hrj | Entries tagged with personal history and philosophy

I'm not sure how we fell into the conversation -- my co-workers know I'm on the progressive side of politics, and sometimes when social/politics topics happen to come up, I tend to get...um...enthusiastic.

But this morning a casual conversation (I forget about what) veered onto questions of innate versus socialized behaviors (around gender) and then slipped sideways into racial justice. And here's the thing: this particular co-worker is ... I'm not quite sure how to describe his politics accurately. "Conservative" is probably best, but not in a frothing right-wing sort of way. We've had some conversations of mutual incomprehension before.

But today I got too frustrated to keep trying. Because he slipped sideways into "I believe myself to be unprejudiced and to interact with all people as unique individuals, and therefore I choose to believe that everyone is like that. If you want me to believe that there people in the world who act out of prejudice (racial, gender, etc.) then you need to provide me with scientific studies that I will give due consideration to." And in the specific example we were discussing, "Unless and until you prove it to me, I will not believe that police officers are preferentially hostile to Black people, putting their lives in danger, because that wouldn't be a rational way to act and I believe that people are rational."

But here's the kicker. He ended the conversation with, "But we can agree to disagree and it doesn't affect our friendship and how we feel about each other."

And I had to tell him bluntly that his willful ignorance *did* affect my opinion of him. That his choice to be oblivious and incurious about how other people's lives and experiences were different from his own, did result in me having a lower opinion of him. It might have been easy to shrug it off. And I have no illusions that my answer will cause him to reflect any more deeply that he's chosen to do in the past. But I had to be honest.

He closed by saying he hoped we'd have a chance to have more in-depth discussions in the future, but I feel like I could drown him in statistics and studies and he'd find some reason to decide they weren't conclusive. So why should I do his homework for him?

You ever have one of those times when you think, "Didn't I write a blog on this topic once upon a time?" and then you try to work out the keywords to find it again? (Dreamwidth content doesn't show up in web searches, as far as I can tell.) My ultimate sledgehammer technique for content old enough that it was once on LJ is to pull up the folder of month-by-month LJ downloads (which are in a raw comma-delimited format) use the power of Apple's search function on my best guess at a distinctive phrase, and try to narrow down the possible dates, at which point I can browse in DW (because I migrated everything over).

Tags are, of course, intended to make the process easier and, to the extent that I use them usefully, they do. Hence, when I decided to follow up on the idea of identifying all the posts I've made that contain interesting philosophical explorations, I pulled up the tag "personal history and philosophy" (which was designed for that exact purpose) and reviewed the hundred or so posts it pulled up for the sort of thing I had in mind.

As a result, I now have a list of almost 50 blogs that contain writing that I consider potentially worth revisiting. Or maybe turning into a collection. Or something. They fall in some general categories: applying analysis techniques from cognitive linguistics to life and literature, my experiences and thoughts on writing queer fiction, thoughts on my own personal growth.

There's another entire body of blogs I've written about my writing process that get tagged "writing process" that aren't included here. That would take a longer review and a lot of them are over on the Alpennia blog (which I haven't mined yet).

Is it egotistical to think that some of my casual (or not-so-casual) writing might be worth re-purposing? And some point I jotted down in the Notes app on my phone "if you ever have to write a guest of honor speech, check out those "personal history and philosophy" blogs for content." I think I jotted this down while listening to someone's brilliant guest of honor speech and speculating that my mind would go utterly blank if I tried to come up with one from scratch. I mean, time's growing short for fantasies about "some day when I'm famous" but I think it's plausible to suppose that I might some day get asked to be GoH of some small local convention. (OK, technically I was GoH at an OVFF but I don't think anyone noticed or remembers it.) I could put together an interesting speech from "the uncanny valley of fictional representation," "under what circumstances am I a man writing gay sci-fi?", "the coffee shop metaphor of LGBTQIA as a literary category", "how to create non-tragic queer characters", "all 31 flavors of lesbian fiction", "expectations for sex in fiction, or why are you calling my cat a bad dog?" and similar topics.

So, we were doing a role-playing exercise in a training session for "facilitating discussions" and my small group was assigned the discussion topic "your local $SportsTeam has donated $10million to the city to improve the quality of life -- what should you spend it on?"

I'm supposed to be role-playing the "contrary" person, so first off I wanted to know what strings were attached. What sorts of concessions did $SportsTeam want in exchange for this bribe...uh...donation? Or what were they trying to make up for?

The mock facilitator handled that digression nicely.

Another team member proposed that a good use of the money would be to install and maintain more public toilet facilities, on the basis that this would be a general civic good. Another team member raised the discussion of whether public toilets would become an "attractive nuissance" for unhoused people, and was concerned about placement and whether they would improve the quality of life or detract. (I could be kind and assume that this team member was role-playing and did not simply have a knee-jerk NIMBY attitude.)

I had to announce that I was incapable of role playing on this topic, because in my opinion if we could do anything to improve the lives of unhoused people it *would* improve the overall quality of life even if no one else was directly benefitted. And I went on a little rant about how the housing crisis was a sign of our failure as a civilized society etc. etc.

And now you know why my co-workers get That Look when I open my mouth in any sort of discussion that touches on social politics.

I posted this in a comment thread at File770 where a discussion of SFF canons was going hot and heavy...only to realize that I'd shown up at the discussion after everyone else had moved on. SoI thought I'l post it here, though in a somewhat less context-rich environment.

* * *
On Literary Canons

At some point when I and my brothers were very young, our mother (who was a wonderful, brilliant, talented human being so just keep that in mind if you think you know what the moral of this story is) drew up a list of 100 books that she thought we should have read by the time we became adults. The list included fiction from several centuries, books on history, on philosophy, on social and hard sciences — all works that she (coming out of a Masters program in education) thought were a good index to what a well-rounded, well-read person should be exposed to.

She posted the list on the inside of the door of one of the cabinets of books in the house. The cabinet contained some of the books on the list, but far from all of them — we were a library-going family more than a book-buying family. We knew the list was there, but we didn’t give it much thought.

We were too busy reading.

Speaking only for myself, I read voraciously and indiscriminately. I read from one end to the other of the children’s fiction section in the library well before I was allowed an adult library card. I read encyclopedias cover to cover. I read history books and books on farming and books on zoology and after I started inventing my own languages, I read books on language. I read a calculus textbook just for fun. I read a LOT of books.

I read a fair number of the books on that list of 100 books, but I didn’t read a majority of them. In some cases, I started a title and bounced off it. In some cases, it wasn’t a subject that interested me. In some cases, the work was no longer the best (or even anywhere near the best) work on the particular subject. Sometimes the books I’d read instead on the topic hadn’t even been published yet when my mother drew up the list. Sometimes a book that had seemed earthshaking and important in 1960 didn’t stand the test of time. (Does the name Velikovsky ring a bell?)

When my parents retired and decided to sell the family home to move elsewhere, my mother took down the list from the inside of that cabinet door and commented sadly that she’d always been disappointed that we’d never finished reading every book on that list.

That’s what a canon is. It’s the list of 100 books that your mother drew up when you first learned to read that she decided was the measure of being well-read because they were the books she’d read.

