I temporarily unpublished the Worldcon entries until the schedule is finalized, and should have read more of the fine print; in my defense I’ll just say that I’m an obscure self-published writer who doesn’t attract much attention, mainly because I’m hesitant.
My writing career goes like this:
Until age 50 I never finished a novel, and the only fiction I published was occasional informal fics (some of which might now qualify as LitRPG) for my assorted subcultures -- plus I also did things like walkthroughs and reviews under pseudonyms. It had to do with pessimism regarding my ability to mesh with the speculative fiction crowd – why put a lot of energy into making art for a subculture I don’t get along with? There were other factors too, like not wanting to squish myself into a genre, and not wanting to write anything too outrageous that would complicate my relationships with the non-writing world.
Finally, after way too many circular re-writes, I finished the Sonny Knight trilogy (One Sunny Night, Retrograde Horizon, A Dark and Stormy Day), which is about a far future with a changed climate, and humans setting up very different “utopian” societies in different regions, with travel between them being quite difficult, except for this one unlucky boy who stumbles into a political plot involving a country entirely made up of clones.
It wasn’t really a “good” story, but it’s compelling in places, and most importantly, it contained most of the checklist items I decided should be in my first novel. Once it was out of the way I felt more free to experiment.
The second one was a collaboration, and that’s why it fell apart. I wouldn’t recommend collaborating, but I thought it was a good idea at the time. Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler still isn’t technically in final according to my co-author, but she won’t give me her final edits either, and I wasted lots of time trying to work on sequels. I’d still like to give it one more round of editing – for one thing, I want to get rid of this one character named after Lizzo per my co-author’s request. It’s a fantastic story, very “page turny” and fun, but I’m still kind of salty about having IP battles over Baz Rose, my personal Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
After that I tried working in the horror genre, and a novel about a girl fighting a qanon cult. It’s out of print for lots of reasons, mostly because the qanon cult won and is currently in power, plus I had more personal complications with the editor I worked with to the point where I didn’t feel like compunding it by complicating either of our lives with a crappy horror novel making fun of conspiracy believers. They told me the dark fantasy aspect was actually the best thing about this book, so I might try that at some point.
I wrote a non-fiction book, about astrology, explaining things like its origins and cultural history, how people have used it in lots of ways from art to con artistry, how the symbolism has evolved over time. I pulled that one too, because it’s too nuanced – people wanted either an endorsement or a condemnation, and not a meditation on all the deeper nuances involved with superstition.
And finally, the nail in the speculative/horror fiction coffin was Star Language. Which is a first contact with aliens story based on the relationship between Malinche and Cortes. I made the mistake of involving AI image generation in the cover (I used different AIs simulating different art techniques to process the image of a girl’s face that I kept revising and feeding into new prompts), as well as standing up for the idea that AIs don’t necessarily represent the end of the world. Unfortunately, the spec fic community has come together for the idea that AIs are the end of the world, there is no permissible level of involvement with them, and they should be uninvented.
At the same time, I entered Star Language in a literary contest, where it was doing all right, and one of the reviewers actually …
… got me.
That doesn’t happen very often in my life. That's my goddamn grail. That's why I keep writing this stuff, like that whale who finally found another whale in her obscure frequency.
Then the contest organizer went down in flames due to some sex scandal.
And I gave up on Star Language. It’s still in print, but it feels to me like one of those accursed Lovecraftian books that just exists to mess with lives. Maybe I’ll unpublish it but for now I’m kind of in denial.
After that I started working on a book called Lahaina Noon, another horror tale, involving a Maui new age cult run by haoles that conjures a supernatural monster, and an unlikely Scooby gang made up of local types and sympathizers who fight it. Recently a Hawai’i cult similar to the ones that inspired me was in the news, and you can read about it by googling Tulsi Gabbard.
That one fell apart too. It was a reaction to an argument I had with an absolute cunt from the East Coast, who started attacking me online because I was expressing sorrow for the Lahaina fire as a kama’aina haole who was born there, and according to their political worldview (which was shaped by a qanon meme that was going around, circulated by a real estate developer trying to get people to sell cheap), this makes me a problematic colonizer.
Getting cancelled for being sad about Lahaina made me think long and hard about continuing to write speculative fiction.
