Viewing: May, 2015

I arrived home late Sunday night from a gathering at which some pretty decent smoked pulled pork was served to discover a noticeable theme in my Twitter timeline. Everyone I follow was abuzz over the same news item. I also had several DM’s and text messages awaiting me from folks who were sending me the same link.

You’ve all no doubt heard about and/or read the announcement by now. SFF author John Scalzi has signed a very sizable ten-year deal with Tor Books worth $3.4 million (we do love and fixate over our dollar amounts, don’t we?).

I don’t know John Scalzi personally. I’ve never met him, never exchanged a word. I am friends with folks who know him, and apparently he is a heckuva nice guy by literally all reports. In the past I have been openly critical of both his blog and his fiction. I don’t regret the former, more than a little wish I’d kept my mouth shut on the latter. But I went through this whole ill advised self-righteous phase that danced to the tune of, “I’m an author, but I’m also a consumer. If I paid to read a novel I’ll say whatever the fuck I want about it.”

And yeah, that, but also maybe if you’re an author and you don’t have anything nice to say about other authors’ work just shut the fuck up.

In fact, more that second thing.

Trust me. I’ve done the research.

Anyway. Because of things I’ve said or written in the past, most of which I’d think better of now, folks who know me seemed to be expecting, even hoping for a rant of some length against Scalzi receiving what is perceived as a blockbuster publishing deal.

Hey, who am I to disappoint the five people reading my stuff?

So, although it would probably behoove me politically and professionally not to shoot my mouth off about a vastly more popular author, and I should’ve learned this lesson already, I am going to offer my controversial hot take on this.

Ready?

Here goes.

I thought it was the best news I’ve read all year and I was genuinely fucking elated by it.

Seriously.

I felt no jealousy. No resentment. No bewilderment. Certainly no rage. I may not dig on the dude’s stories, but a whole lot of people do. It’s taken me many years to realize there’s nothing wrong with either of those things and that we’re all right. That’s what’s great about art. We can all look at the same thing and see something different and in an ideal world that would lead to some very interesting discourse from which we all learned something and gained a newfound perspective.

Now, I know the internet runs almost totally contrary to this concept, being a place where if someone disagrees with you about anything, even a little, your whole fucking life and theirs must stop until you’ve changed their mind or shamed/battered/harassed them into utter and eternal silence.

It’s pretty stupid.

I want to refer you briefly to a post from earlier in the year about publishing’s culture of extremes in which I wrote of the toxic optimism and cynicism that too often dominate said culture. I bring it up because this announcement of Scalzi’s deal, and the deal itself, is a brilliant and tragic proof-of-concept in that vein.

There is going to be, and already has been, so much hate-wanking over this deal, both because writers, like all working artists, are inherently jealous creatures and because a lot of people just hate the fuck out of John Scalzi personally for a plethora of imagined, half-imagined, or misunderstood reasons. His detractors will come up with no end of borderline insane reasons why this deal is somehow bad for the whole publishing industry, or at the very least how it’s a sham on its face or how its inception was the result of some kind of conspiratorial engineering.

I’m sure Adam Baldwin could explain this all much better than me.

That’s all crap, of course. John Scalzi is where he is because he writes books a bunch of people love and want to read. He has the numbers. The numbers don’t (or rarely do) lie. He got the deal that made sense for both him and the publisher because of those numbers. There’s just nothing to dispute about that.

Then you’ll have the opposite end of the spectrum, the deluded souls certain John Scalzi has won some mythic publishing lottery. They’ll envision him receiving a giant Publisher’s Clearing House-esque check for $3.4 million and then gradually transpose an image of themselves in his place. They’ll see it as proof that all they need do is finish that novel about the ordinary kid who suddenly realizes they have or is bestowed extraordinary powers and they’ll be an overnight literary sensation. All the wealth and fame and recognition will be theirs.

This is an equal fantasy, and for a needed reality check you can read Charles Stross’ thorough dissection of the deal, or hell, just read Scalzi himself putting it into proper perspective.

