C. E. Murphy

More on genderflipping

grrm_flipped

After last week’s post on genderflipped covers, my friend Flit dug up an article she remembered reading about a a bias study regarding female playwrights.

The article is well worth reading, but for the TL;DR folk among us (sorry, I only just learned that TL;DR meant “too long; didn’t read”, so now I have to use it at least once), the take-away is “in an as-controlled study as is possible, it turns out women discriminate against female playwrights more strongly than men do, even though plays written by women make more money.”

That doesn’t really do the article justice, but it’s as close as I can get in a sentence-long summary. Go read it, really, if you’re at all interested in the topic at hand.

The reasons behind the above two take-aways are complex. It appears that women discriminate against women more strongly because they percieve that if they don’t, when they bring too many womens’ work to the table, the men around them will dismiss it/them. So they’re culling early. And it appears the reason womens’ works make more money is that people will take a chance on a promising young male playwright and produce his play, but will tell a promising young female playwright “Now all you need to do is write a hit!” and only after a truly remarkable script has been written will it be produced.

The latter in particular seems to me to fall in line with what I’ve read any number of times regarding women submitting material to anthologies/editors/conference papers/etc: that women are accepted in higher proportion relative to the percentage of submissions, because the work is of higher quality. This is due, evidently, to women being taught that they have to be perfect before they can risk trying, because anything less will fail.

This is not saying men will throw any old shit to see if it sticks, but evidently that they’re trained to believe that they should try, whereas women are less so trained.

So that may in effect be the answer to the Great Social Experiment I’d like to try, the one of writing two series of the exact same type, one under a male name and one under a female name. (Although to properly balance it I couldn’t even write one under CE Murphy, because that’s a name with a known quantity and reader base, which would skew the results. They’d have to be two equally unknown (or known) names, which makes it an even more impossible project.) Or perhaps that actually has no reflection at all on what the results of a Great Social Experiment might be. But it does feel like it all ties together, although of course the way it ties together most basically is “Society: it am broked.” @.@ :)

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Genderflipping covers

So Maureen Johnson, YA author, threw down a gauntlet a couple of days ago regarding the way books are marketed and asked her jillions of Twitter readers to gender-flip some of their favorite book covers. To make a cover that might have been offered up if the book was by a person of the other gender, or was gender neutral (initials instead of full names. She’s written a terrific article about the whole problem of gendered covers here, and it is truly worth a read. Really truly honest to God.

But if you never click through on another link I offer, go check out the slideshow of covers people did, because they’re flipping awesome. Er, so to speak. Let me show you my single-most favorite of all of them, or at least my favorite of the fantasy novels. This is a recent GRRM cover for A GAME OF THRONES:

grrm_current

This is Georgette R. Martin’s A GAME OF THRONES (image by Electric Sheep Comix):

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“Her publisher decided she didn’t need the second “R” in her initials,” said the artist.

It’s nearly perfect. I think the font is actually *too* ornate, but I totally get a Jody Lynn Nye vibe off this, and wouldn’t be surprised at *all* to see it on one of Michelle West‘s books.

Now: for a degree of fairness, GRRM’s covers have undergone enormous changes in the past 15 years. This is the first one I actually remember seeing:

grrm_original

It’s still aimed at a totally different audience than Georgette’s cover is. And honestly, of the three, Georgette’s is the least likely one I’d pick up, although for me, the fact that it has a woman’s name on epic fantasy would make me take a look, anyway.

There’s a Tumblr tag of genderflipped covers that is one of the most worthy things on the internet. Some of them are merely in the A for Effort category, which is admirable on its own, but honestly, many of them are *brilliant*. Check out this TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by Johanna Le Carre (image by xotus):

tinkertailor_by_xotus

This, this, *this*, this is what makes me want to run the Great Social Writing Experiment. To write two series of the same type under one obviously female name and one under an obviously male name, and not let anybody, including my editors, know the gender (clearly a theoretical agent would be in on this, but beyond that) of the person writing the books. Just to see what happened with covers, reviews, promotion, sales, all of it.

This is not, mind you, a practical experiment. I mean, it’d be a lot of time and effort and investment and while I was getting it off the ground, what, I’m going to survive financially by saying, “Hey, here’s my Kickstarter! Fund me, and in ten years you’ll find out what the project was! Hardcover LEs all around!” or something? Yeahno. :) But oh how I would love to try it.

