Spell of Passion or Fear, which developed after I had chosen its title. Once I knew I had a story about the Republic, I came across a passage that struck me—about the tragic case of people who are prevented from pursuing their beliefs through sorcery or enchantment, ‘spells of pleasure or fear’ (413c). My inner fantasy fan was delighted, though my fellow students and I debated whether Plato meant real spells, according to the superstitions of the day, or was only speaking figuratively. In the story, Ariston and Phaleas do the same—but in the end, the Kalliopolis I’ve written about contains only technological wizardry, not sorcerers. A Spell of Passion or Fear isn’t high fantasy, just—as I enjoy clarifying—your run of the mill post-apocalyptic dystopian steampunk M/M romance story inspired by classic Greek philosophy.
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T.C. Mill is a student of philosophy and politics who dreams of one day getting a job with her degree. In the meantime, she writes. Besides A Spell of Passion or Fear, she is the author of After the War (Dreamspinner 2011) and the novel Last of the Lesser Kings (Silver Publishing 2012, under the name T.L.K. Arkenberg). Her stream of consciousness can be found at mumblingsage.tumblr.com and includes social activism, British TV, and internet memes.
A Spell of Passion or Fear is available in e-book format from Dreamspinner Press.
Coming Out #2: Jennifer Pelland on Machine January 31, 2012
Posted by juliarios in : Coming Out, publications , 2commentsWelcome to Coming Out #2! Coming Out is a series of guest posts in which creators talk about specific newly available works. We based this loosely on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series, except, since we’re The Outer Alliance, you can expect all the projects to involve QUILTBAG people and/or content. Our guest poster this time is Jennifer Pelland, author of Machine.
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Machine
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why everyone should fall in with kinky genderqueer pagans in their early 20s
by Jennifer Pelland
Binaries suck.
Although I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.
I started getting my education in the fallacy of binaries when several biracial friends in the early- and mid-80s taught me that A + B did not equal AB, but rather that 1 + 1 equaled 1. (In other words, a human being cannot be two diametrically-opposed halves sutured down the middle — a human being
can only be a whole, indivisible person.) That education continued in college with my own burgeoning bisexuality, although I’ll admit that before I came to that realization about myself, I was one of those annoying people who thought that bisexuals should just pick a side and not be so damned indecisive.
Then, just as I was graduating from college, I fell in with the pagans, and in Boston at that time, the intersection of the pagan and bisexual circles was a queer pagan group called Q-Moon. In Q-Moon, I met several “gender-fuck” transsexuals, as they called the movement at the time, several of whom were into sacred sexuality and BDSM. And they blew the lid off of my brain in the best possible way.
Picture a 21-year-old recent women’s college graduate having lunch with one of these new friends, who asks her, “Have you ever questioned your gender identity?” No, I hadn’t. The new friend smiles and asks, “Why?”
Whoa.
Later on during that same lunch, picture the 21-year-old’s face as her new friend says, “I really want to have a cunt, but I have nothing against my cock. And that doesn’t make me any less a woman.”
Again, whoa.
Picture a ritual in someone’s basement for that same new friend, a dedication to a goddess, involving a nude postulant,chakra anointing, and the sacred consumption of estrogen pills. Picture one member of the circle being kept to the side throughout the proceedings because she’s currently undergoing a BDSM initiation of her own, involving bondage and a horse-tailed butt plug.
Picture the 21-year-old’s brain exploding like the Death Star.
Fast-forward fifteen years. There I am, coming up with the cast of characters for a novel about love, loss, and illegal body-hacking. Of course there’s going to be a character who wants both a cunt and a cock. Of course there are going to be characters with fluid sexuality. Of course there’s going to be a character who erases gender altogether. Of course there’s extreme BDSM. Of course my protagonist, a biracial lesbian, is going to get the lid blown off of her brain by all of this. And of course I’m going to feel like I didn’t go far enough.
So I would like to take a moment to thank the wonderful people of Q-Moon for giving this cisgendered, vanilla, bisexual feminist the education of a lifetime. I honestly think I’m a better person for having been forced to explain why I’ve never questioned my gender identity. Why should people outside the so-called “normal” paradigm be the only ones who routinely have to do that? And I honestly think I’m a better person for being exposed to such a bold group of people who went out of their way to make others uncomfortable with their gender nonconformity. I may not have emulated them, but I learned a lot from them. Most importantly, from them I learned that terms like “gender” and “sexuality” are far broader than their dictionary definitions would lead one to believe, and that we do the human species a disservice by pretending that those definitions are accurate and complete.
