Insert Witty Journal Title Here

Jason Stoddard has posted his 5 Big Things Science Fiction Can Do To Improve Its Image.

He has some new ideas in there. But, actually, in the main, his ideas aren't new ideas. Or shouldn't be. They should be common sense really, for anyone who knows the web. The question that really sticks with me after reading these is: Why don't science fiction publishers get it?

I call your attention also to SF Signal's Mind Meld: Is the Short Fiction Market in Trouble? Thirteen professionals answer the question, with quite varying opinions, and some good thoughts.

Paolo Bacigalupi refers to the traditional sf/f short fiction magazine as a 'box of chocolates'. And Abigail Nussbaum calls them a 'monthly gamble', and an expensive one at that. They're referring to the fact that you really don't know what sort of stories you're going to get in an individual magazine. Yes, they'll all be science fiction (or fantasy, or science fiction or fantasy), but other than that, you don't really know. It might be alternate history, cyberpunk, space opera, sword and sorcery... It might star a woman, a cyborg, an amoeba, or young apprentice... It might shock you, gross you out, uplift you, or make you sad. It may or may not have a story that you really like, but odds are it won't give you a story you're particularly in the mood for. Not like choosing a book from your stack of unread books can.

And I definitely agree. I like short stories, but I am drawn to theme anthologies. At least I know what the subject matter will be for each of the stories. Author collections are also good, as an individual author's stories usually have something in common. You know what you're getting, within reason, with each story.

Fanfiction sites get this, while more general science fiction and fantasy webzines do not. If you want to read a slash fanfic starring Harry Potter and Oliver Wood, but you don't want it to have a lot of graphic sex and violence in it, well, you can find that incredibly easily. It's 4 clicks on fanfiction.net and you can even see how many words it has, if you're not in the mood to read a long piece, or if you like your fiction in more than bite-sized chunks. Plus you can read reader reviews and thoughts before wasting your time on a story.

Isn't this obvious? But yet look at most webzines and what can you browse by? 'Fiction' or maybe 'Fantasy'. Some let you find particular authors. But what if I want to read a story starring a female protagonist? Do I have to click on every story and read the first paragraph or two to find one? What if I like 'cats' as a theme? Where and how do I find those?

Seems to me that webzines need to specialize more and not be so 'pot luck'. Good stories that the editor(s) like is not the best sorting mechanism. For those that don't want to specialize, at least organize the stories in more and better ways. There's more than one way to find what you want on Amazon. In fact, there's at least half a dozen.

Help readers find the good stuff. And remember that 'good stuff' means stuff they like, not necessarily stuff you like.

The Angry Black Woman posted yesterday on The Feminist SF blog about submission and publishing statistics, etc. Are We Talking About Gender and Magazines AGAIN? --- Yes

Some juicy numbers about the percentages of women-written science fiction and fantasy that gets published in the magazines.
( See behind the cut for more links to more numbers! )
The numbers seem to indicate that men are published more than women, but also that men are submitting more than women.

Some have posited it's because women don't have the persistence to keep submitting to a market that rejects them once, twice, or a few times. Others that women have less time to write, what with the fulltime job and raising a family gig.

I don't feel that first suggestion applies to me, and the second most definitely does not. Yet I wouldn't count myself in the 30-40% of the submission pile, as I've only submitted twice. (I'm working on it!)

So here's some other posits ('women' here means 'most women' or 'the average woman' or 'more women than men'. It does not mean 'all women'.):

* Women have learned that short fiction markets don't pay much and they're after real money. So they're off writing novels, or they've jumped ship to better-paying markets such as romance or mystery, or even, gasp, mainstream or literary.

* To the contrary. Women don't care if they're paid for their short fiction, so they're off writing fanfic and original fic and gaining a modest readership online and in zines. For free.

* Women spend more time socializing and less time writing. If you leave a comment on this post, you're socializing!

* Women just don't write as well as men, particularly in the science fiction genre.

* Women's brains aren't wired in a way that lends itself to writing science fiction.

* Science fiction has typically excluded women, with its early lack of women as anything but sex objects or daughters who stand around asking their scientist Dad what's going on. So women didn't grow up reading and liking science fiction so much and eventually drifted to fantasy.

You might call some of the above posits silly and/or sexist, but I think they should be examined before being tossed out. I present them here for thought and discussion, not because I necessarily believe any or all of them to be true.

It's interesting to see on the Broad Universe stats page that Strange Horizons's readership survey in 2001 showed only 40% women. It's hard to find writers where even the readers don't exist. Writers are readers first.

I got the January 2008 issue of The Writer out of the library on a whim. I think I initially had in mind to search for upcoming contests. Anyway, ran across an article entitled "Letter to a (naive) MFA student" by Joshua Henkin.

There's some common-sense advice in there. 'Common-sense' meaning I already knew it. ;) There's also some other stuff that I wanted to jot down. And I might as well do so publicly. A record is a record.

He says passive protagonists come about because humans are naturally risk-averse and conflict-averse and perhaps writers even a bit moreso than average. One sign of a passive character is one who watches a lot. This all made sense to me. I am risk-averse and conflict-averse and I'd already identified that putting my characters in tough situations was a problem issue for me. (At least, I perceive it to be.) I'm thinking maybe I need to try writing some Gryffindor characters as good practice to get out of this mode. Gryffindors live for risk.

Another tip he includes. "Odd numbers are good." As in the phrase: two's company, three's a crowd. Love triangles, menage a troi's, seven people on Gilligan's Island. So if your two characters are being boring, add a third. A lot of teams, especially in children's fiction and TV shows tend to be sets of five. Voltron, G-Force, Captain Planet.. I'd noticed that before. Apparently the reason is.. it's an odd number!

Flashbacks. Apparently writing students put a lot of action in flashbacks. This puts you one more step removed from the action and yadda yadda, you probably know all that. The thought I had while reading about that was though that maybe I could get more in the mode of telling a story if I set out thinking about it as a flashback. 'This happened, now let me tell you how it happened.' You'd think the past tense would be enough of a clue for me, but I'm thinking no. It might be that I'm too used to writing in the present tense for the immediacy of an online roleplaying game. The action is happening now. So when I write a story, I'm just swapping tenses, as easily as I swap gender pronouns. Maybe I need to think about it a bit more and it'll make the writing easier. It might make the conflict seem like it's at a remove and therefore safer and easier to deal with. (Well, that's my theory anyway, and I'm sticking to it until I've proven it wrong. Like any good science fictionist.)

So.. we'll see if any of this helps.