[Note: details of this account are from memory and may not always match exact historical events and utterances.]

Ok, the craziest thing about working from home is that I get this (resistible) urge to open up the work computer off the clock and churn through some projects I haven't had time for because of our headcount deficit. I have resisted. But the impulse is still here.

I'm not entirely avoiding the world, just taking proper precautions and reducing interactions. I've gone to the store a couple times to pick up supplies that balance out my ingredients. (I definitely needed more onions and tomato sauce. Also: decaf tea.) And I've interacted with a neighbor over getting a tree guy in to do some work at our mutual interface. (We practiced our "bump elbows" ritual.) I also feel comfortable getting out for a bike ride, since it doesn't involve human contact...though not this weekend, since it's raining. Fortunately, rain on the weekend doesn't mean I lose my yard work window! I got out and did some work every evening this week. But I confess that I'm already starting to feel the absence of face-to-face interactions. I may be an introvert, but I like the feeling of being *around* people.

I worried a bit that being in the house all the time would mean I'd end up snacking constantly but that hasn't happened. In fact, I feel like I'm eating smaller meals overall. Huh. I'm also cooking seriously, which is something I often don't have time for during the normal work week. I finally tried out one of the recipes in Maryanne Mohanraj's A Feast of Serendib (which I got signed at FOGCon last weekend). And yesterday I did a braised chuck roast with dry cider and plum puree. It occurs to me that this is a good opportunity to work through some of the older things in the big freezer.

I also figured this would be a good opportunity to do some kitchen reorganization. I've started pulling things off the shelf in the food storage cabinets. After sorting through and making sure I don't have anything too expired, I'm going to organize better for how I use things. I also plan to draw up an inventory of all the Produce Of My Estates which will help remind me to use things. Food is not something where you want to "save it for a special occasion" endlessly! After I do the food, I may reorganize the pots, pans, etc. though I think they're mostly in their optimal configuration (not "good" but "optimal").

I wrote up a podcast script this afternoon and am about to record the next two episodes, then I need to get back to my correspondence with potential interviewees. At least that's done at a distance already! And I might--just might--set up my daily schedule to include starting on new writing projects.

These days I often find myself suspended between "ack, the world as we know it is ending and anyone not in full panic mode is complicit" and "there are concrete things I can do to make small parts of the world a better place and it's better for me to focus on doing those things well than panicking about things I can't affect." I lean towards the latter because...well...it involves things I *can* do.

I *can* do my day-job well and conscientiously, and that means that I help deliver medical treatments that make people's lives better (and in some cases save their lives). Say what you like about Big Pharma, we don't actually want to live in a world where effective medical treatments don't exist, or where they can't be relied on to be safe and effective.

I *can* share knowledge and understanding about the diversity of experiences and identities in the past that may help contemporary people feel more connected with history and help them appreciate the long parade of mutable and shifting ways in which identity constructs itself.

I *can* provide entertainment that gives people a respite from the aforementioned full panic mode.

I *can* share and boost information about other people who are doing similar things.

And I can't do all those things well if I'm in full panic mode every moment of the day. But panic can creep in around the edges. One of my co-workers (doing the same job I do) quit abruptly around midnight last night when the stress of having to be on the job until midnight in order to fulfill the requirements of "well and conscientious" became too much. I don't know if the world's ambient full panic mode contributed, but I know it contributes to my overall stress level. When they officially told us about her quitting this morning, we were admonished to speak up to management or HR before we felt we were getting to a breaking point. I pointed out that we were speaking up regularly about the workload pressures (I'm certainly known for it!) and that nothing seemed to change. And now, of course, those of us who are left will need to pick up the half-finished investigations that she was working on, when we already can't keep up with our own workload.

This isn't going anywhere in particular. It's just a day when it's easy to look at the world and wonder what the use is. To feel that even just putting one foot in front of another on the path is complete failure.

I'm not a stay-up-until-midnight-on-NYE sort of gal. I experienced midnight vicariously while on the phone with my girlfriend in New York and then went to bed. Of course, I was woken up at midnight by the noisy celebrations of neighbors. Took me an hour and a half to get back to sleep. Slept for an hour and then struggled awake from a nightmare of a sort that I usually recognize as a nightmare and bring myself out of.

Nightmare journal: (This is the timeline chronology as pieced together, although it felt like the earlier parts of this were 'remembered' later in the dream rather than experienced directly.) I'm about to go on a short trip (only a couple of days) and as I'm preparing in my garage, a stranger approaches me with a problem. He need to store some things in a safe place for a few hours. I (evidently, based on later events) lend him one of my garage door openers so that he can put the stuff in there and then get it out later. When I return from my trip, my garage door is open and everything valuable is gone. Also gone is my car (although I was driving my car on the trip -- this is the point when I would usually click over into "this must be a dream" and wake up). There is a scruffy-looking mechanic in the process of putting away a bunch of tools at the side of my driveway. He allows as how he just finished helping some guy hot-wire a car at that address. He was pretty certain that the guy he helped was stealing the car, but hey, not his business to ask questions, right? I'm trying to explain all this to someone in authority but having trouble making sounds in that "trying to scream but nothing comes out" sort of way. I wake up.

Analysis: Yesterday's "review of the decade" post included reviewing some postings from 2010 about when my car was stolen out of my driveway at my Oakland house. This is very likely the seed of this nightmare. Also contributing was that my nose was a little congested and I was breathing through my mouth (with my CPAP thus blowing air around in my passages), which may have contributed to the image of communication difficulties.

Note: this next part is *not* a dream. It actually happened.

Took me a couple hours to get back to sleep. Woke up again around 6am because...regular wake-up time. Lying in bed trying to see if I can drop off again when there's a loud *crunch* from the street outside. Rip off the mask, get out of bed, put on my glasses, and go to the window. There's a car with a crunched-in front end sitting sideways across the near lane of the street and a young man standing next to it holding his head in his hands looking very distressed.

I pull open the window and shout to get his attention and ask if he's hurt, if he needs me to call an ambulance. No. So I throw on a bathrobe, grab my phone, and go out to investigate further. He self-reports that he nodded off at the wheel on his way to work. (He doesn't sound impaired in any way, just extremely shaken up.) I question him again about injuries in more detail. He doesn't know of any. He's dazed and saying he doesn't know what to do. (Also talks about "how am I going to tell my parents". Poor kid! He looked about 20 years old but I'm a horrible estimator of ages and he could easily have been older.) I tell him that I'm going to call the police and ask if there's anything in his car or on his person that would be a problem when the police come. I tell him that I want him to be safe. He says there's nothing. So I call and report a non-injury, non-emergency auto collision and verify the location.

Several neighbors have gathered (having also heard the initial crunch) including the owners of one of the cars he ran into. I run interference, letting people know what happened and that the police are on their way. When the police arrive, I introduce myself as the caller, introduce the driver (who is at that moment on the phone with his mother) and then step back and begin videoing the interactions between the police and the driver, just in case anything unfortunate goes down. (It doesn't, and I stop videoing when it's clear that the police are treating the driver with respect and sympathy.) Everything sorts itself out eventually. The driver's parents come pick him up. Cars are towed away. I check with the neighbors whose car was totaled to make sure they have alternative transportation for taking care of business in the mean time. They do.

