cool things
Jun. 13th, 2023 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit1) Relevant to my interests and perhaps to yours is Kai Ashante Wilson's essay Whither Queer: a Genre At Midlife and a Rec-List. Wilson looks at an issue I've talked about a lot: the historical lack of queer male characters in sff, and the current glut of queer male characters . . . written by and largely for women.
I had moments of intense recognition reading this piece (Judith Tarr! making note of books with queer men and hoping to stumble into them in used book stores!), and also moments of disconnect, because I've been involved in fic fandom for 20 years and Wilson has not; he is intensely skeptical of the influence of fanfic on contemporary sff. I hate it when people use "fanfic" to mean "writing I don't like," and Wilson does a certain amount of that here. He never entirely specifies what these fanficcy tendencies in sff are, either.
And yet, I can't say I entirely think he's wrong. When I read contemporary sff by younger authors (not just the queer male stuff, either), it does feel fanficcy to me, in ways I too find hard to pin down but often don't love. I read the first few paragraphs of Gideon the Ninth in a sample somewhere and bounced hard off that fanfic voice. (One of the few specific things Wilson mentions is ironic banter.) A lot of m/m relationships in contemporary sff are written using fanfic tropes and a kind of fundamental narrative structure or assumption that, again, I can't pin down, but it feels like slash fic to me. *shrugs*
I think part of what gets my hackles up, when people use "it's like fanfic" as criticism, is that I immediately think of the kinds of fanfic I enjoy. I forget that there's a ton of fanfic I don't enjoy but that is hugely popular, and that, I fear, is what's influencing professionally published sff these days. Anyway, I'd love to hear what other folks think of Wilson's piece.
As for his recs list, there's not much on it that I didn't know about, but I'm pleased to see Melissa Scott there (twice!)--Wilson's criticism of "the female gaze" in queer-male-focused sff does not boil down to "doesn't like women writers"--and also trans male writer Billy Martin (publishing as Poppy Z. Brite). Wilson's discussions of all the books are illuminating--I may have to give Water Horse another try--even if you don't agree with his general approach.
2) Samba Schutte, the actor who plays Roach in Our Flag Means Death, has designed an awesome t-shirt to raise money for True Colors United, an organization that fights homelessness among LGBTQ youth. OFMD-inspired without quite being referential (or copyright-infringing; I doubt David Jenkins would object but HBO/Max is evil). Beware the checkout process, though--it steers you hard to sign up for Shop Pay, a Shopify-based instant payment thing. You can avoid it by checking out as a guest, but I got confused and managed to sign myself up accidentally. Must remember to de-activate it once my order has processed.
I had moments of intense recognition reading this piece (Judith Tarr! making note of books with queer men and hoping to stumble into them in used book stores!), and also moments of disconnect, because I've been involved in fic fandom for 20 years and Wilson has not; he is intensely skeptical of the influence of fanfic on contemporary sff. I hate it when people use "fanfic" to mean "writing I don't like," and Wilson does a certain amount of that here. He never entirely specifies what these fanficcy tendencies in sff are, either.
And yet, I can't say I entirely think he's wrong. When I read contemporary sff by younger authors (not just the queer male stuff, either), it does feel fanficcy to me, in ways I too find hard to pin down but often don't love. I read the first few paragraphs of Gideon the Ninth in a sample somewhere and bounced hard off that fanfic voice. (One of the few specific things Wilson mentions is ironic banter.) A lot of m/m relationships in contemporary sff are written using fanfic tropes and a kind of fundamental narrative structure or assumption that, again, I can't pin down, but it feels like slash fic to me. *shrugs*
I think part of what gets my hackles up, when people use "it's like fanfic" as criticism, is that I immediately think of the kinds of fanfic I enjoy. I forget that there's a ton of fanfic I don't enjoy but that is hugely popular, and that, I fear, is what's influencing professionally published sff these days. Anyway, I'd love to hear what other folks think of Wilson's piece.
As for his recs list, there's not much on it that I didn't know about, but I'm pleased to see Melissa Scott there (twice!)--Wilson's criticism of "the female gaze" in queer-male-focused sff does not boil down to "doesn't like women writers"--and also trans male writer Billy Martin (publishing as Poppy Z. Brite). Wilson's discussions of all the books are illuminating--I may have to give Water Horse another try--even if you don't agree with his general approach.
