Letters to Tiptree

 Today Twelfth Planet Press released the list of contributors to their forthcoming anthology, Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce, and The Los Angeles Review of Books published The Women You Didn't See: A Letter to Alice Sheldon by Nicola Griffith.You can check out the star-studded list and preorder the book at http://www.twelfthplanetpress.com/products/ebooks/letters-to-tiptree. The book is scheduled for release on the centenary of Sheldon's birth, August 24.

Nicola Griffith to read at the Seattle Public Library

For those is the Seattle area:

Nicola Griffith will be reading Tuesday evening at the central branch of the Seattle Public Library. She will read from her new novel, Hild, and do a Q&A after, followed by a signing. The University Bookstore will be on hand to sell copies of the novel. More information can be found here.

I've had the pleasure of hearing Nicola read several times, so I can assure you that the occasion will be a treat.

Stuff of interest

First off, congratulations to Nicola Griffith! The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced that she is one of two writers being awarded the 2013 James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. The judges commented: "Trebor Healey and Nicola Griffith are both writers who are unafraid to take risks in their writing, stretching the strictures of genre to ask bigger questions. They use the lens of their LGBT experience as a prism through which universal themes of love, society, and the meaning of life are refracted, disassembled and reassembled in ways that are at once challenging and rewarding to the reader. Their work deepens and enriches the tapestry of LGBT literature: worthy of a place in the modern canon of English literature while expanding the notions of what LGBT literature can be."

Also of interest:

--Over at Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison has produced his annual gender statistics fest for reviewing in the sf/f field. I'm sorry to say his results are pretty much what they were last year. Do check them out here.

--Ethan Robinson productively continues the conversation on Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 with his thoughtful post, Proust on Mercury and other issues in coming to terms with 2312.

 --The Digital Public Library of America launched last week. Among other things, the site offers its Digital Library Digest, which collects annotated links to news about digital issues as well as about public libraries. The Digest for April 25, 2013, for instance, links to five items, including an announcement from the House Judiciary Panel that they'll be starting "a comprehensive review of copyright law" and an article on Simon & Schuster's pilot library ebook project. The DPLA has an interesting (to me) web address:  http://dp.la/.

--Over at The Guardian, Alison Flood discusses digital matters of concern for readers, authors, and publishers: Ebook anxieties increase as publishing revolution rolls on.

--And finally, also over at Strange Horizons this week, Julia Rios interviews Rose Lemberg in Noticing Language.

The 2012 Galactic Suburbia Award

Have you heard? The f/sf field now has a feminist award! It's called The Galactic Suburbia Award for activism and/or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction in 2011. The women of Galactic Suburbia, Tansy, Alex, and Alisa, have just announced the first year's winner and Honours List.


Honours List"

Carrie Goldman ad her daughter Katie, for sharing their story about how Katie was bullied at school for liking Star Wars, and opening up a massive worldwide conversation about gender binaries and gender-related bullying among very young children http://www.chicagonow.com/portrait-of-an-adoption/2010/11/anti-bullying-starts-in-first-grade/

Cheryl Morgan for "Female Invisibility Bingo" ( http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=10805 ), associated blogging and podcasting, and basically fighting the good fight

Helen Merrick, for the "Feminism" article on the SF Encyclopedia: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/feminism (i think its a rewrite not new)

Jim C Hines for “Jane C Hines” and associated blogging, raising awareness of feminist issues in the SF/Fantasy publishing field. - http://www.jimchines.com/2011/09/jane-c-hines/

Julia Rios, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond for episode 11 of the Outer Alliance podcast (The Writer and the Critic special episode)

http://blog.outeralliance.org/archives/875

L. Timmel Duchamp - for continuing to raise issues of importance on the Ambling Down the Aqueduct blog [I'm sure they mean Ambling Along the Aqueduct--td] and various Aqueduct Press projects
http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/


Michelle Lee for the blog post “A 7-year-old girl responds to DC Comics’ sexed-up reboot of Starfire” http://io9.com/5844355/a-7+year+old-girl-responds-to-dc-comics-sexed+up-reboot-of-starfire


Winner

Nicola Griffith - for the Russ Pledge, and associated blogging http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2011/06/taking-russ-pledge.html

The winner will receive a Deepings Doll (www.deepingsdolls.com) hand-painted figurine of a suffragette with a Galactic Suburbia placard.

Congratulations, Nicola!

If you have ideas for the Honours list for 2012, please email Tansy, Alex, and Alisa at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com or tweet @galacticsuburbs

Aqueductista News

--At Alexandria's Eve, Nic has posted a thoughtful review of Nicola Griffith's With Her Body.

--Marjorie Senechal reviews Chandler Davis and Josh Lukin's It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, at length, for the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. I think I can safely aver that this is the first time an Aqueduct Press title has been reviewed in a mathematics journal.

--I'm going to the dentist this afternoon, to have a "tiny" cavity filled. More exciting is that I've just received, in the mail, this year's Clarion West tee-shirt. This year's class didn't put a brain with a fork on it, but it's not without its own particular moment...

More documentation, more numbers, more "explanations"

Last Saturday, Nicola Griffith posted A shocking UK sf 'favorites' score: men 500, women 18. She begins:

Yesterday, in the Guardian, Damien G. Walter asked readers to list their favourite sf. And they did. In a follow-up blog piece, Walter estimates that more than 500 books were mentioned. I scanned the Guardian comments--yes, all of them--and counted only 18 women's names. Eighteen. Out of more than five hundred.

I admit, I could have missed one or two. For the sake of argument, let's say there were exactly 500 novels mentioned. Let's say 20 of them were by women. (Yes, some respondents mentioned titles, some author names. Apples and oranges. Sue me. Or, better, take the time to parse the comments yourself and then share.)

The ratio of women to men is 1:24. About 4%. I'm quite aware of gender bias in literature (see, for example "Hard Takes Soft" and "Girl Cooties") but this ratio, frankly, shocked me.

She then takes notes of some of the “explanations” for the disparity, and remarks:

Or, as Joanna Russ might have put it:
"She didn't write it."
"She wrote it but she wrote only one of it."
"She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist (sf writer), and it isn't really art (sf)."
"She wrote it, but she's an anomaly."

These are just a few of the classic arguments, so beautifully exposed by Russ, used by critics to suppress women's writing. (If you haven't read How to Suppress Women's Writing, your education awaits.)

Clearly, women's sf is being suppressed in the UK. Oh, not intentionally. But that's how bias works: it's unconscious. And of course sometimes it's beyond a reader's power to change: you can't buy a book that's not on the shelf. You can't shelve something the publisher hasn't printed. You can't publish something an agent doesn't send you. You can't represent something a writer doesn't submit. Etc.

You'll want to read all of Nicola's post, for she goes on to offer a list of Things to Be Done to correct the situation.

I was bemused to see a post in response to Nicola's on the Guardian's blog yesterday: The incredible shrinking presence of women SF Writers.

Is it the industry itself that is sexist? High-profile women in major UK publishing houses working in the genre – including, but not limited, to Anna Gregson, Anne Clarke and Bella Pagan at Orbit, Julie Crisp at Pan Macmillan and Jane Johnson at Voyager – would suggest that the glass ceiling doesn't exist at the business end.

Nor is there a shortage of women writers troubling the SF/Fantasy/Horror bestseller lists – Jaine Fenn, Sarah Pinborough, Marianne de Pierres, Justina Robson, Stephanie Swainston, Cherie Priest, Tricia Sullivan ... it would take more space than is available here to list every woman writer active in the genre today.