No one hurt, though at least three families whose new year will be significantly disrupted by dealing with auto damage. One young man with unknown personal consequences but probably no legal ones. Me feeling like I've had another chance to practice the sort of social awareness and reflexes around authority structures that feels unfortunately necessary these days. (Did I mention that the driver was black and the police were white?) Please don't think I'm looking for cookies about that. I blog about details like this to communicate examples of everyday awareness and social caution. For me, the important thing is practicing that awareness: how could this go wrong for the most vulnerable person(s) involved? What can I do to mitigate that hazard? What are the social privileges I can bring to bear to help others? How can I do that without making my own unwarranted assumptions about people? (Was asking the driver about possible problematic items in the car a reasonable precaution or a prejudiced jumping to conclusions? I hope it was the former and that I would have gone through the same routine no matter who the driver was. But I'm interrogating myself over this and rehearsing whether I might have handled it differently.)

Anyway, that's how my new year has begun. How about yours?

People on twitter are posting about their creative output in the last 10 years, and I'm going to do that too. But here's a version that also includes some life events to fill in the earlier part of the decade. The major event that happened just before the beginning of the 2010s was my mother dying, which colors all manner of things at that point.

2010: Several circumstances conspired to convince me to sell my triplex in Oakland and move to the suburbs. I began preparing for this toward the end of the year.
2011: I sold the Oakland house, moved to Concord, and bought my present house. I finally completed the first draft of Daughter of Mystery.
2012: Daughter of Mystery is accepted for publication by Bella Books.
2013: I'm sure something of significance happened this year.
2014: Daughter of Mystery is published. I self-publish "Three Nights at the Opera." I start the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog on LiveJournal.
2015: "Hoywverch" is published by PodCastle. The Mystic Marriage is published. "Where My Heart Goes" is published in Through the Hourglass.
2016: I self-publish "The Mazarinette and the Musketeer". I start the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. Mother of Souls is published. I enter a massive creative slump due to general anxiety both about the world in general and about the reception of my books in specific.
2017: "Hyddwen" is published by PodCastle.
2018: "Gifts Tell Truth" is published in Lace and Blade. I publish 4 audio stories as part of the LHMPodcast.
2019: Floodtide is published. I publish 5 audio stories as part of the LHMPodcast. (Or 6 if you count the audio release of "Where My Heart Goes".)

For a total of 6 years of history blog, 4 years of podcasting, entry into the field of audio fiction publishing, 4 novels, 4 short works sold to other publishers, 2 short works self-published.

Other stuff happened. I got a promotion at work. I started attending Worldcon as an every-year thing. I dropped out of the SCA. I began a long-term, long-distance dating relationship. I turned 60. You know, stuff.

I am a creature of habit. I like to have my life organized so that I do specific things at specific times in specific contexts.

One reason for this is that, when unscheduled, I tend to go all hyper-focus on one particular thing, drag it almost to the finish line, then get interrupted by Life and lose track of next steps. So if I tie each of my desired goals to a daily or weekly context in which that goal is my focus, then all of them get pushed along at a sustainable rate.

Another reason for habit is that it prevents me from losing track of essential tasks, or having to scramble to do them at the last minute (all of which creates anxiety). So, for example, on arriving home in the evening, before I even feed the cats, I do the following:

Rinse the travel mug and set up the coffee maker for the morning
Unpack the gym bag, hang the multi-use garments up to air/dry, replace the single-use garments
Set out my work clothes for the next day
Plug in any rechargeable devices used on a daily basis (may include iPad, earbuds, USB battery stick - the iPhone doesn't get plugged in until I go to bed)
Collect any breakfast/lunch items I'll be taking to work the next day
(Next is feeding the cats, but they are much less likely to get overlooked, being sentient wanting beings)

The larger daily/weekly schedule gets shifted periodically, much like I sometimes rearrange the furniture just so I can experience living in a different world. But there are certain practical constraints that shape both efficiency and possibility. For example, if I drive to work, then the time when I'm on the road drastically affects how long the commute takes. Also only certain secondary activities are possible while driving. If I take BART to work, different secondary activities are possible while on the train, but I am constrained in possible side-trips on the work end, as well as constrained in what secondary objects I can carry with me. This can be modified by whether I use a bicycle in conjunction with BART, but conversely having a bicycle with me affects certain schedule logistics (crowded trains, daylight hours).

For the last year, my daily routine had become ill-fitting due to one major shift. I could take BART and have more free time at the edges of my day if I did my gym workout on my lunch hour at the gym near work. Or I could drive and have almost no free time at the edges of my day because I needed to get on the road before traffic and then would do my gym workout after work to wait out rush hour. A big down side of the latter is that I'm driving a lot (down side for ecological reasons, since the expense is actually close to identical). The major shift? I can no longer reliably schedule a workout at lunch due to meeting density. But the thing keeping me from making major adjustments was a year-long gym membership at a specific location (near my workplace). To get my workout, I either needed to do it at lunch or after work, and after work didn't work (because: reasons) if I was taking BART.

So... my gym contract was up in October and I decided to take the plunge and change to a gym in Concord (and also one that's on my workplace's benefits plan, so the expense is massively reduced). I could routinely take BART again. Now all I had to do was find new arrangements for the building blocks of all my scheduled secondary activities.

Old Schedule

Morning at home: non-existent
Morning drive: either listen to podcasts or dictate fiction (if actively writing)
Morning coffee shop hour: write -- either blog, LHMP, or fiction
Lunch break: read for LHMP and draft blog notes
After work: gym workout & read fiction
Evening drive: listen to podcasts
Evening at home: catch up on email and internet (I read email and social media on my phone during the day, but can't do any substantial posts/responses that way)
Weekends: write up LHMP, podcast scripts, record and edit podcasts, catch up on correspondence that requires brainpower, work on fiction

New Schedule - which is partly what I'm settling into and partly aspirational

Morning at home: wow, I actually have one! Mostly because I keep waking up on my prior schedule, but I'm thinking of making it work for me. Eat breakfast at home (rather than at my desk at work). Do the writing that was previously the coffee-shop tasks. (Though at the moment it's mostly correspondence for book promotion and podcast stuff.)
Morning BART: read/annotate on iPad for LHMP (can't juggle a physical book and post-its, though)
Walk from BART shuttle to work (I've chosen a path that includes a 15 minute walk): listen to podcasts
No morning coffee shop
Lunch break: currently filled with LHMP because my immediate to-dos are physical books
Walk from work to BART shuttle: listen to podcasts
Evening BART: read fiction
Gym: listen to podcasts/read fiction
Evening at home: write up LHMP, do correspondence that requires brainpower
Weekends: podcast scripts, record and edit podcasts, work on fiction

In theory, everything's just been rearranged, but the dust hasn't settled yet. Eventually I need to work on fiction in the morning-at-home session because that's when I tend to be most productive--when I make it work for me. And I'm still struggling with the brainpower to do serious correspondence in the evening. But I'm rather enjoying having actual breakfast at home on work days.

