Champagne and Socks

I’m assuming a whole bunch of these posts I’ll make on this grand adventure of realisation to the extent of women’s body policing and sexism I am about to experience you’ll nod and tell me you told me so. And sadly, that’s just how it’s gonna be, I spose.

One of the most infuriating things for me in the first trimester was that whole not telling anyone thing til you hit the 12 week mark. Actually, it’s had me raging mad for weeks and weeks. It’s a whole lotta bullshit, that, that serves to make other people feel better and bright and shiny about my experience. There’s no way that shit is about me.

For example, on news that I was indeed pregnant, I discovered, much like getting engaged, I was suddenly completely behind on everything. Apparently, if I want an OB (and I do, see yesterday’s post about some potential complications plus my age etc), I need to book in with my Dr of choice at 6 weeks or else they get booked out. And I’d know which doctor I want because … ???

I couldn’t book an appointment with my GP until I was 7 weeks along and the OB doesn’t see you until 10 weeks so that’s a long time to go in your beginning stages without really any advice, guidance or help if it’s your first time if you don’t tell anyone. Am I supposed to have just gone to a couple of books and muddled through on my own?

And of course, no matter how much I tried to be all “hey this is not a thing until like 8 months along, I can totally just go on with my regular daily life like nothing is different, cause that’s what I’m supposed to do, right?” I felt dreadfully ill most of the time, unbelievably tired, I have a cold that doesn’t go away (8 weeks now – I think it’s just another pregnancy symptom and it does allow me to not have to supersmell all the time), I can’t sleep and then I need to sleep all the time, and pregnancy brain … I was dropping balls all over the place. And … I’m supposed to just … offer no explanation?

BUT … I’m also supposed to suddenly go off coffee (that one is hard to hide in an office situation when you are known as the local caffeine addict snob), alcohol, soft cheese, unknown if unwashed salad, prepared salads, uncooked eggs, smoked salmon, anything that has been in your fridge for more than 24 hours etc etc (try looking unsuspicious at a convention with that list). And what the fuck is with every vegetarian option at a restaurant being pregnancy unfriendly??? Seriously?

You know what? I’ve just felt like a big fucking liar for the last 2 months. This whole not telling people means you have to lie, all the time. How is that more palatable? And people get suspicious (I’m sure a bunch of my Twitter followers picked up on the clues) and start asking you outright, like “Why aren’t you drinking coffee, Alisa?” Which is like … if I was going to tell you, I would tell you, right? But instead I had to look people I really like and respect in the eyes and lie. It made me feel like shit, every single time.

And here’s what makes me angry about that. You don’t tell people you’re pregnant in the first trimester “in case something happens”, right? I’m going through this experience regardless of whether or not you know about it. I’m on the train and it’s left the station. No matter the outcome, this is real and valid to me. Now if I tell you and then I have to … untell you? … then you have to deal with the yucky unhappy icky things related to “something happened”. If I don’t tell you, and something happens, you get to go on with your life and not deal or interact with it. But for me, I was already on the train, regardless, I have to go through it. And the not telling others is about sparing them “unnecessary” emotions.

So, if you don’t tell anyone and you can’t talk about being pregnant, does that mean it’s not really real until the second trimester? If people don’t want to hear about it til they know it’s “stuck” then … what is it when it’s the first trimester? Not something we want to take seriously until we know for sure it’s going to work out happily? We don’t want to be a part of the unhappy stories of first trimester pregnancies. And for me, then, the whole discussion about how evil murderers women are if they have an abortion in the first trimester becomes so unbelievably fucking hypocritical. YOU DIDN’T EVEN WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE IT ANYWAY!

One of those, either way women’s experiences must be denied, things.

It won’t surprise you then that I decided “fuck that” and did it differently. There’s no way I would have made it through that first stage without my friends. I did need the reminder that “this too shall pass”. I needed suggestions and help on finding ways to make it through the day. And what’s normal and what’s not. And a shoulder to cry on. Most of that, of course, was C, who has been brilliant and kind and patient and got himself a loyalty card at the pharmacy round the corner for his midnight runs already. One night, he gave up rugby training to lie in bed and hold my hand and watch DVDs all night with me cause that’s all that was left that could be done. I also had to tell a few people I’m working on projects with because I became flaky and unreliable at working to deadline and I needed to be watched, with that suddenly unreliable pregnancy brain. It was really clear something was up. There really was no way to hide it. Plus, in publishing you work on 12 to 18 month timeframes and I have a huge chunk of time about to come up in which I won’t be working, really. And I needed to start troubleshooting on that with authors.

