“Her Mother’s Child” was published in Kaleidotrope today.
Kaleidotrope publishes mostly speculative fiction and prefers unconventional stories. My story, published in their summer 2015 issue, features a coming-of-age tale in a gently magical secondary-world setting, featuring goddess spirituality, queer perspectives, and a protagonist with an unusual disability.
Ian Wood of Novellum has posted an entirely negative review of The Invisible Orientation. In part, it reads as follows:
I am completely open to the possibility that this is an orientation rather than a condition. The problem for me was that this author comprehensively failed to make her case. I started in on this book hoping to learn something about his topic and I finished it (well, finished half of it before I gave up on it!) precisely as uninformed at the end as I had been at the beginning – or perhaps more accurately, no more informed than I was before I read it, and worse, no more convinced.
One problem with it was that is was one of the driest tomes I have ever laid eyes on. It was like reading a scientific paper, but without any science in it, leaving only stilted semi-scientific language, but with no vigorously beating heart of solid science underlying it. There were quotations, and references, and definitions galore, but nothing from scientific research. Almost worse than that for a book of this nature, it had absolutely no personal accounts whatsoever, not even that of the author! Not in the portion I read anyway. I think I would have learned a lot more, and empathized a lot more if I could have heard from people who experience this phenomenon/condition/orientation, and been able to read their input.
Though I don’t think it’s dignified or professional to argue with reviews, I do think it’s irresponsible for folks like this to claim “the book has absolutely no [x] whatsoever” while admitting to having read only parts of it. Especially since the book opens with personal content; the introduction is the only explicitly autobiographical section, though. I didn’t want the book to seem like a personal account; there are plenty of those on the Internet on asexuality blogs, so I only included a little bit of autobiographical info for context. The aforementioned “quotations” are also all other people’s personal content through box-quote anecdotes, which many other readers said they found really relatable and humanizing.
This fellow also mocked some data tables’ failure to total 100% of people surveyed, so it looks like he didn’t quite grasp what they were measuring. The tables were labeled to indicate that survey participants were allowed to pick more than one answer, which of course means numbers aren’t being represented as mutually exclusive parts of the whole. He asserts that this is confusing and contradictory, but I haven’t run across any other reviewers who were confused and said so. Hopefully that wasn’t the impression other readers got.
For the record, I don’t mind negative reviews at all. If someone doesn’t like a book or finds it too boring to read all of, that just means I didn’t satisfy that person’s taste; I know not everyone will find my tone engaging. And I know some people will complain that it’s not what they wanted (for example, some people’s reviews have said they wanted more personal content, while others said they wanted it to be more academic). But I do find it disappointing when someone misrepresents my book as failing to contain information it does contain, suggests that its numbers not adding up makes its message laughable or questionable, or throws out various “zinger” questions that they present as unanswered/unanswerable (“If a person is asexual, why are they identifying with any sexually-oriented group? The author doesn’t tackle this”), even though they are explicitly addressed (perhaps in the parts that the reviewer readily admits to not reading).
Folks who wonder if this reviewer is right about my total lack of scientific support are welcome to read any of the slightly more than two dozen scientific and academic papers I quoted (with footnotes) and listed in the bibliography. It is admittedly not a “scientific” or “academic” book; those exist already, while a layperson’s guide did not.
For anyone who mistook my book as universally beloved, you should know that this fellow and a small but not insignificant group of one-star reviewers do exist. 🙂
I contributed a few quotes to an overall article on the asexuality movement published this week by A Plus.
Please read this lovely article here.
I attended the 2015 North American Asexuality Conference in Toronto this year and gave a workshop called “Handling Detractors.”
My workshop was very low-key; I just passed out index cards, got people to write down a comment that had been said to them about their asexual-spectrum or aromantic-spectrum identity, and collected them in an envelope, then pulled them out one by one to talk about them with the attendees. I had a pretty big audience and everyone was very responsive; I was only talking maybe half the time. I enjoyed hearing everyone’s perspectives and trying to give some advice on how to handle these comments. It went very well.
Besides my workshop, I had a table for my book.
I collected names to give away two hardcovers and two audio copies of the book. Quite a few people already owned the book and had brought it with them, and they got me to sign it. It was pretty amazing.
