la_marquise

I'm back from the writing retreat and pleased with the progress  made on Dragon Weather. I cut a fair amount but also added new material and I think it's in better shape.

Tidying the files this evening, I came across this. It's a scene I wrote three years ago, then cut before anyone but me and Phil saw any part of the book. I like it, but it's a scene that doesn't add to the plot, and anyway the plot went in a different direction. The characters still have their original names here, too. (The book started as me having fun with the characters from The Book of Gaheris.)

Anyway, here's an outtake.

“I’m an idiot,” Gawain said, and looked at the wall speculatively. “Is that brick or plasterboard?”

                “I don’t know,” Gaheris looked at him curiously. “Why?”

“I’d rather not make a hole in it.”

“Please don’t,” said Kay, and coughed. He was thoroughly fed up of feeling ill, and it was still only Thursday. Gawain had told him earlier that he was to stay home at least until the end of the week. He was going to go mad. Or rebel. Preferably the latter, once he had enough energy to stay awake for more than a couple of hours or do anything more energetic than walk from the bed to the sofa. Flu was a huge time sink. And very annoying. He didn’t recommend it.

It was just before eight in the evening. Gawain had stopped by to look at him – which he did not need, thank you – ask Gaheris a couple of arcane sounding questions about laundry, and fill him in on the new doctor. Today had been her first day, and she sounded competent. At least, she seemed to have Gawain under control and that was always useful. If he was honest, Kay did not entirely trust Gawain alone at the surgery. He was a good doctor, but trouble did seem to follow him around.

“She drew up a job description for a part-time practice manager,” Gawain said, still eyeing the wall. “It sounds just like the twins.”

Kay choked on his tea,[1] and Gaheris gave him a worried look. “I’m fine. Just startled.” And then, “Tell her it has to be approved by all three partners. That should buy us some time.”

“I could come in for a while. If it would help.” Gaheris spoke softly, gazed fixed on some point halfway between the two of them. “If it’s admin.”

“Heris, it’s people. Lots of them.”

“I…” Gaheris rubbed his arm. “I know most of them. Probably. And… Well, it might be good. To try, I mean.”

“Heart,” Kay began, remembered Gawain was in the room, and blushed. Gaheris gave him a sidewise smile.

He said, “I’ll be all right. You’ll be there.”

“Kill me now,” Gawain said. “Am I the only person in this village who hasn’t turned into marshmallow?”

“Percy,” Gaheris said, thinking about it. “And Mrs Galvoy at the Co-Op. And…”

“Rhetorical question,” Gawain said, hastily. Gaheris could be rather literal at times. “But about Rauni – Dr Guillou, I mean… Will you both stop looking at me like that?”

Kay looked at Gaheris. Gaheris looked back at Kay. “I’ve created a monster,” Gawain said. “I take it all back. Kay, you’re a terrible influence on my brother.”

“Hmm,” Kay said. And coughed some more. “I could… come in tomorrow… and talk to her…”

Both brothers Looked at him in turn. It was easy to forget, sometimes, how very alike they were. “I don’t think…” Gaheris began.

“Absolutely not,” Gawain said. “Rest and fluids, remember. Not to mention that today’s the first day you’ve spent more than twenty minutes upright since Monday morning.” And how he knew that… Kay would have to pay more attention to how often Gaheris was texting his brother. “The less you push it, the sooner you’ll feel better and you know it.” Gawain paused, considering. “If it was this one down with flu,” and he nodded towards his brother, “would you be letting him do that?”

Gaheris was still underweight and sometimes brittle. He’d spent the last three nights sleeping on Kay’s floor, the days taking care of him. He was so very young and so vulnerable… The situation was different. Kay wasn’t twenty five or fragile. He had responsibilities.  Gawain was still Looking at him and it was very annoying.

“You set one foot in the surgery tomorrow,” Gawain said, “and I’ll hire Lynette for the entire summer.”

And that was a low blow. Kay drew breath to protest and coughed yet again. “Point proved,” Gawain said. “Do as you’re told, or I’ll send Gareth round to cook, as well.”

Kay raised a hand. “All right, all right, you win.”

“Which reminds me,” Gawain continued. “I invited her to dinner this Saturday. Kay, too, of course, if he’s well enough. Is that all right.”

“Oh,” Gaheris said. “Okay. Right.” His hands crept towards each other, fingers twining. “That’s not.. I mean, the prep time… I need to know about allergies and what she likes and…”

“No allergies. And she’s a grown up who I am sure will be happy with anything you choose to make.”

“But…”

“Heris, I thought you said you wanted to try meeting new people more?”

