My only reaction to this is, um, wow.

In pictures:

Two days ago, I tweeted:

Yet another male writer interviewed about "why he writes strong female characters." Um, okay. But where are...the interviews of female writers who write strong female characters? Or strong male characters? Is it that no one cares...or is it that men really, really need those cookies? #womenareinvisible

To which @rachelswirsky replied, "Man bites dog" situation.

That's part of the explanation, sure. It's the same reason so many stories and movies fail the Bechdel Test: our culture is male-centric. Straight white male centric, to be specific.

Today, I came across an article that expands on the subject, which sums up the situation well:

Writing from a female point of view seems to be generally regarded as something more like writing from the perspective of a deer: you might get points for novelty, but it'd be impossible to get right, and who really wants to hear a deer narrate a story, anyway?

Good article, thoughtful comments (at least, as of posting this entry). Depressing, too, if you consider that fewer people will listen to her just because she's female. It's not conscious, but it's real. I see it happen in the workplace, on SFF panels, in LJ blogs, all over. Women are invisible (especially older women, but that's another rant.) We are making progress, sure, but we won't make real progress until books about women are seen as just as important as those about men, until the words of women are valued as much as those written by men.

#amwriting #loveanddeath #thankyoufred

...of Queen's Hunt is now online at Macmillan's site.

*does happy author dance*

Feedback on ALLEGIANCE is showing up. (Yay! Thank you!) I'm thinking about plot issues, but I don't want to start any serious revisions until 1) we've moved, and 2) my official editorial letter also makes its appearance.

My short story idea died. Again. I wrote up some notes and filed them in my idea folder.

I am getting images and such for a follow-up River of Souls novel. It's about secondary and minor characters from QUEEN'S HUNT and ALLEGIANCE, set in Karovi, in the aftermath of MAJOR SPOILER. A draft of this novel exists, but several plot lines have shifted when I wrote ALLEGIANCE, so it needs a complete rewrite. Alas, I can't start anything new at the moment, but I might indulge myself by writing that scene with Maryshka and a shirtless Jannik.

House renovations are in progress. Bedrooms repainted. Pool repairs nearly complete. Contractor engaged for exterior painting and the new kitchen. Move-in date in two weeks.

...from Publishers Weekly.

There's a sweet spot, between finishing the novel—and I mean really finishing it: taking it through editorial revisions, copyedits, and galleys—where I have this momentary sense of victory. It is, by no coincidence, the last moment where I have any control over anything.

Oh, sure, a few shiny moments pop up along the way. Holding the ARC in my hands counts as a big one. Or coming across some positive buzz.

But then the ARCs go out to reviewers, and anxiety descends. Will the reviewers like it? Will they even bother reading it, or is the ARC headed straight for eBay? More important, will the readers like it? The ARCs go out four or five months before the release date, and during that time, it can can feel as though the book has vanished into a black hole.

So. Queen's Hunt is now in that black hole. Luckily I had a short story project that claimed my attention for a while. Plus the dayjob. Plus moving house. Even so, I have bouts of panic from time to time, worrying about pretty much everything a new, relatively unknown author can worry about, plus some.

If I follow the same pattern as before, I'll get some good reviews and bounce around. I'll get some bad reviews and fall into despair. I'll get excited all over again when the book shows up in bookstores, followed by more despair when the first one or two star review shows up. (Yes, I know it's madness to read reviews. I'm getting better at avoiding them, but I'm not all the way there yet.)

Eventually, two or three months after publication, I come through to the other side. A bit resigned (again) that I'm no star in the genre world. Happy that the book worked for the readers it did work for. And busy with edits for the next book.

Wednesday and Thursday, I posted the results for applying the Bechdel Test to my short stories and novels.

The results weren't bad, but the point isn't really to go all rah-rah, look how great (or awful) I am. The real point is to double-check my own unconscious choices when creating plots and characters. Why should I do that? Well, to make better stories. If my default choice is male, then I'm failing to think hard enough about my characters. (Even more so if the default choice is white, straight, cis-gendered male.)

