Insert Witty Journal Title Here

So there was this article, SEXISM IN GENRE PUBLISHING: A PUBLISHER’S PERSPECTIVE which boils down to 'women work here so we're not sexist. Fewer women are submitting to us and we don't know why.'

I thought, "Would I want to submit a novel to Tor UK?"

I'm in the US, so there are possible reasons related to that that the answer would be no.

So, I went to their website. And I looked for their submission guidelines. They were not particularly easy to find. They weren't under Contact. And they were under About, but only if you read/skimmed the blurb.

So, they're here for those who want to jump right there.

And, wow.. They sort of apologize for still existing as a traditional publisher. Almost making excuses for why you should submit to them rather than self-publish. "Besides, hopefully, there is still a fondness for having the book edited, packaged and published by us traditional types… :-)" -- So, we're supposed to submit to you out of a feeling of nostalgia? Smiley face?!

They'll read your unsolicited submission, with this rather odd explanation of how long it will take them:
"If we would like to publish your novel, we will let you know within twelve weeks of receipt. Unfortunately, due to the large number of submissions we receive, we are unable to respond to unsuccessful submissions. If you have not had a response within sixteen weeks please assume that we have, regretfully, decided not to publish your novel."

Sad that you have to assume a non-answer is a no. But actually this is quite good as a turnaround time. (Apart from the fact that most of the time there's no actual turnaround.)

1. You can submit a novel to them and get a yes within 12 weeks, and assume a no by 16 weeks. (3 months and 4 months)
2. You can submit more than one novel at a time. (simsub)
3. You can submit if you're not in the UK.

As submissions policies go, it's good. But nothing about the introduction to the policies convinced me they'd be a good publisher to work with.

Back to the About page, I find this:
"Our science fiction output features talents such as Douglas Adams, Peter F. Hamilton, Neal Asher and Gary Gibson" -- Man, man, man, man. And I haven't heard of the last guy.
"On the fantasy side, our list contains wonderful writers such as Adrian Tchaikovsky, Douglas Hulick and Mark Charan Newton." -- Man, man, man. And I haven't heard of any of them.
They name drop five other men before naming Amanda Hocking. Who got her successful start self-publishing, note.

Now, there's a link for 'Buy Tor Ebooks'. I can't find any such list for print books. Do they only publish ebooks?
How do I find a full list of what they've published or at least what they have in print? Or a list of their authors? I see authors who have contributed to the blog, which includes Cherie Priest, who you would've thought they'd namedrop on the About page.

Short of reading various blog posts, which may or may not be useful, I find no way to learn more about the company from their website.

On the Pan MacMillan site, I find this on their imprints page:
"Tor UK is a London-based publisher of hardcover and paperback books committed to science fiction and fantasy writing. Its authors are regularly nominated for prestigious awards worldwide."
That interestingly does not mention ebooks.

Over on Amazon, I tried to find books by them, but it turns out (at least on Amazon UK) that they're just listed as 'Tor'. How am I to differentiate between them and their US counterpart? Do they have John Scalzi's The Human Division, or don't they?

My next question would be what a Tor UK contract looks like. They certainly weren't prepared to tell me on their website.
My quick Google searches didn't yield up any answers. It's full of talk of their ebooks being DRM-free. Which good. Yes. But not what I was looking for.

I can't find an entry for them on Wikipedia and no mention of them on the main Tor entry.

Conclusion:
1 -- Their About page screams 'male publisher!'
2 -- Their submission policies are great. (but the page itself doesn't come off as confident)
3 -- They need to work on their publicity -- website needs more info, they need a Wikipedia page.
4 -- They should provide some info about what rights they're buying and what they're going to do for you, the author.

They've gotten more attention in the last week or so thanks to that blog post, so maybe they ought to position themselves to capitalize on it with, basically, MORE INFO.

It's been about a month, so here's some links!

I Am Not a Puzzle Box - Metaphor. If it doesn't make you think differently, you can use it to make other people think differently.

The Omniscient Breasts by Kate Elliott - About the (straight white able-bodied cisgendered) male gaze.

Adults Read YA - From the 'Duh' files, but they did a study and stuff.

Comic Relief Video with David Tennant - To make up for all that reading I'm making you do above. :)

Janus and Aurora content online - Historical feminist SF fanzines. Online.

Sonic Screwdriver Remote - The BEST Christmas/Hanukkah/Today is Friday present ever!!!

Racism in the Books We Write by Justine Larbalestier - Helps to have read Liar, or to at least not mind being spoiled for Liar

Worldcon and Accessibility - Read the post, but then read all the comments as well. Then go forth and improve your local con.

