"I Would Love To Be Friends With An Alien!"

Jim Hines brought my attention to this quote from someone in science-fiction fandom:

Instead of insulting us, [Hines] could be using whatever influence he has in social media to help recruit more people of color into our circles. They need to know they’d probably be much more welcome here than they might be elsewhere. (After all, many of us would love to befriend extra terrestrials or anthromorphs.)

Many of these guys would love to befriend an alien… in the abstract. But I’m pretty sure that if we did meet aliens, they’d be, well, alien.  They wouldn’t understand humans all that well.  They’d arrive from an entirely different culture, one they’d consider to be the “default” culture that all sentient beings follow in their heart of hearts, and they’d make constant mistakes.  You’d get invited to the alien’s house, and they’d forget, oh hey, you eat chicken strips and not cans of semi-sentient slime.
Man, that’s so messed up that you eat dead chickens, the aliens would say.  Why would you do that?  Why aren’t you drinking our slime?  Hey, check it out, this guy eats dead chickens – do you just snap their necks and gnaw on the bodies? 
You don’t?  Crazy.  Anyway, all we got is slime, so here, we put some ice in it.  You humans all love ice.
And the aliens would be thrilled, showing you around to all their friends, because you’re their proof that they’ve got a human friend.  You have the vague feeling that they really don’t give a crap about you per se, you could be any human, but they’re very happy to show you off like you’re some kind of prize they won when you go to their alien parties.
And when the aliens are a little tipsy on their slime-drinks, they make comments.  They high-seven each other and talk about how great it is that we helped you.  Because you guys – you’re always “you guys” – never did invent intergalactic space travel.  We had to give it to you.  Oh, yeah, I’m sure you would have gotten there eventually!  But it’s good to help the races that just don’t put it together as fast.  You folks were pretty much stewing to death in your wars and garbage and whatnot, and, I mean, wow, you sure like killing each other.
“I never killed anyone,” you’d protest.
Your people do, though, they’d say, and you’d have this discomforting feeling like there’s no distinction between you and everyone else like you.
And at parties, some of the aliens would dress up like you, putting on a comically oversized Texan hat and dancing Gangnam Style and putting on that big, swinging foam genitalia they think is so hysterical because they all reproduce asexually and eyew sex, and they’d wander around mashing your whole culture into one discrete wad, and they’d laugh because you humans have so much of interest to tell us.  And their stories would all feature humans as a stock figure of The Race That Didn’t Really Want It, a bunch of backwards hicks who were so caught up in strangling each other they never thought to look to the stars, either the tragic figure who had to be killed to make way for progress or the goggle-eyed comic figure who wandered around Jar Jar Binks-style, astounded by all their magical inventions.
And after a while, you might stop coming to the parties, because the slime-drinks weren’t any good and their movies made fun of you and the aliens kept getting drunk and touching your junk because oh my elders, is that how you reproduce, lemme see that!  And when you complained, they assured you that you were making too big a deal of things, those were just jokes, and these were just movies, they didn’t think that way about you, come on.  We love you guys.  We love you.  Just stick around.
You might stop attending those wild alien parties.  And the aliens would talk among themselves, trying to figure out why the humans were staying away.  We were friendly! they’d cry.  We bought them chicken strips! 
What’s wrong with them, that they don’t show up? 

Why I Can't Outline My Novels

I am, as they say in “the biz,” a pantser.  I don’t plot anything; I just find an interesting starting point and get to writing.
This is a high-wire act, rife with failure.  Neil Gaiman once likened it out leaping out of a plane and hoping you can knit a parachute on the way down.  And I have the smashed wreckage of many stories that I could not find an ending for, including one sad novel that devoured half a year of my life before coughing up blood on my vest.
Yet I am currently rewriting the last third of a novel, after someone In The Biz pointed out that the last third didn’t fit with what had happened before.  (Oh, the plot made sense, but thematically it’s like Dorothy went to the Land of Oz and then jetted over to visit Christopher Robin; the last third wasn’t bad, but it was addressing entirely different concerns than the first bits.)  So I made a detailed outline (10,000 words!) and ran it by some very smart friends of mine who’d read the book for me, and they agreed it was pretty good.
Writing the actual words has been a vacuous hell.
As it turns out, I write to see what happens next.  And knowing what happens next, all the bits afterwards are boring transcription: I’m left with all the tedious details, the equivalent of choosing camera angles after the actors have been cast and the sets built.  And some really get off on selecting camera angles, there’s nothing wrong with that, but for me I know what they’re going to do and they can’t vary all that much from it because it’s a quite good outline, so now what?
This novel will make me gain weight, as the only way I can force myself to write it is to promise myself a large glass of chocolate milk when I am done with the day’s work.  And nothing is better than a large glass of chocolate milk.
Oh, there are little surprises, enough to keep me going: here’s a need for a secondary character, here’s a scene that turned out more powerful than I’d envisioned, and of course I need my protagonist to be more active in his fate.  (Always my problem in early drafts.)  But in general, this is loathsome writing to me, a thing I find mechanical and hateful.
Many outline their plots wonderfully.  Every time I’ve tried, it’s ended in disaster.  My inner muse doesn’t like being bossed around, and I guess I’d better let her run amuck.
Which is the real lesson for all writers: There’s nothing that works.  There’s only what works for you.  Find it.

