I love early dismissal day

No lunch at the high school today. So I dropped the kids off (stopping to purchase two fundraiser Krispy Kremes and send the kids into the cafeteria to buy milks to go with them) and went to a university library. Not for the books--although that's a great feature of the place. But there are also many large desks with outlets and ethernet jacks, armchairs near lots of same, big windows, and a cafe. You can take a drink anywhere in the library so long as it has a cover--food they want you to keep in the cafe. I have written many, many words there.

I worked for nearly three hours on The Snake's Wife, mostly retrofitting for things I've changed about the last part. This is harder than it seems at first blush. If I want to, say, insert a specific reference to a character's armor, that should be very simple, a single sentence or even a word or two. But when the scene I'm working with is polished and worked over, those couple of words can totally change a scene, or make it unbalanced, or minimally make a previously good sentence ugly. So inserting something like that often requires half and hour or so of staring and rejecting various possible ways of doing the job.

Related to this is another thing I've found and am intrigued by. Let's say I want to make a major change in...oh, the atmosphere of a scene, or the attitude the reader has towards a character. Not infrequently that change can be made with a single, carefully made and strategically placed sentence. (Not always, you understand. But often enough that it's interesting to me.) It's amazing how tiny details can really do a lot of work. The flip side, of course, is that you have to be careful when making even the smallest of changes.

Anyway. The three hours saw all the retrofitting and fixing finished, and the next session will involve forging ahead, which I always prefer. Once I'd done as much as I was going to, I packed up my stuff and headed out to have sushi for lunch, all by myself with a book.

****

Nick Mamatas thinks women are generally better writers than men. I'm not sure I agree with him. I do agree that the demographics of reading make it more likely that women will write, or know something about putting words together when they do sit down to write, but I personally and with no data think that if you counted up every writer, male and female, you'd find the same proportion of good and bad writers.

But I also think Nick is telling the truth about his slushpile--that by and large women's mss are of higher quality.

See, I think women are socialized to underestimate their abilities and achievements. I think that if you've got two writers of equal ability, one male and one female, the male one is going to be more likely to confidently send his stories out, while the female writer is more likely to consider very carefully whether it's good enough to send out. And maybe decide that it's not. The end result is the slushpile that Nick describes.

This does not say good things about story selection in markets where the gender balance of the TOC matches the slush--let alone where the proportion of female contributors is lower than the actual slush proportion. It is telling to me that ASIM, which has blind submissions, has a higher proportion of female contributors than submitters. It is also telling to me that the finalists in the recent contest at Escape Pod were authored by women more than half the time--subs were blind.

I now wish to state for the record that I do not think Gordon Van Gelder is a sexist pig. Really and honestly, I don't. (Though I have to admit that the whole Truesdale thing is....okay, the kindest way I can say it is "a result of poor judgement." Amplify in your own imagination.)

Where I'm going with this is a defense of the Slushbomb.

I think a lot of the folks who just don't see the point of the slushbomb, or who are offended by it, are perhaps seeing its goals very differently from the way I see it. It's not intended to "prove" that any given market's selection policies are a result of gender bias, unconscious or otherwise. (The existence of unconscious bias in editors of either or any gender is, to me, a given and so obvious that it should need no explanation.) I know that ccfinlay suggested it with the express purpose of seeing its results, sales-wise, but myself, my immediate reaction was "Oh, no, waaaay too small a sample."

I also don't think it was intended as a punishment, or meant to offend. As a protest it's not particularly useful--a sexist pig will be convinced of nothing, and an editor who is unaware (and determined to remain unaware) of his or her own unconscious bias is not going to find in the slushbomb any compelling reason to re-evaluate.

But believing as I do what I said above--that a lot of women are failing to submit out of lack of confidence--the slushbomb is a partial antidote. "Don't be afraid of subbing to Analog! It's fun! We'll all sub (and be rejected) together!" To me, it's a way to encourage more women to submit more. And for the folks who believe that the slush proportions are the source of TOC proportions, this would be the one effective way to address that--by upping the slush proportions. Right? So what's not to like?

Being offended by the Slushbomb, as an editor, is missing the point. The Slushbomb is not about editors. It's about women writers.

Thinking it's stupid or pointless is another thing entirely--but if one thinks it's stupid because supposedly it's meant to force an editor to do anything, or criticize any particular editor, then one might perhaps consider the possibility that one is mistaken in one's assumptions.

*****

I am looking forward to Wiscon, and seeing my CW peeps! And also a few folks on my f-list who I have never met in real life! Paidhi Girl is very unhappy that she's not coming this year--she had a blast last time. Next year, I promised her.

Those of us from my CW class will be doing a group reading, and I'll be there with "The Sad History of the Tearless Onion." Besides "Footprints" it's the only thing I have that's short enough--I am not by any stretch of the imagination a miniaturist. The reading is Friday evening, 8:45 to 10:00 pm.

****

Last but certainly not least, a review at Tangent Online of the upcoming Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007 edition(edited by Rich Horton), including a para about "Hesperia and Glory."