Which means, if we're looking for a culprit, that suspicion must fall on the genre's very active fanbase: as this Guardian poll suggests, if there is sexism in the SF world, it may well be a matter of representation by the readership. It's difficult to legislate for equality in an online poll such as the Guardian's: the results are what they are. With no shortage of women working in the industry, the question must be asked why the people who offer their opinions – be it in a survey, or by way of compiling a book or magazine supplement – are putting forward a demonstrably male bias.

Perhaps the received wisdom that SF really is just for boys is true. Or maybe it's just that those who take part in online polls are mainly white, middle-class men, and a very, very vocal minority out of a much wider and more representative readership. Thoughts?

The “thoughts” that follow, in the comments, range mostly from abominable to dense, and so I read only a handful of them. I wonder how much this is due to the blog author's (the post seems to be unsigned-- I couldn't find a byline on the page) suggestion that it's the fault of the fan-base...

One commenter did point to Cheryl Morgan's post on the subject Female Invisibility Bingo. In her post, after reflecting on Nicola's apt citation of How to Suppress Women's Writing, Cheryl makes this suggestion:

There should be a bingo card, and we can add to it some of the reasons I saw given this morning as to why women shouldn’t care about exclusion from things like “best of” lists.
1a. Women shouldn’t complain about exclusion because their books are more popular than men’s.
1b. Women shouldn’t complain because the lists reflect popular taste.
2a. Women shouldn’t complain because it is only critics talking and who cares what they think?
2b. Women shouldn’t complain because it is only fans talking and who cares what they think?

And the beat goes on...

Links for the Weekend

It's been one of those days. I spent several hours of it tramping through the rain so that I could get one of my precious electronic gadgets fixed. (Seattle's pretty decent bus system proved inadequate in this case.) I'd never crossed the Montlake Bridge (which is a drawbridge) on foot before, and so made the astonishing discovery that when buses cross its steel grid, they make the cement sidewalks running along the sides tremble in a rather scary way. So, a bit later than I'd planned, here are a few links of interest:

--Nicola Griffith, Hard SF and Soft, or Girls vs. Boys. Here's a brief taste: "For the Old Guard, a novel’s hardness depends to some degree on the biological sex of bodies entwined. Women are perceived as literally and metaphorically softer than men. If the viewpoint character having sex in an SF novel is a woman, the squick factor is doubled. If she’s having sex with another woman, the Old Guard passes out."

--At Locus's Roundtable, Karen Burnham speculates about what in New Wave sf makes readers today uncomfortable.

--Abigail Nussbaum sounds the clarion for A Few Good Women: A Call for Reviewers at Strange Horizons.

--N.K. Jemisin writes an open letter to Hollywood: Dear Hollywood: How’s That Bigotry Working Out for You? ---an absolute must-read.

--Gillian Pollock has posted an excellent collection of guest posts for (last month's) Women's History month. You can see the list of guest posts by Lucy Sussex, Ann Vander Meer, Jane Routley, Cheryl Morgan, and numerous others, here.

New E-books from Aqueduct Press

I'm in Sunnyvale this weekend, for Potlatch, but Tom's still in Seattle and today uploaded new e-book editions to Aqueduct's site. I'm very pleased to announce that among these is a masterpiece from the 1990s, Gwyneth Jones's Aleutian Trilogy:

White Queen

  Winner of the 1991 James Tiptree Jr. Award
  Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee

As White Queen opens, mysterious humanoids arrive on Earth in 2038; apparently telepathic hermaphrodites, they are called Aleutians. The relationship between aliens and humans becomes a metaphor for the relationship between men and women. Johnny Guglioli, exiled as a "petrovirus" victim from the United States, befriends journalist Braemar Wilson and the "woman" Clavel. From Clavel's behaviors, they deduce the insidious invasion, but cannot unriddle what the aliens want. Are they superbeings, candidly offering assistance to a world shaken up by geological and political catastrophes?

North Wind

  BSFA nominee
  Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee

In North Wind, set a hundred years later, the story continues, featuring a quest by both aliens and humans to find the last flowering of human technology. Bella, a crippled Aleutian, and "her" human caretaker, Sydney Carton, share an unusual relationship in a world riven by gender war. Men want to violently eradicate the Aleutians and human collaborators, while the women desire a return to power through a more nurturing society. The aleutian' proposal to level the Himalayas generates violent anti-alien sentiment. While sheltering Bella, Sydney seeks the instantaneous travel device that the legendary Johnnay Guglioli used to reach the Aleutian's starship.

Phoenix Café

Phoenix Café concludes the tale of the Aleutian invasion in a hip, dark, violent novel. Another hundred years on, the Aleutians prepare to leave both Earth and a humanity transformed in strange and sometimes unpleasant ways by two hundred years of alien exploitation. The Aleutians have the space drive. But what has humanity gained or lost, and who will pick up the pieces? This is a novel of politics, economics, sexual identity, and the fate of humanity.

We've added several other new e-book editions to our list, as well: Nicola Griffith's With Her Body, Andrea Hairston's Carl Brandon Parallax Award-winning Mindscape, Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things, and L. Timmel Duchamp's The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding).

2010 Locus Award Nominations

Tis the season for award nominations. A new set is out, this time for the Locus Awards, and some Aqueductistas are that ballot, too. Congratulations to Rachel Swirsky, for yet another nomination for "Eros, Philia, Agape," to Nicola Griffith for "Second Time Around" and to Maureen McHugh for "Useless Things," and congratulations to Ursula K. Le Guin, for Cheek by Jowl (an Aqueduct Press book)!

Here's the full ballot:

Science Fiction Novel

• The Empress of Mars, Kage Baker (Subterranean; Tor)
• Steal Across the Sky, Nancy Kress (Tor)
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
• Galileo's Dream, Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperVoyager; Ballantine Spectra)
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

Fantasy Novel

• The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
• Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)
• Drood, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland)

First Novel

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
• The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry (Penguin)
• Soulless, Gail Carriger (Orbit US)
• Lamentation, Ken Scholes (Tor)
• Norse Code, Greg van Eekhout (Ballantine Spectra)

Young-Adult Novel

• The Hotel Under the Sand, Kage Baker (Tachyon)
• Going Bovine, Libba Bray (Delacorte)
• Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic; Scholastic UK)
• Liar, Justine Larbalestier (Bloomsbury; Allen & Unwin Australia)
• Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

Novella

• The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)
• "Act One", Nancy Kress (Asimov's 3/09)
• "Vishnu at the Cat Circus", Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon)
• "Palimpsest", Charles Stross (Wireless)

Novelette

• "By Moonlight", Peter S. Beagle (We Never Talk About My Brother)
• "It Takes Two", Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three)
• "First Flight", Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor.com 8/25/09)
• "Eros, Philia, Agape", Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/3/09)
• "The Island", Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)

Short Story

• "The Pelican Bar", Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse Three)
• "An Invocation of Incuriosity", Neil Gaiman (Songs of the Dying Earth)
• "Spar", Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)
• "Going Deep", James Patrick Kelly (Asimov's 6/09)
• "Useless Things", Maureen F. McHugh (Eclipse Three)

Magazine

• Analog
• Asimov's
• Clarkesworld
• F&SF
• Tor.com

Publisher

• Baen
• Night Shade
• Pyr
• Subterranean
• Tor

Anthology

• Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Dark Horse)
• The New Space Opera 2, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos; HarperCollins Australia)
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
• Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Subterranean)
• Eclipse Three, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade)

Collection

• We Never Talk About My Brother, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon)
• Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
• Wireless, Charles Stross (Ace, Orbit UK)
• The Best of Gene Wolfe, Gene Wolfe (Tor); as The Very Best of Gene Wolfe (PS)
• The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volumes 1-6, Roger Zelazny (NESFA)

