Sexual apocalypse - no thanks

Last week I finished reading a book, the second in a series, that I came to because of the promise of the environmental SF of the first book.  That promise was badly betrayed in the second book, which seemed to have abandoned the environmentalist principles that made the first one so interesting.  In this book, the focus was on poverty, politics, and war.

The overall tone of the book was depressingly gloomy, as is the cover.  But what really annoyed me was the amount of gratiuitous sexual content and references to sex, some of it alluding to violent sex, some verging on the erotic.  Sorry, but I don't read SF to learn about a squad of elite berserkers who have violent sex with each other every night, an activity encouraged by their leaders.

What really bugs me is that this book was written by a woman, and edited by a woman, both of whom  have been involved in decrying the lack of representation for women in the SF genre.  Sorry, but if your solution to that problem is to write and publish books about sexual apocalypse, count me out.  I'm more likely to write about an apocalypse that occurs because a woman can't be corrupted that way.  

I'm kicking around several ideas for stories where women rulers simply can't be affected by the promise of sex, where "fluff-head" women turn out to be totally immune to any kind of sexual flattery.  But the thing is, if this kind of sexual apocalypse is what the market thinks it wants, do I stand a hope in hell's chance of ever getting those stories published?  Sometimes I despair when I ask that question, as I suspect the answer is 'no'.

But there is one thing I can do. I can refuse to nominate this book, or any other with a sexual apocalypse in its pages, for any awards.  And I can refuse to buy or read any more books by this author.  I can refuse to send my energy her way, and focus on finding and supporting storytellers with more positive messages.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Competing to shock - loss of the moral compass

I was appalled to read on Twitter last week that a bestselling thriller writer was boasting that his next book would be his most violent ever. I have only read one of this author's books, and the amount of graphic and unnecessary violence in it ensured I'd never read any more.  I have met women, some of them in their sixties with grandchildren they dote on, who've said that the more violence there is in a book, the more they like it.  This bothers me.

It seems that many crime writers, and some SF ones too, are competing for the award of Most  Shocking Narrative of The Year.  Yes, literature must  reflect the zeitgeist of its age.  Yes, it should comment on and challenge the tenets of the prevailing culture and societal values.  

But at this point the writer's moral compass comes into play.  Both metaphysics and quantum physics tell us that, at a fundamental level, everything is pure energy.  And they also tell us that we affect that energy with the thoughts and words we put into it.  That gives us a moral duty to think very carefully about the amount of death and violence we put into our work, and about how graphically we describe those things.

There is a very successful fantasy series of books, and now its associated TV series, that have gained notoriety for the number of people killed in its stories.  But to me, there's something obscene about boasting that the body count for series five will be even higher than series four.  This is a series of books I've refused to read.

Sometimes I feel like King Canute, trying to hold back the relentless tide.  But then I remember that everything is energy.  And if I can send my energy out into the universe untainted by such violence then that is one clear voice slicing its way through the darkness, showing a different way,  By refusing to add to the sum of graphic violence, by refusing to read about it and watch it, I am making a difference.  I'm throwing a small pebble into the pond from which great ripples arise, ripples of awareness that spread out and help others to say no, and to change things.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Every title tells a story

This week I've been sorting our four years' worth of back issues of Writers' Forum magazine.  I cut out the articles I want to keep and file them in alphabetical order in lever arch files. They provide a rich resource for designing workshops.

At the same time as I was sorting through them I was trying to work out - yet again - why I'm not getting any short story acceptances.  I've rewritten the first pages and sections of many of them to make them tighter, and I was looking for any other ways to improve them.  That was when my eyes lighted on an old article about turning rejected stories into accepted ones.  I'd tried most of the remedies suggested in it, but the one I hadn't tried was changing the titles of stories.

Then I came across another article by prolific short story writer Della Galton, talking about rejection.  She too said she'd changed story titles and subsequently had the stories accepted.  She said that sometimes a good title could sway an editor to accept a story.