2) Samba Schutte, the actor who plays Roach in Our Flag Means Death, has designed an awesome t-shirt to raise money for True Colors United, an organization that fights homelessness among LGBTQ youth. OFMD-inspired without quite being referential (or copyright-infringing; I doubt David Jenkins would object but HBO/Max is evil). Beware the checkout process, though--it steers you hard to sign up for Shop Pay, a Shopify-based instant payment thing. You can avoid it by checking out as a guest, but I got confused and managed to sign myself up accidentally. Must remember to de-activate it once my order has processed.
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Date: 2023-06-13 08:20 pm (UTC)If you do manage to pin it down, I would be interested in hearing about it. In the meantime, I'll check out Wilson.
[edit] I really like the variety of his list, both in terms of authorship and material—I don't think I had heard of Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn and Child, which sounds of definite interest to me, or John Keene at all. I also liked his point about instantiation.
[edit edit] I don't have a lot of useful thoughts about the state of contemporary speculative fiction, because for reasons still not clear to me I seem to have disengaged from a lot of it over the last four to five years; it's weird.
an awesome t-shirt to raise money for True Colors United
Thank you; I really appreciate knowing about this shirt.
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Date: 2023-06-14 07:54 pm (UTC)I think
the state of contemporary speculative fiction, because for reasons still not clear to me I seem to have disengaged from a lot of it
*nods* Honestly I have no right to be talking about it, since a lot of the time my idea of contemporary is "was written in the last 20 years" and even then I haven't necessarily read it. But I have noticed a pattern of books that make a splash, that everyone seems to love, and I read them and am unimpressed. (Part of the problem may be that I'm hearing about these books through fandom!)
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Date: 2023-06-14 10:16 pm (UTC)That makes sense. I have comparatively little experience of category romance and not much more of slash, to be honest. I can recognize something like The Wild North (1952) as slashtastic because good Lord it isn't subtle; also it's more than half a century old and its primary relevance to this conversation is as evidence that some of the tropes in current use are older than dirt.
Some of it, I think, is woobification (which may also be a romance trope; I don't read enough romance to be sure), where the sympathetic characters are excessively abused by the world but are nevertheless virtuous, kind, and good. Highly traumatized but not in any ways that are seriously difficult or that last for longer than it takes for them to be saved by love.
I agree on that pattern in most of the contemporary romances—het and queer—which I have encountered in the last few years, occasionally to melodramatic lengths. One of the reasons I want the mother of my godchild to finish her (nb/f) romance is that its central conflict is not based around anyone's aestheticized trauma but is instead a communications problem rooted in differing economics and life experience that both parties run slap into in a way that has to be talked out rather than dissolved by romantic gestures. I find that sort of thing fantastically compelling. And I have always gravitated toward characters who are trash fires, but I still found myself side-eyeing a romance I picked up on a recommendation and then found that one of the principals is terminally ill and the other has an opium habit and it's all very cozy and soft and what?
But I have noticed a pattern of books that make a splash, that everyone seems to love, and I read them and am unimpressed. (Part of the problem may be that I'm hearing about these books through fandom!)
You may in fact not be the target audience!
Do you like Kai Ashante Wilson's queer sff, speaking of? I've read A Taste of Honey, but not The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.
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Date: 2023-06-14 10:45 pm (UTC)His short story The Devil in America is stunning, but brutal.
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Date: 2023-06-14 11:10 pm (UTC)Can't imagine why.
(For what it's worth, I didn't find A Taste of Honey very sad—I liked the twist of its thought experiment, which reverses how its two narratives have seemed to interlock—but my parameters may not be yours.)
I read "The Devil in America." It made me think of the music of Zeal & Ardor.
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Date: 2023-06-13 09:46 pm (UTC)Drawing Blood was the first Poppy Z Brite I read, was impressed, but what I really fell in love with is the series of Rickey and Gman low-key New Orleans chefs. Given up hoping Dead Shrimp Blues will ever be written, alas!