“Yes, but…” Clasp, unclasp; clasp, unclasp. Kay began to try and get up, to move closer, so he might take and calm those troubled hands. He stood up all the time, after all, without even thinking about it. It was easy. It should be easy. It was just a virus, damn it. He used a hand to push against the arm of the sofa, and his legs let him down completely by wobbling. He caught at the back of the seat for stability, and Gaheris was there, one hand under his elbow, the other against his back. “What are you doing?”

He really could be remarkably like Gawain. The long hands steadied him, and pressed him gently back down. “If you need anything, ask me to get it,” Gaheris said. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“You were warned,” Gawain said, amused. “He’s worse than Blodwen for fussing over his pack.”

Gaheris threw a cushion at him.

It's a truism that all writers are different and no-one has exactly the same process. Over the years, I've met writers who write detailed, scene by scene outlines and writers who start with a vague idea and a few opening lines. Some of us work out plot points on post-its or Scrivener peg boards. Some keep notebooks or ideas files. Some create playlists and moodboards. Some have complex rituals, others just sit down and start. I know writers who always create a first draft longhand, writers who work in bed, in garden sheds or in coffee shops. I know even more writers who vary, depending on circumstance and project.

I write both fiction and non-fiction, though rarely at the same time. A friend once observed to me that he found the two completely incompatible and needed a clear division between the two. I'm not quite in that category, although, again, it depends. Serious academic research takes up a lot of brain space and concentration and I've never been able to write the more literary end of my fiction if I also have an academic project on the go. On the other hand, I write non-fiction far faster than fiction. WIth history, at least, the article or book at the end is the final, often shortest stage. I've done all the research and the note-making and the thinking and the discussions. I'm just writing up. Again, though, this is me. I've had colleagues who find the writing stage slow and difficult.

I'm not an outliner: even with non-fiction, the most I do is come up with a list of chapter headings, with maybe a few key words about intended contents. WIth fiction, outlines trip me up. They feel too rigid, clsing down the creativity, the depth, the landscape of the book or story. I make running notes: in my long hand days, these were in the margins of whatever notebook I was using (usually Alwych All Weather, which I still prefer). This days I make them in bold at the front of the file. But I don't always remember to look at them. I also leave myself notes on scraps of paper, which I then lose or forget and rediscover months or years later and wonder at.

I don't always write in the same voice, either. With non fiction, a monograph or an article for a peer-reviewed journal requires a different style and tone to one intended for the popular audience. My first copy editor told me that I was unsually clear, even in the most technical sections, which I treasure as a comment and try to live up to. But at the same time I have peers who produce wonderful work in High Academic, and I enjoy that, too. It's just not how my thoughts tend to flow. (I can speak Post-Modern and Post-Structuralist if required, but I don't write it. this is at least in part because I'm an early mediaevalist and the sorts of source materials I work with don't lend themselves fully to these in terms of theoretical model -- too many absences and lacunae, which my personal academic sense of rigor feels it would be inappropriate to try and fill with models from theory.)

Fiction, though... Elizabeth Bear once said that all writers arrive with two skills already rooted. Mine are style and atmosphere: I feel my way into and through my books, reaching always for the emotional effect I want to create. Words are each of them layered and nuanced, bringing with them resonances from culture and context, history and daily use. No word is an island.

Flaubert, it is said, agonised over almost every word of Madame Bovary. Sometimes I know how he felt. Words matter and it makes me itchy when I can't find the right one. There are things I want to say that are unamenable in English. There are echoes I want to conjure. Words are beautiful and I want to use them to build structures worthy of their beauty.

So far, so literary -- and I am, alas, a literary fantasy author, in terms of style at least. It doesn't make for commercial books, which is not ideal. But I like Living With Ghosts and The Grass King's Concubine. I like how they sound and feel, even if I worry about my skill with plotting. My plots often go sideways, and that's not ideal.

Almost all my life, I've written stories and most of my childhood and teenage writing was essentially fanfic. I still have a lot of this stuff (no, not going up on AO3). From my mid teens onwards, it reads like me, in the way I stack and shape words and the games I play with grammar. Much of it is pretentious and annoying, and, well... (I once wrote a story in the style and language of Sir Thomas Malory, for instance. There's anotjher that's a literary allegory based on T S Eliot. They're appalling.) Every once in a while, I come across something I'd forgotteen I'd written, and, well, yes, that's my voice.

