Productive? Or just writer's masturbation?

I think I just wrote a story nobody will want to read or publish. I foresee no market for it; I see few people who would agree with the statement it makes; and in general there are no dashing heroes and cackling Bavmorda-esque villains. Unless you consider American triumphalism, exceptionalism, and hegemony "villains," in some vast global sub-war-conflict (not submarines, silly).

Toby says that as writers, people have to, you know, write. And it takes a lot of writing before one hones the craft into something others want to read. So perhaps I have written something I'd like to say, but nobody would care to read. And it sits in my own personal "slush" pile, an exercise completed solely intended to exercise the part of my brain that writes. Physical therapy for the cerebellum, if you will.

I didn't really have anything else to do on a Saturday, I suppose. It's raining and the Ninja is chained up in the garage. Maybe tomorrow I'll do something more productive, like get out on the bike.

edit: and I haven't written 5,000 words in a sitting since I spent three days in a San Diego hospital while my mother recovered from surgery (a couple years ago). I wonder what this means for the quality of the story, or my attachment to it.

Corollary to "1958"

short: navel gazing and commentary (really, rebuttals) on a couple of soliloquies on race and gender in fiction.

[ there will be no menion nor pictures of Sarah Palin in this post ]

I am deeply troubled by an analysis of my own writing after reading a post At Aaru Tuesday, and its followup with brief commentary from China Miéville. Two of the stories that I am most happy with, one accepted for publication, and the other quite close (two rejections; however, both editors said it was engrossing, "had brilliant moments," but ultimately either "needed polish" or "wasn't right for [her publication]").

Both stories portray a mostly less than 1:1 ratio of men to women. In one story, the only woman is in fact a prostitute, working for an organised prostitution business, and the other concerns not only a prostitute (who plays a mostly minor role, but exposes a very big piece of the story and is as such important), but a fretting mother.

Which means I fail the "1958" test, and badly. I have wondered myself, not a few times, why my own writing includes prostitutes as prominent female characters, and can't come up with any good reason other than some deep-seated psychological issue with women (which I guess I haven't figured out yet).

 

Vin Diesel, both biracial and cast in a movie with a strong female character.

I came across this while reading Toby's analysis of the "problem," and he seems to make no judgement on the commentary from, other than to agree with it, elaborate on the exact nature of diversity in science fiction, and to say, in closing,

To find currently published writers of color, keep up with the Carl Brandon society. The awards list mentions how hard it was to find works, and if you know the markets, you’ll see a lot of them were combed from *outside* our field.

There are a number of ways we can look at this, of course. First, Charlie Stross is a good example of an author who portrays women as well-developed characters, as non-mommy/prostitutes, and who figure prominently in his books. He also, in Accelerando, portrays a devout muslim and delves deeply into what that actually means for the character (so deeply, in fact, that in at least one place, it's quite disturbing). At the same time, he holds up Sterling's Schismatrix as one of his favorite works, and the root of Reynolds' entire career (well, nearly). Schismatrix is an older work, so I think we can say it's fair for it to be a little less enlightened, and it is written by a much younger Sterling than we see today, but it really doesn't get enough of a pass to be exempt from the "1958 test."

Charlie is, at the moment, something of a darling in the SF/F community, speaks often on panels, and so on, so I think he makes a good argument that progress is being made. Of course CJ Cherryh has been writing prominent female figures (and in fact, often weaker male characters) her entire career, spanning many dozens of books (Cyteen being a phenomenal example).

There are a number of other arguments which seem to question, if not invalidate the test itself.

First, as Banks has been very clear about in his Culture books, both sexuality and gender become much more ambiguous "in the future," where most speculative (there's that word again) fiction authors place their characters. Personally, I see this as inevitable. Gender is near irrelevant as things like the environment become more prominent factors (oxygen breathers living in a primarily vacuum universe; war, such as Haldeman's Forever War). Gender is, even today, a hindrance to both sexuality and progress as we see women indeed oppressed throughout the world, and the boundaries of sexuality being pushed as far as they can go (as in the case of the Marquis de Sade, or warning, nsfw: Buck Angel). I see this trend only increasing. If we put fiction a hundred years in the future, how much further will sexuality have changed? How much will gender actually matter?

 

Reiko Ayelsworth, both biracial and portrayed as (usually) a strong character on 24.

One interesting, contrasting, scenario is Stephen Baxter's enclaves of feminity in the Coalescent, Exultant, and Transcendant books (sort of, kind of, part of the Xeelee Sequence). Sterling's is of course the Geisha "guild," which is organised prostitution whose currency is hours of "treatment." Cherryh paints a similar situation in the Chanur books, where a matrilineal/matriarchal society are the only space-faring members of a species because males are, well, testy and untrustworthy.