I can’t imagine not being able to access and lean on my sisterhood. I think that must be one of the cruellest ways to control women – to shut them down and tell them they shouldn’t share (and validate) their experience with anyone. I don’t think I would have made it through without my friends. And I feel very angry that anyone else should have to feel that they should have to be able to do it on their own.

Incidentally, thank you to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post – I think there is a big difference between drive by lobbing of advice bombs and being engaged in a conversation in which you’re invited/asked to share your experience.

I’m snuggled into bed at Tehani’s house and am so so tired but so happy to have been to Conflux 9 this weekend. After half a week living with my friends, they’ve got my morning sickness figured out and my Crohn’s sorted and I’m feeling halfway decent after weeks and weeks. I’d been looking forward to this weekend for lots of reasons – seeing my friends all in one place, getting to launch Asymmetry, and FINALLY being able to tell people that I’m having a baby!

I’m having a baby!

I’m not very good with keeping my own secrets and I’ve been wanting to explain the loooooong period of sickness and redeem my very unreliableness. It’s been a really interesting process, both I guess, internally and socially. And I’m sure I have more of this “interesting” to go.

I’ve had a pretty rough time of the first trimester. If I knew it would be like this, I’m not really sure I would have signed up. Some days I was really quite immobilised by it. I quit my job 2.5 weeks early (went part time for one of those weeks) because I felt so ill and because I needed to sleep 3 hours at lunchtime after coming home from work about midway into my first trimester. I had days where I had about 1 hour to check emails and work on my press outside of my day job and needing to sleep (and I HATE napping). Morning sickness kicked in at about lunchtime to 2pm ish and increased steadily by bedtime. I’m still pretty much worse in the evenings and just not interested in life (generally) after about 7pm. That made being at the bar at the con til late an impossibility for me this con. But c’est la vie. I also have been suffering some side effects of Crohn’s which have been very painful, and interfered with any joy in life including sleeping. So it’s been a fun time (where fun is the opposite of a good thing).

I think this weekend, we’ve pinpointed some symptoms that are not morning sickness but Crohn’s related on top of it and so managing those as well as the other seems to be helping.

It’s been interesting how people are so quick to judge, though, how I’m going in relation to their own experience. The one thing I’ve learned so far is absolutely guaranteed that my experience of my pregnancy, and how it tracks, is going to be informed in no way by any one else’s. At all. And I’ve pretty much stopped listening. But it’s still *really* irritating how people have a need to share.

As well as my Crohn’s, I have a couple of other issues to manage through this. I have an Rh negative blood type so there’s stuff for that – that whole thing all my life where doctors and my mother have said “you know you have negative blood, right? And that that will cause problems when you have your babies” has finally arrived. But luckily they have antibody injections you can have now so that just seems like a monitor and manage situation.

The other is a bit more serious. For the last 8 years or so, I’ve had an anxiety disorder. It’s manifested in the OCD but also in mild panic attacks and depression. I’ve always been aware that depression can be exacerbated by the pregnancy/birth process and I’m aware of issues with my anxiety that may magnify through this and beyond. So I’ve been really managing my mental health with this in mind – mostly sticking with monthly visits with my counsellor, whether I really needed them or not, just to have someone really know me and be able to monitor me when I may not be able to. And also … just in case … etc.

But I’m quite fascinated by the number of people who feel a need to … is initiate the right word? … new people on this path. The number of people who feel a need to make comments like, “your life is over/going to change now” or “you will never sleep again” or “it’s going to be so much worse than you can imagine”. It might make them feel somehow triumphant, that they survived this death defying obstacle course but it’s really not a nice thing to do to someone with an anxiety disorder. I mean, really? You think I know nothing about pregnancy and child rearing that I haven’t been stressing about this for the last 5 to 10 years and that’s why it’s taken me this long to do this? I mean, really? What? I’ve never known *anyone* with a kid or just ignored *all these really obvious things about kids*? I’m a pretty organised, plan oriented, research gathering kind of person. You’d have to not know me very well to think I just woke up one day and thought “hey this’ll be fun” and leapt in, feet first, with no preparation whatsoever.