(Someone asked on Twitter, so I’ll answer it here too: No, I haven’t seen any “EC Murphy” covers (and don’t expect to, because my name isn’t that big), but I have to admit I’d kind of love to see THE QUEEN’S BASTARD or PRETENDER’S CROWN with the assumption of a male writer. :))

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t necessarily want all covers to be gender neutral, but what prompted Maureen to do this genderflip thing was saying “If I had a dime for every boy/man who’s said “Can’t you get less girly covers so I can read this?”…” She went on to say,

The assumption, as I understand it, is that females are flexible and accepting creatures who can read absolutely anything. We’re like acrobats. We can tie our legs over our heads. Bring it on. There is nothing we cannot handle.

Boys, on the other hand, are much more delicately balanced. To ask them to read “girl” stories (whatever those might be) will cause the whole venture to fall apart. They are finely tuned, like Formula One cars, which require preheated fluids and warmed tires in order to operate — as opposed to girls, who are like pickup trucks or big, family-style SUVs. We can go anywhere, through anything…

There’s obviously a larger societal problem going on here, but it’d be pretty damned nice to see Michelle West (or Kate Elliott or Judith Tarr or or or or or) getting covers that weren’t oriented At Girls.

It would be even nicer, of course, if a cover like Georgette Martin’s or Johanna Le Carre’s wasn’t off-putting to boys. Making covers more neutral can’t be just about making them more appealing to the male of the species; that’s still assigning them a gender preference, the one we regard as default. But! As an awareness issue, this kind of project certainly does the trick, and I loooooove it!

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crowdfunding across the universe!

the essential kit

Two things: first, the most awesome car commercial ever made:

Second, and completely unrelated, a friend of mine is running a crowdfund project for a performance piece this summer that my sister and other persons of my acquaintance will be performing in. It’s in dire need of support, with seven days and 75% of the way to go yet. Perhaps you will go support it because I have just shown you the most awesome car commercial ever made (*hopeful*! O.O), or maybe just because you’re awesome, or maybe you can boost the signal even if you can’t support it. <3!

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Recent Reads: Astonishing X-Men (Warren Ellis run)

ghost_box

ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, EXOGENETIC, XENOGENESIS: Sometime back Warren Ellis said he was never going to write for Marvel again. After reading this trilogy of story arcs, I really wish he’d stuck with that. I gather the X-universe storylines have taken a turn for the bleak recently, but I liked GHOST BOX less than anything else of Ellis’s I’ve ever read, and less than any X-story I’ve ever read, including what I considered to be the god-awful Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely run that culminated with Cassandra Nova.

The art in GHOST BOX was pretty painted stuff by Simone Bianchi, but I didn’t think the pages were well laid out or easy to follow, and this comes from somebody who really follows comic stories through the text, not images. The Ghost Boxes opened doors to multiuniverses, and the last issue of the GHOST BOX storyline was a glimpse at three or four multiverses. They were very well done, all of them, in both story and art, except *Jesus*, depressing.

EXOGENETIC was an up-tick in both story and art; Phil Jimenez remembers that Cyclops’s nickname is Slim, which no one has remembered for most of the past twenty-five years, and draws him accordingly. I liked the art very much. I’ve read reviews that didn’t care for the story at all, and I see their point, but I still preferred it considerably to GHOST BOX.

All that can be said about XENOGENESIS was I didn’t dislike it as *much* as I disliked GHOST BOX in terms of story, but I thought Kaare Andrews’ art was appalling. I mean, actually embarrassing to look at. While there are individual panels where I absolutely freaking love the style he’s coming in with, in the vast majority I find the women horrific (See the third panel here for an example that isn’t even as egregious as many of them are). I’d rather look at Frank Quitely’s art, and I don’t like Quietly’s art at all.

So yeah. Basically, that was awful. I’m going to read AvX next (well, for some value of next, WRT whenever I get around to reading another GN) and then step on board with Marjorie Liu’s ASTONISHING, which I have considerable hope for.

extraordinary people

the essential kit

So I was reading something–probably Kate Elliott ()’s fabulous The Omniscient Breasts–and some guy was commenting (to paraphrase), “Why would anybody want to read epic fantasy about women, who basically got married at fourteen and stayed pregnant their whole lives and never went five miles from where they were born?”

I find the blindered attitude behind that to be staggering. I mean, unless this guy is working under the delusion that actually every male in history has left home, become a knight, discovered he’s the lost orphaned king of the land, and taken back his country…then who does he think he’s reading about when he reads epic fantasy starring male characters?

Stories are about extraordinary people, regardless of their gender. Sometimes they’re ordinary and have been thrust into circumstances that makes their simple *survival* an extraordinary event; sometimes they’re the lost prince; sometimes they are nominally ordinary but have a gift or talent to see them through or elevate them. Or whatever. They are very rarely about the day to day life of Arthur Dent, needing to buy a new toothbrush and unable to find his left slipper. And thank goodness for that: we all have plenty of needing to buy a new toothbrush and being unable to find our slippers.