Besides those two things, I went to several other workshops: Explaining Asexuality to Non-Aces, Ace-Friendly LGBTQ Organizations, Asexuality and Social Media, and Asexuality and Feminism. Plus I got to make some new friends, hang out at restaurants, collect some great items from other aces, and have some wonderful conversations. Asexual Outreach did a great thing here and I hope they continue to get the message out there.
I’m in Toronto! Here I am for the second year of hosting a session at the North American Asexuality Conference.
Asexual Outreach is hosting this conference and so far everything’s been pretty great–I made it to Canada with a minimum of frustration and confusion and tomorrow I’ll be doing a nice workshop on handling detractors. I think I’m not going to be recording it because of the nature of the material we’ll be covering–just a low-key discussion about what kinds of objections we all face and what we should say in response.
And I even got a cheap place to stay by renting one of the empty dorms at the college! Here I am celebrating that I didn’t get lost going out for food.
I’d also like to do a raffle to win a copy of my book but we’ll see what happens.
This month I did a video that gives short story publishing tips and takes you through a tutorial on using The (Submission) Grinder to find good markets for your work!
This is the first time I’ve used an application to do extensive screen capture, and it was a pain, so I hope people find it useful!
Sometimes when a book (or other form of media) completely rocks my world, I think about what core elements inspired that reaction from me and what I can learn from it that I can apply in my own writing. On rare occasions I’ll admire a creator’s skills in setting and worldbuilding and artistic medium choices (word artistry in books, art style in visual media), but first and foremost, a work that grabs me is almost always about the characters.
So I just put together a short list of five things I enjoy seeing in characters–things that make me stay for their stories and hang onto their words.
1. They have a past.
Good characters, for me, never feel like they started living when the author began typing page one. They have a past, and the fact that they have a past is clear from how they act and interact (even if we, the consumers of the media, do not know what that past is). They have grown from birth to their current position in life affecting and being affected by their reality, and you can see evidence of that. And it must not be one-dimensional, like a disaster defining the entirety of who a person is as a trauma victim or a person who thinks of nothing but revenge. Their past must be complicated and formative, and must be woven into who the character is.
2. They have a future.
Everybody I want to hear stories about wants something. They’re going somewhere. If they aren’t sure where they’re going, they have something to say about that, too. Good characters are being framed in the context of their media at what is theoretically the most interesting part of their life–when they’re going from now to later, for better or for worse, and they are showing us how they’re moving forward. Good characters imagine their futures and have opinions or aspirations about getting there.
3. They have relationships.
Stories are rarely about one person who doesn’t interact with others (and has never done so). Good characters should have history and current feelings regarding other characters and those relationships should be complicated. That is not to say they have to be messy or negative; it’s just that organic relationships in real life are an amalgam of many factors, and fictional relationships should be similar. Authors should know (though not necessarily reveal) how every important character met every other important character, what they like and dislike about each other, what important things they have done together, and what they want from each other. And the real skill comes in (hand in hand with item 1 above) when authors make us feel what those relationships are in the spaces between the words without spelling them out necessarily (though sometimes explicit explaining happens).
4. They have quirks, attitudes, opinions, thoughts, and actions.
In real life, people have inside jokes; they have gestures; they have favorite foods; they have hobbies; they have political affiliations (sometimes); they have religions (sometimes); they think and do certain things in their lives that reflect what’s going on in their heads. A good character always has a mental life as well as a set of actions and words we can observe. And even if we are not partial to that mental life, evidence of it must exist. That is not to say people have to fall into traditional boxes or that all opinions have to be consistent with other opinions (cheese knows we all know inconsistent people in real life!), but people have to internally make sense and externally reflect that they are alive. They might have speech patterns that differentiate them from other characters, or fashion preferences, or always wear a certain item of jewelry, or have a talent or a challenge or an allergy. These parts of good characters flow naturally from who they are as people; they’re never just collections of attributes stuck together on a stick figure. Good characters have these quirks, etc., and they make sense with what we learn about them in the story.
