Five Great Speculative Fiction Novels by Women

I’ve been meaning for a good long while to set aside a period to read only women authors. It’s not that they’re unrepresented on my shelves or in my to-read pile. But if I’m honest, I’ve read way more books by men than by women. Having realized the disparity, I felt a certain compulsion to address it. But I put it off for a long time, for whatever reason I could think of when the disparity re-intruded on my consciousness. Again, if I’m honest, my resistance was rooted in discomfort, as much as anything at the realization that my personal pre-sets, left unchecked, had brought about the disparity in the first place. If I did something about it, well, that meant it was a real thing, a disparity between my aspirational and actually-lived selves.

All the more reason to do something about it, and so a few months back, I made a conscious decision to read mostly books by women for a while. And I am surely glad that I did. Not for some consciousness-raising epiphany about men and women and society and literature (though there surely was that), but because I’ve found a rich vein of work that tickles a personal and particular sweet spot that I had been previously unaware existed, and that I had fervently wished was out there. Turns out my pre-sets had just prevented me from seeing it (thanks, patriarchy).

See, I’m a bit of a rare bird in reader culture, or so it seems to me. I love and identify with both speculative fiction in most of its forms and with more highfalutin quote-unquote literary fiction, with all its inquiries into history, psychology, language, and well, you name it. I came up reading both, love both, and wish they got along better in public. As a writer I try and draw from both sources. As a reader I crave works that weave the two together. Despite the continued snootiness of the literary set and the flagellations of spec fic’s misogynist rump, the overlap between the two is growing, and the correlation with the increasing prevalence of women writing speculative fiction leaves little doubt the phenomena are connected.

There’s so much great work being done right now. It’s a really exciting time for a reader like myself.

In celebration of that, and in honor of Lightspeed Magazine’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! issue, here are five great speculative fiction books by women that I’ve read recently, and why I think they are awesome and you should read them, too, whatever kind of books you like to read. Continue reading “Five Great Speculative Fiction Novels by Women” →

The Work Itself Has to Be the Reward

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Albert Camus

This is one I wrestle with a lot. I want a career so bad I can taste it. I want to spend all my working time writing and get paid enough to keep doing it. I want people to read my work and be moved by it. I want the years and the effort I’ve put into my writing to pay off. I daydream about it constantly, smiling to myself at how I imagine it’s going to be.

It’s going to be awesome. I’m going to quit bartending, and travel, spend more time in the shop making things, and being a writer is going to pay for all of it. Yeah.

The problem is that I’m supposed to be using that imagination for my work, and no matter how bounteous it must still be a finite resource. Time certainly is, and the time I spend imagining being a successful writer is time I am not spending imagining new worlds and different people and the things that happen when those things are made to collide.

The other problem is the little jolt of neurochemical satisfaction I get from the fantasy. Sure, it’s just a shadow of the satisfaction you get from actually accomplishing something, but it’s free. You don’t actually have to do any work, just imagine that you have done (I spent most of my twenties doing this, imagining being a writer instead of actually writing, much). Do it too much, and you end up never actually doing any work, because actually writing is hard at the best of times and gut-wrenchingly, soul-clenchingly painful at the worst. Don’t even get me started on revising. And that’s before you ever show it to anybody.

Take a step back and look at it, and the whole damn thing’s a slog with no real end in sight and a spoonful of heartbreak with each uphill step. Even if you get to the top there’s no guarantee anybody’s going to want to publish or even read this thing you made, and even if they do it’s likely never going to pay your bills entire, necessitating some other line of work to fill out your expenses. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you why anybody would want to go through all that, and that’s speaking as someone who’s spent the better part of his adult life doing it.

And there’s plenty further to go. Further enough, at any rate, that the end exists only in my imagination, which makes it even nicer than it’ll likely actually be.

But I am happiest when I don’t even think about it, when the work itself is my reward. When my focus is less dilute, my ambition banked. When I think about my writing practice and not my (thus far largely non-existent) writing career. I might someday have those problems. From where I sit now they look like they might be okay problems to have. But they’re not the problems I have now. Right now (and always) I need to be writing, and content with that.