That is not to say, not at all, that this isn’t a highly lucrative deal made of real dollars. I mean, for fuck sake, the median wage per person in America is less than thirty thousand bucks.

But it’s not “fuck you” Gulfstream jet money, either.

Again, we’re a culture of extremes, and the above camps are those extremes in action.

Me, I’ve worked very hard to find the middle ground in all things (more realistically, most things. But I do try).

I’m excited precisely because John Scalzi didn’t win the publishing lottery, but nor am I hateful or envious enough to believe that $3.4 million is as big a lie as the cake and he’ll be begging for change at the bus station.

I’m excited because Scalzi isn’t a global phenomenon like JK Rowling. He’s never had a number-one best-selling novel. What he has is an ardent, broad readership and an expansive backlist that sells very well. What he does is deliver solid, steady, worthwhile numbers for his publisher. Because of that they were willing to make a long-term investment in him for a wholly reasonable, healthy sum of money that will be spread out over a number of years and depend heavily on his performance and the performance of his output.

Now, when you say it like that it’s no longer sexy. It’s not anyone’s fantasy of authorial nirvana. It’s not the “rock star” fantasy of being a best-selling author.

It almost makes it sound, gulp, like a regular-ass job.

And that terrifies most folks with dreams of being authors.

To me, however, it sounds like Heaven, and I’m utterly delighted and inspired by an SFF market that can support that kind of dependable vocational bliss. We’re inundated with bitter mantras, mostly published by Salon, reiterating that there is no money to be made as an author, especially of SFF. It’s refreshing and nourishing and needed to be reminded people are still buying and reading these books. A lot of people, in fact.

Scalzi has accomplished that most difficult and admirable of feats, he has turned writing novels into a steady, stable, well-paying day job.

The fact doing that is possible, especially good-goddamn-hallelujah in SFF of all markets, is what’s cause for celebration.

I also want to refer you to this tweet from author Greg van Eekhout, who nailed another important point here.

eekhout tweet 1

Publishers are not at all unlike movie studios. Both survive on their hits. Most books (and if it isn’t most, which I genuinely believe it is, it’s an overwhelming fucking amount) lose money. That’s just the crapshoot nature of the public and the business. Authors like Scalzi whose backlists pump their publisher full of cash each quarter are what keeps that publisher in business and able to afford your first book contract.

These are all good things. These are all necessary things.

They require only a scant bit of perspective.

Perspective is one of many qualities writers and the publishing community at large often lack.

So, yeah. The announcement of John Scalzi’s big damn $3.4 million deal with Tor is good news for every SFF author with realistic goals and expectations willing to put in a couple of decades of extremely hard work writing consistent, regular novels and building the platform and awareness to support those works and that author’s personal brand.

If that’s not you then you either need to reassess this industry and your potential place in it, or you need to get very, very, very astronomically fucking lucky.

Hey, it does happen.

And if you’re among those hate-wanking to this news because you loathe John Scalzi and probably yourself a little or more than a little for any number of dumbass reasons…just stop.

Really, stop.

I know it’s difficult, what with the Twitter and the Facebook and your internet umbilical cord and you just can’t help having it thrown in your face, all these amazing things every other author seems to get that you don’t and it’s very easy for that to roll itself into a big sour ball of bitter and envy and hate in your stomach.

Unfurl the ball. Relax. Stop focusing on others and focus on your own shit.

I promise you, we’re all just geeks making it up as we go along.

You’ve been shown what’s possible.

Hopefully, you now understand what it takes to get there and what it actually means once you are there.

Hopefully, you’re motivated by all of this, and for the right reasons.

Now get to work.

So, here we are again. And it seems most of us, myself included, haven’t learned a damn thing.

My, but that purely does suck.

You know, initially I dismissed writing this. I really did. I read a number of tweets last night, many of them by folks I admire and respect quite a bit, who’ve stopped watching or never watched Game of Thrones. Upon hearing of the truly awful and unnecessary rape scene that ended last night’s new episode, the tone of these folks was casual, unsurprised, dismissive, even less rueful of the series and more rueful of the viewers.