And now for these I'm too lazy to look up links. That's why Zuckerberg invented Google. (I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Google was totally invented by a librarian, right?)

Ann VanderMeer is an editor at Tor.com now!

Call for subs - Crossed Genres is paying pro rates on their magazine. They list upcoming themes on their website, so go look those up.
- Crossed Genres antho for super powers that may not seem so super at first.
Spencer Hill Press antho for extra time

I'll leave it at that. I have a Tivo to program.

Thank you to my two sponsors. Yes, that's right, only 2 sponsors!! *sad face* But thank you to the two of you nonetheless!

The Write-a-Thon is working for me so far. I finished a story Wednesday night and sent it off. For those interested in sponsoring me by word, it clocked in at 2487. Fairly lengthy for me. I was rather surprised. Of course then I had to CUT IT. The market it was written for wants under 2000 words, and preferably closer to 1500. I did what I could.

I hope it made the story better, because I'd hate to think it didn't! Did cut some stuff I rather liked. And it resulted in having to come up with a different title.

This market responds fairly quickly, so I hope to be able to let you know how it did before the Write-a-Thon is over (if not well before).

I had my eye on two anthologies, one with a deadline of yesterday and one with a deadline of today. I won't make those.

I'll probably write stories to those themes anyway, but I'll be looking at Duotrope's list of themes and deadlines and trying to find one for mid-late July.

So, that's the update.

You can sponsor me here!

Okay, so this is going around. You can plug in your writing to http://iwl.me/ and it'll tell you who you write like.

Most of my writing is on my computers at home. So I snagged a background for a MUSH character I wrote the other day. A.. Harry Potter MUSH character. And it gave me this:






So, yea.. it works!

The application deadline for this year's Clarion workshop is 11:59pm Pacific on March 1st. That's today! That's something like 15 hours from now! Hurry up!

Seriously, if you were still waffling on it, just do it. Us procrastinators know that things done at the last minute still have a way of working out.

This is your last chance to learn from an amazing lineup of instructors. Maybe you'll have a chance to learn from one of these instructors in the future, but all of them? All in a row? I think not!

Delia Sherman, Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer, Samuel Delany, George R. R. Martin, and Dale Bailey.

Go do eeeeeeeeet!!

http://clarion.ucsd.edu/

ETA: Mathfail. I originally said 13 hours. Because 12 + 3 = 13. See?

I'm reading "The Wave in the Mind", a collection of talks and essays by Ursula K. Le Guin. In "The Question I Get Asked Most Often", she talks about ideas and the idea of 'idea' and influences or lack of influences and lots of stuff to chew on.

I came up with what my answer would be to 'Where Do You Get Your Ideas?' I figured I'd answer 'Books.' and leave it at that. And then the next time I was asked, I would answer 'Television.' And so on and so on.

Of course this also turned out to be one of her answers:

Where do you get your ideas from? From books, of course, from other people's books, what are books for? If I didn't read how could I write?

We writers all stand on each other's shoulders, we all use each other's ideas and skills and plots and secrets.

Naturally this also comes on the heels of me reading a bunch of other essays, including "Unquestioned Assumptions" wherein she discussed writers and works that assume the reader is white, male, straight, Christian. And also on the heels of Wiscon, where all this sort of stuff is on the tops of everyone's minds and the tips of most people's tongues.

So it occurred to me, or at least it occurred to the conscious part of my brain, that the only way to write non-white, non-male, non-straight characters is to read more of them. And I'm pretty good about reading the last two, but not so good on the first one. I'm getting better.

So I'm going to read more, but not stop trying to write non-white characters in the meanwhile.

I know a lot of you are going to reply, or at least think, 'duh'. So I'm not saying this is anything profound. Just thought I should write it down. Maybe others will get some use out of it. At the least, it'll be here to remind myself if I need reminding.

(Also need to read more good female characters so I can write more female characters that interest me. Which is not the same thing as non-male.)

Found off of John Scalzi's Whatever, Charles Stross discusses book series and breaks them down into 2 basic types. What I would call episodic and um.. non-episodic. "The Art of Being Late" is in response to the annoying, self-centered fans being jerks to George R. R. Martin.

In a rather different topic altogether (except it's still about writing), Salon.com's Laura Miller asks "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?". It's about Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. Women currently share equality as far as bestsellers go, but when it comes to recognition by academics, critics, jurors, etc, there's a huge discrepancy.