Hmm. Clearly I've been missing a trick here.  I'm a very solid practical person, and I tend to think of solid, practiical titles for my stories. They tend to be down-to-Earth titles that describe the story, often in one word. Maybe they weren't exciting enough?

Then I went on-line and started reading some more recently-published SF short stories.  And found that many of them have lengthy, often quirky, and sometimes obscure, titles.  When I read the stories, the titles seemed only loosely connected with the narrative they headed up, but they were getting sold.

So my next experiment is to change the titles of stories I believe in and am happy that I've edited to within an inch of their lives.  I've found two good titles already, and am about to submit them in their new guises.  My only problem then will be keeping track of the old and new titles, and where I've sent the story as each.  But if an obscure title really will tempt an editor to buy the story, what have I got to lose?

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Committing to submitting

I've been keeping up my submission commitment this week, with five new submissions.  I'm not sure whether it's good to get rejections swiftly, or after a month's wait.  I've had some of both types this week.  At least the quick ones allow you to move on fast and get the story turned around and sent out again.  Those that take a month to return somehow seem like I've wasted time getting the answer.

It helps to keep an eye on social media when you're submitting stories.  Following publishers can alert you to their open reading periods, and I came across one of these this week.  Tor.com closed submissions some months ago, and have just re-opened.  But when I was following up their submission requirements for short stories I happened to notice they were open for submissions of novellas again.  For a whole month.  But I just happen to have a novella looking for a home, so I submitted that too.

I've been spending some time recently looking at the openings of stories that have been published.  Even for subscription magazines, you can usually read the first three or four paragraphs of published stories for free.  As these are the very paragraphs that persuade an editor whether or not to buy the story, that's handy research.  

I've also been trying to take a long, hard look at my stories to work out why they don't sell.  Ànd I've detected a tendency in me to start the story too slowly, or just a shade too early.  I'm still writing myself into the tale.  Once I've got to page two or three the story's rattling along, but it needs to do that on page one as well.  So the novella, and the stories that got submitted this week, got a page one re-write to eliminate the excess story establishment before they went off. 

I'm committed to submitting my work now, and to selling it.  So if I need to keep on changing my stories I'll do it.  But it's knowing what to change that matters too, and I sense I've reached a higher level of awareness on that in the last few weeks.  I'm learning to pull back far enough to look at my stories as a stranger, to develop the lack of investment in my work that allows me to see it as an outsider who knows nothing about me, or the story.  Time will tell if it pays off.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Making first contact - the cheat's way

This week I'm re-writing Genehunter.  In it I have a human crew making first contact with an indigenous species of big cats, the U-Vai.This raised the question of how to keep the story moving when the two species know nothing about each other and can't speak each other's languages.

I've resorted to a couple of tricks to get around this problem.  First, I have a viewpoint in the head of one of the aliens, Yull.  Getting into his head means I can tell the reader about the cats' society, culture, and concerns without having to worry about the language barrier.  The big cats do have a language, and they speak proper words.  (I'm not sure whether that modification to their vocal chords would mean the couldn't roar, but I want them to roar, so they do that too.)  being in Yull's head allows me to tell the reader relevant history long before my human characters discover it.

Second, I've cheated by letting the two species have universal translators.  They both have tech, so I've figured that they might be able to find a way to exchange binary files.  It's unlikely that they'd receive the complete databases I've miraculously had my characters doing, but this is fiction, and I have to do what's needed to keep the story moving.

In reality, even if the two species had such help, making a first contact would be a cautious, long drawn out process. But I want to send the two species on a journey together, to figure out what's happening at the other end of the continent.  So  I need them to be able to communicate and agree to travel together on this adventure,

I've made Yull a young leader, but wise in ways some of the older members of his tribe are not.  That means he's more open-minded, a dreamer, more able to cope with the culture shock of meeting people who came to his world through the 'deep black'.  And his son Villjo has a youngster's lack of fear, and makes friends with Aris, my human heroine, easily.