Oh, and Mondays are special because Mondays are dragon boat practice after work, but this means that since I have to drive for that, Mondays can also be "take the week's lunches in to work" and "do the week's grocery shopping after practice" day. It was trickier back when I went to the Tuesday practice, but I changed over earlier this year because Tuesdays were so lightly attended that a) I ended up steering far more often than I got to paddle, and b) entirely too often there weren't enough people to go out at all.

I hope you've been entertained by this window into the arrangement of my life furniture.

This is a grump that can't help but come across as a bit whiny and self-serving, which is why I'm writing it here and not on my professional blog.

One of the things I do to monitor my authorial presence online is something that people will say an author should never do: I routinely do a name-search for recent mentions, as well as searching on my book titles. I know all the reasons why authors aren't supposed to do this, but since I don't have a personal assistant to do things like keep track of glowing reviews I might want to quote, or to find out who's linking to my blog and podcast, and what, I have to do it myself. I don't tend to have the problem of stumbling across conversations that might tempt me to be That Author and wade in when I should walk away. (Honestly, I"m really good at walking away.)

In addition to keeping track of things like evidence for how my books are doing, regular name-searches are also a way to stumble across the rare piece of evidence that people other than close personal friends find my online content useful and entertaining. It's also a good way to stumble across evidence that random strangers are using my content for their own profit. And that's what I'm grumping and whining about today.

I'm not talking here about simple book piracy. We'll take that as a given, like periodic ant invasions of one's kitchen. I'm talking here about the increasing presence of automated click-sites that go around scraping content (or sometimes just keywords & links) to divert searchers who might be looking for my content to go instead to their income-generating site instead. In some cases, the sites have lifted entire articles. In other cases, they've hot-linked material. In many cases, they've scraped fragments that turn into utter gibberish because even the idea of providing borrowed value to their "customers" is beside the point. The point is to disrupt the value of search engines by turning search results into income.

One of the psychological failures of online content culture--and I've whined about this many times before--is that the practice of "free content and I'll try to find a way to monetize it that the readers won't notice" has created a consumer culture that is encouraged to be oblivious to the notion that actual human beings create that free content, and that those human beings have goals and desires of their own in creating it that, if not fulfilled, may eventually result in the content drying up.

And, of course, this dynamic reaches its apotheosis in gibberish, keyword-scraped, click-farms that have entirely eliminated the step where actual human beings create content. The heat-death stage of that process is when the internet consists only of click-farming scrape-sites busily scraping each other's gibberish and feeding it back to each other. There are two group that process leaves out entirely in the cold: actual human beings who create content, and actual human beings who want to consume meaningful content.

It is, alas, a feature of human psychology that the easier it is to obtain something, the less we tend to value it. The ease of access to information that the internet provides can be immensely valuable. I can sit at home and locate scanned copies of unique historic documents for my research that I could never afford to have access to if I needed to see the actual object. And for the most part, the only thing I'm expected to "pay" for that information is an acknowledgement of the source and a link to direct other people to it. The "free content" movement embraces a certain amount of hostility to anything that impedes that access, whether by requiring subscription, or even just account registration.

The "free content" culture also encourages people to treat any online source of information as having a moral obligation to provide any additional data and interpretation that the user wants. I receive a fair amount of requests from people who want me to do personal research for them (even types of research that my web contact page explicitly says I won't do). You know what the major reason I cut way back on answering such requests (even answering to decline)? Because even when people are corresponding one-on-one with a real human being, they treat the content they receive as not even being worthy of a thank you. If I'm feeling particularly passive-agressive, I'll follow up with an email to say that I just wanted to make sure they received my response since I hadn't heard anything. But mostly, I just ignore the requests now. If I'm not going to get even a brief thank-you for personally tailored work, I'll stick to doing the content creation that gives me personal joy on its own.

But you know? It hurts. It hurts that if I break down and beg people to throw me a scrap of a bone to say that they find what I do valuable, I can get some responses. But I can't get the sort of ongoing, casual engagement that makes it a public joy to share my knowledge, my resources, my time, and my hard work. I don't want "likes", I want human interaction. I want dynamic engagement. I want people to just bleeping talk to me without me having to hold up a dog biscuit and say, "Speak!"

You know what people say when I point this out? "Oooooh, Heather, but you're too scary to talk to! You're so intimidating I wouldn't have any thing interesting to say!"

So I go out with a search engine and look for evidence that someone, somewhere, is talking about my work with other people (because they're scared to talk to me about it). And why I try to do that, I get drowned in content-scraping click-farms. The rob me of even any vicarious feedback.

If someone out there is creating original online content that makes your day a bit brighter and more interesting, if they're giving you something that you would miss if it weren't there, don't assume that they have any other reason to continue than the direct, one-on-one human contact that you have been trained not to consider necessary. Don't assume that everyone else is giving them that contact and that you'll be meaningless noise. Don't assume that they have somehow monetized your eyeballs and get their feedback in financial remuneration.That ship has long since sailed.

There's no rousing finish to this. No trumpet call. No simple and easy one-time solution. Just one little real live human being hoping that if only I'm interesting enough, if I'm eloquent enough, if I provide enough value to others, that maybe someone will want to talk to me.

Today I tackled pulling stuff out from the righthand side of the garage to clean, catalog, photograph, and organize for my "Yes, I'm ready to admit I'm not doing SCA any more" giveaway open house. Tents, beds, tables, kitchen furniture. I've moved the containers of smaller kitchen equipment into the house for more focused sorting and washing. There's also the Wall-O-Fabric and the craft supplies to go through.

I'm not getting rid of *everything*. I'm keeping enough basic mundane camping gear for the possibility that I'll load up the Element and head for the woods. And I'm keeping plenty of fabric and craft supplies to be happy. But I'm aiming for "right-sizing".

The hardest part of this process isn't the "stuff" itself, but the investment I put into making and adapting things for my "ideal medieval environment". Some of those things I only enjoyed a few times. Some were still in the process of being perfected. But here's the thing: I'm *not* using them. And I have no rational expectation of using them in the future. And I'd rather that someone else used them to help build *their* "ideal medieval environment" rather than having the stuff continue to collect dust in my garage.

There's been a recurring theme in my life of needing to distinguish between living the life I will truly enjoy, and trying to live a fantasy life that I only *want* to want. Let me unpack that. The example I usually use to illustrate this struggle is My Fantasy Canopy Bed.

When I was a little girl, I fantasized about the French Provincial Canopy Bed in the furniture ad insert of the Sunday paper. But I didn't just want the canopy bed as advertised, I wanted it with the full curtains around it, like I knew canopy beds were supposed to have. I knew I was never going to get one. I had a perfectly good bed and my family didn't buy fantasy furniture like that. At one point I improvised a sort of half-canopy using random lumber and extra sheets. The fantasy was the image of having a private, closed-off space that was mine and mine alone in the middle of the house.

And when I was an adult and I had a place of my own and was doing some redecorating, I thought very seriously about fulfilling my childhood dream of having a canopy bed with curtains. And I realized that it was silly. Because the entire *house* was my private close-off space that was mine and mine alone. The image of what I wanted a canopy bed for was no longer relevant.