I can't describe either the "gender doesn't matter" or "gender is a serious matter" as being plausible because as such fiction is indeed speculative, we'll only know when we "get there." Discussions of whether this is okay or representative or not in the future are thus kind of moot before they've begun (unless you're talking about contemporary or historical fiction, in which case, we're not discussing speculative fiction anymore, which was the whole concern to begin with).

There's another point that, of all people, my mother brought up with me after reading early drafts of Limits, which will probably not ever be published, "why did you write the main character as a woman?" The explanation was, I had been inspired by women I found to be incredible people in my "real" life. As an engineer, especially as a programmer or systems administrator, there are very few women around, and the ones that are there, clawed their way in, and are very, very sharp. Val (from my time at that ISP in Reston) will probably not ever see this, but she's an example of a woman who is comfortable in a largely male organisation, can hold her own, and in fact put ornery men in their place, quite effectively. I have met perhaps a dozen others. They inspired me, and the woman I wrote as my character was an amalgam of these very strong women – but I would stress I saw them as strong people, not as strong women – and I tried my very hardest to avoid what my mother referred to as the typical problem of men who write women: "they tend to drool a little." I went even further, describing the woman, and who I felt she was as a person, and ran drafts of scenes with her in it through women I know and respect (hi, Cheryl). I tried very hard to place a woman in the forefront of this story to expose the weakness of men in the trade, the strength of women in general, and a character who was different from the typical Super-male we see in most male-written fiction.

Which brings me to another, I feel important, point. As a man, it's very hard for me to write a believable woman. If I write a main character as a man, and have a complementary woman, but both characters have the same motivations and reactions to conflict, have I not entirely removed the issues of sex and gender, thus not addressing either? I feel writing as such should also fail this "1958" test, although it is not mentioned in the post outlining the test itself. I don't know how women feel about certain – most – things. I don't know how a woman would react to a gun pointed at her head, whereas I know exactly how I would react, and when I write a male character, I can extrapolate from that based upon the character sketch I have (always) written beforehand. I could go as far as to say that if I tried to maintain a 1:1 or better ratio of men to women in my writing that I would be doing women a disservice by portraying them in ways they would find implausible, or indeed I may drool a little bit (yes, if you write a description of a woman, especially as viewed through male eyes, you must describe breasts and other secondary sex characteristics), and women find this as bothersome in fiction as they find it in life.

Brandon Lee, biracial and cast prominently and as a strong character.

An unworkable solution to the above problem is to co-write books with women. I can't ask a woman to write my women characters because it is so hard to get everything put together in a novel (or short story) that adding an additional author, at least in my eyes, would make the whole process interminably tedious and difficult. Even though it may succeed as accurately portraying female characters, it might fail to feel "cohesive" and be described by readers as "choppy" or "poorly sequenced," or "inconsistently voiced," all of which are fair complaints. Gentry Lee and Arthur C. Clarke wrote quite a few women characters in their Rama books, and in each acknowledged the active participation of Lee's wife in "reviewing" and "commenting" on these women characters, yet they failed to be much different at all from the male characters, and in fact, the primary (woman) character is obsessed with her husband through much of the second and third books of the series, which, again, fails the 1958 test, despite clear "female intervention" in the writing of the book. This, to me, hints that perhaps there is some merit to the notion that women do indeed spend a lot of time thinking about men, making babies, and so on. But, as I said above, I wouldn't know.

The last argument, as I ran my concerns by my wife, may be the most to-the-point and salient. When I grew up, I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy (back then, it was Asimov and Piers Anthony, largely, and as I grew older I started to delve into the works of Anne Rice and Poe), whereas she read a lot of historical fiction, romance, contemporary fiction, some fantasy, and Anne Rice as well (I am not sure why everybody seems to have read at least a couple Rice books). Her comment was that in quite a few of the books she had read, that in almost every case, the male characters were written as weak, or were indeed prostitutes, and provided a contrast to the women characters which made them indeed stronger, having better motivations and actions (generally un-doing or preventing the things that men had done to fuck up the story). Anne Rice is particuarly "guilty" of this (although I feel the word guilty is unfair) – again not considering the Roquelaire/Beauty books.

 

"Fergie," both biracial and portrayed as a gender role model (as well as sex object) and successful woman.