The consensus among them is it’s not even worth talking about anymore.

While I don’t at all disagree with their decision to abandon and/or ignore the show, and I know those attitudes probably mask or are scabs over deep and severe pain over this kind of content, I think they’re very wrong about that last bit.

Very wrong.

It is worth talking about.

Game of Thrones is an immensely popular piece of media, and popular media is always worth talking about.

In fact, it’s kind of everything.

Movies, television series, novels, they matter. A lot. Popular forms of them matter even more, because it’s popular media that shapes our culture, our perceptions and perspectives, and shapes the stories and storytellers that come after.

What’s popular in fiction is dreadfully powerful, and dreadfully important.

About a year ago I wrote a post very similar to this one, to which I’m unable to link now because, like so many other posts from 2014, it was lost when we switched this website over. That post was written on the heels of the widespread outrage over the character of Jaime Lannister raping his sister Cersei beside their son’s funeral bed on an episode of Game of Thrones.

I wrote about a lot of things in that post. I wrote about how stunningly and dangerously out-of-whack our priorities and perceptions are. I wrote about how rape seemed to be fourth on the list of things people were outraged by in that scene, after the choice of location, the incest factor, and the fact it wasn’t in the books. I wrote about how there was nothing approaching that level of outrage or outcry when, in the very next episode, Burn Gorman’s character Karl Tanner delivered a monologue while around him literally a dozen women characters were being violently raped. I wrote about fanboys letting themselves and the book series off the hook because that particular rape wasn’t one of the many rapes in the canon, and how George RR Martin is in fact responsible for the world he created and that continues to be created by television writers.

I wrote about the quick and needed death I want to watch rape as a cheap device of narrative drama die.

I stand by all those points, and they all apply to last night’s grotesque rape of Sansa Stark.

Not only is it an increasingly repetitive use of gratuitous sexual assault in the series, it’s probably the most denigrating yet to actual survivors of rape and to women characters in the series itself. It almost immediately follows a scene in which Sansa stands up for herself, a scene of empowerment, of her owning her fear and position and circumstance. I’m not even sure that was a conscious decision on the writer’s part, which is even more disturbing when you think about it. Just as bad as that is the fact they focus on Theon’s face almost the entire time Sansa is being assaulted. Sansa’s character is divorced from her own scene of assault. It becomes about how her violation impacts him. It nullifies and reduces and erases her character, that assault, and its effect on the actual victim.

It was about as backwards as visual storytelling gets, and it is sadly, infuriatingly par for the course.

Yesterday was a day of interesting juxtaposition for me. With the love of my life, Nikki, I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road in the theater. I watched Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa utterly own the post-apocalyptic wasteland. I watched a plotline that had concerned me deeply in the trailers, that of the “Vestal Virgins,” executed with dignity and without victimization. I saw sexual assault referenced and its effects explored through character, but no rape or the threat of rape utilized or exploited for dramatic purposes. I watched old women kicking ass and taking names. And without a sign pointed at any of it. It all just played out.

It was inspiring, entertaining, compelling, and engaging.

Truly.

Then we came home and watched the newest episode of Game of Thrones, which ended with a young woman having her power taken away as soon as she dared to own it. We watched as just as quickly that violation was dismissed and reduced to a cheap enhancement for a male character. We were repulsed instead of compelled, disgusted instead of engaged. It was a lazy, obvious, repetitive attempt to shock and manipulate base emotions that only reinforced the standard gender roles we see in movies and on TV all the time.

Women as helpless victims.

Men as dominators of women.

Rape as a normal, expected event.

Two very popular pieces of media and culture operating at the height of their respective mediums, both dealing with the same subject matter.

In my opinion, humble and novice though it may be, one of those works got it right and the other failed itself and us all.

The writers of Game of Thrones haven’t learned a damn thing. They’re still using rape as a cheap plot device, and reducing any woman who dares to exist in their world let alone attain power in that world to victims.