Editor

• Ellen Datlow
• Gardner Dozois
• David G. Hartwell
• Jonathan Strahan
• Gordon Van Gelder

Artist

• Stephan Martinière
• John Picacio
• Shaun Tan
• Charles Vess
• Michael Whelan

Non-fiction/Art Book

• Powers: Secret Histories, John Berlyne (PS)
• Spectrum 16: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, Cathy & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)
• Cheek by Jowl, Ursula K. Le Guin (Aqueduct)
• This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is "I"), Jack Vance (Subterranean)
• Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess, Charles Vess (Dark Horse)

2010 Hugo Nominations

The Hugo ballot was just announced at Eastercon (and was reported live by Cheryl Morgan via Convention Reporter, which is my source for what follows)-- and looks to be a much more inclusive selection of nominations than in recent years. I was especially pleased to see some Aqueductistas' names on the ballot-- congratulations to Nicola Griffith, Rachel Swirsky, and Helen Merrick! And as you might imagine, I'm particularly tickled to see that Aqueduct's The Secret Feminist Cabal has been nominated for Best Related Work. Also in that category, by the way, is the excellent On Joanna Russ, ed. by Farah Mendlesohn. Imagine that, two strong feminist works of nonfiction on the same ballot!

Without further ado, here's the ballot:

Best Novel:
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (Tor)
The City & The City by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
Wake by Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

Best Novella:
"Act One" by Nancy Kress (Asimov's 3/09)
The God Engines by John Scalzi (Subterranean)
"Palimpsest" by Charles Stross (Wireless)
Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow (Tachyon)
"Vishnu at the Cat Circus" by Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days)
The Women of Nell Gwynne's by Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Best novelette:
"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09)
"The Island" by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)
"It Takes Two" by Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three)
"One of our Bastards is Missing" by Paul Cornell (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three)
“Overtime” by Charles Stross (Tor.com 12/09)
"Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" Eugie Foster (Interzone 2/09)

Best Short Story:
"The Bride of Frankenstein" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's 12/09)
"Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)
"The Moment" by Lawrence M. Schoen (Footprints)
"Non-Zero Probabilities" by N.K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld 9/09)
"Spar" by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)

Best Related Work:
Canary Fever: Reviews by John Clute (Beccon)
Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees by Michael Swanwick (Temporary Culture)
The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teens' Science Fiction by Farah Mendlesohn (McFarland)
On Joanna Russ edited by Farah Mendlesohn (Wesleyan)
The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms by Helen Merrick (Aqueduct)
This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is "I") by Jack Vance (Subterranean)

Best Graphic Story:
Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Written by Neil Gaiman; Pencilled by Andy Kubert; Inked by Scott Williams (DC Comics)
Captain Britain and MI13. Volume 3: Vampire State Written by Paul Cornell; Pencilled by Leonard Kirk with Mike Collins, Adrian Alphona and Ardian Syaf (Marvel Comics)
Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages Written by Bill Willingham; Pencilled by Mark Buckingham; Art by Peter Gross & Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn; Colour by Lee Loughridge & Laura Allred; Letters by Todd Klein (Vertigo Comics)
Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright

Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse
Written and Illustrated by Howard Tayler

Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form:
Avatar Screenplay and Directed by James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox)
District 9 Screenplay by Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell; Directed by Neill Blomkamp (TriStar Pictures)
Moon Screenplay by Nathan Parker; Story & Directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films)
Star Trek Screenplay by Robert Orci & Alex Kurtzman; Directed by J.J. Abrams (Paramount)
Up Story by Bob Peterson, Pete Docter & Thomas McCarthy; Screenplay and Co-Directed by Bob Peterson & Pete Docter (Disney/Pixar)

Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form:
Doctor Who: “The Next Doctor” Written by Russell T Davies; Directed by Andy Goddard (BBC Wales)
Doctor Who: “Planet of the Dead” Written by Russell T Davies & Gareth Roberts; Directed by James Strong (BBC Wales)
Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” Written by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; Directed by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)
Dollhouse: “Epitaph 1” Story by Joss Whedon; Written by Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon; Directed by David Solomon (Mutant Enemy)
FlashForward: “No More Good Days” Written by Brannon Braga & David S. Goyer; Directed by David S. Goyer; (ABC)

Best Editor Short Form:
Ellen Datlow
Stanley Schmidt
Jonathan Strahan
Gordon Van Gelder
Sheila Williams

Best Editor Long Form:
Lou Anders
Ginjer Buchanan
Liz Gorinsky
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Juliet Ulman

Best Professional Artist:
Daniel Dos Santos
Bob Eggleton
Stephan Martinière
John Picacio
Shaun Tan

Semiprozine:
Ansible edited by David Langford
Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace & Cheryl Morgan
Interzone edited by Andy Cox
Locus edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong, & Liza Groen Trombi
Weird Tales edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal

Fanzine:
Argentus edited by Steven H Silver
Banana Wings edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer
CHALLENGER edited by Guy H. Lillian III
Drink Tank edited by Christopher J Garcia, with guest editor James Bacon
File 770 edited by Mike Glyer
StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith

Best Fan Writer:
Claire Brialey
Christopher J Garcia
James Nicoll
Lloyd Penney
Frederik Pohl

Best Fan Artist:
Brad W. Foster
Dave Howell
Sue Mason
Steve Stiles
Taral Wayne

The John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer:
Saladin Ahmed
Gail Carriger
Felix Gilman
Seanan McGuire
Lezli Robyn

Judging the Judges

As you've probably already heard, this year's Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best Books of 2009 is exclusively male-authored. WILLA (Women In Letters And Literary Arts) has issued a press release titled "Why Weren't Any Women Invited To Publishers Weekly's Weenie Roast."

Quoted in The Huffington Post, PW confidently admitted that they're “not the most politically correct" choices. This statement comes in a year in which new books appeared by writers such as Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and Alicia Ostriker.

“The absence made me nearly speechless.” said writer Cate Marvin, cofounder of the newly launched national literary organization WILLA (Women In Letters And Literary Arts), which, since August, has attracted close to 5400 members on their Facebook web page, including many major and emerging women writers. “It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.”

WILLA’s other cofounder, Erin Belieu, Director Of The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, asked, “So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that. I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people—writers and readers--who don’t feel good about it at all.”

PW also did a Top 100 list and, of the authors included, only 29 were women. The WILLA Advisory Board is in the process of putting together a list titled “Great Books Published By Women In 2009.” This will be posted to the organization’s Facebook page and website. Press release to follow.

In Sexism Watch: Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of 2009, Melissa Silverstein, at Women & Hollywood from a feminist perspective, concludes:

I personally believe that it is bullshit that the top 10 books of the year are all by men (and by the way 9 out of the 10 are by white men.) People who make these lists need to look at their own inherent and internalized biases. Wonder how those women who didn’t give a crap about political correctness yesterday are feeling this morning.

Interestingly, though, Nicola Griffith suggests that Publishers Weekly's cutting women out of its ten-best list is a screw-up that "is just another indication that PW is rapidly becoming irrelevant to the real reading world."

I've often thought that annual "best" lists more often than not reflect the workings of hype. Is it ever really possible to pick out the ten "best" (even when the selection is restricted by genre, and even supposing that the persons compiling the list have excellent reading skills and anything by the most narrow of tastes), given just how many fine books fly under the radar, particularly during the year in which they are first published? I rather like Nicola's assumption that such lists can be used to judge the credibility of their makers.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part One: Gwyneth Jones and Nicola Griffith

Gwyneth Jones:

Best of 2008

This hasn't been a very sf/f year for me, or a very musical year, and though I've seen the usual number of new movies, only one of them (see below) really impressed me favourably. I recommend Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, ed. Lynne Jamneck, Lethe Press. I'm not much of an erotic writer, but I tried to make up for that with sf content. Some of the other authors are a lot hotter: however, don't expect a cosy feast of 'adult' material. You should read this collection for a different, fresh, and challenging perspective on standard genre situations; which you'll certainly find.