I’m going to start being much much more assertive (I was going to write “rude” there but actually, it’s them who are rude) about patrolling my boundaries. I need to for my mental health and there is going to be NO touching my stomach without asking, I am stating that now.

My aunt gave me some really great advice which was to pick one or two good friends who’ve had babies and follow their advice and ignore everyone else. And I think that’s really wise. Her other piece was – you’ll discover you’re not superwoman but you’ll also discover you’re the only one who cares. Talk about hitting the nail on the head. I’ve been really struggling with this for I guess 2 months now. I had pregnancy brain really really badly. I’m not used to not being able to rely on my head, in the face of anything. And here I was doing shit like making a cup of tea, carrying it out of one room and appearing in the next without it and no idea why. I lost words, they were just not there when I went to use them. I forgot how to do things. I became very clumsy. And it was *awful*. And then I resigned from the day job and it almost all went away. And I thought … shit, I was trying to do too much, I have a limit. And I did not like that. And, between you and me, so far, I’m not really enjoying being pregnant. I’ve kinda hated it, to be honest. And by extension, the world (more on that tomorrow). And I’ve been thinking that maybe I’m not going to be one of those women who love pregnancy and can hold down a day job and clean their house and cook dinner and run a business and be sweetness and light to everyone and everything. And I’m thinking that I might have to come to terms with being ok with that.

Before I move on, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the stats I presented last time on the Aurealis Awards novels categories.

In my last post, I compared the gender of shortlisted authors and the winners in each of the Aurealis novel categories and then compared those to the gender breakdown of the Ditmar novel category. I wanted to look at that a bit more closely. Here is the breakdown in Ditmar novel winners by whether they won, shortlisted or were overlooked in the Aurealis Awards novel categories.

The Ditmars are often seen as a “correcting force” for the Aurealis Awards. 6% of the time, or once, a novel won the Ditmar which did not make the Aurealis Awards shortlists. That novel was The Scarlet Rider by Lucy Sussex. It is recognised in the subsequent charts as N/A for Aurealis Award category.

This chart breaks down the Ditmars novel winners into genre using their shortlisted categories in the Aurealis Awards (for the length of the Aurealis Awards, only). 50% of the time, a SF novel wins the Ditmar. Last year was the first time that SF novel was written by a woman – Kim Westwood’s The Courier’s New Bicycle.

61% of the time, the Ditmar novel goes to a novel that only shortlisted, but did not win an Aurealis Award. Those winners are broken down below into genre category.

The other aspect I wanted to drill down into was the Fantasy novel category. It was remarked to me after I posted the last statistics that it’s interesting because it’s not a new thing for this category to be a strong female – dare I write “dominated” – category. It’s essentially the trend for this award.

Tallying up the winners for this category, where each nomination is a separate novel,  a couple stand out:

Juliet Marillier – 3 wins, 8 nominations

Sara Douglass – 2 wins, 10 nominations

Sean Williams – 2 wins, 3 nominations

Garth Nix – 2 wins, 3 nominations

Jane Routley – 2 wins, 2 nominations

This starts out with some feel good, happy carefree plots but be prepared for the sobering finish.

Looking at the gender breakdown of the Aurealis winners and shortlists over time.

Aurealis SF Novel category:

Here is the breakdown by gender of the SF novel category for the history of the award:

And here is the corresponding breakdown by gender of the SF Novel category winners for the history of the award:

But what of the shortlists? Here is the breakdown by gender for the shortlists for the SF novel category for the history of the award, by year:

What I feel I still need to chase down here, if the information can be found, is what was eligible for consideration for the shortlists for each of these years to have a look at that gender breakdown.

But here’s some fun facts for this category. Over the course of this category award, there have been 19 wins to 13 individuals: 4 women and 9 men. The 4 women are Marianne de Pierres, Kim Westwood, Maxine McArthur and Kate Orman and they each won this award once. 5 men have won this award more than once: K A Bedford (2), Damien Broderick (3), Sean Williams (2), Sean McMullen (2) and Greg Egan (2 – though he declined the second).