I feel like this post ought to really be an impassioned tirade full of marching and singing and raising banners and the like, but when you get right down to it, 1. I hope like hell I’m preaching to the choir here anyway, and 2. it just seems so self-evident that doing anything other than boggling at the idea that somebody is that small-minded is kind of wasted effort.

Although the extraordinary people aspect may tie into the problem a lot of women readers seem to have, which is that they found female role models in the books they read as children to be lacking. I never had that problem; it never occurred to me, and if it had, well, I didn’t (despite plenty of checking) have a door to Narnia in my wardrobe either, or a sword to pull from a stone, or six signs to seek, or mysteries to solve every few weeks, or a black stallion to care for, or what-have-you: of course these people weren’t like me, and to that end, the gender of the protagonists never struck me as an issue.

It’s also possible that, as with Title IX, I am just on the cusp of a generation that benefited from women who had felt that exclusion growing up and were writing books to address the problem, and am therefore not quite able to comprehend what I intellectually know to be factual. I could list you dozens, possibly hundreds, of books I read with female protagonists, all before age twelve. And frankly, I couldn’t list nearly that many with (solely) male protagonists, which might mean the girls made more impression on me, or it might mean I just lucked out and read huge numbers of books with female protagonists.

I got a little off topic there, didn’t I. :)

gender parity

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So after reading Juliet E McKenna’s quite terrific blog post about women in SF/F, I became curious as to the percentages of books I read by each gender (only because this guy is trying to balance his own gender parity in reading). Since I’ve been keeping an annual reading list since 1998, I could offer up a very thorough look at fifteen years of my reading proclivities.

I haven’t got the time right now to do a 15 year retrospective (if somebody else wants to, have at!), but it was quick and easy to check this and last year’s books read, anyway.

In 2012, I read 40 books by women, 21 by men, 1 by gender unknown, 1 by a writer pair, and 1 by Richard Castle, who technically falls under gender unknown. :) Out of the 21 by men, 10 of them were graphic novels, which is neither here nor there but mildly interesting to me.

To break it down a bit farther, since a number of the books were by the same writers, I read 20 women writers in 2012 and 14 male writers (plus the above changed out). While that’s not parity, it’s not too far off.

This year out of 21 books so far, 13 are by men…but 11 of them are re-reads and those 11 were written by only two authors. So 4 men and 7 women so far.

Am I likely to try to set a goal of gender parity in my reading? No. Why? Well, mostly because I’m so terribly far behind on my reading anyway that if I have to add thinking about that in, I’m never going to catch up. :)

(see, now i can’t stop myself. 2011, 9 women, 10 men. 2010, 6 women, 8 men. And that’s as far back as I can go quickly, because of how I used to keep the lists…)

(eta: can’t…stop…! 2009: 23 books by women; 15 writers. 37 books by men; 22 writers. Also, again: 23 of the 37 were graphic novels. For whatever that’s worth. Besides commentary on the preponderance of men writing superhero comics.)

overwhelmed by sarcasm

Stormcloud sunset

I was just briefly overwhelmed by sarcasm over on Twitter. Alastair Reynolds (whom I like very, very much) was commenting on stories he’s reading for (I think) a ‘zine, the first 3 of which he’s read have all been grim, dystopic, pessimistic near-future SF, and said, “Hey kids: you can do more than one thing with science fiction, you know?”

But by that time the sarcasm had already seized me. I said, “So does this mean the hopeful aspect of my planned climate change trilogy is Right Out?” and it all went downhill from there, with my nod to the fact that as things stand, as a woman writing near-future SF, I’m doomed to obscurity anyway, and that being hopeful about it will obviously only consign me to the gutter that much more quickly. I mean, it’s one thing for Kim Stanley Robinson, who is Big and Important and Respected, to be hopeful about the future, but me? Pshaw.

My friend Alan/ said I’d just have to redo it as “fang fucker” urban fantasy (causing me to throw tomatoes at him *laughs*), and, “Hey girlie, lay off them there Big Themes!”

The terrible, terrible thing is that there really does seem to be a great deal of that kind of real attitude out there. And of course I *don’t* believe that the barriers can’t be broken and that the marks can’t be made, whether it’s in gaining respect as a woman writer of science fiction or any writer at all offering a glimpse of a hopeful future, even if wracked by climate change. There’s virtually nothing that gets my back up like being told I can’t do something (even if it’s a generic “I” that encompasses women SF writers in general), and so I by God want to try.

And Al, bless him, said, “Good luck with it in any case.”

fed up.

the essential kit

I am fed up with social media. Yes, I know, a blog is social media, but let us refer to it as old school, or static, social media: it does not roll over completely every few seconds-to-minutes, nor is it expected to.