The Book of Gaheris has four different viewpoint characters, each narrating a section. They sound different, because each of the characters sounds different in my head. (The same is true of LWG and GGK, but the sections are more interwoven.) I always assumed that all my fiction writing was basically the same, however -- that the difference in character voice was somehow not the same as variation in style. Then Phil suggested I write a particular short story I was working on in my 'Gaheris voice'. Which... Well, it was a surprise. My writing is my writing. But I went and looked at the Gaheris material again (this was before I wrote the second two novellas or thought about trying to sell any of what I'd written in that background). It was me, yes, and it was the character, but it was also something further. It was demotic, somehow. It was that difference I already recognised from my non-fiction, between the technical and academic and the popular.

Not all The Book of Gaheris is in that mode: certain characters required a more literary tone. The thing I'm writing at present, though, is entirely in demotic voice. It reads, well, fun -- I tend to think my tone in fiction tends to the serious. It's fun to write. Maybe I'm changing as a writer. Maybe I'm just weird. I don't know. But what matters here, for me anyway, is that, finally, writing is once again fun.

As a working academic, reviewing was part of my job. Indeed, a lot of scholarship and debate in history is carried out in reviews. It's not always fun -- it can be stressful -- but it's interesting and important.

It's clear to me that literary criticism can work this way too. I read criticism and occasionally write it, though I have form on going sideways to the mainstream. Perhaps because I spent so long as an academic, I remain suspicious of ideas around canon and importance and how certain peoples and places and modes of action or writing are viewed. As a historian of Wales, I was infamous for questioning the main idee fixe in my field (around the greater legitimacy of one royal dynasty and one particular kingdom to hegemony over the others) because it struck me as informed more by modern conditions than the beliefs of earlier centuries.

When it comes to literature, the opposite sometimes seems to be true -- Canon is White and Male because [list writers here] are Great -- and while many many critics now question this, mainstream reviewing does all too often still conform to this model. Listing off the 'important' writers in any given period tends to lead to a predominance of white men (as do sales figures, because our culture privileges them in terms of publicity etc). We all know this. In sff, in more recent years, the emphasis has shifted somewhat -- though I do wonder how permanent this is, given the tendency in western culture to run the diversity carousel, which swaps marginalised groups in and out according to fashion but somehow the white men carry on. But even so, when shortlists for awards appear, there is always someone -- multiple someones -- questioning why Important White Man is not listed. And sometimes critics reproduce this in who they focus on. (The best example is China Mieville, who is a good writer who has repeatedly talked about the influence on his work of Mary Gentle and Michael Moorcock. Yet Gentle gets left out, often, when Mieville is discussed by others -- because, I suspect, those others haven't read her and don't see why they should, and she's out of print, which Moorcock isn't.)

Which... well, it's annoying and it's unequal and it's typical and people still say 'Yes, but...' about it.

And it's partly why I am so ambivalent about reviewing. I'm trained to write reviews that raise questions. With fiction, this isn't always appropriate -- and fiction writers are mostly not trained to expect questions in the way historians are. I fret about the writer and how they feel. Writing novels is hard and we invest a great deal in them, and it hurts when someone doesn't like them or is dismissive.

I have multiple categories for books in my head, one of which is 'A good book that isn't for me'. Patrick O'Brien is a case in point. I can see he wrote complex, well-researched, effective books. I can see why people love them. But they're not for me. For some reason, I just don't like books set on boats. (I don't get seasick, I just find boats boring.) I've read and reviewed a number of books that fall into this category. Excellent books, sometimes. They're not hard to review, because I can see all the depth and complexity and character. It's remarkably akin to academic reviewing.

But some books are meh. Some books, sadly, are just bad. I hate reviewing those, even though sometimes the problems need addressing. I'm thinking here of things I would address with a writing student, stuff about structure or consistency or unexamined assumptions and prejudices. It's something I would hope an editor would do, though this doesn't always happen. These reviews are hard, not because the book isn't great -- spotting the problems isn't the issue -- but because the book has an author and the author might be hurt.

Some people will say, well, author should have done better. But that's subjective. Most authors are doing their best, or trying to. We all fail. The art is trying again and failing better. We all have unconscious assumptions and biases, which can be hard to see. And, in my opinion, anyway, there's no right to be mean in these circumstances, at least most of the time. Maybe it's because I taught for so long, but it matters to me that to highlight some positives alongside the negatives, even when the negatives predominate.

And that can be hard, and, well... Reviewers need to try again, too, sometimes.

Skirt of the day: Holy Clothing blue

So, right now, I'm working on revisions for the work in progress, which is a modern-day magical family fantasy romcom with Arthurian themes, dragons and a very clever cat. This is not at all the book I expected to write, and it's a lot sillier than anything else I've written.

