#also if anyone named their feminist organization 'GIRL' i would say the writers are virtue signalling

[indigosabyss]

Something I love about Nadia is that she is almost perpetually broadcasting innocent cinnamon roll vibes. She told a blind lawyer that he was probably a very good lawyer because the statue of justice was blind too and I- SHE MEANT SO WELL 😭😭😭😭 LOOK INTO HER SMILE SHE HAS NOT A SHRED OF MALICE

[thebewisepodcast]

How does a movement evolve: can there be a successful bad feminist?

In the age of #metoo and #timesup, I personally wonder just how potent the movement will be in the future if feminists aren't able to agree with one another in the present. Feminism appears split at the seams but these times, where the agents of an agenda are at conflict with how to define themselves, often make for the strongest coalition of unified minds. Forged like a sword at the hands of perfectionist blacksmith, any movement will grow more firm by each side of the schism holding the other to the fire. As a mere man, from the outside, it is not my battle to coach feminism. My job is to be an aid to the movement and to support where I can. 

Among the schism, exemplifying its nature, comes this recent piece by Margaret Atwood. In The Globe and Mail, the acclaimed dystopian author penned her own doubts with her version of feminism and how she fits within the fluid structure of it: 

"------It seems that I am a "Bad Feminist." I can add that to the other things I've been accused of since 1972, such as climbing to fame up a pyramid of decapitated men's heads (a leftie journal), of being a dominatrix bent on the subjugation of men (a rightie one, complete with an illustration of me in leather boots and a whip) and of being an awful person who can annihilate – with her magic White Witch powers – anyone critical of her at Toronto dinner tables. I'm so scary! And now, it seems, I am conducting a War on Women, like the misogynistic, rape-enabling Bad Feminist that I am.

What would a Good Feminist look like, in the eyes of my accusers?

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My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system.

Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we're back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.

Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such rights.

So let us suppose that my Good Feminist accusers, and the Bad Feminist that is me, agree on the above points. Where do we diverge? And how did I get into such hot water with the Good Feminists?

In November of 2016, I signed – as a matter of principle, as I have signed many petitions – an Open Letter called UBC Accountable, which calls for holding the University of British Columbia accountable for its failed process in its treatment of one of its former employees, Steven Galloway, the former chair of the department of creative writing, as well as its treatment of those who became ancillary complainants in the case. Specifically, several years ago, the university went public in national media before there was an inquiry, and even before the accused was allowed to know the details of the accusation. Before he could find them out, he had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The public – including me – was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly, since under the agreement he had signed, he couldn't say anything to defend himself. A barrage of invective followed.

But then, after an inquiry by a judge that went on for months, with multiple witnesses and interviews, the judge said there had been no sexual assault, according to a statement released by Mr. Galloway through his lawyer. The employee got fired anyway. Everyone was surprised, including me. His faculty association launched a grievance, which is continuing, and until it is over, the public still cannot have access to the judge's report or her reasoning from the evidence presented. The not-guilty verdict displeased some people. They continued to attack. It was at this point that details of UBC's flawed process began to circulate, and the UBC Accountable letter came into being.

A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see. We are grownups: We can make up our own minds, one way or the other. The signatories of the UBC Accountable letter have always taken this position. My critics have not, because they have already made up their minds. Are these Good Feminists fair-minded people? If not, they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world.

A digression: Witch talk. Another point against me is that I compared the UBC proceedings to the Salem witchcraft trials, in which a person was guilty because accused, since the rules of evidence were such that you could not be found innocent. My Good Feminist accusers take exception to this comparison. They think I was comparing them to the teenaged Salem witchfinders and calling them hysterical little girls. I was alluding instead to the structure in place at the trials themselves.

There are, at present, three kinds of "witch" language. 1) Calling someone a witch, as applied lavishly to Hillary Clinton during the recent election. 2) "Witchhunt," used to imply that someone is looking for something that doesn't exist. 3) The structure of the Salem witchcaft trials, in which you were guilty because accused. I was talking about the third use.

