Mostly Harmless
I am no longer the most dangerous woman in speculative fiction, for multiple reasons.
The first is that it’s corny. It always was, by design. A deadpan “I am dangerous” spoken by a short, zaftig creature with no structural power in a withering industry is inherently silly.
The moniker was a reclamation of a histrionic accusation spread by another group of writers I stopped associating with. Here, I could describe the harassment campaign (the rumors, the death threats in my inbox, the rape jokes at my expense, the clumsy attempts at hacking into my social media accounts) and how the industry’s leaders encouraged it, but that was years hence, and the state of the world is such that complaining about people on the internet being mean to you several presidential administrations ago looks a little whiny.
Many sci-fi/fantasy authors have built careers on being victims of internet bullying only to turn around and become even bigger internet bullies once they got into power. I don’t want to be one of them. I’m not any good at it, anyway. I never learned the choreography for the Sympathetic Victim dance routine, and I’m too clumsy to pull it off, and I find the spectacle distasteful.
“Fuck you dad”-style rebellious contrarianism is a necessary stage toward self-actualization, but it cannot be the end point. It is freer to define oneself with indifference to one’s enemies, not in opposition to them.
Like the doomed police chief in a gritty 1990s cop thriller, I am too old for this shit.
The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin’ party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it—with chickens—is to clip blinders on them. So’s they can’t see.
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little
The second reason is that I’m not really active in the speculative short fiction scene these days. Aside from a story in a recent issue of Typebar, I’ve mostly been focusing on nonfiction. I had a review column in the New Haven Independent for a while, and I recently had pieces in Fangoria and Current Affairs. Since this quiet transition, I’ve found myself a lot calmer and happier. Sometimes you don’t realize how miserable an environment is until you leave it.
Occasionally I’ll hear about the latest semi-incomprehensible tempest from the SFF scene. Maybe a writer is being accused of animal abuse for killing off a fictional dog in her fictional novel. Maybe it’s time for the annual Worldcon scandal. Maybe another romantasy author has been outed for racefaking. It’s a lot funnier on the outside, and a lot smaller, too. None of it matters.
Leaving Substack
I’ve been cutting back on social media. I deactivated my personal Facebook account years ago. I haven’t logged into my writer Facebook account in well over a year. I quit Twitter after its new CEO intervened to reinstate the account of a man who had been banned for posting child sex abuse images. I haven’t used Substack in ages. I ended my podcast, and instead put that energy into finishing a novel.
Most social media platforms are run by creepy technofascists. Even when their algorithms don’t nudge us toward reactionary politics, they still nudge us toward loneliness and frustration. They want to keep us engaged, and misery and anger do a great job of that.
Contributing to the Hot Take Economy can boost or even build a media career, but it has a cost. The psychological cost is obvious. But the creative one is, too. Social media isn’t writing. It’s posting. Doing it too much degrades your ability to write thoughtful, nuanced work. It seeps into your fiction. Your characters start talking in Tweets.
Maybe you’ve heard of “smartphone face.” In short, it’s an actor with facial features too contemporary to belong in a period piece. It breaks immersion. Show Keanu Reeves’ Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula a microwave and he would immediately know how to heat a burrito in it; show a microwave to Willem Dafoe’s Albin Eberhart in Nosferatu and he would accuse you of devilry before fainting.
I’ve come across too many recent American novels with “smartphone voice,” where all the dialog–no matter whose mouth it comes from, whatever the character’s age or gender or race–sounds like a late-30s college graduate posting on social media. It’s particularly jarring when reading a historical novel or a secondary world fantasy. I don’t want a faerie to sound like someone who replies to posts with that animated gif of the woman laughing into her cappuccino. I don’t want an orc who knows what a podcast is.
So here is the new home of the monthly newsletter, and whatever scattered thoughts I can’t sell. Welcome to the Benediction.
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