I have a few other standard examples of figuring out the difference between wanting something that I'll genuinely enjoy and wanting a fantasy of something that I can never actually have. I keep running up against that with home improvements. I fantasized about building a backyard combination grill and open-fire-cooking setup so I could invite my SCA friends over for medieval barbeque parties. Um...so the fantasy part? The part where I invite bunches of friends over on a regular basis. Wasn't going to happen. Sorted that out in my head soon enough to avoid expense and trouble. I've had similar issues around fun kitchen equipment for cooking things that I'm not actually going to cook on a regular basis. (Ooh, wouldn't it be fun to make my own homemade pasta...now that I've deliberately cut way back on carbs in my diet.)

Anyway, a lot of my SCA camping gear was about putting together that fantasy ideal of the medieval campsite. I got pretty close. I had plans for getting even closer. But even at its best, that fantasy ideal involved spending massive amounts of time and physical effort to pack the vehicle, unpack, set up, organize, and then reverse the whole process less than 48 hours later. All for one waking period of trying to "live the medieval fantasy" (and here's the kicker) at events where "living the medieval fantasy" mostly involved going to *other* people's campsites. Well, anyway.

There's the SCA experience I *wanted* to want and enjoy. I got close to it a few times. And that dream is what I had to let go of to be willing to give my gear away. I hit apogee. It's behind now. Somewhere in my files are the sketches planning out my medieval camping canopy bed. With curtains. I never did make it. In a box somewhere I have the mock-up of the bed curtains done in a cheap fabric for proof-of-concept, but I never found the right balance between engineering, portability, and historic appearance for the structure itself. I'll be giving away my IKEA-hacked camping sideboard that was going to have a plate display rack added to the back. I completed the design. I bought the lumber and hardware. Never made the display rack.

That's what I'm letting go of: that gap between the dream and the accomplishment.

One of the projects I truly do mean to finish is a set of throw pillows decorated with pieces of half-finished lace and embroidery. Projects that never got the momentum for completion. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Ou sont les neiges d'antan?

[I don't usually repost entire entries from my Alpennia blog, but I thought this one might be of enough general interest to duplicate here.]

Today, my department at work is taking me out for a lunch celebrating my 15 year anniversary at the company. My plan and goal (knock on wood) is to be here to celebrate my 20 year anniversary and ideally to retire at some point shortly thereafter. I don’t know whether my career path is at all typical of my generation, but it’s certainly different from that of my parents’ generation and feels different from how my younger friends talk about career expectations. So I thought it might be amusing to set out exactly what my work history has been (with all the serial numbers carefully filed off).

When I graduated college with a BS in a life science, my initial thought was to find a job in the same town where the university was located. Something doing research, perhaps. The why is lost to time, but probably it was just a matter of not having a clear idea what to do next and that was one way to narrow the possibilities down to a manageable level. But I was a practical sort, so the first goal was to get a job, any job, to enable me to continue my career search. That’s how I ended up working in fast food. For a month. Not that the job drove me away, but by the end of that month, one of my housemates had recommended me for a position at his workplace, which had the advantage of being 40 hours a week and better pay. And that’s how I ended up working in mobile home construction. I believe that was for six months. I was continuing my more science-oriented job search through it all, but people with life science skills looking for entry level positions are a glut on the market in a university town. So when an opportunity offered itself for a “wanderjahr” in the UK, I decided it was a good opportunity—one I might never have again.

That opportunity involved room and board in exchange for…well, what it was supposed to be in exchange for was not quite what the expectations turned out to be. (Nothing horrible, but lots of emotional labor in addition to the economic productivity.) I’d originally gone thinking I might be there for a year. I stuck it out for two months, after which I still had enough money to do a further month of sightseeing before heading back home. (The job there did not include pay, so this was money saved up from the construction job.)

Heading literally “home” since I defaulted back to my parents’ house at that point. The life sciences job search began anew, but once I’d gotten a sense of the job market, I decided that the best pickings were going to be in the SF Bay Area. Fortunately I had relatives I could stay with there. I think it was about half a year’s searching to find a job. I’ve never been substantially jobless since then. That job was with a small private clinical lab (doing medical testing for doctors unaffiliated with hospitals). Mostly I did “chief cook and bottle washer” work, washing glassware, preparing media in petri dishes, running the blood chemistry analyzer. I also learned phlebotomy (taking blood samples) and did some of the morning rounds of the care homes that we serviced. I have stories. After a couple years there, I realized that the only step up in that organization was to get certified as a medical technician and perform the more complicated analytic work. And that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So back to job hunting, though not with any urgency.

The first interview I went to, I was offered the position at the end of the interview. I rushed back to give my boss notice (he was about to go on vacation), found a new place to live, and moved, all in the space of two weeks. That job was at a university-affiliated lab where I mostly worked with lab animals. The job lasted a couple years until the lab was defunded, but a former boss had a lead on a position with her new employer (a start-up biotech company) and I barely had to interview before I was hired. This is something of a continuing motif. I seem to be good at making an impression on the people who hire me.

The biotech company gave me opportunities to learn a lot of new lab skills and my second boss there was delighted to have me tackle database projects, SOP writing, and assorted other skill-accumulation opportunities. I enjoyed the work, impressed the management, and even got a company award. I might have been happy to stay there for quite a while, but two things intervened. One was that I’d been thinking more and more about tackling the intellectual challenge of graduate school—not in the life sciences (which is where I would have been steered if I’d done it right out of college), but in linguistics, as an outgrowth of my historic interests. So I’d investigated the possibilities at a local university and was taking some classes through extension to beef up my application. The second thing? I’d been at the biotech company for 7 years when my employer hit a snag in getting their product approved, resulting a quarter of the company getting laid off. I was laid off and laughed all the way through my exit interview because I was getting 6 months’ severance instead of worrying about when to give notice. I had some mild anxiety during the few months between being laid off and getting my grad school acceptance, but in the mean time, personal connections had landed me a job at a small fiction magazine that would be the perfect half-time job to go along with my academics.

The magazine job filled the next three years until I felt my professional development called for switching to student instructor jobs. Those carried me through the remaining (painful, many) years of grad school until I’d maxed out my eligibility for teaching positions, which meant it was time to hand in my dissertation and return to the Real World. I’d entered grad school thinking in terms of an academic career, but during the (*cough* eleven *cough*) years I was in school, the academic job market had shifted from promising to abysmal and I recalibrated my expectations. I was in my 40s, I was part owner of a house, I owned a lot of stuff™ that I didn’t want to be moving every year until I’d racked up enough short-term positions to maybe earn a tenure-track job somewhere. I said goodbye to the dream of academia and for the first time in 20 years found myself seriously worrying about being unemployed.

