Well, I have a list of things that I want to do in 2012 and I know it’s ambitious. But it does include getting my read on so I thought I might as well throw my hat in the ring and join along the Australian Women Writers 2012 National Year of Reading Challenge.
Objective: This challenge hopes to help counteract the gender bias in reviewing and social media newsfeeds that has continued throughout 2011 by actively promoting the reading and reviewing of a wide range of contemporary Australian women’s writing. (See the page on gender bias for recent discussions.)
Goal: Read and review books written by Australian women writers – hard copies, ebooks and audiobooks, new, borrowed or stumbled upon by book-crossing.
Genre challenges:
Purist: one genre only
Dabbler: more than one genre
Devoted eclectic: as many genres as you can find Challenge levels:
Stella (read 3 and review at least 2 books)
Miles (read 6 and review at least 3*
Franklin-fantastic (read 10 and review at least 4 books)*
* The higher levels should include at least one substantial length review
So, I’m going to be a Purist and stick to speculative fiction . And I’m also going to be practical and set myself the Stella Challenge level – 3 books and 2 reviews.
I think it will be a lot of fun and I want to encourage others to participate. There’s also a second part of the challenge WeLovetoRead2 which is also a really worthy challenge. I’m not going to participate in that aspect of it though, due to time constraints.
However, Twelfth Planet Press will be getting behind the campaign and will be offering a 10% discount on our books throughout 2012 which conform to the challenge. Either email us at contact@twelfthplanetpress.com with the link to your challenge post for a discounted invoice or let us know in the instructions for your purchases by including the link to your challenge post. In the meantime, we’re having a sale for December and are offering 20% off almost all of our catalogue.
This guy is pretty upset, I think. I tried to read the whole post but its loooong and it goes off on tangents and really, doesn’t really get much to the point. He was paid an advance of $65 000, six weeks after he signed his contract with S&S and apparently that’s not immediate enough for him – pretty standard turnaround where I work when you come on as a brand new employee but whatev. And he’s upset, I think because:
Your designer (who is good – I bet he’d have done good work if he ever saw my design brief) is not the problem.
No wait the designer is not the problem. Wait for it, cause publishers love to be told this one:
Okay, whatever. At least you spent some time implementing the three hour long design brief I wrote for the cover, giving specific recommendations and historical comps?
Alas, no. When I got the cover, they totally ignored everything about my audience, my goals, my notes I gave you guys, and whatever else. I re-wrote notes, and they were ignored. So much for “meaningful consultation”!
I’d list more, but it’s all the same sort of thing. Suffice to say, I kept coming with ideas that might or might not work, and getting back nothing or less than nothing in return.
So this dude is a debut author. And so of course, like many people who do things for the very first time, he knows everything about the industry. He knows what sells, he knows how to sell it, he knows how to run this business that he’s … oh, no, wait, that’s right. He’s never actually sold a book before.
But why I’m blogging this is not for the above or the other bunch of verbose ranting which you may or may not feel like ploughing through (oh my gosh does he not sell himself as a writer in that post! Or um, you know, someone I’d want to work with …) it’s for the UNNECESSARY use of the word “bitch” throughout it. You know, I get that he’s upset. I get that he feels like he needs to vent. I get he might feel like his back is up against the wall. But OMG! He feels like he’s being “treated like a bitch” and that that, THAT is the worst thing that could ever happen to him.
And this, just a few weeks after the mencallmethings campaign on Twitter.
Seriously. Some people are just cool. They’re talented and brilliant and ahead of their time.
I’m sick. And I’m catching up on random bookmarked articles. One of which was 10 Fantastic Banned Books that Talk about Sex. Book 6 is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. You, like me, might have just reacted with What the ..? to that. You’re what now? It turns out that the first 49 years of publication of Anne Frank’s diary was a slightly edited version – her father transcribed her original diary and he nipped and tucked a few bits here and there. In 1995, to mark the 50th anniversary of her death, her unabridged diary was released and it contained this paragraph, which she wrote when she was 15:
“…Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris…”
That a young girl might have to actually explore her own anatomy and then write it down – and that 50 years later, this might be considered to be “inappropriate for an eighth grader” – is entirely the point (thanks to @theducks for the link). In fact, so ahead of her time was Frank, that it was in the late 1960s and the second wave of Feminism that the Myth of the Female Orgasm had women reaching for hand held mirrors and peering at themselves to take a proper look and find their clitoris.