The audience hasn’t learned a damn thing. They’re still shocked by the circumstance of a rape rather than the act itself and how it’s used in this way.

And I haven’t learned anything either, because I’m still watching the show. I’m still enabling that brand of storytelling season after season because there are aspects and characters I like in the series.

So, what do I have to write now that I didn’t write a year ago?

I want to speak to the future creators out there. The “aspiring,” as you’re called. Because that’s largely who follows me on Twitter and whatnot. I don’t want to speak to the writers of Game of Thrones or similar series/scenes, because they are who they are and I hold little hope for them improving or changing. I don’t want to talk to the writers out there of both screen and prose who are doing great work and getting it right and changing and challenging gender roles, because those writers have got their shit figured out, or at least figured out enough.

I want to speak to you folks who are going to go on to write the novels that hit and sell the pilots that become the next big dramatic series. I want to speak to the folks who will staff the writers’ rooms of television shows and will develop a voice in the process. I want to talk to those among you who will sell a spec screenplay and/or be given the chance to script a mainstream movie.

Sadly, that won’t be most of you. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Most of you will never get to create work utilized by those mediums, at least on that level.

But maybe, just maybe, a few of you will make it through.

So, I want to speak to you and I want to tell you this: Try harder. Do better.

That’s all.

If you make it over the wall it’s going to get even more difficult than the climb. There are going to be deadlines and demands and entitled fans and pissed off editors and demanding producers and the more you win the more pressure there will be to keep winning and even if you aren’t being asked to compromise your standards your brain will simply just get tired, and you will be backed into a creative corner one way or another.

In that corner you can decide to have the bad guy rape the powerless girl and most of the audience won’t think about it too deeply and they’ll hate the bad guy and feel sympathy and pity for the girl and they’ll be shocked and outraged and tune in next week to watch the fall-out, hoping for some form of satisfaction.

You can decide to do that, or you can actually try.

George Miller didn’t have to invite Eve Ensler to consult on his movie. He didn’t have to cast Charlize Theron or write the part of Furiosa. He didn’t have to think any deeper than a six-pack of models in white midriffs for his captive women. He could’ve crashed cars into each other and blown shit up for ninety minutes and still gone home pretty happy and even done just as well at the box office.

George Miller, at age 70 and without a hit Mad Max film in almost 25 years, actually tried.

The writers of Game of Thrones didn’t have to end last night’s episode by violating Sansa Stark. They didn’t have to settle for shocking us rather than trying to compel and engage us.

The writers of Game of Thrones, in the fifth season of an impossibly popular television series that can literally do no wrong at this point, did not try.

They relied on the same repetitive, lazy device and damaging, problematic roles they always have. And there’s nothing to be done about that. It’s the juggernaut it is, they can get away with it, and the majority of creators being put on by Hollywood are who they are.

However, here’s the good news. The next generation of all of this belongs to you. Some of you will create the media that people talk about and discuss and dissect the way they do with Game of Thrones and are doing with Mad Max, and it will inspire and influence the generation of creators after you.

That’s how things actually change.

And hey, if what you want to create is a serious and genuine exploration of sexual assault and/or its survivors because that’s the story you have to tell or desperately want/need to tell, by all means.

But if rape is the device you choose to create drama because you’re too lazy and/or unoriginal to delve deeper with your story, we don’t need you anymore.

You’re done.

Among many other things, we need to see women in fiction the way women actually are, not the way mostly male writers have imagined them in popular culture for centuries and continue to regurgitate now.

We don’t need to keep seeing their helpless victimization and the minimization of sexual assault by its use as a cheap dramatic device.

Try harder.

Do better.

That’s all. That’s what I’m going to try to do. That’s what I encourage you to do. Outrage and “think” pieces (I love that we’ve finally cast thinking as a pejorative, by the way. Fuck everyone who complains about “think” pieces), while often entirely valid, don’t change anything.

Create the media you want to see.

Create the media we all need to see.

When it’s your turn, try harder and do better.

Also: Make damn sure you get a turn.