On the other hand, I had a lot of possible directions to go. I had experience in biotech, in teaching, in publishing, in writing…and after only a couple months of searching, I landed the perfect intersection of those skills: technical writing and editing for the documentation department of a pharmaceutical company. It was a temp job for a crunch project and the contract was up after I’d been there for five months. I liked the location. I liked the work environment. So I asked my agency rep to see if he could find me something else. Evidently my manager told people I walked on water, because I got a call from another manager saying, “I don’t really have time to do interviews, so can you just start next month?” I didn’t worry about asking what the job entailed; I said yes. And that’s how I landed a job that was even more perfect for my skillset and one I never even knew existed. (Discrepancy investigation.) The job turned permanent after four months and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since (with several promotions). There have been a couple times when I've looked into lateral moves in the company, but when it comes down to it, I love what I'm doing and I'm damned good at it.

It’s not as continuous a career path as a previous generation would have expected. It wasn’t until my present job that I had anything resembling a decent retirement plan. And 15 years is more than twice as long as I've been at any other single job. But it’s a more solid path than many of my contemporaries have enjoyed. And having a retirement plan at all is more than most people expect these days. (Retirement planning is on my mind a lot these days.) Those are just the salaried jobs. There’s also been the writing: not high paying, but fairly regular and varied. The thread through it all is broad-based technical knowledge and language skills. Sometimes the emphasis has been on one, sometimes on the other. Being able to combine them ended up being the secret to my success.

It occurs to me, in this month of graduations and students wondering what they'll do with their lives: none of the major turns of my career path are anything I would have (or even could have) predicted that day I stood at the end of a very long line of black-robed graduates to receive my diploma. (They graduated my whole division in a lump, grouped alphabetically by major. My major was Zoology.) You don't need to know what all the branches of your path will be. The important thing is to start walking and be ready for whatever comes your way.

This is a totally non-specific appreciation going out to the parents in my social sphere who have given me the great (though not personal) gift of allowing me to watch their children grow up via social media.

I don't have any children myself -- never wanted any, would have made an awful parent. (Though if fortune had dealt me that hand, I would have tried my best.) While my local social circles have included parents of children, I haven't tended to be a spectator to the early years of the process. And the one member of the next generation in my immediate family grew up on the opposite side of the continent (and before significant social media). But I've gotten a lot of joy out of reading about the day to day growing of my friends' infants to toddlers to school kids to...well this particular context hasn't tended to stretch farther than that yet.

It has given me joy. Especially when the parents in question are the sort of hyper-thoughtful, analytic people who use social media to process their own experience of parenthood and therefore allow me an inside view of that experience. If you think I might be talking about you, I probably am.

Thank you.

2018/07/13 23:00

For the last several weeks I’ve been doing a gradual purge and cleaning of my refrigerator and freezer. I really need a better system than memory for the identification of the contents of freezer containers. Especially after four or five years. Was that leftover spaghetti sauce? Oxtail soup? Ah, no, it’s medlar pulp. How about...right. Red wine ice cubes. (From half-used bottles, useful for small cooking amounts.) And yes, the baggies of portioned cooked spinach are easy enough to figure out. But...so that’s what freeze dried garlic cloves look like! Dinners are going to be interesting this month. The refrigerator was a bit easier though I’m still amazed how assorted home made jams and jellies seem to accumulate much faster than I use them.

2018/07/14 10:30

Hmm, so evidently "the contractor window is 9-12" means "the contractor will show up to start work sometime between 9-12...probably closer to 12." This is, at least, better than "the contractor will show up to do the estimate at 8am" meaning "the contractor will ring your doorbell at 7:30am when you are still in your nightgown and sitting on the can."

2018/07/14 13:00

The lovely guys from Lamps Plus installed the ceiling lights in my library. Now I’m inspired to organize the library closet which will remove a bunch of the bankers boxes from the great room. Dreading the task of going through boxes with old financial records and correspondence. Especially now that I’ve gone all paperless for the financial stuff I’m tempted to shred the entirety of the old stuff. Pondering the likelihood that anyone at any point would find value in the paper letters I accumulated back when one did such a thing.

2018/07/14 22:20

Progress! The library closet is...well, more organized. At the cost of having a large quantity of miscellaneous stuff sitting in a heap on the library floor waiting to be sorted through. The closet has shelves that hold the remaining stock of assorted SCA & Filk publication projects (which have already been written off on my taxes as obsolete and discarded). I should make them available as freebies in appropriate contexts to protect my conscience from simply trashing them.

This is things like: the original paper edition of The History of the West Kingdom, my irregularly-annual medieval Welsh history journal "Y Camamseriad"; the remaining copies of my song collection "Songbook Pusher" as well as remaindered copies of the two filk collections I co-published with Wail Songs. Also all manner of handouts for SCA classes I taught.

The closet also holds old computer-related equipment and supplies that need to be gone through for obsolescence. There's a lot of obsolescence lying around in heaps. An assortment of various types and grades of printer paper. Do you know how long it's been since I actually printed something on my home printer? I don't even use the scanner function of the printer because I can get better resolution just by taking a picture of the document with my phone.

Back in Junior High, we were assigned to read Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock". Toffler had no fucking clue. I turn around and the things I used to rely on to manage my life have become utterly obsolete. And they've been replaced by better things! I have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of living a paperless life to the extent possible. (Except for books. You can pry my books from my cold dead fingers.) But now I'm left staring at heaps and boxes of paper (and the equipment for managing paper) and I'm paralyzed by the inability to simply move on.

I will though. I'm going to double-check the record-retention recommendations for personal financial paperwork, scan a few essential items (I've already done that for all my past tax returns), and then find a local secure shredding service. I'll keep the letters, though I may trash the bundles of old Christmas Cards. I can let go of Christmas Cards.

2018/07/tomorrow

I'm dealing with 7 bankers boxes of photocopied journal articles and book excerpts by throwing some money at a teenager to whom I'm loaning my old Mac and sheet feeding scanner. The theory is that I'll receive the computer back with a folder full of pdfs with file names filled in on the bibliography spreadsheet. At that point, even if I never look at any of the articles again, I'll be content to recycle the paper copies. And I actually do use those articles for research. It was one of the first projects I tackled for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. The vast majority, though are linguistics, Welsh history, and clothing & textiles. I really do intend to pull in a bunch of the Welsh history research in my fiction. (I've been noodling with the 10th century "Viking girl kidnaps Welsh princess" story lately.) I think the moment when I might have done something serious with the surviving garments database has passed, though. It was one of those projects that tickled my data-cataloging fancy, but hit a point where it was not complete enough to really go public in a big way, but too big to be happy about walking away from. Such is life.

I have too much life for one lifetime. And I've reached the age for pruning branches away so that the remaining fruit will ripen properly. And it breaks my heart sometimes.

Some thoughts on the depiction of same-sex relationships in history inspired by the Frankentastic podcast (a re-gendered reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).

A think-piece inspired by reading The Salt Roads, hearing people talk about Perfect Rhythm, and re-analyzing some of my response to The Privilege of the Sword.

This is inspired by a discussion in the car driving back from participating on today's Women's March in Walnut Creek. (I was able to join a group of local friends to march together, which was so much more satisfying than going by myself.)