To conclude, I’d like to encourage all young people out there who aren’t already kinky genderqueer pagans to find a similar group to fall in with during your most impressionable years. You can’t reassemble a blown mind, and that’s a damned good thing.
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Jennifer Pelland lives outside Boston with an Andy, three cats, an impractical amount of books, and an ever-growing collection of belly dance gear and radio theater scripts. She’s garnered two Nebula nominations, and many of her short stories were collected in Unwelcome Bodies, put out by Apex in 2008.
Machine is available in paperback and as an e-book from Apex Book Company.
Stories! Free for your enjoyment! November 25, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : links, publications, queer-friendly publishers , 5commentsIn the United States, today is commercially known as Black Friday. It’s a day when people are urged to buy All The Things. Ads on television, in newspapers, and on billboards pester us for weeks in anticipation of this day. Stores plan giant sales. Some of them open at midnight, others at four or five in the morning. All the messages tell us that we should be embracing our national identity as consumers, and that Christmas (one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year for the culturally Christian among us) is officially coming.
Me? I’m a bit of a rebel. I hate shopping usually, and I loathe giant crowds. I tend to fall by default into the segment of the population which calls this day Buy Nothing Day. Some of my compatriots feel passionately political about their choice. I mostly just feel relieved not to be in the middle of that fevered mess of acquisition. This year, though, I thought maybe it would be fun to do a little more. Instead of just quietly hiding from the world, or (horror of horrors) going out and joining the hordes of consumers, what if I offered an alternative? Whether or not you’re in the US, if you’d rather spend a bit of time reading free fiction than shopping today (or even in addition to shopping), this post is for you.
One of the neat things about the OA is that so many of the members are writers as well as readers. This means that, as a group, we produce a lot of awesome fiction. Much of that is for sale, but thanks to this wonderful internet, there’s a lot of great free stuff out there, too. Below are a few stories by OA members which have appeared online this month. Enjoy!
“Conjuring Shadows” by Craig Laurance Gidney is a story about a transgender conjure woman in 1920s Harlem. Since November is the month in which the Transgender Day of Remembrance falls, I thought we’d lead with this one. It’s a lovely fantasy, which will take only a few minutes to read, but which might linger in your mind for quite a while after you’ve finished it. You may read it at Expanded Horizons (and if you’re unfamiliar with that magazine, I highly recommend it in general. It’s full of gems, and makes a point of celebrating diversity in specfic).
“Cockatrice Girl Meets Statue Boy” by Willow Fagan is a funny and sweet story about… well, the title says it all. It doesn’t feature overtly QUILTBAG content, but it does playfully examine gender assumptions, and the author identifies as genderqueer. The bio accompanying this story on the Cast of Wonders page explains that, “… they feel more like a pirate princess than like a man or a woman.” Rock on, Pirate Princess Willow! I love that description! You may listen to this story in two parts here and here.
“Eight” by Corinne Duyvis is a more somber exploration of personal sacrifice, war, and alternate timelines. The protagonist is a bisexual woman, though this is neither integral to the plot, nor really mentioned in more than a passing sentence. This is a story which suggests a hundred other stories, and given its subject matter and prose style, it might especially appeal to fans of Elizabeth Bear’s Jenny Casey books. “Eight” is available at Strange Horizons.
“The Day Alan Turing Came Out” by Leonard Richardson explores alternate timelines from a different perspective. This one has a bittersweetness, which comes from knowing that in our current timeline, history unfolded less pleasantly. This story first appeared in the Retro Spec: tales of fantasy and nostalgia, but the author has now put it up on his own website. If you are curious about the background on this one, you can find a brief interview with Leonard as part of the OA Spotlight post about Retro Spec.
That’s all I’ve got for today, but if you have recommendations for great free fiction, I’d love to see them! Please consider leaving them in the comments!
Coming Out #1: Catherine Lundoff on A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace October 25, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : Coming Out, publications , 2commentsWelcome to Coming Out #1! Coming Out is a series of guest posts in which creators talk about specific newly available works. We based this loosely on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series, except, since we’re The Outer Alliance, you can expect all the projects to involve QUILTBAG people and/or content. Our first guest poster is Catherine Lundoff, writing about her new collection, A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace.
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I suspect it’s easier to find a single overarching “Big Idea” in a novel than in a collection of short fiction. Part of me wanted to be completely smart-alecky and say, “It’s a bunch of stories by Me” and leave the whole Big Idea notion at that.
