Ordinary Day

While I was working the NIWA table at Worldcon, one of the people who came by was a very outspoken, charming fellow who took the time to chat and make jokes with several of us. I wanted to like him. Except for one thing: he was very blunt in his opinion of romance, sweepingly dismissing the entire genre as “swill”.

And as soon as he said that, I had to speak up in romance’s defense, as well as back off from talking to him much after that. Because it seemed pretty evident that he had an opinion, the kind of opinion that isn’t easily going to change in one chance meeting, and I didn’t want to drive him away from buying anything at the table if there was a chance he would.

But I did want to talk about this here. Because it’s yet another example of what I see out of SF/F readers on a regular basis: i.e., the broad-spectrum dismissal of romance as a genre that’s worth paying attention to. Usually this is hand-in-hand with misogyny, targeted at female SF/F authors who get their work dismissed as “thinly veiled romance novels”, thereby insulting female authors and the romance genre in one double-fisted blast of “oh for fuck’s sake, this again?”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m really tired of SF/F readers snarking on romance. And hell, I’m not even as devoted a romance reader as many; I’m on the periphery of the romance readership at best.

I see in the regular remarks to the effect of “X is still a better love story than Twilight“. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not about to run out and read Twilight, but I think it’s also unnecessarily condescending to go on and on and on about how anything is a better love story than Twilight. Particularly when most of the time, the people doing the snarking haven’t even read the series, so they have no real basis on which to deliver the snark.

I see it in the constant dismissal of the romance genre as nothing but “porn for women”, and how “bodice rippers” still gets thrown around to describe the genre, despite how the genre hasn’t really been rife with bodice rippers since the 80’s. As anyone who actually cares enough to explore the modern state of the genre could easily discover for themselves.

I see it in the constant ever-so-convenient failure to ever give male authors any level of shit for having love stories in their work, either. You don’t see men getting their books dismissed as “thinly veiled romance novels” or “porn for women”. Even when they also have sex scenes in them, especially given how rapetastic a lot of modern fantasy epics can wind up being. Because apparently a woman getting raped in a fantasy novel by a man is “realistic”, while a woman having a positive consensual sexual encounter in a fantasy novel written by a woman is “porn for women”.

Surely I can’t be the only person who sees the injustice in that attitude?

So I’ll say this again: SF/F readers, quit it with the genre snobbery. We’ve all grown up with a history of getting snarked on for our reading tastes, so we shouldn’t be sneering at what other people like to read. Particularly when we haven’t even bothered to look at the books in question ourselves.

Sure, romance has its share of bad books. Every genre has its share of bad books, and SF/F is not exempt from that. And not every genre is going to be appropriate for someone’s reading tastes. I’m not asking for people to unilaterally embrace romance as the awesomest thing that ever awesomed.

But I am asking, yea, challenging you: next time you catch yourself about to snark on a book in the romance genre, particularly one you haven’t even bothered to read, take a step back and ask yourself how you’d feel if somebody else was about to do that to a book you loved. Remember that the person you’re snarking to, or people who may be reading that tweet or post to your Facebook wall, might well have actually read and loved that book.

Likewise, I challenge you to consider: is a book that portrays romance and love stories and positive sexual encounters for women really all that bizarre a concept?

Here endeth today’s rant. Thank you.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Dara and I returned from Worldcon yesterday and I’m taking today off to decompress–because I spent the entire con pretty much working the NIWA table in the dealers’ room, and that’s dealing with a lot of people by my introvert standards. So I need some downtime!

I will, nonetheless, post today!

Since I was at the NIWA table so much I actually wound up seeing very little of the convention. And I gotta say, we were totally spoiled for space at our table, occupying a corner booth as we did. We had a truly magnificent spread of books, with 37 different authors represented on the table! Seriously, check this out, this was the booth space we had to play with! (And you can guess which portion of the table was my favorite, I expect!)

(Putting in a More tag as this post is kind of long!)

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Since Worldcon is IMMINENT (and I have posted about that very thing right over here on Here Be Magic), I have elected to put Faerie Blood AND Bone Walker on sale for 99 cents!

This price will last until 8/27, so as to give any congoers I happen to talk to at the NIWA table time to get home from the convention and buy my ebooks if they are so inclined. So if you’re reading this, whether or not you’ll be at Worldcon, this will be an excellent time to snap up both these books!

And if you’re so inclined, spread the word, won’t you? Here are pertinent links to share! (If you don’t see the price down to 99 cents yet, give it a bit, various sites may take a bit to catch up to the prices I just set!)

Faerie Blood: Amazon | Nook | iBooks | Kobo | Smashwords | Google Play

Bone Walker: Amazon | Nook | iBooks | Kobo | Smashwords | Google Play

Cheers all and hope to see some of you at the convention!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Not too long ago on Facebook I was giggling over the Easter egg on Google Maps that actually takes you into a TARDIS interior if you click on certain police boxes that show up in the UK. Related to that story, I went and dug up this old pic of myself from 1995, from when Dara and I went to the Worldcon in Glasgow in Scotland that year. We called this “Anna Buys a Used TARDIS”.

Anna Buys a Used TARDIS

I posted it to Facebook and was promptly asked whether I lost the vehicle in a card game. This was my reply!

Certainly not. There was a PERFECTLY LOGICAL EXPLANATION for the entire affair. See, this little Scottish dude with an umbrella showed up and said to me, “YOU! I NEED YOUR HELP! I seem to have parked my police box here without proof of ownership and aheh, well, I’ve got something I’ve DESPERATELY got to take care of. I don’t suppose I could convince you to buy it from me for oh, say, half an hour?”