There's a lot of discussion of how progressive politics get undermined by "ideological purity" or what I've tended to call "portmanteau politics", i.e., the idea that people need to be unified on all positions in order to work together on any position. It's not a new phenomenon by any means. I can still remember back in the '70s and '80s how there were groups that felt you couldn't be a "real" feminist unless you were also a vegetarian. Or that to be truly anti-war one needed to be a complete pacifist and anti-gun. The list goes on and on. As a personal observation, it seemed as if the more closely aligned a particular social or political group was, the less tolerant they became of any remaining differences. And we see a lot of fracturing currently around priorities and intersectionalism and erasure of some of the most marginalized groups from larger movements. It is real, and it is a problem, and it should always be kept in mind.

But I'd like to look at progressive politics through the lens of the sort of conceptual category structure that I studied as part of a cognitive linguistics program. A lens that looks at categories (like "progressive politics") not as a fixed list, or a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but as structured by things like concept-clusters and linked radial models, and fuzzy "goodness of fit" ideas.

One of the standard student exercises when I TAed classes on this material is to analyze the category "mother". Not as some sort of definitively describable set of characteristics, but in a way that captures all the different ways in which people use the word, and the ways in which they assign value to the relevant characteristics, and the ways in which the idea is extended and transferred and morphed into new uses. How do you describe the category of "mother" such that you could apply it equally validly to two individuals who share no relevant traits between them? This may appear to be a simple question, but even among the six people in the car this afternoon, it was immediately apparent that there was a diversity of opinions on which characteristics "counted most". How much more complicated is it to identify "the set of political principles that best represent liberty, equality, and justice"?

I think this is the sort of thinking we need to start bringing to the progressive movement. I think we need to construct an understanding of "progressive politics" that can see the underlying essential connections between principles, struggles, and actions even between two people who might not share any specific concern in common. I'm obviously not saying that "progressivism" can be expanded to include any sort of principle at all. Only that there are underlying connected concepts that can be found that can join people together even when they may disagree on specific actions. Identifying those connecting principles is not merely desirable, but essential, for we cannot each address every worthy goal simultaneously. And we need principles that will enable us to recognize and appreciate those who are working on a different part of puzzle, who are building a different part of the house, who may be making the dishes on which the food we are growing will eventually be served, courtesy of the labor of cooks yet to come.

These connections will involve constant negotiation and evaluation. They will almost certainly involve occasionally feeling uncomfortable with one's political bedfellows. But a successful progressive movement cannot be a fixed portmanteau of positions that one signs on to, all or nothing. That route leads only to the final schism between the last two "true progressives" once they identify the remaining issue on which they, too, disagree.

Crossposts: http://hrj.livejournal.com/641312.html

I’ve probably written on this topic before, but it’s one that’s very much at the heart of much of my historic research (and historical fiction), and one where I’ve watched a lot of evolution of approach in academia over the decades.

One of the strongest preoccupations driving the early beginnings of LGBTQ history--actually, let’s be bluntly honest and call it “gay and lesbian history” at those early beginnings--was the identification of historic figures who could be “claimed for the team.” The building of team rosters, as it were. Given an awareness of the strong forces of heteronormativity in most historic cultures, and of how evidence for non-normative sexuality tended to be left unrecorded, suppressed when discovered, discounted, and all the other techniques of erasure, there was a tendency to take any scrap of evidence for same-sex desire and to count it as overriding the rest of a historic figure’s life story.

On an emotional level, the impulse was understandable. After so long of being told that we were historic aberrations, that we had no history--in the face of even researchers of gay and lesbian history assuring us that sexuality was entirely a cultural construct and that our own identities had no meaning outside our own little window of space-time--there was a fierce...let us say, “pride” in reaching back into the ages and staking a claim: “this person was one of us, we are like them, they were like us.”

But a big problem with the metaphor of ownership is that it’s grounded in the framework of tangible, physical control and co-location. If I own an object, no one else can own it. In the realm of “owning” historic figures, this metaphor leads to the notion that if one is going to claim a person in the past as gay or lesbian, then they cannot be anything else. They cannot belong to anyone else. And if they do belong to another group, then they have been taken away from us--stolen, in the language of physical possession.

The other side of the “ownership of history” problem is the ways in which the pool of potential “owners” shifts over time with shifting understandings of intersectional identity (and even--to the extent that social constructionism is valid--shifts in the existence and nature of identity-categories). Thus, in the initial exuberance of the “owning gay and lesbian history” movement, next to no consideration was given to questions of bisexuality or to gender identities rooted in something other than physiology or to differences in the experience and expression of desire. In part, this was because there were a lot of conversations around those topics that simply hadn’t evolved sufficiently yet. In part, it was due to the relative(!) social power of gay and lesbian academics compared to those studying bisexual or trans topics. In part, it was a realization (conscious or not) of the necessary power of extremes: that certain progress of historic understanding could not be made without the shock value of statements like “Leonardo da Vinci was gay and Queen Christina of Sweden was lesbian” as opposed to presenting a more nuanced (and more accurate) but less controversial position.

I came back to contemplating this topic earlier this week when author Cheryl Morgan brought my attention on twitter to an article she had written considering Radclyffe Hall (and her semi-autobiographical character Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness) as a trans man rather than as a butch lesbian. I touched more briefly on this consideration in my commentary on Esther Newton’s 1984 article about Hall and her best-known character.

How then, as a lesbian and a lesbian historian, is one to react emotionally to the hypothesis that the author of what is probably the most iconic early novel of lesbian identity might equally (or more?) validly be understood as a trans man? I say “emotionally” very deliberately. From an academic point of view, data is data and analysis is analysis. But emotionally? That’s something different. That depends on how one constructs historic similarity and category membership.

This emotional question has haunted the relationship between lesbian and transmasculine identities literally for thousands of years. At the very least, since Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe presented the only possible and imaginable resolution (much less the only happy one) to being an assigned-female-at-birth person in love with a woman was to identify as--and physically transform into--a man. In researching lesbian-like themes in pre-modern history, one of the emotional frustrations for me is this recurring trope: that to love a woman inherently means that one must be a man. It wasn’t the only pre-modern understanding of same-sex desire, but it was certainly the one most prevalent in literature. (This is a topic I keep meaning to come back to in more depth, but it's rather fraught and I don't think I'm ready yet.)

To claim those literary characters and their real-life counterparts (such as Eleno de Cispedes or Catherina Linck) as “lesbian” under the metaphor of historical ownership is to deny the very obvious transgender interpretation and to “steal” them from transgender ownership. But to categorize every literary character who received a magical/divine sex change in order to facilitate their Happily Ever After with a woman, to categorize every “passing woman” or “female husband” or “mannish Amazon” as a trans man (or as being significantly toward the transmasculine end of a gender continuum) is to ignore the immense pressure of cultural models, historic misygyny, and the erasure of less visibly transgressive persons from our understanding of history.

This is where I keep circling back to my thesis that the underlying issue in these emotional conflicts is not that of identifying the precisely correct category membership of historic persons and characters, but of abandoning the idea of “historic ownership” based on categorical assignment. I remain quite skeptical about the idea that the internal experience of gender and sexuality is socially constructed, but I’m quite happy to embrace the notion that the categories we use to organize and label those experiences are entirely organized via the larger and ever-shifting cultural conversation. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen massive changes in the organization and understanding of categories and category membership on the lesbian end of the scale. How then could I assume that the categories understood and used by people in previous centuries would correspond sufficiently to the ones we use today such that we could argue over ownership?