The main reason I write is so I can be part of the greater community of writers, and find intelligent conversations with other humans. I started out aiming for a dizzy young-adult kind of style, and I still prefer to write younger protagonists. I realized that would hold me to a higher standard about avoiding mature subjects, and trying to include positive messaging, but I felt it was workable and started crafting kind of an experimental “dizzy blonde lady who writes YA” persona to see if I could pull it off.
Didn’t work. For one thing, chronic pain combined with lots of other things to make me a lot more solemn. For another, I was getting cancellation-related-bullying left and right. Frequently nonsensical, like getting denounced as a misogynist for disagreeing with Billie Eilish that concerts shouldn’t last three hours. Often with a core of surrealistic psychotic sadism – someone’s so upset about my sorrow after Lahaina burns down to use it as an excuse to reprimand me over a simplisticd take on colonization?
And sometimes with real teeth – there was a story I pitched to someone that had artificially gestated babies as an element, and she had a major conniption in which she denounced me as sexist and demanded I read the Miles Vorkosigan books and inform myself on the history of science fiction … and a story about that’s up for the Hugo this year. I voted for it. I wonder if my story about the same thing would have come out any better.
I heard enough tales from others (like the Lisa Adler-Golden episode described on File 770 where she harangued an author in public, following a panel, over a slur she had never used) to draw a conclusion that this was what the atmosphere was like, and unless a writer had lots of back-scratching reciprocal arrangements intact … well … that kind of explains the gap between a lot of the Hugo entries and books like DC Carl that people virally enjoy.
So I moved out of spec fic, and right now I’m writing a courtroom drama about a novice lawyer with a wrongful death claim resulting from an enthusiastic fan who got electrocuted when she encountered faulty wiring while hanging around outside a K-Pop idol’s rented house. She’s up against a ruthless tech bro representing the rental agency, a handsome idol whose fans are willing to leave retaliatory glitter bombs on her front porch, and Bunky Woodcock, allegedly negligent homeowner and author of several western novels as well as beloved regular on the western novel convention circult. He might be partially inspired by a science fiction writer.
When you write speculative fiction, you’re open to anyone and everyone condemning you, with their best performative rage displays, for not envisioning an future in accordance with their utopian visions, which constitutes harm. There was a time when the performative rage was more aligned with speaking truth to power, but now it feels a lot more like what Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill describes in her biography, where scenesters with trust funds were using punk purity tests mainly to gatekeep working class blokes like Kurt Cobain.
But when you write in the real world, about lawyers and witnesses, you can describe what you see, and what you know, and what you can reasonably infer. You bear no responsibility for problematic worldbuilding or unvirtuous role models. And even better, you can write about all the godawful people you met in speculative fictionland as thinly-disguised-yet-fully-conforming-with-applicable-slander-and-libel-laws parodies, and caricatures, and muses. So I’m going to take the basic writing advice, and write about what I know, and I’ve spent something like forty years working in civil litigation. Instead of trying to make up science fictional worlds where I can escape from it, I’m going to lean in.
And that’s kind of where it stands with Worldcon this year, and why I’m not actively promoting my books, or myself.
I feel like I’m a legit member of this population, my best book sold more than the 15 copies (the rumored threshold for most trad published books), I’m in SFWA, I’ve an experienced panelist, and I know enough about science fiction to have a discussion with other nerds about it.
At the same time … recently there was a viral social media meme thing, where someone (theoretically serving the forces of good) failed at statistics, making an issue look way more prevalent than it actually was. The people who fell for the original ragebait turned their wrath on the fact-checkers instead of the propagandists … because people who hate fact-checkers aren’t rational, by definition. And these days I work as a fact-checker. And I absolutely refuse to code-switch when I'm off duty.
I had a brief period during my teens where I was interested in science fiction and gamer conventions but the sexism put me off; now upon my return it feels like I don’t really thrive in a Mama Bear environment either. At this Worldcon I’m doing a reality check, to see whether I actually do feel like I’m part of this crowd, or whether I end up bouncing between weird little microaggressions like the last time I went to Baycon, or hooking up with the kind of frenemies who are liable to detonate into drama bombs for random reasons, if any.
I’m an awesome futurist though. I totally called it with regard to K-Pop Demon Hunters and I’m going to be crowing about that. As long as I can continue being a futurist it doesn’t really matter whether or not I’m a science fiction fan.