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (interview with Satrapi on the site here, and Amazon.com's page here)

Originally published in France, graphic novel, the autobiography of a girl growing up in Iran at the time of the 1979 revolution, becoming a Punk, getting sent (on her own) out of the country to keep her out of trouble; filmed as a black and white animation in 2007, won the Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Oscar nominated.

I saw the movie in May 2008, it's wonderful, but would also highly recommend the graphic novel, and I'm not alone (see the amazon link!). The heroine is beguiling, the b&w drawing is simple, elegant, and just beautiful, a delight to the eye; the story of a much loved, outspoken young rebel-without-a-cause, and then clueless expatriate teenager, transcends nationality and culture: really struck a chord with me, anyway. Tragic, undaunted, also very funny indeed. But this is all happening in Iran, (aka Persia, to those who really don't know!) so you also get a strong corrective to preconceptions you may have about Islamic Womanhood. Admitted, Marjane Satrapi's background is privileged, the world she grew up in no longer exists, some of her "historical facts" are suspect; and the term "Persepolis" conjures up an expat-community of a certain generation, regarded with cynicism by some Iranians. But the women and girls you meet in Persepolis -talented, irrepressible, daring: speaking out in university lectures, shouting back at modesty-police, and able to behave like this and survive are still around, living in Iran today. Still fighting for equal rights, still making art for a cause and still, though embattled and quite often in jail, a credit to their religion, their ancient country, their remarkable culture.

See it, buy it. Excellent and classy entertainment.

The Night of Mir'aj, Zoe Ferraris (Amazon.com listing here; published in the US as Finding Nouf)

I'm a big fan of thrillers as comfort food (couldn't tell you how many Swedish police procedurals, in translation nb, I've consumed this year), but just occasionally I strike something completely different. The Night of Mir'aj is set in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, it's the story of the death of a rich young woman; the life of another woman, the amazing Katya, who practices as a forensic pathologist in the most forbidding conditions; and the moral journey made by one man of goodwill, as he tries to reconcile their two narratives with his own devout and narrow piety. A window on a hidden world that's totally different from Persepolis. A woman who steps out of line will quickly get into trouble, in Iran, but the lines aren't impossibly oppressive. In The Night of Mir'aj we witness the bizarre behaviours of human beings, men as well as women, just trying to get by from day to day in a thoroughly twisted, disgustingly unnatural society. I can hardly stand to call it Islamic.

It says here, on the back flap of my edition, "Zoe Ferraris lives in a conservative Islamic community in Jeddah. . .". Not any more she doesn't! I thought, when I'd read the book, and inevitably I'm right. She's back in San Francisco these days, with her daughter and not with her Bedouin ex-husband. The murder and detection story isn't the reason to read this book (although murder-and-detection, as many writers have discovered, is an excellent tool for dissecting a society); but by the end it's clear there's a good chance Katya and Nayir may become the stars of an exotic detective series. In a way I'm sorry, as I feel there's bound to be a dilution. But I was really, really impressed by their debut.

Blonde Roots, Bernadine Evaristo

I reviewed this for Strange Horizons, which you can read here.


Gwyneth is the recipient of two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society's Children of the Night award, the P.K.Dick award and shared the first Tiptree award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason. She is the author of numerous novels and many short stories and essays. With Aqueduct she has published Life, which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and will be publishing a collection of essays, Imagination Space, with Aqueduct in 2009. Her most recent novel is Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant.





Nicola Griffith:


•Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: the Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Duncan & Klooster. My novel-in-progress is also set in a blood-stained period: seventh-century Britain. To avoid the misty romance of fictional violence--a few gleaming edges, a splash of crimson, heroic horn notes--I read Bierce's first-hand accounts of the real thing. Ugly, true, very human.

•The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart. To see how the masters do it I revisited this old favourite, reeking of mist and menhirs, moors and magic. For the first time I noticed anachronisms, for example a character who is spasming is 'jacknifing'. But she's still brilliant.

•Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With People, by Marco Iacoboni. Mirror neurons are what make great novels feel real--they're responsible for us being able to recreate the experience of others inside ourselves, to literally put ourselves in the story. If you don't know the science, this will lay it all out for you neatly.

•Entourage, on HBO. Total boy tv, but I love it. The boys pick up girls, beat the system, and earn a pile of money...

•The Sword of Rhiannon, by Leigh Brackett. I was asked to write an introduction to this masterpiece of '40s planetary romance for republication next year. I'd read it before but rereading showed me a lot I'd missed the first time around: the beginnings of cultural consciousness, the absorption of crime fiction's tropes--and Brackett, it turns out, is an elegiast.

•The Journal of Late Antiquity. It's fascinating to watch scholarship evolve: the 'Dark Ages' becomes 'Early Medieval' and 'Sub-Roman,' and now the latter is more often called 'Late Antiquity'. And here's the journal to prove it, stuffed with essays whose authors are bursting with the excitement of a new discipline.

•The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie. Don't read this. I forced myself through about a third and was, frankly, disgusted by Rushdie's laziness. He has undeniable gifts, and he's fearless, but he squanders them on careless prose.

•True Blood, on HBO. The best new series on TV. Sex, blood, politics. Vampire/queer analogies, Cajun accents, moss-festooned live oaks. Fabulous. (The books are sad little things. Why do bad books make such good tv?)

•Beowulf, trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland. This is the umpteenth translation I've read of this epic, but for whatever reason I noticed a lot about it that I'd missed before. (I also missed a lot of stuff I'd missed before, sigh--see my post, Retconning Beowulf, on my research blog, Gemæcca. Fortunately, some medieval experts put me right.) I say 'translation' but I'm beginning to think 'interpretation' is a more accurate term. Still, it got me thinking about culture, again. Plus how can you not love something with dragons, hoards of gold, and sword-swangin' heroes?

•Iron Man. Woo hoo. Loved this. Loved the fact that Stark eschews that superhero secrecy crap. Given that Marvel appears intent on building a superhero metaverse, it's a pity The Incredible Hulk was so incredibly lame.

•Chalice, by Robin McKinley. Another inimitable tale of growing into oneself from the empress of such things. This may be McKinley in a minor key (more Sunshine than The Blue Sword) but she kicks Rushdie to the curb.

Nicola's awards include the Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times). She is the author of five novels and a memoir, as well as essays and short fiction. Aqueduct published Nicola's collection With Her Body: Short Fiction in 2004. She's currently working on a huge historical novel set in 7th century Britain.

Sun on Dragonfly

Nicola Griffith has posted a fan vid based on her story "Touching Fire" (which can be found in With Her Body, Volume 2 in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series) on her blog, in the entry titled Murder music, heat and sex music. The vid, "Sun on Dragonfly," is by Karina, who has also made a vid in response to Kelley Eskridge's " Strings."

20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards

I'm a little slow to have seen this, so maybe others have been, too. In case you hadn't heard, an Aqueduct author and a couple of Aqueduct's friends were awarded Lammies two nights ago:

Nicola Griffith's And Now We Are Going to Have a Party won in the Women's Memoir/Biography category and Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel's First Person Queer won in the LGBT anthology category. (The complete list of winners can be found here.

Congratulations, Nicola! Congratulations Lawrence and Richard!

Aqueduct Authors To Read at A Different Light in Los Angeles

Just a reminder, in case it slipped past you in the welter of stuff here about WisCon: Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith will be reading tonight at 7:30 p.m. at A Different Light Bookstore in West LA. Nicola will be reading from Always and Kelley from Dangerous Space. This is their first reading-- ever-- in the LA area. For more details, go here.