I'll address Toby's last point very quickly, as I think while it's valid today, it loses its validity in its entirety in much of fiction whether it be fantasy, historical fiction, or future-fiction. Demographics of race diminish substantially as people mix. While he correctly complains and explains about the portrayal of race and the attitudes towards race in fiction, he entirely misses the point that as time progresses, the world becomes a smaller place, and we lose race as an identity entirely unless it is fiercely protected – and this happens, often with great loss of life, but not nearly as often as its opposite – by intermixing of people. It is inevitable that humanity will become space-faring. Whether we send men (and, yes, women) to Mars or Luna (or Callisto or Enceladus), or FTL shows up and we gallivant around the universe, the makeup of such crews will at early stages include people of different races, necessarily. We have had Japanese, Russian, Israeli, American, and other nationalities and races in space already (NASA, ESA, and JAXA have all declined, probably correctly, to comment on "sex in space"). As time progresses, and as men and women spend time in tight areas, sex happens, and race diminishes.

I am caucasian. My wife, however, is Chinese. Our children, should they ever happen, will not be anything like the first example of this "hybrid." We see this all over the world, from my friend Ryan Ozawa in Hawaii (perhaps the greatest example I know of), to places like San Diego where primarily Caucasian sailors travel the world (San Diego is/was a huge Navy town) and bring home asian wives (forming both strong Filipino communities and breaking down the barriers between the races). This trend will continue as people breed, and race will disappear. Toby, you are Caribbean, to use your term, but I see your vision of the future,

But the genre I work in is something different, it’s the imagination of humanity, its daydreams, its nightmares, its pleasant fantasies, it’s hopes and its inventions. It’s not like the other literatures. And I want people like me to look into the imagination of humanity and see people like himself looking back at him. I may not be perfect, but I am excited that it is something that I’ve been managing to publish and gain a readership for.

wholly unlikely. You may see in science fiction people who look back at days when we stood on this tiny lump of rock eight light minutes from an insignificant star in an insignificant corner of an insignificant galaxy, and wonder about how we could have thought that somebody who was born on one island (let's say, for example, Grenada) or another (how about Ireland or Pitcairn) was somehow different from the other. Asimov goes as far as to describe in the far-flung future of his Foundation books that Earth itself is forgotten, and humanity spans a great light cone, as humanity, not enclaves of race, gender, sexuality, and so on.

But that's my opinion, and to use your term, which I like, I want people like me to look into the imagination of humanity and see humanity looking back at me, not enclaves of ethnicities and genders isolating themselves from one another, trying to retain boundaries that, even today, are close to meaningless. Toby, you and I have so much more in common with eachother, or even this Angry Black Woman (whom I do not know) than we do with CJ Cherryh's Kif or your average butterfly that I cannot imagine you see a future in which humanity is not "humanity" as such but rather "different groups of humanity."

Sorry. I don't buy it. (although I will admit to feeling a twinge of guilt)

Writing outside your element

short: I gripe about pre-writing niggling issues.

One of the hardest things I've had to do as a writer is write outside of where I live and what I do. While I wasn't a big fan of Stephen Hunter's The Second Saladin (Salahedin, if you prefer), he managed to write a believable Kurd and have a believable sort of mindset and cultural background for the character. The same is true of Ken Follett's Lie Down With Lions, it was easy to become entirely engrossed in the Panshjir valley. Ahmad Shah Massoud, while he did not play a big part in the story, was also entirely believable.

And perhaps the best example comes unsurprisingly from Richard K. Morgan. Black Man, or Thirteen in US markets, portrayed his typical "Kovacs-style" male, and his typical female characters, but he also described South America beautifully. He knew that in areas, you weren't going to get along with just Spanish, that you needed Quecha, and that you were going to contend with age-old Incan/Mayan/Azteca biases. Furthermore, he knew the geography and weather.

For me, this is one of the most difficult parts of writing anything, whether it's a short story or a book. The easy example is writing a believable Portland and a believable Barbados or Kwajalein. I spent hours in Google Earth, looking at the terrain, doing fly-throughs from low angles of attack to see what the terrain looked like, and to find where people actually lived, and what their level of urbanisation/gentrification is. Furthermore, you can find from their lat/lon coordinates and general weather reports what the weather is like to be at a certain time of the year. You can find their languages from the iKipedia, as well as the various cultural conflicts (which every area has, from Los Angeles to Bogota). But it's hard to find more subtle things like plausible names. Follett had it easy because in general, the book was about three American characters. But you can't write a book about the middle east and have everyone named Mohammad or Ahmad or Abdul. Just as my last name is fairly uncommon, it's still something that's plausible for its cultural reference. It also happens to not be especially cliché.

So how do you accomplish this? Research. Where do you do the research? That one's tough, too. You can read someone else's work on the subject. You can also read history of the area. You can read almanac and encyclopedic articles on the people/area you're focusing on. But this is a long, time consuming process, and can in fact take longer than the actual writing of the work. I know at least a couple authors who have done nine months of research to write a book that took perhaps six weeks to outline and make a rough draft of, and six months to get ready to print.