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Date: 2023-06-14 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-14 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-14 08:35 pm (UTC)I bounced heinously off Rice at multiple points in my life and own almost everything written by Billy Martin. Seconding Liquor and its assorted sequels, which are nice mysteries as well as New Orleans novels and novels about people in a relationship.
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Date: 2023-06-14 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-14 07:56 pm (UTC)If you haven't read Wilson's own fiction, I highly recommend it. It can be painful, though.
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Date: 2023-06-14 02:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-14 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-17 05:00 am (UTC)I read a lot of romance novels when I was younger and liked them more, when they had less cultural cachet, but as more and more of publishing is chewed up by romance and more genres have more of that romance novel influence it annoys me more.
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Date: 2023-06-15 07:29 pm (UTC)I read almost exclusively SFF as a kid/teen/early 20-something, and then largely stopped. (Of the authors mentioned in the essay, I still really vibe with Samuel R. Delany's work - and I was very into Billy Martin's books as a teen but the appeal didn't stick for me when I got older, personally.) In retrospect, the accessible metaphorical queerness of SFF and the way actual queer content could sneak onto the shelves and be found by way of the Lambda Awards list that secretly lived in my wallet back in the day was a big part of that.
In the last few years, I've kept meaning to get back into reading more SFF or trying out romance, and the unprecedented amount of queer material in those genres has been a major motivating factor. But I just keep bouncing off almost everything I try, in a way that I generally haven't with the queer lit that has genre elements but generally gets positioned more on the literary side of the shelf.
I've been reading fanfic pretty much unceasingly for the last 25 years, but I'm aware that I read at the fringes of it. As a result, I know what I'm bouncing off in both published queer SFF and a lot of more popular fanfic, but I honestly can't tell if the queer SFF I'm trying is too fanficcy, or if both it and 'mainstream' fanfic have become more influenced by the romance genre and modern mainstream YA, or if romance and YA themselves were influenced by fanfic first, or if it's all just an expression of some bigger influence of internet age marketing forces.
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Date: 2023-06-16 02:13 am (UTC)If you feel like elaborating, I'd love to hear more. I said in another post that one bounce factor for me is having the emotional volume set to 11 all (or most) of the time. But I think there's a lot more to it that I haven't pinned down yet.
Some of my earliest queer lit reading was Mary Renault, who's interested in complex little ripples of emotion and whose volume never goes higher than about a 2. Her work, for all its many many flaws, sets the bar very high for profound emotion without melodrama.
the queer lit that has genre elements but generally gets positioned more on the literary side of the shelf
Got recs? Because I'm starting to give up on sff, sad as that makes me. And I'm contemplating how many queer men who wrote excellent sff--Wilson himself, and Hal Duncan, come immediately to mind--no longer seem to be writing it. I don't know their reasons, but I do know Duncan's books are out of print. The publishing economy is awful for everyone, but I'll bet it's especially awful for writers like that, when the sff audience seems increasingly to consist of (a) young women who grew up reading YA and fanfic, and (b) a small contingent of increasingly right-wing middle aged men.
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Date: 2023-06-16 07:54 am (UTC)One issue definitely is turning the emotional volume up to 11. Or specifically, turning the emotional volume up to 11 but not cranking up the level of emotionally intelligent resolution and catharsis along with it. This is something I'm often running into with OFMD fic, where a conflict or emotional response is already at a satisfying level for me in canon, the situation and characters' reactions are doubled or tripled in fic, and yet the resolution that's meant to set everything right doesn't feel to me like it even addresses the canon scenario. I'm not opposed to melodrama, but overall, yeah, I likewise cut my teeth on Mary Renault for queer lit and I much prefer a quieter approach to big moments and deep feelings that lets a reader sit with those things.
Part of it is also whether the character's thoughts and feelings at any volume come organically from the character or seem assigned to them. In fic, this is the basic hurdle of "Is this in-character?" (Or maybe not always hurdle but choice - I've seen multiple author's notes to the effect of "This is actually about me" and I think that's an approach that happens more often than it's warned for. It's not at all invalid for hobby writing, it's just not what I'm usually looking to read.) In published fiction, I feel like it is an issue a little more likely to strike SFF - and queer SFF in particular.