Stuff to Check Out

Now that I'm no longer living WisCon 24/7, I can begin to catch up with stuff going on elsewhere. Here are a few links:

Kelley Eskridge is interviewed by LeeAnnKriegh on AfterEllen.com.

David Rovics eulogizes Utah Phillips, who died this weekend.

Lesley A. Hall reviews Blood in the Fruit, the fourth volume of the Marq'ssan Cycle, for Strange Horizons.

Kaolin at GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominaor) Magazine reviews Sue Lange's We, Robots.

Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith will be reading on Friday at A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood. You can catch the details here.

Nicola Griffith Reads at Hugo House

Tomorrow night at 7 p.m. Nicola Griffith and Corinna Wycoff will be reading from their Lambda finalist works at Hugo House. Nicola is a finalist in the memoir category, for And Now We Are Going to Have a Party; Corinna Wycoff is a finalist in the Lebian debut fiction category.

The details:

Tuesday, May 6 at 7:00 pm
Hugo House
1634 Eleventh Ave, Seattle

Nicola's portion of the reading will be video'd for YouTube.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Part 1: Nicola Griffith and Cat Rambo

Let the lists begin!


Nicola Griffith:

"Lists and essays can include every sort of text," Timmi said—and I'm going to interpret that broadly, starting with music. Early this year, my publicist at Riverhead set up a MySpace page for my new Aud novel, Always. The music she picked to play when the profile page opened was "Girlshapedlovedrug" by Gomez. It's a bouncy little tune, but what caught me was the lyrics:

She’s a wicked girl/Worst in all the world/A mystery lies in her/She spends her days/ In a violent rage/Try as I might I love her.

I was struck by the notion that lyrics like that for a pop tune (and it aspires to be nothing else) would not have worked ten years ago: a woman, a "girlshapedlovedrug who messes with your mind," who is dangerous and unpredictable but with whom the singer is nonetheless helplessly in love. It was a lovely discovery; women are taking up more roles in the pop culture world, something beyond the old virgin/whore, goddess/crone dyads. Oh, and another Gomez track, "How We Operate," is a haunting, addictive piece with banjo and mandolin. Download those two tracks and have fun.

Once Riverhead had my MySpace page set up, I couldn't help putting one up myself for which I had to put together a whole playlist for my profile. I began to listen to old favourites with attention, and fell in love all over again with Nina Hagen and Marianne Faithfull, the transgressive babes of the early eighties. Faithfull's "Why d'ya Do It?" (on Broken English) was like nothing I'd ever heard in my life: rage directed at a boyfriend for fucking another woman, full of words I'd never heard a woman use in song before: cunt, snatch, cock, dick, pussy, bitch. Although the rage is nominally directed at the man, the double focal points of the song are two women. And the rage isn't hissy, or venomous, or catty, it's volcanic. Then there's Nina Hagen's NunSexMonkRock, performance art in German-in-LA rock clothes. Hagen barks like a dog, acts out the part of a pig-herder possessed by demons shouting at Jesus, and froths at the mouth as a mad-dog Soviet radio propagandist. Unlike every other singer of the seventies and eighties she is wholly unconcerned with her image as a sexual object. It's thrilling music, angry, dissonant, and definitely before its time.

The new novel I'm working on, a big historical set in seventh century Britain, has led me to discover the wonderful world of early medieval bloggery. My three favorite online resources are Heavenfield, a blog, The Heroic Age, an online journal (both founded by Michelle Zeigler) and The Medieval Review, a moderated disribution list. It was from reviews, articles, and conversations on these lists that I found incredible, novel-altering non-fiction, such as The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, a new translation by Barney, Lewis, Beach & Berghof from CUP. This book made me fall in love with Latin all over again. It made me laugh. It made me marvel (that one man sought to codify what was known to be known in the 6th C). The translation (and book design—all those typefaces) is a tour-de-force. It's a real window into early medieval pedagogy, and it's made me rethink the education of my viewpoint character, Hild. (Hild has got to be the most—not one of the most, but the most—fascinating historical figure not yet fictionalized. This book excites me so much I tremble. I can hardly stand it.) Another book that made me tear up and rethink my seventh century was Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, by Penelope Walton Rogers. Did you know that at least sixty percent of women's time in the seventh century would have been spent on textile production? Nor did I. But it's a fact that changes everything. And it led to some serious fun with words: I ended up inventing a wholly new social concept concerning the relationships women formed as weaving teams, and repurposed an Anglo-Saxon word, gemæcca, to describe it. Writing this novel is beginning to feel like writing science fiction. My face is beginning to hurt from smiling so much.

One more non-fiction journal that's delighted me this year: The Economist. It's unswervingly funny, incisive, and beautifully designed. It's the best magazine in the world. Their website is finally catching up to its potential, too. Give it whirl.

The world of television has been a bit disappointing this year. The Sopranos, frankly, sucked. I hate, loathe, and detest ambiguous endings; they smack of lack of courage and indecision. They're cheap and infuriating. I think David Chase made a grave error. Given that ending I certainly won't be shelling out for the series on DVD. Lost seemed to be disappearing up its own fundament. Heroes degenerated; the first few episodes this season were unbelievably bad—full of 'As you know, Bob' dialogue—and if you're going to dilute the tension by splitting the action into two strands, the writing has to really shine. The Bionic Woman was boring. Pushing Daisies was so mannered I found it unwatchable. Then there was Battlestar Galactica: Razor. It was nicely written, well-acted, and I love BSG the series. (What's not to love? It has jokes, and sex, and battles. What a blast!) But it felt...thin. And there's the whole problematic powerful-evil-women-are-lesbians paradigm. I still enjoyed it, though; I'm still wriggling at the thought of the new series next year—assuming the writers' strike doesn't take that off the table. But that's too depressing to think about. One consistent cause for optimism has been Dexter: it's funny, appalling, the characters are consistent, and the stories follow clean, clear arcs. You can tell it's adapted from a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay; it makes sense.

Most of the novels I read this year were re-reads. Lots of old favorites like The Blue Sword (Robin McKinley) and Fire From Heaven (Mary Renault). But I also read McKinley's Dragonhaven which, while not entirely satisfactory—it was intensely claustrophobic; it had to be, given the subject matter—still deserves a place on this year's Tiptree honor roll. I've never before seen a boy go through the horrors and stress as well as joy of motherhood. McKinley's willingness to Really Go There continues to astonish me.

I'm going to finish where I started, with music. "Faster Kill Pussycat" by Paul Oakenfold (featuring Brittany Murphy). A woman singing to a woman, 'I think I'm losing control/you turn me on/you know you're turning me on' with a great video and hip-shaking beat, and all sung by the woman who voiced Gloria, the love interest in Happy Feet. It's addictive. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Cat Rambo:

Several story collections stood out for me this year. One was Kelley Eskridge's Dangerous Space, which was solid and full of good stuff, while another was Susan Palwick's The Fate of Mice. I heard Palwick read from Shelter at WisCon last May and immediately added her to my to-read list—I'm looking forward to continue exploring what she's written so far.

Daniel Abraham's fantasy novel A Shadow in Summer blew me away, as did Justina Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love. Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box was a terrific read, although a wee bit skimpy towards the end. Sarah Monette's The Virtu lived up to its predecessor, Melusine. Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow was a wonderful read, and a good accompaniment to Sergei Lukyanenko's Nightwatch trilogy. Those are older books, but the release of the first two movies based on them makes it worth mentioning that the films may be significantly more comprehensible if you've read the books first. Jo Walton released the follow-up to her terrific alternative history, Farthing, Ha’penny.