This whole process of writing is so misunderstood by the (reading) public, and by new authors, and I dare say even writing, published authors. This is the point where you get complaints about "wooden," "cardboard," and "thin" or underdeveloped characters. Sure, it was a story, and you had all the requisite elements (sans character development...), but it necessarily fails to be engrossing because the environment isn't enough to engage the reader.

And I want to state again, because you may have missed it above: geography is a character in any work. Whether it's the inside of a building or a mountain (e.g., Lovecraft, Poe), or a planet and/or space environment (your average space opera, but notably Cherryh and Reynolds), if the geography (I suppose I should be using the word "setting" here) does not play a role in the story, to me, it's near worthless. (conversely, one can say if it plays too large a part in the story, as it does in Robert Reed's Marrow, it can become quite tedious)

Anyhow, I rant, or perhaps explain, this situation today as I endeavour to write a story in an area I know little about, and I did not invent myself. Start with the research, even though I have the characters and the story in my head; I can't just write about Billy Bob the Basque sheep farmer.

...and nobody was surprised

Happy to have only the TV we want to watch on the AppleTV, as opposed to having to wait for it on Cable or to Tivo or DVR or whatever it, I've been combing through the selection of television on the iTunes store to realise that, well, most of television is just utter shit. And now that I can conveniently download it with my Apple TV or with my Mac, it doesn't mean there's going to be any content worth downloading. It just means I'll be able to get at that crap easily.

Fuck. There are a lot of bad books out there, too, but the really good books are better than the best of television shows and most movies (Aronofsky being particularly good), and there are so damn many of them. Why aren't there more "gem" television shows? What is it, in particular, that causes television to be full of complete crap?

Pornography, Erotica, Speculative Fiction, and heads in asses.

short: this is long. really long. don't bother. but there's sex. and gore. so, you may be interested. (this was written before Tissue was accepted for publication)

I am taking a break from writing the TDMA module (which, as I keep saying, is really close to being done now) to talk about something that should keep some of you far, far away from this "piece," whether it is because you are at work or you are offended by the subject of pornography, erotica, taboo, and where their lines begin and end, what their ultimate goals are, and, more importantly, where and how it affects fiction.

I do this because I haven't been able to get it out of my head for days. I wrote a story I like a lot, Tissue, that had a whole lot of traditional nipple-grabbing and face-sucking sex in it, but I felt very clear that it was not a story about sex, or whose primary purpose was erotica (I'll get right to the erotica, I promise.). Furthermore, I didn't feel it was pornography, and that frankly it was hard science fiction, definitely noir, and had, perhaps, enough "horror" in it for it to actually be submitted (I use Duotrope – thanks JM – to find homes for stories, which classes publishers as SF/F, Horror, or their other genre; there are very few that are described as being multi-genre) to a horror digest.

So if you're squeamish about porn, it kind of gets slippery here, and, again, you may want to stop. I've told google that I do not consider this to be kids material, and since I think my top keyword search is "futanari," the chances are pretty good they understand that.

My Mac is equipped with a dictionary. I love it. I want it attached to a big old "dictionary" hotkey at the corner of my keyboard because I use it so much (primarily because my vocabulary is bigger than MS Word's, and secondarily because it gives me a little insight into a given words etymology – if I'm lucky), but they'll never do this for me. Fie! Fie on Apple! My single piddly feature won't be included in their next computer! Wait for that rant, folks. It's coming. (Apple claims this is the "New Oxford American Dictionary" – and thesaurus, which I'm not much into. It also claims to source Apple's dictionary, which may be /usr/share/dict/words or maybe something even more sinister. But this should establish where all this is coming from. At no point in this document will I reference either wikipedia or wiktionary.)


But I seriously digress. Erotica is the simplest topic to discuss here, as its definition is the simplest:

literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire.

 Well, okay, then. This places the onus on the author to create something intended to arouse the reader. I think the first example of direct description of sex out there which comes to mind that is not intended to be erotica, but rather humour, is this piece:

Females can be a little harder. The most obvious way a female dolphin has of displaying her sexual interest is the pink-belly effect. Their genitals become very pink and swollen, making the genital region very prominent. They may be restless, or they may be acting as normal. If you are out of the water, they may swim up to you and roll belly up, exposing themselves to you, coupled with pelvic thrusts. If you are in the water, they may press their genitals up against yours, nibble your fingers, nuzzle your crotch, or do pelvic thrusts against you.

I am almost entirely certain this is intended to be humorous. They're a positive, pro-sex site, but in the terms of "out-call prostitution should be decriminalised" and decries the suicide of Jeane Palfrey (the madame in this case) as being wholly unnecessary. So, dolphin sex? Humour. Of course, if you're brave enough to actually go looking for "dolphin sex" (use the quotes, please) on your favourite search engine, you will find various incidents of dolphins and people having, er, unfortunate encounters. Take from that what you will, but the piece above is clearly humour, written to amuse rather than arouse, and as such is not erotica.