It is too simplistic to say that we should abandon the idea of “owning” history entirely. To do so runs too great a risk of a de facto “ownership” by the most powerful and privileged cultural forces--the ones most able to take over the conversation and talk over the other voices. One only needs to look at the histories of non-dominant cultures and peoples in an ethnic/racial context to see the danger in that direction. But I think it’s important not to see “historic ownership” as a zero-sum game. Radclyffe Hall can be an icon for both lesbians and transmen. Iphis and Ianthe can be a mythic narrative for both. The early modern cultural model of “passing women / female husbands” provided a conceptual space for both lesbians and trans men to negotiate their way through a hostile society. History is not a ball that only one person can play with at a time.

My primary blog has moved, but feel free to comment in either place.

Under what circumstances am I a man writing gay sci-fi?

If the above question seems nonsensical to you, consider the possibility that it is because you are the default member of most categories you are included in. I put out a brainstorming call for today’s Random Thursday blog and got a request to talk about “the generic ‘man’” in the context of writing about female characters in a patriarchal society. As usual with random prompts, I reserve the right to go off in entirely different directions with a topic than intended. So I’m going to talk about the extra emotional tax of being a non-default case.

To begin with, let’s note the categories in which I am the unmarked default. For example, I’m white. And although I’m an atheist raised in a non-conformist religious tradition (Quakers), my cultural heritage can reasonable be described as generic Protestant. So if I’m buying something labeled “flesh-tone” I can expect that the color will match the tone of my flesh. And if a workplace schedules days off to coincide with religious holidays, I can expect that they will correspond with the days I grew up celebrating as holidays. So this essay isn’t about “poor, poor, pitiful me”, it’s about using the experiences I can best speak to in making my point, rather than appropriating someone else’s experiences to do so.

Talking about the “generic man” or “generic he” is a useful starting point, because it’s a discussion many people have had at some point. You know, the one about how “man” just means “person of any gender” and should be understood as such, not made a fuss over for being off-putting and exclusionary. Because a job listing that says, “we’re looking for a man who can do X” couldn’t possibly be intended to convey “and we aren’t allowed say so but we really don’t intend to hire a woman for this job”. Except of course when it does mean that. But in some ways, the ubiquity of the “generic man” makes it less useful as an example. So let’s talk about writing gay sci-fi.

Because I don’t. Except, of course, when I do.

Navigating the online categorization and labeling of orientation-related fiction means constantly having to investigate and evaluate and ask whether “gay” means “male homosexual”[*] or whether it means “homosexual of any gender” or whether it means “anyone in the LGBTQ spectrum” or whether it means “we want the progressive cachet of claiming we’re inclusive of the whole LGBTQ spectrum but when it comes down to it male homosexuals are the only group we care about.”

[* I realize the “h word” can sound dreadfully antiquated these days, but sometimes it carries the gender neutrality one needs for the purpose.]

A good example is the small Seattle book conference “Gay Romance North-West”. When I first heard of it, my reaction was, “Well, it’s almost certainly limited to m/m books, given the name.” But because I can’t afford to ignore possible opportunities, I paid the extra emotional tax of investigating the group in detail to see if my impression was correct. I say “extra tax” because I neither had the ability assume that my work would be included nor could I rely on the efficiency of being certain that it wouldn’t. As it happened, I was both right and wrong. The name had been established when the group was m/m centered, but the conference was non-specific. So last year I attended. But in addition to the “extra tax” of determining the exact definition intended, I pay the extra tax of attending an event whose name will more easily draw attendees who assume the default topic of m/m rather than expecting (or even seeking out) books with other orientations.

More often, I pay the non-default-tax in lost opportunity. If a review site, or a publicity opportunity, or a conference, or what have you identifies itself as “gay”, I just cross if off with the expectation that 80% of the time it specifically does intend to exclude me, maybe 15% of the time my presence would be tolerated but in no way supported, and the remaining 5% of the time may participation may be actively desired be I’m going to end up being marginalized anyway for the above reasons.

So what about sci-fi?

If you want to hear religious debates, ask a wide cross-section of people whether the category “sci-fi” includes fantasy. I use “sci-fi” rather than “science fiction” advisedly, although many of the same debates can be had for the longer form. In much the same way as “man” or “gay”, the category sci-fi can always be assumed to incorporate “science fiction”, but one pays an extra effort-tax to determine whether any specific usage welcomes fantasy.

The facebook/online group Queer Sci-Fi explicitly welcomes writers and readers of fantasy. The relatively new subgenre category of “sci fi romance” has solidly established an expectation that fantasy is excluded. The acceptance of fantasy as an integral part of the World Science Fiction Convention is taken for granted today, but if you go far enough back (or scratch deep enough beneath some surfaces) that acceptance becomes more tenuous. If I am in a literary venue that identifies itself using the label “sci fi” or “science fiction”, I pay the extra tax of having to determine whether fantasy is considered off-topic.

So there you have it. Picked apart into its components, and encountered in the right context, I might be perfectly acceptable to someone looking for “a man who writes gay sci-fi”. But it sure as hell isn’t the way to bet. And if that’s what you’re advertising for, don’t be surprised if people like me don’t even bother to ask.

My primary blog has moved, but feel free to comment in either place.

Today's heading is from what is probably my favorite line in The Mystic Marriage, when Jeanne has thrown a bunch of random ores and chemicals into a crucible, describing them in terms of all her conflicting and chaotic emotions, and presents it to Antuniet saying, "This is my heart. I don't know if it will come through the fire, but it's yours, if you will have it." (This may be paraphrased; I'm typing it from memory.)

One of the extremely difficult things for me about self-promotion (and I'm not trying to speak for anyone else) is that it's a chaotic mixture of conflicting relationships. There's one relationship where I have created a widget and I'm making people aware of the existence of that widget in case they might find it useful and be willing to spend money for it. There's one relationship where I've submitted the work of my brain and hands for evaluation, and I'm soliciting judges to tell me whether it's any good. There's one relationship where I have created a gift of love and I'm desperately hoping it won't be the equivalent of the ugly sweater that gets stuck in the back of the closet.

But for me, personally, there's also the relationship where my writing is the equivalent of putting on my fancy duds, spending an hour at the mirror doing my face, and going out to a club hoping someone will want to dance with me. Or the equivalent of a peacock's tail, spread out to attract the attention of a potential flock. This aspect applies to all my writing, not just the fiction. It's my way of enticing people to look twice, to pause a moment and consider entering into some sort of interaction with me. You may say, "Look at that peacock--he thinks he's all that. Showing off so proudly." But the peacock's just working what he was given to work with. A peacock isn't going to attract attention with his beautiful song. Or with his ability to build a nest. Or by performing aerial acrobatics. We've assigned him the attribute of pride and vanity, but that's not why he's spreading his tail. He's just working with what he has.

And for me? Words are what I have. I don't always know if they will come through the fire. But they're yours, if you will have them.