5. They change.
Hand in hand with number 2 above, as good characters go toward their futures, they are changed by what happens to them, change themselves, or try to change themselves. Even very settled, established characters who exude stability by not changing very much in a story still need to demonstrate that they can learn, or might be changed in small ways by helping others change more radically. Completely static characters aren’t just boring; they aren’t realistic as people. We love seeing people change, even if it’s not for the better and can’t be called inspirational. We tune in for other people’s stories because we want to watch them move from one place in their personal journeys to the next, and we are unlikely to enjoy the ride if the travelers learn nothing and end up back where they started.
There are other less generalizable elements of characters that I tend to personally latch onto, but these are the boiled-down simplified versions of character traits I can identify in pieces that have moved me in extraordinary ways. If I’m just not into a story, there’s probably no one in it who feels real to me, and the above five items are what I think makes a character feel like a person. If I believe in a character, I might care about them even if I don’t like them, and once that happens, I’ll likely tune in to watch them do whatever they’re doing . . . no matter what it is.
Here’s something a little different from my usual: I’m offering a video about romance tropes in fiction and how they can sometimes send damaging messages to people about what real-life romance is and what place it should occupy in our lives. Informed primarily from an aromantic perspective–meaning that I’m a person who rarely sees herself in fictional narratives and is affected more negatively by certain messages about romance the way it is currently handled in fiction.
The big takeaway from this video is that we need more important friendships in our fiction! And fewer assumptions about the inevitability of romance and the heteronormative assumption!
In May 2005, after being inspired by some non-traditional text-heavy webcomics, I decided that I too could tell stories in graphic format, and my webcomic Negative One was born.
It was just an experiment for the first month or so; I wanted to see if I could do it, and I knew that webcomic audiences tend to get rabid if artists don’t update on time, so keeping to a set schedule was very important to me. But I settled into it easily and managed to bang out a new issue every Friday for the first month. I can handle this, I thought. And handle it I did.
For the next ten years.
On May 20, 2015, Negative One celebrates ten years of weekly updates, without having ever missed an issue, been late, or gone on hiatus. That’s 522 issues. 11,400 panels. And a lot of busy Fridays. I’m holding a contest to celebrate. There will be three prizewinners, with winners being allowed to pick from comic-related gifts/art or just store credit to any online retailer. Prizes are worth $40, $20, and $10 respectively. And there are multiple ways to enter–taking a quiz, sending me fan art, submitting questions for the characters to answer . . . it’s all in the link!
| ENTER |
For the folks who’ve never read my webcomic before, I want to tell you a little about why it’s special and maybe entice you to read it. Since the contest to win prizes is open for over a month, there’s time to read the archives and get caught up if you want to. 😉
Negative One begins as a personal story that alternates between two young women struggling with extraordinary problems. The storytelling involves first-person reflections of their quiet adventures, rendered in light dialogue and heavy introspection, accompanying pencil sketches of the characters. (Yes, pencil sketches. It’s not inked.)
Chinese-American New Yorker Meri Lin finds herself pregnant unexpectedly, and with her parents disapproving of the baby’s white father, she battles anxiety and growing worries about raising her child. When baby Amanda is born with unheard-of superpowers and Meri Lin’s life mutates into a surreal unknown, she and her devoted partner Fred are on their own dealing with stuff they’ve never heard of outside of science fiction. Her story is about family and fear and all the joys and terrors of mothering a special child, and it also leads to an alternately inspiring and depressing portrayal of how she and Fred handle grief when their worst fears are realized.
The other storyline follows Adele, a young woman from another dimension. At the beginning of her tale she is in training to be a master prophet under the tutelage of her teacher Tabitha. She has very mixed feelings about her ultimate mission: her teacher, who is from our world, is sending her there permanently to find and teach the next human with prophetic abilities, but in her journey she’ll lose most of her important memories and never be able to return. She’ll have to live as an alien in a strange world and figure out how to build her life from there, and she’ll have to leave her family and her beloved teacher and most of her identity behind. Adele’s relationship with her teacher and somewhat estranged family, her devotion to her art and her small rebellions, and her eventual travels in our world are at the center of her story.
As the story goes on, I add three more narrators: the first two are male characters from other dimensions who travel to the human world accidentally during a sort of interdimensional earthquake, and the third narrator is Meri Lin’s baby. She starts narrating her own comics when she’s about two years old, and she basically becomes the main/focus character of the webcomic.