It started by mistake. It was going to be a self-indulgent short story, as I said before, as a kind of fanfic coda to the Book of Gaheris. (Yes, I know, fanfic of my own original fic. I am hopeless.) That became a novella, which I sent to interested parties, expecting to move on. I even made a start on an entirely different project, which I'm still pondering.

And then... I sat down at the computer to work on a review, and the phrase 'Wednesday, there was a dragon behind the Co-Op. Kay encountered it on his way back from his morning run' wrote itself. This isn't the first time something like this has happened to me: the ferret women bounced their way into The Grass King's Concubine this way too. But I was already working on GKC at that point, I just hadn't met them yet.

(In an aside, characters who arrived in my books unannounced and unexpected: Quenfrida, Yelena and Julana, Safere, Essyllt, and, in the WiP, Elene.)

I looked at the dragon for a while. It looked at me. It looked at Kay. Kay wasn't at all impressed.

Kay had already established himself as one of the main protagonists of the unscheduled Arthurian novella. So he wasn't too much of a surprise. The dragon, on the other hand... I don't write dragons. I can, in fact, take or leave dragons. But here it was and Kay had Opinions, and, well... Novel. Fantasy comedy novel.

My subconscious, it is not disciplined or tidy at all.

Skirt of the day: black Haruka.

So, a long time ago, I lived and worked in Dublin (Ireland) for a couple of years. I made some good friends, did some useful academic work and rather lost my heart to the city itself, which is the perfect size for a capital, in my opinion, anyway. Phil came out for a year, too, and it was good.
Our flight back from Dublin after Worldcon didn't go until late afternoon, so we spent the morning wandering around old haunts. My old flat on Leeson St (Upper) is still there, and, I learnt from a friendly neighbour, my former landlady, who was lovely, is still alive and doing well. The neighbourhood has gone up market, though -- fewer clubs and bars and dodgy tenements, more accountants and posh flats. Then we walked on round past the Institute where I worked, and I realised something.
I was 25 when I moved to Bublin. I'd spent the summer beforehand writing my first full novel, and the job was my first academic job. I had hopes of becoming a real person, in all sorts of ways. People told 25-year-old me that it was possible, that I might well become a respected academic, a novelist, all sorts of things.
And I did, in a sense. I worked for another decade or more in academia, published a string of books and articles, taught many many great students. I wrote another novel and a bunch of stories, three of which later sold. But none of them sold then. None of them sold until the 2000s and that was partly my fault and partly down to culture.
Because two other things happened, back then, back when I moved to Ireland. Many many people, I will stress, including all of the Irish sff fans I met and most of my colleagues at the Institute, treated me like a real person. I had many good days, many good experiences (including helping to run the first two Octocons).
But then there was the colleague who slowly, continuously, determinedly undermined my scholarship solely on the grounds that they had decided I was English. (Nota Bene: I'm not English. I'm Anglo-Welsh, and yes, that's a real thing.) There was the senior academic who attacked me in public at a seminar not on any detailed of my work but on my inherent unfitness to do that work to begin with, because, well, Insufficiently Celtic.
Now, I get it completely about how important it is for cultures that have been colonised and derided to own their own history and lore. I come from one of those myself, in part. But this person did not do this to my male, fully English colleague, only me. Because I am female, and female is not quite the same as person. And women are the soft underbelly of the perceived antagonist.
I already knew that when it came to writing, women weren't quite people in the eyes of many. I'd been in two writers' groups where this was made perfectly clear. (Not the one in Dublin, which was uniformly lovely and produced at least two other professional writers from this period.) But it was while I was in Dublin I took the first steps towards writing seriously. And fandom in the UK told me not to. Someone I trusted lit into me in public and yelled at me for daring. Someone else I trusted told me never, ever, to speak to an editor or agent at a con because I was not the kind of person who should be doing that.
And I realised that, for all I had been told up to that point, that I was only partially a person. I gave up writing (apart from fanfic) for a decade or more, and I accepted the negativity I received in academia. I did more than my fair share of admin and pastoral care, published regularly in good journals, looked out for my students, and had some lovely colleagues.
And some appalling ones.
Up until around 1998, though, I still thought I was going to turn into a person some day. I worked hard, I got good feedback from my students (students are absolutely the best thing about academia). I wrote some important articles, including one on Denmark that helped to change the field  and a book on Wales that did change the field (warning: Kari speaking well of herself. Guilt incoming). I still had two novels in a drawer and I thought about them from time to time (but didn't write original fic, because, well, I'd been told off for doing so).
Then it all came down. I was nearly 40, and I broke. It was already too late for me as an academic: I would never climb high enough, due to my gender and to that drip-drip about my insufficiency due to that English blood. Most of my colleagues were lovely, I stress, but there were one or two who made sure I knew my place. (This looks like whining, I know. All I will say is: ask me in person about what happened. I am not prepared even now to write about it where it might be seen. I will note, however, that the union were so horrified they wanted me to sue.)
And I broke, and lost my academic career. And I ceased to be a person. I had no real job. People have jobs. People without jobs... well, they not quite the same thing as *people*.
By the time I was able to start over, I was over 40. I went back to writing, and, y'know, in many many ways I succeeded. I sold a novel and it won an award. I sold a second one. The thing I had day-dreamed about since I was 6 or 7 came true and I remain profoundly grateful for that. I have been very very lucky. Twice over, because I was in the last tranche of Celticists to find any kind of job at all.
And yet, looking at the Institute in Dublin, I realised something. I realised that somehow, between then and now, I have come to accept that I am not quite, not really, a person.
Women are not fully people.
Older women are definitely not fully people.
And women are told, over and over, when they are young, to be good and wait our turn, and many of us do.
And then, one day, while the white men of our age climb up and up, and are welcomed and praised, we are told: get out of the way, it's too late for you.
More so if, like me, those women are from the Lower Orders.
Even more so, if the woman is a woman of colour.
Even more, if she lives with a disability., if she is trans or gender non-conforming or queer.