This is where it gets slippery, and I don't mean in the dolphin sense of the word. Pornography is defined as

printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.

What this means is that if I write a piece of humour (let's say, about having sex with a dolphin), and someone subsequently comes along and is aroused, there's a grey area. Sort of. You see that tricky phrase there, "intended to stimulate?" I wrote the piece as humour. The guy who finds it erotic may disagree with me, and somebody (a third person; a law officer, an editor, a friend, and so on) who doesn't find it humorous may feel that I wrote it with the intent to "...stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings."

Which is where we get to the quote everyone knows,

MR. JUSTICE [Potter] STEWART, concurring.

It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476 , in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts,

• 1 that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography.
  
• 2 I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

We got Sandra Day O'Connor after Stewart, and I kind of tremble at the thought of her take on this sort of thing. The emphasis of course is mine. The problem here is Potter has, in about as honest an opinion the SCOTUS (I regret they do not offer anything older than the recent few years' worth of opinions online, and my best source for this is secondary) has ever offered, he says simply that pornography is something indefinable, except by the viewer.


So what does it mean when a submissions guidelines or an editor's/agent's preferences say "no erotica" or "no pornography," such as in the two following cases:

We accept all types of Horror, Noir, Dark Fantasy, Twisted Sci-Fi, Absurd, Bizarro...anything weird, creepy, makes you shiver or look behind you, think twice about going into that dark room or makes you say,"That is so wrong," we want it. No Erotica.

 

I am not looking for run of the mill vampire stories or dry poetry that no one but the author can understand or enjoy -- but I'm not an ogre either and have been known to be flexible when the occasion demanded it. While I am not a stranger to erotica nor do I have a problem with it, no stories with excessive sexual content or profanity will be considered for publication. Yes, you may certainly swear, but not every other word -- and if you need to have a sex scene, please do it tastefully and without explicit detail when possible.

Now, I have found this promising description from Clarkesworld,

Horror can be supernatural or psychological, so long as it is frightening. There are no barriers as to levels of profanity, gore, or sexuality allowed, but high amounts of profanity, gore, and sexuality are generally used poorly. Be sure to use them well if you do use them.

But again, we see it is the consumer that determines whether the work is pornography (because erotica is defined as such by its author; if an author writes a non-erotica piece another person considers to be "intended to stimulate," it can be defined, I guess, as both – this is a precarious position for the author, as "erotica" is not illegal, while some forms of "pornography" are).

It seems very much to me that editors are trying to appear as though they are not prigs or luddites or timid when it comes to sex, but it really is just a token gesture. To say that you're "not a stranger to erotica" and then go on to say, "please do it tastefully," what the hell is "tasteful" supposed to mean in this question? Is it that the adjectives I should use are warm fuzzy ones and I shouldn't ever characterise sex as a struggle, as painful, as regretful, or even life-changingly ecstatic? Are we really saying, "sex is okay in fiction submitted, but please make sure it's all missionary and fade to black when her bra comes off"?

And so, I recently asked an editor about their pornography submissions "specifications," if you will. To paraphrase a personal email, he replied that paedophilia, outright rape, bestiality and its various derivatives, and glbtq-bashing. This kind of surprised me. To be honest, I had no idea that people were writing gothic horror short stories about child-rape. Really. What? I mean, infinite monkeys and typewriters and all, but surely sixty billion fingers on six billion appropriately configured keyboards wouldn't be coming up with such garbage and actually submitting it to an editor? Can you imagine that editor having to read (at least, to that part...) this stuff?

So it's no real wonder everyone's got their knickers in a twist about what is pornography or erotica or whichever, and I think there's some serious confusion about the two terms and that they should not be used interchangeably (as they most definitely are being used). I've never aspired to be an editor of anthologies or novels or a literary agent or anything like that, but the fact that there's fiction out there looking to get published that might come across my desk, well, gives me the willies. Which just goes to show you that pornography is decided by the consumer, which in this case, would be me.

 

Wait, what?

But we still haven't got to my favourite topic yet, and since everyone is so looking for it, I've got to talk some about futanari. Put shortly, folks, futanari ("futa") is manga and anime involving girls who either normally possess penises (with or without scrotums and/or vulvae) or, uh, "sprout" them under various duress or conditions. Now, I'll be perfectly honest here: this really is the best thing since lesbian porn. And, leave it up to the Japanese to invent it, naturally. But there's always a catch, right?