Aurealis Fantasy Novel category:

Shortlists by gender:

And the winners:

And shortlists broken down by year for comparison:

Aurealis Horror Novel Category:

Shortlists by gender:

And the winners:

And shortlists broken down by year for comparison:

And YA Novel Category:

Shortlists by gender:

And the winners:

And shortlists broken down by year for comparison:

And finally, I thought it would be interesting to compare the above with the Ditmar novel category.

The Ditmars have been running a lot longer than the Aurealis Awards, are a popular vote by the attendees at Natcon and there is only one novel category:

Now, this is a pretty shocking pie chart. I think it presents case in point, Tansy’s Theory that as soon as you ask people to narrow their choice down to one, you [mostly] get a male winner. That 15% female winners, equates to 7 compared to 39 male winners: Cherry Wilder in 1978, Lucy Sussex in 1997, K J Bishop in 2004  and then Margo Lanagan (2009), Kaaron Warren (2010), Tansy Rayner Roberts (2011) and Kim Westwood (2012).

Or more importantly, here is where they sit chronologically:

I need to do a proper comparison, but it feels like in most years, the SF novel beats out the Fantasy or YA to win the Ditmar. The other thing of note, is that the fantasy Aurealis category has some strong female novelists who appear multiple years on the shortlists and often have won several. These include Juliet Marillier, Sara Douglass, Glenda Larke, Marianne de Pierres, Isobelle Carmody.

I think these two awards gender breakdowns are interesting to compare to awards I already looked at, namely the lifetime achievement awards:

All these awards represent narrowing the winner choice down to one person. The most interesting here is the Peter McNamara Convenors’ award, given the novel category gender breakdowns above.

Despite having a bad night again last night, I think I’m progressively starting to feel a bit more like me. Ish. I still have a battery of tests to do, running here there and everywhere for time sensitive stuff, but they’ve started giving me drugs to treat symptoms. And it’s amazing how you realise just how bad you felt when you start to feel not bad and also just how easy it is to forget what feeling human feels like. One of the most important leaps forward was having my Vitamin D trebled by a doc this week. I feel instantly better. I’m sleeping great and I have my energy back. OMG not having energy is like some kind of horrible torture for me.

I’m also my own worst enemy, as my mother loves to say.

The worse I feel, the less likely I am to take action to make myself feel better. Dehydrated? Unlikely to start drinking more water. If I’m lucky, I’ll up the caffeine intake. Have a headache? Why pop a pill when I can just blame the self infliction and thus point to the self deservingness of said pain? Lack in energy and general blahness? Why consume more fruit and veggies and take a vitamin when I could loll listlessly about, nosh nutritionally devoid junk and just groan?

So my gradual improvement this week has also improved my outlook on life (yay) and I’ve started to eat better and take my meds and gotten into the upwards spiral I so often avoid.

And got myself to uni yesterday for the first time. (I mentioned I have an office at home so I don’t really need to be on campus all that much?) I had the energy and mindset to be able to cope with parking (luckily I had already set the parking app up on my phone so I just had to learn to use it) and I found the Humanities building and the postgrad lounge where the workshop I had RSVPed for was held. I’m not convinced I needed the workshop, I couldn’t tell you what I got out of it and to be honest, I find most other people’s thesis topics kinda boring (except for Helen’s other student who was there, obvs, since his is SF creative writing), which is more likely due to my lack of arts qualifications than anything. Also, I’m mostly not here to hang out and waste time. I can see that it’s a really fun campus and there are so many cool things on and even just that I could get involved in in my own dept but at the same time, I have a lot going on in my life right now, I took a big salary hit to be here, and I feel too old for the uni experience this time round. I’ve been there and done that and know how easy it is to lose 6 months or a year of productive study to being a student. And so on the one hand I’m making myself go to all these workshops on how to do a phd, which I didn’t take the last time through, but on the other hand … I mostly know all this stuff – I know that my thesis topic will change over the next four years. I know that at the moment I want to solve the world but most of that will fall away because the point is that you need to focus on one specialised idea and contribute that to your field etc.

Probably the one thing I took away from yesterday is the way a creative production phd is a dance between the creative work and the exegesis, that the two form one thesis together and that you need to work on them simultaneously so that one informs the other. And that that’s pretty cool as a thought exercise. And that it’s really really cool that I get to spend the next three years, like, thinking. I still can’t believe I’m allowed to have fun enjoying my day job. So weird.