This structure – guilty because accused – has applied in many more episodes in human history than Salem. It tends to kick in during the "Terror and Virtue" phase of revolutions – something has gone wrong, and there must be a purge, as in the French Revolution, Stalin's purges in the USSR, the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina and the early days of the Iranian Revolution. The list is long and Left and Right have both indulged. Before "Terror and Virtue" is over, a great many have fallen by the wayside. Note that I am not saying that there are no traitors or whatever the target group may be; simply that in such times, the usual rules of evidence are bypassed.

Such things are always done in the name of ushering in a better world. Sometimes they do usher one in, for a time anyway. Sometimes they are used as an excuse for new forms of oppression. As for vigilante justice – condemnation without a trial – it begins as a response to a lack of justice – either the system is corrupt, as in prerevolutionary France, or there isn't one, as in the Wild West – so people take things into their own hands. But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained. The Cosa Nostra, for instance, began as a resistance to political tyranny.

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

The UBC Accountable letter is also a symptom – a symptom of the failure of the University of British Columbia and its flawed process. This should have been a matter addressed by Canadian Civil Liberties or B.C. Civil Liberties. Maybe these organizations will now put up their hands. Since the letter has now become a censorship issue – with calls being made to erase the site and the many thoughtful words of its writers – perhaps PEN Canada, PEN International, CJFE and Index on Censorship may also have a view.

The letter said from the beginning that UBC failed accused and complainants both. I would add that it failed the taxpaying public, who fund UBC to the tune of $600-million a year. We would like to know how our money was spent in this instance. Donors to UBC – and it receives billions of dollars in private donations – also have a right to know.

In this whole affair, writers have been set against one another, especially since the letter was distorted by its attackers and vilified as a War on Women. But at this time, I call upon all – both the Good Feminists and the Bad Feminists like me – to drop their unproductive squabbling, join forces and direct the spotlight where it should have been all along – at UBC. Two of the ancillary complainants have now spoken out against UBC's process in this affair. For that, they should be thanked.

Once UBC has begun an independent inquiry into its own actions – such as the one conducted recently at Wilfrid Laurier University – and has pledged to make that inquiry public, the UBC Accountable site will have served its purpose. That purpose was never to squash women. Why have accountability and transparency been framed as antithetical to women's rights?

A war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well. This is a very important moment. I hope it will not be squandered.------"

[scifrey]

Get To Know The Writer

 Get to Know the Writer Tag

Rules (always post the rules): answer the questions given to you, write ten questions of your own, tag ten people.

@rosecorcoranwritessaid anyone who wants to do it can, and it looked interesting.

1.) Where did the title(s) of your latest project(s) come from?

 The titles for The Accidental Turn Series were sort of decided by a committee of my agent, my editor, my publisher and me. I’m rubbish at naming books, so through a series of emails a list of about a hundred throw-them-out-there titles were whittled down (mostly by Googling them and seeing if any other book had that title already) to a few themes. From there we narrowed down and named the first book (The Untold Tale, where I had been calling it That Feminist Meta Thingy), and then the other two books dominoed into place after that (The Forgotten Tale, and The Silenced Tale.)

These titles are because in book #1, the fantasy is being told from a side character who in fantasy-novel tropes is often overlooked. In book #2, other fantasy stories start vanishing, forgotten by the readers, and in book #3,someone is trying to silence the writer of these fantasy books forever.

 City By Night, one of my novellas, is also being reissued next month. Its original title was The Dark Side f the Glass, which was both an allusion to Alice Through The Looking Glass, as it’s about a woman who falls into a TV instead of through a mirror, and a tip of the head to the song of the same title from the soundtrack of one of the television shows the novella satirizes, Forever Knight. However, my agent thought the reference was too obscure, and after another big round of back-and-forth, it was decided to name the novella after the fake-TV show I made up for the story.