To be honest, the comic’s flaws include pretty poor art most of the time and nearly plotless storytelling, with a very slow pace; I know that means it really isn’t for everyone since it’s almost entirely character-oriented and rooted in the everyday existence of extraordinary people who don’t save the world or do anything but battle personal demons and develop/destroy relationships with each other. But I did create the comic for a semi-indulgent reason: I wanted to take the characters from an unpublishable fantasy series I’d written and share them with the world in such a way that I didn’t have to worry about marketability and expectations, and now it’s just a place I can tell the kind of story I want to tell with the characters I care about. So that’s what I’ve done here.
But if you like very nuanced character arcs and want to see explorations of complicated people, you’ll probably find yourself getting invested in the story once you get used to it. Meri Lin and Fred may be raising a child who isn’t like any real baby out in the world, but they also have some relatable struggles: they wrestle with discipline and “me” time and how to cultivate their intimacy despite what they’re facing, and Meri Lin learns to wear a mask to cover her grief, and when family and friends try to help her she has to learn how much to shut out and how much to invite in. Adele deals with being closer to her teacher–a foreigner–than she is to her own mother, and she shoulders crushing responsibility as a very talented prophet who also sometimes needs to make mistakes as a teenage girl. She wonders what kind of love and support can be available to someone like her when she comes to a world where she is a stranger, and when others depend on her for her mystical guidance and perspective, she’s conflicted about what it means to be needed.
My extradimensional characters Weaver and Dax have some complicated struggles too. Weaver has to deal with literal imprisonment at the beginning of his stay in our world, and later there are themes of brotherhood, isolation, and kind of being the local goofy genius. (Seriously, when Meggie showed me Guardians of the Galaxy, Rocket reminded me so much of Weaver.) Dax deals with loyalty and faith/spirituality and the meaning of companionship and strength; he’s kind of a gentle giant type. And he smokes some weed. Heh.
And of course the story follows a ton of complicated stuff as Meri Lin’s baby makes her way into the world. As a very small child whose first understanding of herself incorporates the experience of scaring the crap out of people, she’s at times very fragile and at other times the strongest and most independent child you’ll ever see. She is faced with fitting in and standing out in unprecedented ways, and figuring out how to meet her own needs given some of her ordinary and extraordinary desires makes for some unique opportunities for me as a storyteller.
It may seem like a weird thing to say about a story in which three out of the five narrators aren’t human, but the story also incorporates a lot of diversity and underrepresented perspectives. Obviously all the aliens have that whole Extreme Outsider narrative, but then I do deal with more ordinary marginalization as well. Meri Lin is the daughter of Chinese immigrants (who later moved back to China), and her romantic partner is a white man, so some of her story deals with the unique issues associated with their relationship, and from raising a mixed-race child. As for the baby, when she begins to tell her story, she really has no concept of race, and isn’t frequently recognized as being mixed due to the prominence of other peculiarities, but she is.
The story also features a child from an abusive/neglectful home, a major character who is a black homeless mother who has epilepsy, another mixed-race family with children from different fathers, a white single divorced mother who’s a business owner, and a black man who’s a business owner. A lot of the supporting characters are not white and aren’t necessarily in typical living/working situations. There’s also a secondary character with severe mental impairments who receives support and care from some of the cast members, but she’s also from another dimension. The story is not about characters being Asian or being black or having illnesses, but those aspects of the characters are incorporated into their stories–as part of who they are without being a focal plot point.
I’ve spent ten years bringing little bits of this story to the Internet every Friday, and though I don’t have many loyal readers, I think most of the people still reading are quiet about their enjoyment of it; I don’t get too much interaction or comments. So I figured as part of the ten-year celebration I’d make a few posts about the comic and see if it attracts any new blood. It still gets a little spike of visitors every Friday so I know some people out there are still paying attention, but it would be so cool if some new people dropped by and read one of the things that takes up my time every single week.
Happy anniversary to meeeeeee!
Well, it looks like I’ve won a fourth award. The book is really cleaning up!
I’m the category winner in the LGBT Category of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. You can see the announcement on their page.
My category:
WINNER ($100 PRIZE):
FINALISTS:
I’ll be at the awards ceremony in New York. Hooray!