Whilst I slog away processing the full stats for the history of the Aurealis Awards, here’s some stats for the current shortlists. I think these will be interesting to compare against the average, when I have that. Being a creative publishing phd, I’m also very interested in publisher statistics. I’m in the process of thinking through performance indicators for various measurements of “success” and here I am playing around with some of the elements of those (how do you measure how successful you have been at executing what you set out to do? – Big thesis-ey question)

Here is the breakdown of shortlisted authors, editors and artists by gender:

And this one is a breakdown of the lists by the publisher size:

I’m also interested in looking at trends and changes in the publishing industry so the following graphs look at which publishers have what proportion of the shortlists – divided roughly into big publishers and indie; and also number of titles per publisher shortlisted.

ETA one final plot, of the women shortlisted for the Aurealis Award in 2012, these were their publishers:

Just a short one today – The Kitschies. The Kitschies are new awards, established in 2010 with the single Red Tentacle (novel) and subsequently gradually adding the Golden Tentacle (Debut novel), the Inky Tentacle (Cover art) and the Black Tentacle (Judges’ discretion). Important things to know about The Kitschies are that they are presented by Kraken Rum and “reward the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” The mission of the The Kitschies is “encouraging and elevating the tone of the discussion of genre literature in its many forms.” And the most important thing about these are the prizes – £2,000 in prize money and hand-crafted Tentacle trophies!

Here are the stats. I’ve only presented two charts here. The first chart is the gender breakdown of winners with 12 winners across 4 years, and excluding two of the Judges discretion awards at this time – SelfMadeHero (which does have a female publisher) and the World SF Blog.

And the gender breakdown of the Red and Golden Tentacles ie the fiction component only.

As part of prepping and researching for my phd candidacy application, I’m playing around with lots of gender numbers in Aussie specfic. This is actually going to be far more intensive and fiddly than I originally thought and I keep coming up with extra ideas and tangents to run off in. Meanwhile, I thought I might throw various plots and snippets here as I compile them. At the moment, nothing really is part of any narrative or train of thought. I’m just amusing myself as I compile a looooot of different sources of information into something usable.

Today I played around with the achievement oriented awards. So these are more to do with rewarding individuals for their contributions to Australian SF/F rather than rewarding a specific accomplishment in the preceding year (like the Ditmars or Aurealis). We have three main awards for these – the A Bertram Chandler which is awarded by a jury on behalf of the Australian SF Foundation; the Peter McNamara Achievement Award for lifetime achievement; and the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for excellence.

So, first here are some pie charts of the breakdown of all winners for each award by gender:

You can see we’re hovering around that 25-30% average Russ talks about. The Chandler and the Peter McNamara Convenors’ awards decisions are made by juries. I don’t have the breakdown of those at the moment. However, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award decision is made by one person. A different person is selected each year to make the decision. Here is the gender breakdown of these judges:

So the breakdown by gender of the judges is the same as for the winners. But interestingly, when you look at who chose whom, only one woman (Helen Merrick) chose to award the Achievement Award to a woman.

Then I thought it might be fun to look at how many people won more than one of these achievement awards – how diverse are each of these awards? In total, there were 47 winners of these three awards. These 47 wins were won by 37 individuals.

8 individuals in the Australian SF community have won more than one achievement award but only one of these was a woman – Lucy Sussex. Shaun Tan and Terry Dowling have both won the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence twice – the only ones to have done so. And just one person – Paul Collins – has won all three awards.

Blogging is really hard right now, for a whole bunch of reasons. I have a lot to say but no energy to start.

So instead let me tell you about my exciting glass drink bottle. I’ve been coveting my boss’s one for ages. And then recently, I’ve had to take water with me everywhere I go, and not being overly organised, I’ve been stopping at my local servo on the way out to anywhere to grab a bottle of water. Since the need to have water on me is not going to go away any time soon, I’ve been starting to feel really bad about my consumption (and disposal of) plastic bottles. Yesterday, I was unable to make it to Lee Battersby’s book launch in the city and C went as our representative. Since he was killing time later on, I got a message asking me “about those glass bottles I wanted” and he brought me home two of my very own. And today,  I trialled the 800ml one. It wasn’t as heavy as I thought it might be and now I feel all virtuous at my reusing the bottle and it’s ability to be regularly cleaned. Here’s one very happy water drinking person and a nice reduction in my carbon/water usage/landfill footprint!