I love early dismissal day

No lunch at the high school today. So I dropped the kids off (stopping to purchase two fundraiser Krispy Kremes and send the kids into the cafeteria to buy milks to go with them) and went to a university library. Not for the books--although that's a great feature of the place. But there are also many large desks with outlets and ethernet jacks, armchairs near lots of same, big windows, and a cafe. You can take a drink anywhere in the library so long as it has a cover--food they want you to keep in the cafe. I have written many, many words there.

I worked for nearly three hours on The Snake's Wife, mostly retrofitting for things I've changed about the last part. This is harder than it seems at first blush. If I want to, say, insert a specific reference to a character's armor, that should be very simple, a single sentence or even a word or two. But when the scene I'm working with is polished and worked over, those couple of words can totally change a scene, or make it unbalanced, or minimally make a previously good sentence ugly. So inserting something like that often requires half and hour or so of staring and rejecting various possible ways of doing the job.

Related to this is another thing I've found and am intrigued by. Let's say I want to make a major change in...oh, the atmosphere of a scene, or the attitude the reader has towards a character. Not infrequently that change can be made with a single, carefully made and strategically placed sentence. (Not always, you understand. But often enough that it's interesting to me.) It's amazing how tiny details can really do a lot of work. The flip side, of course, is that you have to be careful when making even the smallest of changes.

Anyway. The three hours saw all the retrofitting and fixing finished, and the next session will involve forging ahead, which I always prefer. Once I'd done as much as I was going to, I packed up my stuff and headed out to have sushi for lunch, all by myself with a book.

****

Nick Mamatas thinks women are generally better writers than men. I'm not sure I agree with him. I do agree that the demographics of reading make it more likely that women will write, or know something about putting words together when they do sit down to write, but I personally and with no data think that if you counted up every writer, male and female, you'd find the same proportion of good and bad writers.

But I also think Nick is telling the truth about his slushpile--that by and large women's mss are of higher quality.

See, I think women are socialized to underestimate their abilities and achievements. I think that if you've got two writers of equal ability, one male and one female, the male one is going to be more likely to confidently send his stories out, while the female writer is more likely to consider very carefully whether it's good enough to send out. And maybe decide that it's not. The end result is the slushpile that Nick describes.

This does not say good things about story selection in markets where the gender balance of the TOC matches the slush--let alone where the proportion of female contributors is lower than the actual slush proportion. It is telling to me that ASIM, which has blind submissions, has a higher proportion of female contributors than submitters. It is also telling to me that the finalists in the recent contest at Escape Pod were authored by women more than half the time--subs were blind.

I now wish to state for the record that I do not think Gordon Van Gelder is a sexist pig. Really and honestly, I don't. (Though I have to admit that the whole Truesdale thing is....okay, the kindest way I can say it is "a result of poor judgement." Amplify in your own imagination.)

Where I'm going with this is a defense of the Slushbomb.

I think a lot of the folks who just don't see the point of the slushbomb, or who are offended by it, are perhaps seeing its goals very differently from the way I see it. It's not intended to "prove" that any given market's selection policies are a result of gender bias, unconscious or otherwise. (The existence of unconscious bias in editors of either or any gender is, to me, a given and so obvious that it should need no explanation.) I know that ccfinlay suggested it with the express purpose of seeing its results, sales-wise, but myself, my immediate reaction was "Oh, no, waaaay too small a sample."

I also don't think it was intended as a punishment, or meant to offend. As a protest it's not particularly useful--a sexist pig will be convinced of nothing, and an editor who is unaware (and determined to remain unaware) of his or her own unconscious bias is not going to find in the slushbomb any compelling reason to re-evaluate.

But believing as I do what I said above--that a lot of women are failing to submit out of lack of confidence--the slushbomb is a partial antidote. "Don't be afraid of subbing to Analog! It's fun! We'll all sub (and be rejected) together!" To me, it's a way to encourage more women to submit more. And for the folks who believe that the slush proportions are the source of TOC proportions, this would be the one effective way to address that--by upping the slush proportions. Right? So what's not to like?

Being offended by the Slushbomb, as an editor, is missing the point. The Slushbomb is not about editors. It's about women writers.

Thinking it's stupid or pointless is another thing entirely--but if one thinks it's stupid because supposedly it's meant to force an editor to do anything, or criticize any particular editor, then one might perhaps consider the possibility that one is mistaken in one's assumptions.

*****

I am looking forward to Wiscon, and seeing my CW peeps! And also a few folks on my f-list who I have never met in real life! Paidhi Girl is very unhappy that she's not coming this year--she had a blast last time. Next year, I promised her.

Those of us from my CW class will be doing a group reading, and I'll be there with "The Sad History of the Tearless Onion." Besides "Footprints" it's the only thing I have that's short enough--I am not by any stretch of the imagination a miniaturist. The reading is Friday evening, 8:45 to 10:00 pm.

****

Last but certainly not least, a review at Tangent Online of the upcoming Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007 edition(edited by Rich Horton), including a para about "Hesperia and Glory."