 The titles of the to books in The Skylark’s Saga (#1 The Skylark’s Song, and #2, The Skylark’s Sacrifice) are because I do love alliteration when I can get away with it! These are the only titles of the recent projects that I decided on my own and the rest of my team liked! Score!

2.) Do you have any rhyme or reason behind your character names?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For the Accidental Turn Series fantasy books, I stole a lot of street names or snipped letters out of traditionally “European” names, like Kintyre, Forsyth, and Bevel to make them look suitably fantasy-esque on the page. But when the characters come to the “real world” I made a point of surrounding them with characters who had distinctly non-white, no-European names like Ahbni, Ichiro, and Juan just to really emphasize how much more diverse the “real world” is over traditional fantasy. 

In Triptych, every friend who helped me with edits got a character named after them. And in The Skylark’s Saga I got a bit silly - the Sealies all have surnames inspired by pagan gods, the Saskwayins are colors, and the Klonn are plants.

3.) What is your writing routine, if any?

When possible, I like to write at night, in silence, and with only my desk lamp on.  I try to keep my desk area very tidy, too, with only notes about the project I’m immediately working on written on my whiteboard wall. I need the only mess to be what’s in my head.

I’m more of a pantser who has, by virtue of writing series, been forced to learn how to plan. But even then, my planning is pretty rudimentary. I often do this in a notebook on transit (I tend to come up with ideas when I’m in liminal spaces), and run that by my editor. If she approves the vague outline, then I often write whatever scene is foremost in my mind - whichever has really grabbed my imagination, and allows me to figure out who my characters are, what the voice is, who the narrators are.

From there I often write chapter one, and then usually skip straight to the climax of the book and write that. This way I know where I’m aiming before I properly knock the arrow. Even if the target eventually shifts, I still have a sense of its shape and location.

From there I tend to skip all over the narrative and write whatever arrests me or I have in the front of my mind. Once that’s done, I go back to the start and begin the process of filling in the gaps. If I get another idea, I’m always happy to jump ahead and do that.

Using Scrivener has made this process a thousand times easier than when I had to scroll-scroll-scroll through Word.

When I don’t have to go to my dayjob, I try to write about 4000 words per day. When I do, I am for 500-1669, which keeps me limber for NaNoWriMo.

4.) Where is the weirdest place you’ve ever written?

I actually wracked my brains on this one, and I was going t say something like “a 400 year old house on the top of a mountain in Japan” or “in the shadow of the Great Pyramids in Giza”, but honestly, the real answer is on my BlackBerry while high off my face on morphine in the emergency room. Apparently I wrote a GREAT short story, which I emailed to all my friends, and emailed them. Without telling anyone that I was in hospital with Organ Death ™. And without remembering at all that I’d done it.

5.) Do you prefer to write by hand or type?

Typing, hands down. I type way faster than I handwrite, and I get frustrated that my pen can’t keep up with my brain. If I get an idea when I’m away from the computer, I usually only jot down enough to remember the scene/idea/mood/exchange without writing it out. I despise having to do the work twice, and that’s what transcribing from paper to computer feels like.

6.) Ideally, where would you like to see your writing take you in five years?

I’d like to break this barrier there seems between me and the Big 5. My agent and I have been working at it, but there seems to be some strange gap. Lots of editors at the Big 5 like my work, but no one seems to want to sign it. I get compliments on my voice, on my word crafting, but no contracts. It’s so frustrating to be so close to the possibility of working with a team with more resources than I have so far. 

7.) Which character is most fun to write and why?

Now that Triptych is complete and being serialized on Wattpad, any opportunity to revisit Kalp is a delight. I love looking at the world through his eyes. Olly, from The Maddening Science was a lot of fun too, again because of the way I have to shove aside my own assumptions about how and why the world works and see it through the lens of his own intelligence and lived experience. And Bevel will never not be a hoot, because there’s something just so great about getting to be that crass, and to come up with dirty jokes that fit in a fantasy world.