I love the ease of interaction and accessibility to my readers that Facebook offers. Facebook, however, seems to be deliberately and actively trying to make the public pages unusable for the person running it–ie, me.

At the moment, between the enormous size of the cover photo (which, once set, cannot be unset) and the pay-for-promotion, new messages, new likes, insights, tips and whatever other crap they’re front-loading, I cannot see any of the page content until I have scrolled down an entire screen length. And that’s with my screen maximized. Yes, I can collapse the admin stuff (but not the cover image), but I have to do it every time I come back to the page, and I don’t stay on the page all the time. Nor am I going to.

I’m also never going to pay to promote any of my posts, which means every inch of the page is wasted space. But just to complicate things further, they’ve done something bizarre to the comments system there, and it no longer goes oldest-to-newest, but apparently “newest to oldest unless something has a direct reply in which case it gets bumped to the top but it all has a time lag so they seem to jump around and it’s very difficult to tell what’s been posted most recently or not.”

G+ makes slightly more sense, except it also has a system where once a cover photo is set you can’t unset it, which just pisses me off. And furthermore, if you upload an image the same size as their default cover image, it tells you that image is too small. WTF. And although one can nominally set sliders to determine how much of what Circle one wants in one’s feed, after half an hour or more of searching I couldn’t *actually* figure out how to do that. I have a suspicion you need to be using Chrome or something. :p (Ah. Someone just told me they got rid of the slider and how to arrange that now. *sigh*)

I’m also still not certain people are actually using G+, and what I would prefer to use it for is an automatic cross-post from this blog…which isn’t, as far as I can tell, possible. Which is why *I* don’t use G+, and which realistically may be why I never get in the habit of it.

To my surprise, Twitter is turning out to be the least irritating–but also the least threaded-conversation-based, of course–of the social media I use.

Honestly, I’m fed up. I’ve had readers tell me they won’t follow me off Facebook/etc to this blog, and I get that. Facebook is very convenient for people wanting to access me. It is no longer, however, at all convenient for *me*, and I’m just about done with it all.

Kitsnaps: Crow Brings Daylight

Crow Brings Daylight

A long time ago, it was always night. Only Crow, who flew far south and north again, knew of daylight, and he told many stories of the brightness and shadow to the Inuit people. In time, they began to ask for daylight themselves, but No, said Crow, I am too old to drag daylight so far north for your hunters to see by.

Please, said the people, and finally Crow agreed to spread his old wings once more and fly beyond the horizon to find daylight for them. He flew many miles through the northern darkness, often thinking it would be wisest to return home. But finally the edge of the world turned grey, and he knew he was close to daylight. With a mighty flap of his wings, he flew past the edge of the world and into the bright colors of day. The sky was no longer starry or full of dancing green and red lights, but blue as the ocean below. The earth was no longer rough and featureless, but green and brown and hilly. There was a beautiful village and many happy people who played and worked in the daylight, but Crow was very tired, so he tucked his head under his wing to hide from the brightness so he could sleep.

When he was rested, he lifted his head again. To his surprise, the daylight was gone, although a fire burned nearby, like a spark of daylight had been left behind. Crow became soot and flew down a chimney to the fire, which was not a fire at all. It was a box with daylight leaking from the edges, but clever as he was, Crow could not open the box.

A little boy played beside the box. Crow flew into the boy’s ear and made it itch so that the child cried out. Immediately the boy’s grandfather came running, asking, What is wrong, my grandson?

Tell him you want to play with the daylight! said Crow, and the boy did. His grandfather scooped out a ball of daylight and gave it to the boy, but Crow made the boy’s ear itch even more, and the boy cried out again.

What is wrong, my grandson? asked the grandfather, and Crow said, Tell him you want to play with it outside!

The boy did, and the grandfather let him out with the ball of daylight. The world brightened and Crow shook off the soot, becoming Crow again. Then he snatched the ball of daylight away from the boy (for no crow ever could resist something so brilliant and shining) and flew away north with it clutched in his claws.

The Inuit people knew Crow had succeeded when strange light began to creep across their land and show them things they had never seen. They cheered and called their thanks to Crow, who hung the daylight he had stolen in the sky.

But he had taken only half of the daylight from the south, so that is why the Northern lands have six months of light and six of dark, and why the lands to the south have twelve hours of light and twelve of dark.

(Canadian Inuit legend adapted by CE Murphy.)

Magic & Manners: Chapter Two

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With further apologies to Jane Austen, I present to you the second chapter of MAGIC & MANNERS, which is what happens when I get it into my head to wonder what PRIDE & PREJUDICE would be like if it was not a lack of wealth that beleaguered the Bennet sisters, but rather an excess of magic…

Chapter One is here or here, if you want to read it on LJ.

Chapter Two commences behind the cut. :)

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