SFF is a set of genres often concerned with having an "everyman/woman" protagonist who's meant to serve as the reader's entry point into a fantastical world or outright as a vehicle to convey the capital-i Idea of the story (particularly in science fiction). And here I'm trying not to get into nested lists, because I have about ten different thoughts all halfway down highly caveat-ed paths. But I guess if I can branch off into a few broad thoughts:
— I think the protagonist tradition of SFF is an impediment to choosing or developing the most interesting main characters for a story. This is more of an issue now than in decades past because a general trend of expecting more emotion and psychology in our SFF.
— Having an everyman protagonist can at times be fundamentally in conflict with having a queer protagonist. (Okay, this is the one that requires the most "I don't mean..." and "I'm not saying...") I don't necessarily need queerness to be queer in SFF. That can be the whole point about writing about other worlds, or about other times and places in our world. But often there are the beats of queer storytelling tropes and characters ostensibly defined by being queer in a straight world, but without any conveyed sense of queerness in the character's relationship to themselves and to others. I also sometimes need more thought than is given to it when we're talking about significant changes in worldbuilding.
— To take that over to fanfic, there is also often conflict between the story the author wants to tell and where I can meet them. I could go on way too long about this and also probably express myself very badly, but in short, there are popular queer fanfic tropes that are not my personal fantasy, and while I can enjoy other people's fantasies in fic, I do need them to be attached to a character I feel it can work for.
— Other times in both published fiction and fanfic, the character is a vehicle for the vibe. I can enjoy that if the vibe is entertaining enough, but my expectations for the writing go way up then. Sometimes the vibe is a very particular one for social media subcultures I am not a part of and I recognize that it is just not for me.
— Concerns about 'good representation' or the heterocentric belief that adding other central qualities to a queer character may be 'putting a hat on a hat' might also contribute to main characters I find uninteresting or who don't develop to the point of seeming to attach to the stakes or drama around them.
Got recs?
Unfortunately, no burning recs. (Honestly, comics are coming through better for me these days than prose-only SFF.)
But in terms of works that I didn't bounce off for the reasons above, there's Marlon James' two fantasy books, Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King. Not everyone's cup of tea for their violence and rougher edges, but I enjoyed the ride.
I'm still figuring out how I feel about how David Demchuk uses his supernatural horror novel Red X to process a true crime, but it was a strong work.
Andrew Sean Greer's work is usually just called litfic and comedy-satire, but even his most reality-rooted work is still pretty metaphysical and he's written about time travel ad the like.
It's also a stretch, given that these are autobiographical creative essays, but Joshua Whitehead's Making Love with the Land combines his geeky SFF interests with metaphysical poetry for something that reminds me of a Samuel R. Delany and Tomson Highway mashup. He's written a cyberpunk collection of poetry called full-metal indigiqueer that I wouldn't necessarily rec as SFF so much as philosophy, but it makes me really hope that his next novel will be science fiction.
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Date: 2023-06-17 01:55 am (UTC)this is the basic hurdle of "Is this in-character?"
Nodding extra vigorously. As much as I agree that people should write whatever they want to write (and subsidiary points like "it's a hobby" and "not everything is written especially for Kit, more's the pity"), I also think that a story posted on a public forum, described as fanfic about specific characters, should actually be about those characters and not about the author's autobiography/kinks/trauma. There's a lot I'm willing to accept as extrapolation from canon (I mean, I've written trans Izzy, and I write pretty much all the OFMD characters as substantially less muppety than they canonically are), but I think I should at least be able to see canon from the story. Or if not, the story needs to earn it, which they often don't.
Or, as you said, the author should say up front that this story is really about them. (Carefully not opening the can of worms labeled "How much of our fanfic is actually about us?")
SFF is a set of genres often concerned with having an "everyman/woman" protagonist who's meant to serve as the reader's entry point
Ugh. You've reminded me of why I hate portal fantasies where the MC wanders around for several chapters going "What? What do you mean magic is real? Impossible!" Or who wander around voicing all the reader's imagined prejudices (*cough*GenlyAi*cough*).
Everyperson protagonists are so irritating. I find myself much more invested in protagonists who are specific, who have a perspective and are deeply rooted in the world of the story. And, yes, I see your point about how the perceived requirement for an Everyperson creates a barrier to queer characters. One still hears stories of publishers wanting the queerness taken out "to attract a wider audience."