8.) What advice would you give writers just starting out?

Read widely outside of the genre you want to write in. If you want to write fiction, read non-fic, pop sci, and academic papers. Read the news. Read blogs. Read things that are in your wheelhouse, but then randomly grab something from the library that looks cool. You never know where the next idea will come from. Let your imagination wander.

9.) Do you have any “writing heros”? (This could be published writers or non.)

Anyone giving it a go! It’ hard, and it’s disheartening when people don’t love something you’ve put so much work and heart into. It’’s easy to give up on. Don’t.

Otherwise, I love Dianne Wynne Jones’ blatant subversion of stereotypes and tropes, which has really informed my writing, an Jane Austen’s ability to create such diverse, thoughtful, and complex characters.

I also super appreciate fanfic writers, cause they do it out of sheer love, and work for years to hone their craft. Among my faves are @bendingsignpost @sheafrotherdon, and @madlori.

10.) Tell me about your work-in-progress.

 Oh lord, is this a can of worms you really want to open?

 The Silenced Tale & The Accidental Collection  - books #3 and #4 of The Accidental Turn Series  are done. They just need to be line-edited and then the editor can lock the manuscript and it’s out of my hands and into the typesetter/designer’s. (And then of course I need to ramp up to marketing machine.)

 Book #3 is the conclusion of a trilogy of books about a secondary character in  fantasy epic who becomes self-aware and slips the pages of his book.

 The Skylark’s Saga - The two books are written, but one of the relationships is changing dramatically and I need to go in and shift that. I have no idea how much writing/rewriting this is going to entail. However, I do know that I want to get it done by the end of the year. As soon as the manuscript for The Silenced Tale is locked, I’ll be moving onto this.

 This duology is a steampunk-adventure-romance book about a girl vigilante and her ornery rocketpack who gets trapped behind enemy lines after being shot down in a dogfight.

 The Austen Hollywood AU  - I’ve written the first book of the series, and my agent is shopping it now. It’s possible that it may only get signed as a one-book deal, but ideally I’ve developed it as a six-book series (one for each of Austen’s). At some point I’d like to write the first three chapters of the remaining five books, to demonstrate what the voice and tone of each is gong to be like. (Possibly for NaNoWriMo this year??)

 These books are modern adaptations of Austen’s work, but they will all intertwine as characters from different aspects of the entertainment industry cross paths, work together,  and as they do in the originals, find love and contentment.

 The Maddening Science  - at some point I’d like to develop my short story of the same name into a full-length novel, but it would take a lot of research on my part, and a lot of buy-in on a publisher’s. I’m not quite ready to tackle this one yet, though I have pitches and synopsizes and the like written.

Henrietta - This idea is relatively new idea, born from watching a documentary and then reading the non-fic biography that inspired it (see, reading outside your genre helps!), but I think I’d really like to take a swing a writing a historical romance based on the life of a certain historical mistress, something like The Other Boleyn Girl. It would take a massive amount of research as well, but I think would be really interesting and engaging. The woman’s life was fascinating.

The Neridis - I wrote this book about four years ago and it’s been trunked. I’d like to pull it back out and give it a spit-polish and a steam-up, then self publish it sometime next year under my erotica pseudonym. It’s a time-travel lesbian romance story that can easily be punched up into erotica.

And of course, there are three other books that are sort of hovering in the back of my mind, but I’m not ready to write them, or even really a pitch for them yet. The vampire one might be a screenplay instead, I’m not sure.

 Oh, and I am looking to place a script, too - I wrote it under spec for a company that later decided not to shift from distribution into development any more, so I’m not sure what do with 228 pages of cute lesbian comic-book creators falling love over lattes and superheroes. I keep thinking that it would make a great webcomic/graphic novel, but I have no idea how to find an artist willing to commit to like a 500-page graphic novel, and more importantly, find the money to pay them.

I tag whomever wants to jump in. No pressure.