Best to align what rewards me with the things that are in my power, is what I’m trying to say. It makes life a lot happier when you can.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the reward of a thing well done is having done it. Look at it that way, and the hard work always pays off.

How’s the Writing Going?

I get this question a lot, and it’s a hard one to answer. Usually I go with something innocuous, like “It’s going alright” or “It’s kicking my arse” or “I hate it with the passion of a million white-hot suns.” Sometimes, if circumstance permits, I might go into a bit more detail, but I have to stop myself from opening the can up too wide, because I could literally talk for hours and most people don’t have time to hear, much less digest, the full report. I’ll give you an example.

There’s a story I wrote last summer, about woodworking and a zombie apocalypse, among other things. Call it Story X. I worked on it for a few months, did some research, got it banged into what I thought was a pretty good shape, and went ahead and submitted it a couple of times, receiving (relatively) quick rejections. I knew the beginning, vivid and prettily-worded though it was, wasn’t accomplishing enough, so I went over it again, basically rewriting what I’d written before in a way I hoped would be more compelling. As I learned when I submitted it to my writers’ group (which is what I should have done in the first place), I was not particularly successful, and every one of my estimable colleagues saw through my prosaic hand-waving and called me out on it (for which I thank them). At the time I’d started in on a novel, so I set Story X aside and tried not to think much about it. A month or two later I took a hiatus from writing altogether, and have been slowly easing myself back into it for the last month or so. Since I’m not quite ready to get back into novel mode I decided to bang my head against Story X for awhile and see which cracked first.

So far I’m slightly ahead.

Continue reading “How’s the Writing Going?” →

The Lightbulb

Had one of those moments yesterday that really makes this whole being a writer thing worth the heartbreak it usually consists of. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but this is some Sisyphean business most of the time. Push the rock. Push the rock. Push the rock. Why is the rock down the hill again? There’s a reason they say works of art are never finished, only abandoned.

But sometimes, sometimes you get that light bulb, and it shows you something whole enough that you can make a thing out of it, and when it does, oh man, that is some good shit right there. But the switch is only flipped for so long, so when you get that brief illumination, you have to drop what you’re doing and get it down, or you could lose it quick as you found it.

I had that experience yesterday (it’s been awhile). I was in the shower, starting the process of getting ready for work. I had already cleaned myself, and was getting ready to shut off the water and finish my personal toilet when for whatever reason I started thinking about this thing I saw at Burning Man maybe ten years ago, and the guy who had built it, and then I was thinking about Wilhelm Reich, and orgones, and everything just started to snowball from there. A story-frame (and title) crystallized in my brain as if from the aether, and I barely stopped to towel myself off before I ran to the table, still naked, and grabbed a pen and paper. Over the course of maybe eight minutes I scribbled a page and a half synopsis teasing out that frame into a more-or-less complete story arc.

I’ve only had this experience a few times. Continue reading “The Lightbulb” →

“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”

Not that people ask me this much, but they might someday, if I ever manage to submit something publishable to the right editor. And I’ve got a story I’m revising that’s kicking my arse right now, so any excuse to not work on that is deeply welcome. At least here I’m still quote-unquote writing.

So where do my ideas come from? A few have obvious inspirations (I have a draft of a story detailing the thoughts of a man falling to his death after reading a story in which some nameless red-shirt fell to his death, for instance). For the most part they just seem to pop into my head from out of nowhere, usually at really inconvenient times and only very occasionally when I’m actually at the keyboard writering away at something. There are some people (Steven Pressfield, for instance) who believe such inspiration to be divine, a whisper from eternity. Others, like Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, place its source in their own subconscious, in an entity they name the Silent Partner and Fred, respectively, an entity who can be communicated with, but never spoken to, as such, and who can be trained, or at least encouraged, to focus and produce.

Myself I likely fall more into the latter camp, though I’m open to the notions of the former, as well. I see mine as Continue reading ““Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”” →