In re: the storytelling dodging the experience of being queer in a straight world: yes, I see that a lot in m/m romance novels. They'll be a bit of lip service to prejudice and the law, and then the characters will go off to live together in the English countryside in 1952. (Weirdly, there's often more emphasis on prejudice when stories are set in times when it would in fact be easier for queer men to go unnoticed, e.g. the 19th century.)
while I can enjoy other people's fantasies in fic, I do need them to be attached to a character I feel it can work for
*side-eyes all those fics where Ed and Stede end up raising Stede's kids*
Sometimes the vibe is a very particular one for social media subcultures I am not a part of
I don't quite follow you. Are you referring to literal Social Media AUs? (Which I blessedly didn't know existed until a few months ago, and I wish I could un-know.) Or more like "this is a very Tumblr-y sort of fic?"
Concerns about 'good representation' or the heterocentric belief that adding other central qualities to a queer character may be 'putting a hat on a hat'
I've begun to be awfully tired of good representation. By which I mean, good representation as a central value. If we just had more good stories with lots of queer people in them, representation would take care of itself. I do wince a bit when I see people calling for more stories about toxic queer people or "bad gays" or whatever, in these times (and also because stories about horrible people are not personally my jam, and I find the common failure modes of queer characters--the joyless sexual exploiter, the sleazy opportunist, the hot but all-devouring narcissist--particularly grating.) But luckily there are about a million degrees of characterization between the perfect queer cinnamon roll and the toxic nightmare.
Thank you for the recs! Now I have a nice list of ideas, instead of fruitlessly searching amazon and mostly finding more m/m romance (sometimes called sff, but still romance) written by women.* I meant to check out Marlon James's books ages ago, after I heard him on a radio show, but then I forgot.
(*Possibly necessary disclaimer that I think women have every right to write about queer men. Some of them do it very well! But it becomes a problem when their voices are getting published almost to the exclusion of queer men's voices.)
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Date: 2023-06-19 05:23 am (UTC)That's where I'm coming from too. I'm aware that a lot of what I write strikes people as baffling even by fanfic standards, so I'm unsure of my own leg to stand on regarding this one. But while I love a lot of fic that diverges from canon, I'm always starting with my feet in canon when I click on a story, and I want the text to be able to lead me along to where it's going. I can follow easily when it's clear the concept is "What if we dial down the comedy and dial up the emotional realism," or "What if we dial up the unreality and have a farce," or even "What if the stakes being lower in this modern AU means that everyone's a little more chill" and "What if we flipped the protagonist-centered morality around for the antagonist," but it's harder for me to come along when it's a matter of multiple canon events and characterizations being substantially changed based on author preference without any explanation.
In re: the storytelling dodging the experience of being queer in a straight world: yes, I see that a lot in m/m romance novels. They'll be a bit of lip service to prejudice and the law, and then the characters will go off to live together in the English countryside in 1952. (Weirdly, there's often more emphasis on prejudice when stories are set in times when it would in fact be easier for queer men to go unnoticed, e.g. the 19th century.)
Absolutely. And the thing is, it's not like I'm craving more oppression or struggle in my historical romance. In even the most difficult times, there have always been countless couples about whom you could write multiple novels with only the conflicts and triumphs that were completely separate from where their sexuality intersected with the wider world. But in a lot of the queer historical romance I've tried, it's recurringly felt like queerness only exists to add a bit more forbidden-ness to the relationship or - more often - to have the interpersonal conflict fall neatly into an oppressed/oppressor framework, where much of the friction or action is driven by other characters being unfair to a blameless protagonist. It's not like there's any one way or any one list of ways for a character to feel like someone who's gone through one of the thousands of ways to process being queer in a certain time and place, but...I don't know. Most of the m/m romance from the more recent wave of it that I've tried feels like it's missing something I want.
I don't quite follow you. Are you referring to literal Social Media AUs? (Which I blessedly didn't know existed until a few months ago, and I wish I could un-know.) Or more like "this is a very Tumblr-y sort of fic?"