I have always loved good swords and sorcery, and I was pleased to find Charles Saunders' Imaro and Imaro 2 from Nightshade Books. They're a pleasant re-visit to territory that Robert E. Howard made familiar, made fresher by a non-white hero.

I went on a spree of reading superhero-inspired fiction earlier this year that was spurred in part by Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible. Of the various books I read, a stand-out was Karma Girl by Jennifer Estep (yay for superhero chick lit!)

Best of the books about writing was Samuel R. Delany's About Writing, although some of that was familiar stuff that had appeared earlier. But the repeated stuff also happened to be some of things most worth impressing at some deep, unconscious level, so I don't know that it's possible to read it too often.

I'm more of a gamer than a film-goer, and I would mention games of interest, but in general the gaming world continues to frustrate me. I play World of Warcraft despite some things, but my heart grieves to see their latest, very funny set of commercials not feature a single woman. The latest Civ expansion adds one female-led civilization and continues to ignore some of the leaders they could be including. The release of one game, Assassin's Creed, marred by the company's attempt to capitalize on the producer's youth and femininity, has led to yet another ugly episode showcasing the industry's sexism. Maybe that'll change in 2008, but I'm not holding my breath.

A Conversation with Nicola Griffith--part two

Timmi: I’ve been interested in the post-composition stage of writing for a long time. So when I read Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing, it particularly provoked me into thinking about this aspect of the writing process. In his opening essay, “Emblems of Talent,” he uses the German term Begeisterung to designate the passion that is needed to drive the writer to the heights of achievement, and he roughly translates this term as “inspiration.” Now most people—especially those who aren’t artists—conceive of “inspiration” as what happens in the moment that one has an idea, rather than as the passion to take that idea and the work it is based on past the initial rough stage to its ultimate realization. In effect, Delany’s use of the term insists on the primary importance of that second stage of work, where the artist is reshaping the material that she has already brought into existence. Does this way of talking about it make sense to you?

Nicola: It makes sense only if 'inspiration' means vision--not just a clear vision of the work but of self. I'm committed to the notion of brilliance, of never letting a mediocre piece of work past my door. Flawed, yes, inevitably so; mediocre, never. I see myself as a great writer. I have to live up to that vision. I will draw on whatever it takes: will, drive, hope, psychotic self-belief. I understand The Yellow Wallpaper much better now. Am I willing to stare into the abyss yet again with another novel? No! Except, well, yes, of course, because why be a writer if you're not willing to go all the way to make the best possible book?

Timmi: Does the work of composing prose feel more immediate to you than the work of rewriting?

Nicola: Often rewriting is original composition: new scenes with new characters, employing new metaphor systems in the service of new emotional depth. It's just doing it inside a previously explored framework.

However, if what you're asking is: does doing the first draft feel different to subsequent drafts the answer is yes, it does, absolutely (see my answer below).

Timmi: Do you consider the rewriting and reshaping part of the process as vital and important as the immediate composition of the prose?

Nicola: Vital, yes, important, yes. Different, yes. The first draft is the first time with an idea, and it's all about the thrill of the new: discovery, challenge, uncertainty, ecstasy, delight. On some level, a first draft is also deadly serious, exploratory play, it's where you find out if it's going to work, if it's going to be worth developing a long-term relationship.

Big structural rewrites are like those discoveries of something different with a long-term partner: wow, who knew?! Mind-blowingly different and yet strangely familiar. Vastly rewarding.

Intending only a first draft is like a one-night stand. It's fun, and it has its own rewards, but I wouldn't want to take it home to my mother, y'know?

It occurs to me that building a sequence of novels around one character, as I've done with Aud in TBP, Stay, and now Always, is not dissimilar to rewriting in this way. With each novel I re-examine Aud, dig just a little deeper into a woman I already know.

Timmi: Does the knowledge that the first draft may be substantially changed when you’ve finished it make you feel freer to follow your intuition wherever it may lead you? Or do you think the way you write the first draft would be pretty much the same?

Nicola: It's all necessary. I can't imagine any part of the process without the other parts.

The notion of 'intuition' in writing doesn't please me. The first time, yes--I think we all start out writing beyond ourselves--but at this stage I'm far happier thinking about the non-verbal understanding of where I need to go and how as 'expertise'. Intuition is for beginners.

Timmi: And finally, how do you decide when you’re actually, absolutely, done?

Nicola: I think there's a crossing point: where book and author reach an equilibrium, and understanding, where I'm ready to let it go, and I know it can stand on its own. I won't let a book out of the house until I know I can look it in the eye year after year. Twenty years from now, any fault I let by because of impatience will be magnified. For me, a book has to be as close to perfect as humanly possible.

Books, however, come from people. People change. If you start changing in the middle of writing a book, then all bets are off, because if you're changing, what you want from a novel changes. Then you have an awful decision to make. My desktop (and desk drawers) are littered with dozens of abandoned projects. Ideas are cheap. Some are not worth pursuing.

When it comes to being 'done', writing is unlike anything else. Unlike a relationship with a person, when a novel is done it's not over; it's not broken; it's ready to begin, ready to venture into the world.

Timmi: Thanks, Nicola. The next time we drink wine together, please remind me to make a toast to all writers who choose, like you, to risk writing a flawed novel instead of taking the more usual path of writing a mediocre one.

A Conversation with Nicola Griffith--part one

Timmi: The other night at your party, Nicola, when we were talking about how writing fiction just gets harder and harder the longer one does it, you mentioned to me that in working on Always, the Aud novel that has been recently released, you wrote more than a million words that you eventually reduced to 175,000. In fact, you have always done extensive—often architectural—rewrites of your novels, which I take as a testament to your artistry. Artistry, of course, begins with talent, but talent that isn’t backed by passion and ambition results not in artistry, but in mediocre work—that is to say, in writing that is good enough to be published, hyped, and even critically praised but which at base does not live up to its potential. At writing workshops I frequently run into the attitude that if an editor can be found to buy a piece of fiction pretty much as is, a light line-edit of a first draft is good enough. And indeed, when many writers finish the first draft of a novel, they consider it in some essential sense “finished”; the very idea of doing what you do would appall them.

Nicola: It appalls me, too, if I stop to think about it. My guess is the actual Always word count is about two million, if you include the stroking and smoothing and so forth of ordinary rewrites. However, if we're talking about brand-new architectural restructuring, with new characters, new scenes, new metaphor systems, then two-thirds of a million is probably closer to the mark.

I feel for all those young (career-wise if not chronologically) writers who still regard publication as the magic bullet. Being published doesn't make you a good writer, it just makes you published. There is no magic bullet, no funny handshake, no secret decoder ring. There is nothing but talent and hard work and patience. This hard truth is one I think most artists try to dodge, for a while. We are, after all, profoundly lazy. (For me, one of the necessary components of art is elegance. Elegance requires simplicity--the fewest strokes, the most direct step, the least complicated solution. Lazy people work so hard to get things just right because that's how we learn to make things easier next time.)

Writing, funnily enough, doesn't work like the rest of life. It never gets easier. I can give personal examples of that. So settle in, get comfortable: I'm going to tell you of the unfurling of each of my five novels, with a focus on the rewriting.

My first voluntary fiction was a short story I began when I was twenty-two or -three, called 'Women and Children First'. It was meant to be witty and ironic: a spaceship hurtling through the void, an accident, a lantern-jawed hero-captain who says, 'To the lifepods. Women and children first!' The women say, 'Okay', and merrily abandon the ship, ending up on an uninhabited planet and founding a woman-centred society, where everything would be beautiful and perfect. But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia. When I started to write, with my fountain pen on my lined paper, I started to think, and that's When It Changed.