I have a fifteen  year old niece, who is smart and talented and lovely. Right now, she knowns she's a person. I want her always to know that. I want her never to wake up and realise that she no longer thinks of herself that way. Not ever. I never want her stand outside somewhere where she started out with dreams and realise that even when they come true, people can make you feel you don't deserve them.

We all should get to be people.

So, before there was Living With Ghosts, there was Valdarrien, which tells the story of Valdin and Iareth Yscoithi (and gives the background on Yvelliane and Thiercelin). It's not of publishable quality, I think -- at least, not in any form that involves payment. But at the same time, I'm fond of it (and Valdin is the character par excellence for haunting me). So I was wondering about maybe running it here, chapter by chapter, as a freebie. Any thoughts?

In other news, I aten't ded. I'm just out canvassing.

Skirt of the day: autumn leaves

I don't like to write about writing.
I don't like to talk about writing, much of the time. There is a reflex in me that makes me close down whenever anyone asks me about what I'm working on, how I write, how I'm getting on. Oh, I can talk about the generalities -- voice and pace and dialogue and so on -- if I have to, but even then, I'm not really comfortable.
You see, in my head, writing and fear are all tangled up. And I do not like to be afraid.

If I have a single talent, it's fear. I'm really really good at it. I can fill myself up, inch by slow inch, until my skin is no more than a thin boundary on terror and every single part of me is sparking with alarm. I can turn enjoyment into duty and duty into fear in a matter of moments.

It doesn't really matter why this is so. Let's say it's how I'm wired, and move on. There are lots of things that scare me, mostly irrational (it's a fact that I am far more afraid of zombies than I am of being run over. When it comes to things like that latter, I'm fairly calm). And when the spiral, the heavy dead grip of fear takes hold, I find it almost impossible to break free. Once that shiver is under my skin, it takes over.

And writing is scary. People say this a lot, and there are endless lists as to why. Fear of being exposed, of failure, of taking risks... I understand all of those and I sympathise, but, for all their familiarity within the language of writers, they are not really what I mean when I think about the intersection of writing and fear. What I mean, what this fear means to me is this: I am afraid to lose permission.

It sounds ridiculous put like that. And, on the scale of real fears -- of being murdered for one's race or gender identity or sexual orientation or faith, of famine, of flood, of homelessness, of loss of freedom, of persecution -- it is a tiny, unimportant thing. It's ridiculous. I know it's ridiculous, and yet there it is, making me unsafe in my skin.

I'm not good at permission. There are lots of reasons for that. Some of them are socio-cultural, to do with class and gender. Some are personal, to do with lived experience. Many of them are just plain irrational. But in the end, most of the time I hover on the edge of feeling I am not allowed to write, that me writing somehow takes away from others, that it's wrong. I've felt this about writing since long before I was first published. It isn't about public space (though I worry about that too, because there are enough white writers already, and I'm nothing special). It is, quite simply, about whether or not it's okay for me to set down words in a line on a page. Even if no-one will ever read them but me and a handful of my friends.

This looks nonsensical, even to me. But for whatever reason, because of how I'm wired, because of the things that have happened in my life, I find it incredibly hard to give myself permission to do things. And writing matters. I've written since I was 7 or 8. It used to be easy. No-one minded me writing stories for myself and my friends. It was only in my 20s that I discovered how competitive some people can be, how confrontational, about writing -- which is not a competitive activity. And, well... if there is something I can do that others want, I'm wired to think its my duty to step aside and let them have that space. And once that happens, I find it very hard to try and find any new space for myself. Someone else wants it. So I mustn't have it. And I stop writing. Even just for myself, because someone else might not approve.