More like the latter. And to be clear, I didn't mean that disparagingly. For instance, I'd say that a lot of Billy Martin's early work - and a lot of horror, especially gothic horror - falls into the category of books where the characters largely exist to be vehicles for the general vibe. It's just that modern New Orleans and rural goth was a vibe I was into as a teen. But when I wrote that, I was in fact thinking of a certain geek subculture or collection of closely knit geek subcultures that I often see on Tumblr.
(*Possibly necessary disclaimer that I think women have every right to write about queer men. Some of them do it very well! But it becomes a problem when their voices are getting published almost to the exclusion of queer men's voices.)
I wish I knew more about where the publishing industry is at right now. Which is to say, I wonder if the concept internally is actually about putting out LGBTQ literature to any real extent or if it's primarily just about providing a marketing demographic of fiction readers (which I suspect likely skews towards young women) with something they previously weren't getting, with a disconnect between that thought and why that niche was not already filled. Who are the up and coming queer male authors who aren't finding publishers because their market is seen as distinct from the one above? Given how much of the current m/m SFF out there feels very YA and New Adult, is male authors' work assumed to be too adult for the zeitgeist?
On that note, I'm wondering now if I should start trying to find my next SFF reads by imprints rather than by online recs. The YA/New Adult marketing machine is a heck of a thing. I was just thinking the other day about how many books I have on my shelf from Arsenal Press (a small Canadian press with a lot of queer offerings, albeit leaning more toward non-fiction, literary fiction, short stories, and poetry), but how outside of two of their books ending up as Canada Reads finalists recently, I rarely see any of their stuff come up on book blogs or other social media when I'm searching for new things unless I'm doing a very specific intersectional searc. Something more up my alley has to be lurking out there, under all the marketing push for the stuff that's not quite my thing, and I bet/hope it's together in the same place.
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Date: 2023-06-21 12:58 am (UTC)Yes, and to my mind it's in the top 10 most irritating ways to tell a story.
I tried to write a original m/m romance once, and I didn't get very far because writing a novel is HARD. But at least most of the conflict between the two MCs had its origins in a disparity of money, power, and social status, and even the Wicked Rival was a decent-enough guy who just really didn't get the whole true love business and had other things on his mind anyway. It's the sort of thing I wish other people would write. KJ Charles was getting close to that, once, but then (perhaps around the time she quit her day job and had to start pumping out 3 novels a year?) she moved back into a more traditional formula.
if the concept internally is actually about putting out LGBTQ literature to any real extent or if it's primarily just about providing a marketing demographic of fiction readers (which I suspect likely skews towards young women) with something they previously weren't getting
The latter, I suspect. My sense from the writers I follow on Twitter is that publishing is incredibly dysfunctional, that it's following film in wanting only blockbusters, and if that means repeating the same formula until the audience indicates they won't buy it anymore, so be it.
Who are the up and coming queer male authors who aren't finding publishers because their market is seen as distinct from the one above? Given how much of the current m/m SFF out there feels very YA and New Adult, is male authors' work assumed to be too adult for the zeitgeist?
It's interesting that to the extent there seem to be any queer men writing genre, it's horror. Which isn't fully going for that same audience of 15-25 year old women, although based on the recent kerfuffle about "cozy horror," I think it may be starting to.
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Date: 2023-06-22 07:14 pm (UTC)Just going back to this bit because it's relevant to the next bit, but oh yes, I totally took that as a given re: where you were coming from. I also think - to go off on a tangent - that a lot of the broader discussion of this on Twitter grossly overinflates how many of the writers in question are straight women, or identify as women at all, and ignores the longstanding complications of queer 'representation' as it breaks down on gendered lines within the community. Overall, my sense is that it's less about who's writing what and more about what the industry is comfortable publishing, from whom, and for whom. The less ideological and more practical issue being where that leaves writers who express or embody things outside of that comfort zone.
It's interesting that to the extent there seem to be any queer men writing genre, it's horror. Which isn't fully going for that same audience of 15-25 year old women, although based on the recent kerfuffle about "cozy horror," I think it may be starting to.
I agree, although this is now an area where I'd want to do a historical scan of queer male writers in science fiction versus horror. Because while I can think of several big names in the science fiction world, both in terms of people openly writing about queer men and those sticking more to allegory, my gut says horror has always been more of a home for that - possibly because queer horror has always been deemed more palatable than queer optimism/banality?