That is, I changed; my assumptions disintegrated, as soon as I started imagining specific people in specific situations. Specificity is the ultimate anti-cliché tool. I got specific and, phhtt, no more lesbian feminist paradise.

The story became a novel. By the time I finished it (and called it Greenstorm (after the planet it was set on, Grenschtom's Planet), I thought I was the second coming: a novel! I had fantasies of televised black-tie events where the glitterati applauded in awe as I collected my Booker Prize. I knew, flat out knew, I was Destined for Greatness. But first I had to get the damn thing typed.

Eventually it went off to publishers. After much trial and error, it found its way to Malcolm Edwards at Gollancz and to Jen Green at The Women's Press. (For more on some of this, see And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life, my kinda sorta memoir.

Jen Green explained in three closely typed pages what was wrong with the book but that she believed I could fix it. Malcolm Edwards said if I cut it by a third, he'd consider publishing.

This, of course, was tremendous response to a first fiction but all I saw was rejection. I was so beside myself with shock and a deep, focused rage that I destroyed the bannisters of the flat I lived in: kicked them out, precisely and deliberately, one by one. They crack had crack rejected crack me. Too crack many crack words! I thought I was cross at them; really I was appalled that despite all that effort, I'd failed; that they wanted me to work.

I got over it. (I got drunk.) Then I sat down and started rewriting. Half way through I stopped: I saw just how awful and amateurish the novel was, and I couldn't face the almost total destruction and rebuilding it would take. I had grown and changed; the book was too small. I couldn't integrate into the old book the (absolutely spot-on) criticisms I'd been given by these editors because those criticisms had fundamentally changed me as a writer.

I put the novel in a drawer and wrote another. This one was set on the same world but many hundreds of years later. By now there were two societies on the planet: the women-only side of the planet, and the mixed-gender side. I spent more time destroying the notion of essentialism. In a fit of irony I titled it We Are Paradise and then read it through and found it far too science-fantasyish for my tastes. Also, it was a love-conquers-all story. It just wouldn't do. I stuffed it in a drawer without showing anyone (though if you want to read the first four pages, see ANWAGTHAP).

I resolved to learn to write by doing a few short stories. I reasoned that being able to complete a story arc in a month would teach me faster than throwing away a novel every year or two.

I sold my fourth short story attempt, 'Mirrors and Burnstone', to Interzone. It was a solid skiffy novelette about the rescue of a human security officer by an alien native. After it was published I was invited to attend Mexicon II and to be on a panel about gender and aliens. The moderator, Sherry Coldsmith, asked me a question about the aliens in 'Mirrors and Burnstone', and I opened my mouth but what I'd been about to say was blotted out by a sudden huge revelation: the aliens in M&B were women. And the plot of what was to become Ammonite dropped into my head like a screen menu as I sat mute before a hundred people.I spent the rest of the convention in a daze.

I would write this novel, I knew.

But I wasn't in a rush. I let the ideas accrete. I moved to the US. I wrote some other stories, and had an idea for another novel (that became Slow River). I got a letter (this was before email) from Malcolm Edwards, now the Editorial Director at HarperCollins/Grafton, saying, essentially: been reading your stories in Interzone, do you have a novel? Why yes, I said (lying), I'm working on two. And I wrote a paragraph about Ammonite-to-be and Slow River-to-be. And as my reply wended its way to London via the mysteries of international mail, I sat and wrote furiously the first few chapters of Ammonite.

Ammonite unrolled like a rug kicked open before an emperor: inevitable, unstoppable, luxuriant. Soup to nuts it took me less than a year. It came out whole. The reason it was so fast and easy was that it was set on the same planet--Grenchstom's Planet, GP, Jeep--as that first story-then-novel, and some of the characters (Marghe, Thenike, Vine, Uaithne) were familiar to me from the second novel. So another way to consider Ammonite is as the book that took eight years to make.

Meanwhile, Slow River was growing in the back of my mind. I was terrified of it; I knew I didn't have the skill to translate my vision. I was right. Thirty thousand words in, I knew it wasn't going to work. I had become hopelessly muddled with flashbacks piggybacking on flashbacks, and dizzily escalating dream and nightmare sequences. Each time I sat down to work I felt queasy. The more I tried to consciously wrestle the book into shape, the worse everything got. It wasn't until I'd given up--or thought I'd given up--that I found the solution.

Kelley came home from work one night and found me sitting in a heap on the living room floor. How did your work go today? she asked. 'It's crap. I'm crap. I can't write. I've given up. I'll have to find a job.' I meant every word; my life, as I understood it, was over. Once Kelley saw that I was utterly serious, that I could not be consoled, she disappeared into the kitchen and after a long moment re-emerged with two frosty Dos Equis. 'Okay,' she said. I looked up. She held out a beer. 'This is a magic beer. When you reach the bottom of the bottle everything will be better. You'll find out how tomorrow.' I stared. 'Trust me,' she said. 'Just drink the beer. It's magic.'

I drank the beer. About one swallow from the end, I felt a stray thought break my brain surface and arrow into my subconscious. I didn't pursue it. I was trusting the magic.

I woke in the middle of the night, thinking 'Brazzaville Beach', William Boyd's brilliant novel set in the Congo and written from two different points-of-view, though both from the same character. And the solution lay there, whole and perfect, in my mind. The next day I deleted those thirty thousand words and began again.

I don't remember how long it took me to write. Not long, I suspect. I was moving through an ecstatic dream. I printed the draft. Gave it to Kelley. She read it and burst into tears. 'Oh, honey, it's brilliant!' I smiled through my own tears and told her she gave good beer. 'Oh, god,' she said, 'I was so scared that day, I didn't know what to do, I'd never seen you like that before. The magic beer thing was sheer desperation.'

I have since learnt that despair, the feeling of being in the middle of the Gobi Desert--nothing before me but dust, nothing behind me but dust--is just part of my process.

Ammonite took one year to write (or eight, depending on your perspective), Slow River took two and a half (or perhaps four). The Blue Place took ten months--

--or perhaps six years. The idea of Aud--a dream of a woman who could kill without hesitation--occurred to me in 1991. I settled down to write in 1996. I was done, whap, ten months later in 1997. Like writing Ammonite, it just unfurled. Like Ammonite, like Slow River, I had no publisher edits. Unlike the two SF books, with TBP I regret this. The Blue Place is a good book, but it was a new genre and there are one or two things, just little things, line edits and metaphors--and one awful error-of-fact--I'd change today.

But I knew it was good, and I knew it would do well, and I thought the time might be ripe for me to tackle Stay, a novel about grief. My little sister had been dead eleven years. I thought I'd healed sufficiently to examine grief in fiction. So in 1999, I began, and it was hard, but it was good. In early 2001, I was halfway through the first real rewrite when my elder sister died.

I rewrote Stay thirteen times. Three of those were far-reaching changes, all in the service of my struggle to understand grief through the lens of a fictional character. There were times when rewriting felt like ripping off a scab off, over and over, or pounding a bruise with a hammer. It made me ill, physically and emotionally. Twice, I vowed I would stop, cancel my contract with Nan A. Talese, tell my editor there, Sean McDonald, that I wanted to write something else, something easier. Each time, my pride, my sense of who I am as a writer, made me go back to my desk, grit my teeth, and do it again. (I've written about this, from a slightly different perspective, in an essay, 'Doing the Work'.

And then it was time to have fun, to write a novel that wouldn't hurt, that would be nothing but a blast, a big, burly book, all excitement and rollercoaster ups and downs.

So I sat down to write Always. I knew it was going to be big. (The proposal itself was more than fifty pages long; if you're a devotee of process porn, you can read an excerpt here.)