I've tried not to make the contact too unrealistic. It does involve Aris spending long hours with the language teaching programme actually learning the language.  But in the end the demands of the story must prevail.  And now they're ready to set out on their big adventure,

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Plain and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Talking cats - ignoring an editor's advice

When I was gathering together submission guidelines for science fiction magazines earlier this year I came across one editor's list of what he didn't want to see in stories.  Apart from showing that person's jaded and cynical view of the stories he received, it also contained the line: no stories about talking cats.

I have no idea why this should be a no-no.  True, if you're going to replace talking fluffy bunnies with fluffy cute kittens it's likely your story won't have the edge it needs.  But what about if those cats are pony-sized lion-cats with arms and hands as well as four legs?  What if they have language, culture, religion, their own technology?  Ŵhat if they're a fully-rounded, intelligent, alien species that just happens to have evolved from a big cat species rather than an ape one?  I think that's a wholly different story.

This is what I am doing with Genehunter.  The point of creating the alien Ur-Vai was to give me a chance to comment on humans and their beliefs and culture.  For example, do we ever wonder about the feat of balance we perform every day just walking down the street?  From the viewpoint of a four-legged cat, bipedal locomotion should be hard.  After all, humans have no tails to help them balance.

My talking cats are real people.  Their pelt and mane colours differ, as do the shades of their eyes.  They're individuals,  Yull, my viewpoint cat, has eyes of different colours.  The Ur-Vai show the complexity and diversity of form that evolution would produce. And they have different political and personal opinions, as any highly-intelligent race would.  There are cats friendly to my human characters, cats hostile to them, and there are traitors to their own people.

So I'll leave that jaded and cynical editor's advice about no talking cats behind me.  Every trope can be done successfully if we find a fresh angle on it, tell a great story, and give our talking cats real problems and challenges.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more about her at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Putting my head above the parapet

Over the last couple of weeks I've received several savage reviews of stories of mine, stories I love and really believe in.  This is the downside of putting our heads above the parapet and showing our work to the world. VWhen someone tells you that they cannot believe in the premise of your novel at all, this is a grievous wound.  It goes straight to the heart.  And sometimes we get do shot by critiquers.  Badly shot.  And the words wound us and go straight to the heart.

But sometimes there's more than just a comment on our work going on in these critiques.  In one of those savage reviews, I sensed jealousy, and perhaps even a sense of competition from the critiquer.  This was another writer who had not had her novel published yet.  It's coming out later this year, published by a small press I've never heard of.  And that makes me wonder how good she is as a writer.  I didn't get to critique her work in return, so I can't judge.  But I wonder.

If I were a beginner writer that level of savage criticism might well stop me writing for ever.  But I'm not,  I've been writing for forty years, and spent almost as long putting my head above the parapet.  I've taught creative writing for over a decade, and I'm now Chairwoman of Havant and District Writers' Circle.  And in all my workshops and in the Circle I set rules for feedback.  I ask people to say what they like about a piece first, then move on to what they didn't like about it.

There is always something good about a piece of writing.  I've never yet come across writing without one spark of something good to it.  And yet that was the critique I received.  Nothing was good, she didn't believe in my premise, my characters were stupid...  The critique was the most disrespectful I've ever received, and I can't help thinking of this critiquer as a jaded, cynical 'I've seen it all before' woman.  How joyless her life must be if she criticises everything in that manner.

There's only one way to heal from such a wound.  Remind yourself that this is one person's opinion, and that not everybody will agree with that view.  If we want to grow and learn as writers we have to put our heads above the parapet, but we also have to gain the wisdom to sort the wheat from the chaff.  I'll heal from my current wounds, continue putting my head above the parapet, and keep on learning and risking new wounds.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera: Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more about her on www.wendymetcalfe.com