I'd also say to the extent that queer men (and possibly straight men writing m/m?) are writing genre in big ways these days, it's in comics. Maybe not in pure numbers, given the size of the relative publishing worlds, but I suspect in terms of proportion, especially when scoping for the biggest mainstream publishers. I'm really interested in how that actually played out behind the scenes over the last decade. (I think Image was, weirdly enough, a crucial part of it, but I'm not sure of exactly what politics among the Big Three saw this happen.)
I tried to write a original m/m romance once, and I didn't get very far because writing a novel is HARD. But at least most of the conflict between the two MCs had its origins in a disparity of money, power, and social status, and even the Wicked Rival was a decent-enough guy who just really didn't get the whole true love business and had other things on his mind anyway. It's the sort of thing I wish other people would write.
It's certainly the sort of thing I'd be here to read if you ever took another run at it!
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Date: 2023-06-19 05:29 am (UTC)Content-wise, I think the "stop getting your romance tropes in my fantasy / spec fic" suggestion is an accurate one, especially for someone who is concerned about women writing queer men. There's still some underlying "boys' club" mentality when someone wants to say that they want hard science fiction or epic fantasy and they don't want it to be tainted by love stories or romance things, and an influx of women into those spaces is almost always accompanied by accusations of bringing romance tropes (or, in this case, slash fic goggles) into places where they aren't wanted, or that the genre is being watered down so that women and teenagers will find the stories acceptable and desirable. The recommendation that's basically about higher-register prose also feels like making an objection that fantasy is becoming too approachable and accessible as a genre and instead needs to be gatekept more so that fans will appreciate the good stuff instead of an endless diet of drek. (Note the "I've given up on science fiction since Delaney stopped writing it," which suggests a complaint about how SF has stopped being about extrapolating science of the new into a future situation and building a world from there that takes the science fiction as science fact.)
Structure-wise, it seems like the objection is to stories that follow a convention of nearly constant build, then a big peak and a sharp drop-off afterward, since fanfic audiences seem interested in their slow burns and not as much in what happens after they finally get all the way from friends (or enemies) to lovers, even if the narrative arc would like it to continue and explore the fallout from the decisions that get made. If the structuring of the story is around how the characters interact with each other, and there's a plot advancing in the background as this happens that the characters are contributing to, that reads differently than if the characters' primary function is to fulfill the plot that's central to the story, and any development that happens for them is carefully orchestrated in the gaps between the plot beats, as a filler that is supposed to also help set up the eventual plot payoff. "Fanfic" style is often character-centric to a strong degree because canon sources and materials tend to be plot-centric instead, and a lot of fic is about exploring spaces left behind, and speculating on how the characters might react to different situations as presented to them. I think it's telling how the recommendations prefer not to mention characters or characterization if he can get away with praising some other aspect instead.
The critique of the female gaze sounds like a certain amount of "I don't like being objectified, and I don't like being fetishized, and a whole lot of stories about queen men written by women do both," and some of the "fanfic" objection might also some from the stereotype that there's so much m/m material out there because there are a lot of women out there writing it with specific ideas, idealizations, and rose-colored glasses about what it's like being a queer man. (And possibly also inserting their ideas about who tops and who bottoms, too.)
no subject
Date: 2023-06-21 01:06 am (UTC)I can't say there's definitely no sexism mixed into Wilson's critique. But I will say that as a queer man myself, I share his concern that there are so few queer men writing sff, and so much sff about queer men is written by women. Ownvoices is not a panacea (and "don't write people different from you" is a recipe for both artistic and political failure), but having a reasonable number of our own voices in the mix is important. I just wish Wilson had gone on to interrogate what's going on in publishing that has led to this situation. I wonder if it touched too closely on his own experiences, or if he feared it would read as a personal complaint.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-21 01:15 am (UTC)The state of the publishing industry, and who gets published and who does not stop seems very opaque, and when information comes out, it often paints the industry in a worse light than before. Having more queer men writing queer men is a good thing, having them get published and marketed would be even better. (It is happening. I don't have statistics to know how much it is happening, but I suspect if I did, the statement would be "needs way more queer men.")