It's ridiculous. Writing is not a competition, though equally it is far from a level playing field and there are many many writers out there, probably far better than me, who face huge institutional, social and cultural barriers. It matters hugely that writers who face fewer barriers -- writers like me -- boost and support those voices. They matter far more than my nonsense.

But fear is funny and it smothers us. When that inner place where my writing, at least, comes from, is bound up in fear, it paralyses everything else, too. I stop feeling like me. And I am doing it to myself. Those other people are not withholding permission. I don't matter to them at all. And so I'm writing this, to remind myself that this is my fear, not something external to me. To expose the fear to the open gaze of the web, to remind myself of my own ridiculousness. To expose it, even, to anyone who does think I shouldn't have permission.

Because it isn't up to them. It's not up to anyone but me to grant that permission. And, well... I need to learn how to do that by myself.

Skirt of the day: blue cotton print.

So, over on twitter, I have a personal hashtag of #redwriter. I use it for those moments when I'm explicitly talking about my socialism, and sometimes when I realise that something in whatever I'm working on is bouncing off that. I do it, because I am of the age and type that agrees with the slogan 'Politics is life.' And it keeps me thinking, which matters to me. I want to be mindful, in my work, in my words, in my actions, in my life. I fail all the time -- I did so earlier this morning. But I try.

And I'm following the debates about politics in books, and whether they 'belong' and the calls for 'just good stories' and so on, and, well.... Politics is life. We are soaked in them, we are created by them. As with gender and race and class and ability and sexuality, our political assumptions and the political assumptions that we grew up with help to shape and form who we are, our way of being, our expectations, our interpretations. Which means that there cannot be such a thing as a politics-free book. Every decision the writer makes in their work -- who the protagonist is, what the latter wants and approves, the nature of the threat or problem they face, the types of backgrounds depicted, who is left out -- all of those are marked by the author's own expectations and experiences. We all do it. Most of the time we don't even notice. But as a result, how a book plays for different readers depends on how close those readers' experiences and expectations are to those of a writer. 'Just a good story, no politics' is not a simply a call for books to be entertaining. It's a call for books to make specific readers comfortable. But all readers are different: we all have different levels of comfort and familiarity. The easier it is for you to find a book that mirrors your experience -- a 'politics-free' book -- the chances are, the closer you are to the hegemonic centre of society.

None of this is new: people have been saying this for years, usually in response to other people complaining about politics 'spoiling' books. People who are highly privileged are most likely to complain if they meet something that's not comfortable, not because they are necessarily bad people, but because they're used to seeing themselves at the centre of everything, and they're startled. People who are less privileged, less central to social norms are used to reading about characters and ideas and foods and places that they don't recognise, because mainstream books tend to reflect mainstream expectations.

It takes work to notice this, especially if you're one of the privileged. We don't notice things that to us are 'normal' and we expect what we read to reflect that. When we write, we often write to our internalised norms without noticing it. I can see that everywhere in my own writing. I'm a feminist and a socialist, but most of the characters in my first book are rich and powerful. The plot is mainly driven by the male characters, and the three main characters are all men. I made a conscious decision that most of the characters were not white, but I did not, in my own opinion, do anything like enough work to back that up, and I failed. Thew female characters have a lot of political and social power, but at least three of them are self-sacrificing, placing duty and the welfare of others above their own needs and survival. My internalised misogyny was speaking: women cannot succeed without sacrifice, pain and loss. I worked harder of breaking out of misogyny and Euro-centrism in my second book. I made a conscious effort to depict foods and traditions, landscapes and buildings and ways of organisation that were not just versions of what I grew up with. And I still didn't succeed. I really struggled to write Aude as a person with agency: inner training steered me towards making her weaker, more dependent, more timid and diffident. I've never found a character so difficult to depict. (The twins were easy. Ferrets do what they like, regardless of gender. Writing them was hugely freeing and great fun.) But I'm sure there are many places in the book where I failed, because I am marked by my culture, I am trained and shaped by it and it infects everything I do.

We can always find excuses for defaulting to our norms. Let's take an explicitly political book that is also a good fun read -- and often marketed as a children's book -- Watership Down. I love WD; I read it when it first came out (I was 12 or 13) and it was a big part of my teens. It's an adventure with rabbit heroes. It's also an analysis of different political systems and their good and bad points. Richard Adams comes down on the side of a sort of democratic anarchy, with a charismatic leader setting the tone. He set out consciously to write a political novel.