In the Behind Moon - Dulce Report (pardon my poor translation) manga, we have your average hentai publication. The plot is simple, mostly. It's almost a vampire tale. We are introduced to a woman who is undergoing her normal day-to-day activities, and is interrupted by a strange stirring in her underpants, and by the time she gets to the restroom, lo, there is a penis, and she has an insatiable urge to masturbate (naturally...). This sates her for a while, and presumably she's concerned, but, hey, what do you do about surprise penis-sprouting?

Before she can get to her general practitioner or swami or whatever, she meets a friend of hers and they have discussion over lunch or something. You can see where this is going. Oh no, the penis-popping is contagious, and the two part ways, and sooner or later, we get to the part where there are two women, each having a penis (and a vagina!) involved in about every kind of intercourse you can have (I mean, really...).

 

These guys are keeping you safe from dickgirls.

And as in every other good Japanese tale, this is one of good and evil. There's a small army of men with Gendo Ikari mirror-glasses and GLOCK 21's arriving just a second too late after futa-copulation. They arrive to the scene of one poor futa with her tongue lolling out and no penis, or to neither of them being around. Drat!, they say, chasing around Shibuya looking for the "first futa" or whichever (remember, this is similar to a vampire story...). Eventually they find her, one of her companions, and for reasons inexplicable, really, to the reader (at least, not to me), they extract from her what makes her turn into the futa and put it in a vial for safe keeping. Like, just in case, right?

As an American, I can look at this a number of ways. Sure, it's probably pornography, in that, well, gee, it's (here comes that quote again) "...[stimulating] erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings." But we can look at this in a number of other ways, as well. First and foremost, it's really kind of funny. Chicks-with-dicks, in industry parlance, has been around forever, but it's never been done with the wide anime eyes and enormous three-foot penises and "inside-view" frames. It's so over the top it's outright comical. Come on, get over your stuffy morality for a second; big floppy three foot dicks coming out of women who chase eachother around to infect others with said members is akin to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes (the original, please, re: both). I frankly laughed at the sight of Christian Bale running around naked with a not-quite-concealed erection and a chainsaw, chopping people up.

How does something so completely exaggerated, so entirely out of the realm of plausibility be characterised as anything other than parody? So, with Dulce Report, we can see notes of parody and hyperbole of the entire sex industry, a critique of the typical homogenous male-female sexual relations of, er, casual erotica. That is, if you're willing to look at it, and really ask what it represents.

If you weren't already either irritated with my blathering on, or beleaguered by all the "oh, ick" kind of stuff I've mentioned, to further confuse this issue, there is horror pornography, one genre of which is guro. Where exactly does this fall? Is it indeed horror? Well, this little girl is covered in blood and dragging a severed head, and I have to say I'm not even a little titillated. Does that mean it's not pornography? Well, it's guro, and there are people out there who are really in to this stuff.

But more to the point, I haven't just randomly picked horror here as a parallel. People recoil in horror at calling "vampire fiction" erotica or pornography because it acknowledges that there are people who are aroused by such (really) taboo topics as sex with the dead, a want to die, drinking blood, and the less-taboo topics of torture and general bdsm. Nevertheless, editors, agents, and publishers see it for what it is, and are happy to call it that. But when you saw Interview with the Vampire in the theatres (yes, I did read it – in 1991), was anyone calling this "erotica" or "pornography"? No, it was mostly a "period piece" or "horror" or even "groundbreaking film making bringing Anne Rice's to the general public." (!)

Let's look a little closer, at perhaps my favourite part, even. When one reads the book, the currents are a lot stronger, but in the film, it is clear that when Louis turns Claudia (a young child huddled next to her dead mother) for reasons that aren't quite clear to him, she becomes immortal, and travels with both him and Lestat. Yet, as she remains a small girl, she "grows as a woman" (ages; or however you care to word that; I've got the wrong parts to describe that sensitively). She is (in the film; the book describes her dress in somewhat less detail) dressed in more and more adult, sexually attractive clothing. Claudia, a very young Kirsten Dunst, is being portrayed, literally, as a child sex object – no, an aggressive, assertive sexual predator – in a film we are told is noir or horror or whatever. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and all that doesn't really detract from the fact that we've had erotica in all kinds of taboo forms pawned off on the public in ways that were not considered pornography including that most heinous of sins, child pornography (the book goes as far as Claudia presenting Louis with two drunk children for them to either convert, or kill, but nonetheless do some various sucking and touching on; this is very briefly glossed over in the film). Even the relatively controversial issue of homoerotica (which is unmistakable in the book, but less so in the movie) is entirely dismissed because, hey, that's a vampire film or a horror film. Nobody gave Brokeback Mountain a pass because it was a western!