Here's a quote from the article:

Most illuminating, she will, when needed, chart the rise and fall of the reputation of someone like Sarah Orne Jewett (who wrote about late 19th-century life in the small towns of coastal Maine), a trajectory that went from being "patronized as the epitome of the little woman writer" in her own time to being touted as a "recovered" feminist pioneer in the 1970s and '80s, and finally, in the '90s, to being "excoriated and banished by feminist critics for her endorsement of bourgeois values and her political thought crimes."

Jewett's posthumous "dizzy ride on the roller coaster of critical politics" offers a textbook case of the absurdities of ideological criticism in the late 20th century. One scholar convinced herself that the meandering structure of Jewett's best-known work, "The Country of Pointed Firs" (a lovely book, by the way), was intended to be a weblike, "feminine" alternative to the oppressively "masculine" convention in which a linear plot accelerates to a climax; a more circular story supposedly corresponds to the purportedly non-goal-oriented unfolding of women's sexual response. This dubious sort of analogy is surprisingly popular among academic critics, despite the fact that the vast majority of women readers have always exhibited a hearty appetite for linear narratives -- much as most women, when given a choice, would prefer to have that orgasm, thanks very much.

One of the conclusions seems to be that American women writers historically have just not had enough time to practice writing and get good enough to be taken seriously. Having recently read Talent is Overrated and Outliers and watched some British documentaries on reading, I have to agree with this to a certain extent. American women historically have not had the leisure to read and write in any great quantity. The article mentions the Brits having a servant class to do the domestic chores, giving some women more time to read and write and discuss books. Which is apparently what the Bronte sisters grew up doing.

If you need 10,000 hours of practice to become accomplished at a task, then you can see how girls raised up to cook, clean, keep house, and care for children would find it difficult to find those 10,000 hours. Keeping in mind how long it used to do household chores, that it often included farm chores like tending chickens, and that light is a scarce commodity before electricity was widespread.

Not that most of the men had the free time either, but at least it wasn't looked at askance if they showed interest in learning more and going on to college. As long as they had brothers to take their place at the farm.

But all that only takes you so far. Have we done any better in the last 100 years?

Not exactly a resolution for the entire new year, but it's a new year and it's a resolution.

I plan to write every day in January. Doesn't matter how much or for how long, but it has to be actual writing. Story notes, world ideas, character sketches, even character drivel (where they talk to you or write a letter or something) doesn't count. And it should go without saying, but I'll say it, lj and blog entries and random forum posts and facebook stati do not count.

We'll see what happens. I'll probably have to cut back on my gaming - DS, Wii, Facebook, and other. And I'm going to a con in the middle of that. And it's a long month! (Long months good for Nanowrimo, bad for writing every day! Maybe I should wait until February....)

swanjun pointed me to this lj post on female characters. Do you prefer reading about male characters to female ones? If so, why? For me, I'm not sure if I prefer reading about male characters or not, but when it comes to writing characters, I do much better with male ones. They hold my interest better. Does it come from years and years of reading about interesting male characters and less-than-interesting female characters? Or is it from something else?

Broad Universe's mailing list directed me to this article on the ambition of women writers. It doesn't touch on the cultural upbringing women receive that tells them to keep quiet, be submissive, try not to get noticed. Which I think is a great deal of the problem here.

That's why when people say there aren't enough women writers writing science fiction, getting their science fiction published, or getting their science fiction acknowledged, I have to wonder how much is on the women. Why aren't you writing? Why aren't you submitting? If you are submitting, why are you submitting to low-pay, no-pay, or low-circulation markets? Fanfic writers, are you really content with being read only by fanfic readers and not getting paid for it? Or is the 'hobby' aspect of it what keeps it safe and comfortable? Are you not winning awards because you're too humble and nice-quiet-girl to get yourself on the list, or to tell your publisher to put you on the list?

What gets less attention is the dearth of female main characters in science fiction, particularly at certain age levels and certain subgenres. Even if an anthology is half women authors, it might still be all male protagonists. Were we all raised on such a heavy dose of interesting male characters that that's all any writer can write, male or female? When a writer does use a female protagonist, are they usually less interesting and thus that story doesn't get published?

Does The Other play a part? Male writers may be drawn to female characters because they're not like themselves? While female writers are drawn to male ones for the same reason? Many of the more memorable, likeable, enjoyable, interesting female main characters and even supporting characters I can think of are written by male writers. Is this because male writers write more interesting female characters? Or is it because they write them more like male characters and we're right back to liking male characters better?

Read. Ponder.

Here's a reminder that the postage rates in the US are going up on May 12th. Letters will go from 41 cents to 42 cents. However, Forever Stamps will still be good. Hence the name. That means if you want to send letters and manuscripts! and save some pennies, it's a good idea to stock up on the forever stamps.

Just don't lose them!