And yet, his assumptions and training show through. The characters are nearly all male, and such female characters who are present are weaker, more anxious, less able to act with agency -- and presented as potential mates. The rabbits are monotheists. Male leadership is assumed as natural. Threats come from outside, not within. Creatures who are not like you are dangerous. Now, most of this is based on the fact that the characters are rabbits. It's natural for rabbits to fear predators, for instance, and wandering bands of young rabbits tend to be male. But at the same time, Adams -- and the scholars whose work he used -- were affected by their social training when they wrote and researched. Humans live in a society in which behaviour is heavily gendered. It feels natural. So when we look at other species, we assume they do the same. Yet more and more research is now questioning this -- researchers have broken the bonds of their social conditioning -- and finding that in fact, many species do not express gendered social behaviour in the ways humans do. I don't know explicitly what has been observed in rabbits since Adams wrote, but I suspect that the norms his sources detected were refracted by ingrained gender bias. And he was writing a fantasy, in which rabbits have a religion, tell stories, invent political systems. He could have made some of the active central characters female. He didn't. He was comfortable with his own status quo. And he had the excuse, if needed, of 'Oh, but the book I read said...' That books said stranger danger and few women; it did not say religion, but he included the latter anyway. He made an unconscious political choice, just as I did with how I depicted Yvelliane and Iareth and Firomelle in Living With Ghosts.

And here's another thing. Of all my characters, Iareth is the one closest to me. That drive she has to do her duty, come what may, and the problems it causes her, is mine. One of the hardest scenes for me to write in that book was the one where she agrees to stay with Valdarrien. All my instincts -- and thus hers -- were screaming at me that she must not, that it was not Good Behaviour. The first time I wrote it, she said 'No' to him despite the plot. I had to argue with myself for two days before I could rewrite it. And I still think that, had he lived, she would have left him again, in a few months or years, because of that iron sense of duty. That's my own internalised female guilt, right there. I am not supposed to put my own wishes at the centre of my life, because good girls live for others. Like Yvelliane. Like Firomelle. Not at all like Aude, who I struggle to write.

What about 'non-political' books; books in which our personal cultural comfort zone is the default? Let's take Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight, another book I read and reread, and loved as a teen. There is no over political agenda in the book: it's the story of a young woman having adventures, finding love and saving the world. At 14, it was the best book ever for me, because it was a fantasy (my favourite type of book) with a female lead who was always right. Usually female heroes are corrected by men several times in a book, but Lessa talks back all the time, does what she wants -- and the men climb down. It was wonderfully liberating. And yet.... Though the role of Weyrwoman is important, Lessa is a Unique Heroine. She is explicitly different to all the other women around her, she is special. And there can be only one of her (6 by the end of the book). Her life is very, very unusual. Everyone else important in the book is male: the other female characters are minor, unimportant and occupy gendered space: wives, servants and sluts. The political structure assumes male leadership -- and aristocratic, born-to-rule leadership at that -- and the solution to the poverty, suffering or distress of the 'common people' is not more agency in their lives, but having a better Lord (or Weyrleader). Bad lords are overthrown by good lords. Everyone is white, and the trappings of their culture reflect that. The book normalises and even romanticises sexual violence, to the point that it's almost unnoticeable. (When in the sequel F'Nor rapes Brekke, I noticed, and I was never entirely happy with their love story, but I accepted that to Brekke the rape was minor, even good, because the writer said so.) As far as I know, the only agenda McCaffrey had when she wrote Dragonflight was to put a women at the centre (just the one). But the other things are there, because they were part of her cultural norm.

All books are political. All books have agenda, conscious or not. Because we are all products of our cultures, and those cultures show.


Skirt of the day: blue cotton parachute (in non-parachute mode).

I had a lovely time at Picocon last weekend. It really is an excellent convention: enthusiastic, lively and full of energy and imagination. I'm very grateful to the committee for having me back. I enjoyed talking to them, too, and the joint panel I did with Ian MacDonald.

Even so, I came away anxious. Here's why: in the questions part of the panel, someone asked us both about gender and power and external pressures and how that intersects with writing. And I found myself saying, "I let them silence me. I let them cut off my hands."

This is the language that Requires Hate used regularly about writers, particularly white women, that our hands should be cut off or broken. And I understand where that comes from, I really do. The damage done by cultural appropriation and misrepresentation is incalculable. I believe to the core of my being that writers -- and especially white writers -- have an absolute responsibility *not* to appropriate, to misrepresent and distort and abuse the culture and lives of others. I do not believe I as a writer have any right whatsoever to help myself to the cultural property of others. It's wrong.