So, I would say that Anne Rice writes erotica (and don't get me started on the Beauty books). Pretty plain and simple. It's its own special genre, "vampire fiction" or "vampire erotica" (Servant of the Bones not being especially erotica, nor The Mummy, admittedly). My guess is there are any number of other people who would instead call it horror, and an equal number of people who would call it pornography, and both would be right.

[ there are no rape images here. ]

There's one last place to go here, and it's that one thing that really pisses people off: rape. A discussion of rape is so complex that it is, unbelievably, entirely outside the scope of this document, and in fact has a far larger scope. So I'm going to deal with it lightly. Not because I don't wish to discuss the subject, but rather because there's just no good way to discuss it thoroughly without completely missing or misrepresenting things.

I so very often praise Iain Banks for his fiction. I think of any science fiction author, save perhaps CJ Cherryh (and this gets confusing because I've read a lot of her anthologies) or maybe Stephen Baxter (because the bastard writes his books in threes), I've read more Banks than anything else. And Banks is a masterful writer. He has an incredible talent for eliciting disgust, or horror, or stupefaction, or even humour, with the most eloquent prose that it seems somehow formed to the page. It's as if you're reading across a multi-paragraph story of a brutal rape or murder or torture, and it is just so well-written, it hardly even seems that one is reading; it is simply learning what's going on. You're sucked in, and part of the story. (boy, I gushed a lot there, sorry)

The point is, Banks, in The Algebraist, depicts an incredibly intricate rape scene, involving a penis that has been modified to wound the receptacle it resides in, as well as secreting any of a number of fluids eliciting various physiological or psychological effects on the raped. This scene is the most detailed, but it is not the only one, and in fact, it is quite clear that said character is quite the rapist, and that's just the way things are.

But what's he doing here? Is he really writing a story about rape because he thinks it's okay to brutalise women (or men...), to kill them with your penis? To control people under punishment of imprisonment and rape? No. Banks rapes to show an element of a character, to show the flow of control from one to another, or indeed the absolute control of the rapist over the raped, and the fear of everyone of the rapist (something of a, ahem, villain). He further does this to show a change in character of the raped. I think anyone, regardless of their opinion of rape, would agree that rape is the sort of event that changes a person's take on things. If Banks were simply to say, "Joan was raped in 1983, so she carries a gun now," it might pass as an explanation, but if we have an interlude that shows Joan's reaction, the face of her attacker, how and when it happened, we understand the character better.

And as readers, we demand character development. I have bad news for the editors who don't like rape: it sure as shit develops character, on both sides of the equation. The key point here is that we're not writing a story about a dude raping a woman in a cardboard box, walking offset, fin. It's part of the story folks. This is fiction, and fiction is full of things that happen in life. And, yeah, people get raped. Sometimes without genetically altered penises.

So I've ranted on and on and on here for a long time and covered a lot of aspects of what we consider to be erotica, horror, and pornography. The reason I do this is all three are seldom left to themselves. We have "vampire erotica," "gothic horror," "midget pornography," and so on. By the same token, we have "hard science fiction," "space opera," "steampunk," and so on.

Life is full of all kinds of things like rape and death and dismemberment, just as it is full of incredible things like life and learning. One can write a bleak but beautiful Clarkeian tale of wonder at the sheer vastness of the Universe (and not get anything wrong, clearly; Clarke was an amazing author), but I personally think it is unreasonable for somebody to say, "we publish science fiction, but no erotica" or "we publish horror, but no erotica," or "we publish gothic horror but not pornography." These adjectives are mercurial, misused, misunderstood, overused and unnecessarily close the minds of otherwise reasonable people.

I say this because when I write something, I might write something grisly and horrible, really horrible. An example of this (not published, but written, and finished, ready to be published) would be a man beaten to death via punches to the face, including the noises of sucking air through blood and sinuses breaking and the whole bit. But folks, it's not horror. If you read a 5,000 word story, and 1,250 words of sheer brutality are enough for you to reject it – regardless of what that violence meant – what are you doing reading submissions for a living? By the same token, I've written sex and death and other fascinating parts of life into my work, and I'm continually dismayed to see under submission guidelines that they don't want "that kind of work."

They don't know what they're missing. Fiction is, and always has been, especially speculative (note I used that word here) fiction, to provoke the imagination. Clarke bowled us all over with some of his early work, Kubrick did it justice, and the envelope continues to get pushed further out in every direction. Look at Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction as films that are – at the epoch of their filming – grisly, strangely edited, and irredeemable (nobody gets away clean, there's no happy ending). Yet, today, the "Tarantinoan" doctrine of both cross-cut chronology and his dialogue is so common that editors and agents (in particular the departed Miss Snark) will tell you they want nothing of it. Push it further, they say, do something different, but these same damn people are saying, no, don't send me anything that might offend my delicate sensibilities, there are enough kidfuckers and wolves-on-women writers out there that they're not interested if there's violence or sex in a submission.