I imagined it as a dual narrative, one in Seattle in the narrative past, one in Atlanta in the narrative present. The Atlanta narrative would take the form of self-defence lessons; the Seattle narrative would be more traditional novel chapters.

The proposal was accepted by Sean McDonald, now at Riverhead, in 2003. I wrote the first three chapters of each narrative strand, easily, fluidly. I was excited. I wrote some more; this was fun.

Then I became less excited. I began to get tense.

Physical tension is a clue that something isn't right. The body knows. By now, every time I sat at my computer my stomach closed and I couldn't get my breath. Perhaps I was becoming ill. I decided to rest. I set the book aside, did other things (joined the board of a non-profit, thought about teaching, pondered moving house), and felt fine. When I went back to the book, I couldn't breathe.

I printed out what I had and read it with a cold, clear eye. The individual scenes were good, better than good, but the whole was not going to work. For one thing, to say everything I wanted to say in the way I was saying it would take about a quarter of a million words. For another, the double narrative was fighting itself. The metaphors were not in synch; the emotional arcs were working against one another.

I threw away all my delicious work and began again, this time with a single-strand narrative. Fifteen months after my initial beginning, I had a novel. It was 140,000 words, longer than anything I'd published before. I thought it was pretty good; actually I thought it was lovely: nuanced and fun, witty and stately, plotty and character-driven. I sent it to Sean and concentrated on the non-profit I'd joined, on moving house, and on a short story collection. But I began to get very, very tense again. Whenever I thought about the book, I couldn't breathe. The body knows; the book wasn't right.

Four months later, I still hadn't heard anything from Sean and I was going crazy. Then he came to Seattle, and we went out for dinner. I was on my second kamikaze when he said, How come you didn't send me the book you outlined? And I explained that it didn't work, that it was impossible, that, anyway, it would be very, very long. Long doesn't scare me, he said. No, I said, really long. Our entrees came. So tell me what didn't work, he said. Everything, I said. I couldn't make the timing thing make sense, I couldn't get the resonance between Seattle and Atlanta. He chewed thoughtfully. So--and he was quite diffident--have you considered setting the Atlanta events before Aud goes to Seattle, rather than after?

Tumblers clicked and dropped in my head. I sipped my kamikaze. Well, I said eventually, that might work; I'd have to think about it. And then we chatted for another ten minutes, and then I said, 'So, Sean, you know you're asking me to throw away 140,000 words and begin again on a really huge, really emotionally and structurally complicated book and do it in less than a year?' He nodded. 'You know that's impossible, right?' He looked at me and said, 'Well, if you did manage it, I think you'd have an excellent book, and I and Riverhead could try to break you out.'

To a mid-list writer the phrase 'break you out' is magical. It means publicity, attention, print runs, co-op money. I told Sean I needed two weeks to think about it, and then went home in a daze. The thing was materially impossible. I was tired, and sick--viscerally and emotionally--of working so hard. But 'break you out...' Perhaps Aud would finally reach her audience.

I took every minute of the two weeks. What I would be attempting--to write, essentially, a non-fiction instruction manual as fiction, then nest that fiction inside another fiction, and make it all unbearably tense and exciting--would be a literary highwire act, one I'd have to do so well it would look easy; I'd have to half kill myself to write something so good no one could tell it was good.

Then I said yes. A week later, my MS reared up and crashed over me; I went numb from the armpits down. I stayed that way for nearly two months.

The body knows. In this case, the body quailed. Since I couldn't type, I spent my time thinking. I persuaded myself of my ability to achieve the impossible, and eventually I recovered enough to sit at my desk again.

I threw away the beginning and the end and many chunks of the middle of my lovely, heartbreaking novel, and I hollowed out the scenes that were left and began to work on the simultaneous novel-within-a-novel writing that gradually refilled the barebones scenes with different emotions.

And I had an absolute blast writing the self-defense lessons. I invented ten new characters and banged them together joyously and at speed. I was eager every morning to get up and at it. In fact it was all going so well I threw in an extra layer, so now it was a three-ply novel: well over 200,000 words.

I could go on and on and on, but at this point I'll just say I ended up cutting out one layer and slightly reconfiguring the other two to balance the whole, and left thirty thousand words on the cutting room floor. The Always you can read now is not the Always I originally wrote. The first one was very much A Novel. The final one is, well, I'm not sure what it is, A Bustling Slice-of-Life Thriller, an Action Meditation, a Rollercoaster-with-Philosophy Ride? And, believe it or not, I'd love the chance to go through it one more time. The copyedit and proofreading stage was knocked off the rails by my mother's death. There are simple errors (some actually inserted by the proofreader, to the degree that one sentence doesn't make sense). But I'm proud of it. My hope is that most readers will zip through it and simply not understand how much work it was. My hope is that all they'll get is joy, a seamless experience that will, ultimately, change their life.

Because that's the point. To change the reader's world.

Now I'd like to take a moment to backtrack a little and clarify this notion of 'how writing fiction just gets harder'. What's really getting harder for me isn't the writing, it's what happens after the writing. This falls into two parts: shepherding the novel through the publishing process, and then trying to survive on the proceeds.

Trade publishing is a deeply stupid industry. The individuals who work in the business aren't stupid, but the prevailing corporate business model is. International publishing conglomerates are trying to operate in a culture at odds with itself: gentlemanly literary hardcover publishing, whose basic goal, historically, has been the promotion of art and culture and personal prestige, rammed up against cut-throat commercial fiction, whose aim has been to sell product. Both cultures have of course mutated considerably over time but, still, it's like watching Disney try to sell R-rated films; there's an obvious dissonance. In addition, the big houses' long-term profit goals are unrealistic, in my opinion. To achieve these goals they would need to adjust (perhaps 'destroy' is closer to the mark) their models: returns policy, marketing and publicity process, approach to sales, handling of the author, understanding of the reader, relationships with allies and critics... Everything. But this is an old, old complaint. I don't want to bore readers (or, frankly, myself) by rolling around in the grubby details.

The end result of all this is that the ecosystem of the working novelist is becoming increasingly precarious. At first glance my literary lake appears serene, but fewer and fewer things live in it; its underpinnings are being eaten by the zebra mussels of bestseller-focused publishing, and by exotic media. The original habitat is dying. There's very little left for a midlist writer to live on.

I don't know how my life looks from the outside, but lately enough people have made enough off-the-cuff comments in my presence that I can only assume it looks more easy and affluent than it is. I don't have a trust fund, a steady-income-producing spouse, a sideline writing articles for Harper's, or a teaching job. The only money I earn is through novels and very occasional short fiction. As I've never appeared on the NYT or PW bestseller lists, this is less than you might think; it takes me a long time to get a book to the stage where I can look it in the face, year after year.

Don't misunderstand me: I love what I do. It's a joy and a privilege. I'd like to do it forever, but those striped mussels are munching up everything their path. I don't know how much time writers like me have left.

What makes the creation of a great novel possible--and, yes, as I've said, I believe I write great novels--is time. What buys time is money. Those bestsellers who bring out a book a year have an army working for them: privately hired people to do their research, answer their mail, run their websites, cater their parties, do their publicity, even edit their books. (I recently exchanged email with a man in California who makes a comfortable living editing a dozen or so of the biggest names in crime fiction, on their dime.)

I don't have an army, and so it takes more time. I could have published that long-ago first novel, Greenstorm, I think, and my path would have been set: a writer of sub-genre feminist potboilers. I think I might have become rich. I doubt I would have won the Tiptree or Lambda. I wouldn't have readers come up to me (as one did last year) and say, in all seriousness, Your book saved my life. That is worth the time.

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[To be continued...]