Just as important as gender choice is what roles those characters play in the story. Plenty of stories and novels include women, but then those women are treated as accessories to the men. Their lives, and their pupose in the story, revolves around the men. Why? Why can't the women have their own agendas? No reason, other than that default view again.

So my goal, going forward, is to question myself and my choices in my writing. About sex. About roles. About all the elements that make up a character.

What about you? Have you checked your stories and novels? What if we all posted our results? What if someone, lots of someones, paid attention?

In yesterday's post, I checked my published short stories against the Bechdel Test. Today is for my novels. This time around, I'm counting all novels currently under contract, except for one novel that is contracted but not yet complete.




   Ars Memoriae, 2009 (novella chapbook)
X  Passion Play, 2010
   Fox and Phoenix, 2011
X  Queen's Hunt, 2012
X  Allegiance, forthcoming 2013
X  The Edge of the Empire, forthcoming 2014

Score: 6 books, 4 pass. A much better score than with my short stories. The two that don't pass have a single male POV, but as I pointed out yesterday, it's still possible to have a male POV present when two women have a conversation, and to have the conversation not center around a man.

The scores for Allegiance and Edge of the Empire are based on complete drafts, which still need to go through edits. However, there are enough conversations between women, talking about politics, magic, war, cooking, taxes, magic, etc., that I feel comfortable counting them.

The Time Roads, forthcoming 2015, is based on two published short stories, the novella Ars Memoriae, and a fourth as-yet-unwritten novella. The three existing stories fail the test. The fourth novella will be told from the queen's point of view, so the complete book will probably pass, but it doesn't seem fair to count it one way or another at this point.

The Bechdel Test, from the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, was originally used for movies, and has these three simple rules:

1. The movie has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man. (Not limited to romantic relationships, for example two sisters talking about their father doesn't pass)

(An optional variation says the two women must be named characters.)

Now, passing the Bechdel Test isn't a guarantee of quality, nor is the opposite true. However, it shows some interesting (read: depressing) results when applied to movies and fiction in general. I've heard some authors claim how *hard* it is to pass the Bechdel Test. My first reaction is that it can't be that hard, but I thought I'd check my own published work to see how it fares. Below are the results for my short fiction. ('X' means the story passed.)

X  "River of Souls," 2010
X  "Jump to Zion," 2010
   "The Golden Octopus," 2008
X  "Shopping Spree," 2008
X  "Air and Angels," 2008
   "Pig, Crane, Fox", 2008
   "Marsdog," Coyote Wild, 2007
   "A Handful of Pearls," 2007
X  "A Feasts of Cousins," 2010
   "On the Morning of the Day Before," 2006
X  "Remembrance," 2006
   "A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange," 2006
X  "The Colors of Tomorrow," 2005
X  "Watercolors in the Rain," 2005
X  "Chrysalide," 2003
X  "Poison," 2003
   "D'une étoile éloignée," 2002
X  "Of Moondust and Starlight," 2002
X  "Chameleon," 2001
   "Medusa at Morning," 2001
   "Forever," 2000
   "Version 2.0," 1999

Of 22 stories, 12 pass. More than half, but not so great. In some cases, the stories are limited because the single POV character is male (Pig, Crane, Fox; Marsdog; A Handful of Pearls), but "Air and Angels" does pass even so, because the male protag witnesses a brief conversation between two sisters about their science experiment. "River of Souls" is from a male's POV, but in his previous life, he was female, and she has conversations with women. "Jump to Zion" passes only if you don't invoke the "named" part, so I'm not sure if I should count it or not.

The point is, however, that I could do more. Especially when I look at the stories again, I see that several could have passed without much trouble. Again, it's not so much that *every* story must pass, but that stories will be richer and deeper if they do.

Tomorrow I'll post results for my novels (those under contract, even if they aren't yet published).