She Put It Perfectly

Regarding my concern over how many female writers I am reading, pktechgirl phrased it wonderfully:

The premise is not that women are lesser writers who need a hand up. The premise is that the same quality of book will get less attention when written by a woman, and we should actively work to counter that.

My Pretty Pretty Princess Nails, Gone Global

In case you were hoping to share my essay “How Kids React To My Pretty Princess Nails” but were blocked by work because it’s adult content, the Good Men Project has reprinted it in a slightly changed format.  Go check it out, comment, love, whatever you crazy kids to do it.  Also, it gives them traffic, which I support.
I really wish I knew who to petition to have my site taken off the “adult content” lists.  I put it on to be nice because I swore a lot and occasionally wrote about the vajayjay, and I thought being scrupulous would protect my site from kids.  Now the whole Internet is 4chan, and I wish I could say, “Hey, all I do is words, you don’t need to treat me like I’m cow-felching porn,” but I don’t know to whom.  There’s plenty of links to put yourself on the porno lists, but few I’ve found to get off.
(…so to speak.)
In any case, my essay is live and has pictures of me and more shareable, and on a larger website to boot.  So check it out.

Do I Read Enough Female Authors?

It started innocuously enough – when long-time reader Snippy left a comment on my Christmas List:

I’m curious: aren’t there any women writers whose work you’d like as a gift?

To which my snap reply was:

No, because I bought them all. (Or, in the case of Ann Leckie, won the relevant one I would have bought.)

Which was true.  My Christmas list rarely reflects what I actually like, as I am a man of little restraint and tend to rush out and purchase what I want now, now, now.  So when I heard Holly Black had a new book, I immediately zipped out and purchased that, and was literally about to purchase Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice when she announced she was holding a book contest, which I won.  (In retrospect, Ancillary Justice was so good that I wish I’d purchased it just to give her money.)
My Christmas List was, in fact, originally developed as a defensive mechanism for friends and family, because before I started locking everything off, I bought ALL THE THINGS.  So the Christmas List isn’t necessarily what I’m lusting to read – which are usually in my hot little handles – but rather what I’m curious about but not so rabidly curious as to get it that very moment.
Still, it’s a valid question.  Do I read enough female authors?  Certainly the books I’ve enjoyed the most over the last four months skew female: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl In Coldtown, and Joe Lansdale’s The Thicket are my favorite books, so 66% wimmen.  I’m reading Alethea Kontis’ Enchanted, and that’s lovely enough that it’s going to be the topic of one of my upcoming podcasts.
But I don’t know.  I tend to be more enthusiastic on the whole about my female authors than male authors – I’m a big fanboy for Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin, so much so that there’s actually a hidden reference to them in the novel I’m writing now, and that novel is heavily inspired by Kij Johnston and Suzanne Collins.  And while Daniel Abraham is my latest big fantasy crush I’m really kinda psyched to get around to Kameron Hurley’s God’s War, who I love as a blogger.  (I’m actually sort of irritated that that’s not on my Christmas list, as I accidentally marked that as “purchased” on my wishlist when I didn’t mean to.)
I don’t know.  It’s a tough call.  Of the books on my to-read shelf, there’s only two females on it right now out of about ten books (hellooo, Seanan McGuire and Jo Walton), but I do tend to read more books by men because I have old and accreted tastes.  Which is to say that ZOMG NEW STEPHEN KING BOOK and ZOMG JOE LANSDALE BOOK and ZOMG TERRY PRATCHETT and ZOMG OTHER DUDE I GREW UP READING do tend to clog the ol’ bookshelves, as I have a long history of acquiring my reading tastes during a time when women were not well-represented.  And I love those guys severely.  When they have new stuff, I get it reflexively.  There’s nothing wrong with that.
But they do tend to get in the way of reading newer authors.  Every book by an old favorite I’m reading is time I’m spending not reading some new hotness.
Plus, my old tastes had been reasonably constricted for the past decade or so.  I used to read very widely, when I worked at Borders, and then there was a long period where I wasn’t as in-touch with the book industry, so what I read had calcified a bit into old favorites.  Now, with Twitter and Facebook, I’m constantly hearing my friends micro-squee about awesome books, and my tastes have become much more catholic.  There’s just a lot more authors I’m hearing about, period.
And those new tastes tend to skew very equal, if not actually biased towards women, as I read more women bloggers than men and as such I’m more likely to stumble across a really exciting female author.  I think in about ten years that to-read shelf will have adjusted towards gender equivalence, as eventually I’ll have accreted enough new and exciting female authors that I’ll have to have their latest on the shelf, too, clogging up the path for even newer writers who I feel guilty about not reading.
It’s a good question to ask.  I mean, the ultimate goal is to ensure that I’m reading good books, regardless of the author’s gender.  Picking several books at random from girl-writers just to equalize the playing field would be crazy.  But it is good to stop and analyze your reading habits occasionally, to see whether the new books you’re reading could be chosen a little more widely.  And I’m glad to say that I think they are.  I’m still reading probably about 70% guys at this stage, but a lot of those guys are – ahem – grandfathered in.  But of my new and squeeing fandom-reads, a lot of them are women, and I think that ultimately balances out over time.
I won’t read a book just because someone’s a woman, just as I wouldn’t read a book just because someone’s a man.  But questioning what you’re reading?  Questioning what slices of life you choose to experience?  It’s good to be called on that, and even more pleasant to come to the conclusion that you’re well on the path.