But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized that the book does have some overarching common themes. It represents a certain kind of story that I’ve written over the course of the last sixteen years. All the stories in this book have lesbian or queer female protagonists. And all of those characters appear in fictional roles commonly assigned to men: pirate, playwright, private detective, bard, swordswoman. Some of them are very handy with a sword. Some of them are not. Still it is one of the other elements they all have in common: they’re doing the kind of things that I would have loved to read about when I was a teenager and power-reading my way through novels by Dumas, Sabatini, Pyle and Hope. I always loved a good swashbuckler, full of sword fights and deeds of derring-do, where honor trumps almost everything else.
But in those stories, women are love interests to be rescued, or more rarely, villains who are killed like Dumas’ Milady. I always liked Milady. She got a raw deal. She was an entirely memorable character and fiercely, uncompromisingly strong. When I started writing, I wanted to write about characters who shared some of those characteristics: strong women, fighters, though not always with swords. Women I could relate to, but who weren’t me. I tend to write to write about queer women because that’s how many of my characters come to me. The truth is, though, that I want to write about queer women doing things that are about doing things. A writer friend recently pointed out that the majority of my characters take being queer for granted. It’s part of who they are, but it’s not the engine that drives the plot. That would be my worldview working its way through my imagination and looking for inspiration in all sorts of places.
My inspiration for these particular stories was fairly wide-ranging. Some were written because I read about a real woman who fascinated me, like Julie d’Aubigny La Maupin, seventeenth century opera singer and professional duelist or her contemporary, Caribbean pirate Jacquotte Delahaye. Other stories were inspired by editorial guidelines like the one I wrote for the themed anthology that didn’t happen: supernatural mysteries with lesbian protagonists stylistically influenced by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.
Story inspirations are always a grab-bag, at least for me. I run across a reference and think “what if?” Or a first line comes to me out of the blue. From there, if all goes well, I get a scene, a paragraph or two that kicks things off. After that it’s all about trying to figure out what would happen next to this protagonist in this given situation. I’m not one of those writers who know how the story ends when I start it. I have to follow it on all its twists and turns. Sometimes, the writing flows easily and a story gets written in a few sessions. Sometimes, I go through multiple false starts, working and reworking voice, plot and perspective before the story gels.
For me, putting a collection of those same stories together is all about opportunity. First, I figure out what I have that’s available from the stories I’ve already written: nothing that’s under contract that hasn’t been published yet and which hasn’t reverted back to me, for example. Then I need something to tie the work together so it’s a matter of figuring out what these particular stories have in common. Some will just jump out at me as playing on themes I like to work with, while others are just as clearly a bad fit.
At that point, I also need to figure out what I have that’s unpublished; I always want to give my readers something new. Then once all the selecting and editing and writing of individual stories is done, I get to tackle the magic of story order. Trying to figure out what stories will flow into each other without jarring the reader out of the text is an art in itself.
The truth is, though, that hardly anyone ever reads stories in the order I put them in, but the illusion of control is part of the fun of being a writer in the first place, isn’t it?
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Catherine Lundoff is the award-winning author of Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing (Lethe Press, 2007), Night’s Kiss (Lethe Press, 2009) and A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2011). She is also the editor of Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories (Lethe Press, 2008) and co-editor, with JoSelle Vanderhooft, of Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic (Drollerie Press/Lethe Press 2011). Her website can be found at www.catherinelundoff.com.
A few Friday tidbits June 24, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, events, links, news, publications , 1 comment so farFollowing up on the internet hoaxes discussion, here are two links sent in by JoSelle Vanderhooft:
A Gay (Straight) Girl (Man) in Damascus (Edinburgh) by Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui is an explanation of the damage the Amina hoax did from two “New York based writers and freelance-journalists that submitted a blood test and birth certificate to affirm that the above thoughts are their own analysis based on a lifetime of Arab and or queer and or American and or woman identification.”
White Privilege and the ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ is an NPR segment in which Brian Spears (a white man) talks about white male privilege and why it’s not okay to co-opt the voices of marginalized people.
Sara Amis will be moderating a Feminist SF Twitter chat on Sunday at 2pm EST. The theme of this discussion is worldbuilding. If you want to participate, just follow the FeministSF hashtag.
And while we’re talking about #FeministSF, NPR is asking people to share their favorite SF/F books with the goal of ultimately making a top 100 books list. Nicola Griffith reminds everyone to consider including books by women on the list. I’ll add a bid for considering including books by queer people and people of color.
Finally, Ladies of Trade Town is available now at HarpHaven Publishing. I talked to Lee Martindale about this in the big Gaylaxicon podcast episode–it’s an anthology of stories about the oldest profession, with stories by Catherine Lundoff and Cecilia Tan.