But when I answered that question at Picocon, I wasn't thinking specifically about cultural appropriation. I was reacting out of instinct and fear. Because what my 6 years as a published novelist have taught me above all else is to be frightened. There are those out there who will consider this a good thing, for good reason (there are too many white writers already, and the British have too much space). I was reacting to the internalised voices that tell me I have no right to write. But suddenly I was using the language of violence in this context.

Those voices have been with me a long time. Many writers are riddled with doubt about their writing. It seems to go with the territory, as well as being a product of each writer's particular experiences. They began, as far as I can remember, at university, when I first met the concept of the Important Unpublished Male Writer. Up to then, I'd written in mainly female space and felt safe enough -- I was young in my fanfic circles and the women in their 40s upwards who populated it were wonderfully kind and supportive. My mother was enthusiastic and always encouraged me to write. I had a couple of supportive English teachers, too (thank you, Mrs Parnham and Mr Buck). It was something I did, something that was mine, something I enjoyed and valued.

My Cambridge writing group contained some lovely people, but it was structured around the talent of men. I learnt fairly fast that I would never quite be good enough, because no woman could be. The published writers who were discussed and approved were all men: the women writers were spoken of with a faintly patronising air. They were a bit.... soft, weak, lesser. My boyfriend of the time all but patted me on the head and told me it was sweet I tried to write. I learnt to be silent about writing. When I found wider sf fandom, the atmosphere was exactly the same. Women were not expected to write, and if they did, they should be quiet about it. Selected women were okay: Bujold, McAvoy, Cherryh, but they weren't quite.... There was always a knot of men who were loud and ready to explain why a man would have been better.

I was born before the 1973 Equal Opportunities act. My formative years were in a context in which I officially inferior. My education continued that, even after the law changed. My experiences in employment continued it. As an academic -- and I am a good scholar -- I was nevertheless Not As Good As A Man. And writing.... Everyone knew what my writing was like, without reading a line. Syrupy, conservative, romantic, weak, slush. By 25 I knew I wasn't good enough and never could be.

I learnt to keep quiet. To this day, I hate to talk about my writing and feel deeply unsafe doing it. And then the internet got involved.

I have a bad habit of recalling and internalising negative comments. Fan space and university space had enough of those already. The net.... The second I was published, my writing became public space. Now, there are good things and bad to that. Published books belong to their readers and I am fine with that. The inside of my head, though... I wasn't ready to have that handed over to the world. I'm not talking here about regular reviews. Those are part of the profession, and academic reviews can be much harsher than fiction ones. I've had years of dealing with those. No, the problem was the people who demanded access to my thoughts or told me they knew them better than me, for all sorts of reasons. Some meant well. Most, however, spoke out of existing social and cultural assumptions.

Women aren't quite the same as people.
Women are inherently dangerous.
Women's thoughts, like their bodies, must and should be policed for deviance, and wrong thinking.
Women are public property.
Women have no right at all to any space that is not accessible to anyone at all who wants to see inside there.

I've learnt that, as an Anglo-Welsh woman, I have no right whatsoever over my native cultures -- they belong to the higher social classes, to men, and, alas, to many Americans and I have no right to mind. because that minding is in itself inherently evil.
I've learnt that even as an adult, I must never, ever, speak back to those who are more important than me, because they have more rights than I do.
I've learnt that every word I write is simultaneously both utterly worthless (because female and older female to boot, urgh, disgusting) and subject to complete and utter policing, because without having read a line (sometimes) complete strangers can judge me just because they want to.
I've learnt that it's true, I have no right to write, because I might be in someone else's way.
I've learnt that I should cut off my own hands. As far as RH is concerned -- and as I've said before, I bear her no animus at all in respect of myself, though I am very unhappy about how she has acted to others -- she doesn't need to police me. I've internalised the message. I need to be silenced.

Which leaves me precisely where? I don't know. There are days and weeks on end when I feel like I should stop writing altogether. There's hardly a day at all on which I feel safe to write. I used to feel it was okay to write just for myself, that I could if necessary go back to that private space and give up trying to be published. Now, I don't know. A Fire of Bones is under contract. I'm struggling to get a 100 words a day and I feel the book is worthless. This blogpost feels to me like the unsafest thing I can say, and yet I feel obliged to say it.

And the language I use of my writing has been turned against me. I am sitting here waiting to cut off my hands..

(Metaphorically.)

Edited to add: FFA, if you see this, there have been weeks when your comments have been one of the few things holding me together as a writer.

Skirt of the day: denim.