A description of a part of one’s body is hardly confronting nor automatically sexual. Part of me wonders had Anne Frank been Shmuel Frank, would that paragraph have been omitted in the first place and if it had been, would its replacement back in the text be thusly contested as inappropriate?
But more so, I wonder why the exact details of female genitalia are such a secret – so much so that many women find it all rather mysterious too. It’s really quite ridiculous, if you think about it. I saw this great graphic the other day that addressed why girls are conditioned to compete with each other – the premise was men/boys don’t want to be compared to a woman/girl and found to come short so instead, they head it off at the pass by pitting girls against each other. Compare girls to girls and make it cuthroat and competitive and then noone remembers that maybe boys could be compared to girls. I dunno how much I buy into that but it seems to me, if women don’t know that much about their anatomy, and the ins and outs of how it works exactly, then they won’t know if men are “doing it wrong”. I mean, that’s the whole kink with wanting to have sex with virgins, isn’t it?
I’ve had a ripper of a reading weekend this weekend and just finally finished the last 7 pages of The Female Man which I didn’t manage to do in time for the Spoilerific Russ Podcast.
And so I only just read the closing. And didn’t get to go all “awwwwww” on the podcast. Fave quotes:
Go, little book … Do not scream when you are ignored, for that will alarm people, and do not fume when are heisted by persons who will not pay, rather rejoice that you have become so popular. Live merrily, little daughter-book, even if I can’t and we can’t; recite yourself to all who will listen; stay hopeful and wise. Wash your face and take your place without a fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big. Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned. when you grow as outworn as crinolines of a generation ago … do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.
Rejoice little book!
For on that day, we will all be free.
I was all: No! Joanna will still love you and understand you! Oh. Wait. …
New episode up! Grab it from iTunes, by direct download or stream it on the site.
In which we discuss the SF Gateway and some great additions to the Women in SF conversation, Alex eats all the Bujold in one bite, and Alisa’s puppy does his very best to oppress us.
Alisa: Maureen Johnson on www.whyy.org/podcast; Twin Peaks; Mercy (not genre but interesting feminism);
Alex: sooo much Bujold (3rd, 4th and 5th omnibi, and Memory); lots of books, because of holidays! But particularly Heartless, Gail Carriger; Blackout, Connie Willis; Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, NK Jemisin… also Harry Potter 7 and Transformers 3.
Tansy: The Demon’s Surrender, The Holy Terror & Robophobia (Big Finish), Subterranean’s YA Issue
Pet Subject: Feedback from our Joanna Russ episode
Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!
Critics who are too sensible to succumb to some version of She didn’t write it and too decent to resort to the (always rather snide) She did, but she shouldn’t have can often find other ways to dismiss the tuneful yodelling and graceful ice-sliding of those wrongly shaped – or wrongly tinted – Glotolog who somehow persist in producing art despite the obstacles arrayed against them. Motives for the dismissal differ: habit, laziness, reliance on history or criticism that is already corrupt, ignorance (the most excusable of all, surely), the desire not to disturb the comfort based on that ignorance (much less excusable), the dim (or not-so-dim) perception that one’s self-esteem or sex-based interests are at stake, the desire to stay within an all-male, all-white club that is, whatever its drawbacks, familiar and comfortable, and sometimes the clear perception that letting outsiders into the club, economically or otherwise, will disturb the structure of quid pro quo that keeps the club going.
- How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ, University of Texas Press, 1983
Alisa Krasnostein is editor and publisher at Twelfth Planet Press. She is also Executive Editor at the review website Aussie Specfic in Focus! and part of the Galactic Suburbia Podcast Team.
In her spare time she is a critic, reader, reviewer, runner, environmentalist, knitter, quilter and puppy lover.
. And I’m also going to be practical and set myself the Stella Challenge level – 3 books and 2 reviews.