In contrast to the above, I do have a happy ending to offer this obscenely long soliloquy. I had asked the aforementioned editor about his "erotica" guidelines, using the quip, "is Hellraiser considered erotica because nipples were shown as hooks were thrust into them?"

His response, thank god, was, no, send it on. There may yet be hope for this industry so hopelessly caught up in its own ass.

Tissue gets published

Tissue looks like it will be published. The editor has asked for it, and the bio/pic, but I'm kind of bummed about some of the last few half-rejections so I want to say that I'll believe it when I see it.

At the same time, I think it's probably time to feed Gupta or Arizona to a couple other outlets; they are good, publishable stories, and I've been ignoring markets because I've been too sensitive about what they say their requirements are. Toby Buckell has a great philosophy on the rejection thing – basically since it's the only part of the process (aside from writing, of course) that you have control over, that he essentially celebrates these rejections.

I'm not afraid of rejection. What I am afraid of is sending something that might be a little racy or grotesque to an editor and getting rejected and told, why the hell didn't you read our submission guidelines?

But recently, I have been thinking that there is stuff out there a lot worse than what I'm writing. And by worse, I mean things like paedophilia, not that I'm an excellent writer. So, I'll be submitting some of these polished bits to more markets, and I'm finally proud to have publishing credit(s). Neat. Oh, and it appears for all the effort I go through to be a hard science fiction author, I'm a horror author. It's weird.

Jesus it's like fucking twitter these days.

More AppleTV grief for those of you who aren't already sick of me complaining about the company whose products I most loyally use (perhaps, save, Subaru). Linux machines are beautiful, in their ugly, shattered-obsidian kind of way. They're all sharp around the edges, but if you look at them right the sun will glint off them beautifully; their curves and blades will draw the eyes to the mysterious patterns in their makeup; and, of course, they're dense as fucking obsidian.

But the one thing they're very good at doing is taking a difficult situation and making it less difficult. Consider the case of a firewire iPod which I used with my Macbook (remember the flambé Macbook, gordon?), as it had a 1394 port: I now have a Macbook Air. Not only can I not charge this iPod with a usb cable (which is the only port my Air has), actually using the usb cable harms the battery by continually attempting to deplete the battery due to the voltage differential between usb2 and 1394a. After a few hours of being plugged in to my Air, it was toast. We had to ransack the house looking for a wall-mount firewire adapter, and re-charged the poor thing, and it was (or appeared to be) happy.

What next? I cannot use it on my Air. Sandy does not have a Mac laptop, and this is a Mac iPod, so her Vista machine is not going to play nice without torching all that music I so carefully put on there (even if her Vista machine had 1394 to begin with...). No, the iPod goes straight to the Linux box. Yup, Linux says, "okay, that looks like an iPod. I'm gonna go mount that on /media/taint (yes, the iPod is named "taint." Don't ask.), and you go ahead and do what you like with it.

I then pointed JuK at it, which happily ran through its collection of quad-letter obfuscation and reassembled my playlists and id3 tags so that I might listen to it locally. Cool. But, you know, that whole obsidian thing. The Linux machine is pretty cool (Kubuntu + KDE 4.1) but dammit, I'm not going to be moved off the couch and away from my Air, because, well, I'm writing.

So we do the only reasonable thing: sudo aptitude install mt-daapd, or the "firefly" media server. It pretends to be a daap server on your network. I pointed myself at its very pleasant configuration page, told it to go scour through the iPod itself, build a sqllite database in
/var/run, and serve that stuff up over daap.

Ah. And this is where it gets great. I grabs my little white remote, I points it at my Apple TV, and I says, "Music, bitch." To which it naturally replies, "Music? Whatever are you speaking of?"

This is the part where I realise that in order for your Apple TV to read streaming content off the network, it has to pair with those instances of iTunes (and only now do I remember doing this on the Air), even though it knows that those .m4p files over there are my .m4p files, and it has my credentials and an interwebs connection and can frickin verify all this and connect it all if it wanted to, it chooses not to.

Which is the other problem. The Apple TV is plugged into – you guessed it, the TV. So, hey, it might be nice to be able to say, I'm going to play music off my mt-daapd share from my Linux machine here on my Air here in iTunes, to a remote pair of speakers, attached to the Apple TV (essentially using it as an Airport Express). But, no, it doesn't do that, either. For no good reason other than possibly competing with their lowest-end piece of hardware.

Fie, I say! A curse on their engineers! May their villages be plagued with locusts and their endians be all wrong! Curse them until they look to the mountain and see its gleaming obsidian sides and realise there's more to life than simple competition. Sometimes working is pretty cool, too.