“What?” I said? “Why only half an hour?”

“Well,” the little Scottish dude with the umbrella explained, “that’s the RULE. But if you’ve bought it from me that makes you the legitimate owner. It’ll be safe then!”

“Ummmm okay?” I said dubiously, but what the hell, we were only just wandering around being tourists anyway, and it was going to be nice to hang out for a bit. “I’ll give you five pence for it.”

“SOLD!” he said, and dashed off like his shoes were on fire. That’s when things got REALLY weird, because THEN a guy with curly blond hair and the most hideous coat I’d EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE showed up.

The blond guy started to argue with me about the police box being HIS, but I said quite firmly that I HAD just paid five pence for it. So then he stormed off, gesticulating and pontificating wildly, and I was about to say bugger to the whole thing when a THIRD guy showed up. This one had pointy hair and a pinstriped suit on and he was running as fast as his red trainers could carry him. “For the love of all that’s holy, GET OUT OF THE WAY!” he bellowed as he charged past. “Also, you might want to duck!”

I ducked because somebody was firing FRIGGING LASERS over my head, and when I turned around, wait, what? Stompy robots? In Scotland? Da hell? They weren’t even wearing kilts or playing bagpipes. Just kept blithering on about YOU WILL BE DELETED, and they stomped off after the guy with the pointy hair.

By then, I can tell you, I was DEEPLY confused. But that was when the door to the police box opened from the inside, and the little Scottish dude with the umbrella poked his head out and smiled at me. “Here you are then, here’s your five pence back! Also, you might want to have a dash of this nitro nine. On your way now. Be on the lookout for those robots.”

Which was when the police box promptly vanished, with a WHRR-WHRR-WHRR noise that I was pretty sure that police boxes weren’t actually supposed to make. So I went on my way, wondering what the HELL had just happened, and chucked the nitro nine over the fence just so that last robot would explode nicely.

And then I had tea.

Cross my hearts, this was exactly how it happened.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Originally written on 9/6/2007 9:16pm, transcribed 9/23/07 10:17pm

In which Worldcon is over but the Post-Worldcon tour begins, and Day 1 of the tour is made a little bit more eventful by the Oncoming Storm of Typhoon Nine!

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Originally written 9/5/07 5:39pm, transcribed 9/15/07 11:53am

In which we have Worldcon party fun on Saturday evening and head to Tokyo on Sunday!

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Originally written 9/3/07 9:34pm, transcribed 9/11/07 9:12pm

Fell behind on updating my journal for the trip, partly because we've been so busy--and partly because I've come down with a cold. :P Stupid cold. I've been drinking as much vitamin water as I could stand, and burning through multiple packets of Halls.

But in the meantime, we've gotten a lot of stuff done and a lot of things looked at. Here's a brief rundown:

Friday the 31st: I got Esther Friesner's autograph, which was quite cool. :) Told her I had several of her older novels, and she mentioned she has new stuff coming out, so yay! I haven't bought a new Friesner novel in a while; I'll look forward to finding these!

Went to a reading by naominovik, which turned out to be from her forthcoming fourth book of the Temeraire series--very cool. :) Some of it was from the preview I'd read before, but some was new to me, and it definitely spiked my interest in picking that book up.

Later I came in on the end of a Q&A panel Novik was doing, and the main highlight of that was her mentioning that she'll be rearranging the publication schedule for the Temeraire novels so she can play with other books in between the Temeraire books. She said she has the Temeraire novels planned out through Book 7, and that she'll end the series when the Napoleonic Wars end--though she doesn't know when that'll be yet.

I got a chance to get her autograph, too. ^_^ And I thanked her for her wonderful books and journal posts; she asked if I was on LJ, and I told her yeah, I'm annathepiper. She recognized my ID. Woot!

The big con highlight of the evening was a showing of "World Enough and Time"--the latest episode of Star Trek: New Voyages, a fan-produced series that continues the Enterprise adventures from the original series. This little effort has distinguished itself by getting Walter Koenig on to play Chekov--and now they've gotten George Takei to play Sulu! Takei and the dude in charge of the overall series ETA 9/17/07 7:11pm writer/director Marc Zicree were on hand to present the episode, which was pretty solid overall. They came up with a good time travel plot to explain Sulu being 30 years older, and even wrote in a daughter for him. She was well played, even if she was a bit Mary-Sueish (all the main cast loved her, she was smart and insightful, yadda yadda). And it was just weird to see the dude playing Kirk hitting on Sulu's daughter. Hee.

More tomorrow!

Originally written 8/30/07 10:10pm, transcribed 8/31/07 6:08pm, 9:30pm

So, to continue the day's non-stop firehose of awesome:

It was strange and cool to be standing on a bridge in Yokohama and to see a cityscape that Miyazaki might have drawn--and to hear cicadas chirping all over the place. We heard two different kinds, in fact: one kind that sounds like the crickets spazzkat and I know from Virginia and Kentucky, and the other, Paul told us, sounded a lot more like a classical anime cicada. It's kind of hard to describe its chirp properly, but it was this multi-note, complex thing that solarbird took for a birdcall.

There are a number of cool sculptures scattered around in the immediate area; Dara and Paul have both taken pictures. I liked the abstract red one with separate rotating pieces that sometimes lined up and sometimes did not.

I was delighted to find the first on my search for funky-flavored Kit Kats: orange and chocolate flavor! Survey says: not bad. Dara didn't care for them, though I liked them a little better. This specimen was not as crunchy as an American Kit Kat, with chocolate that was a bit on the bitter/dark side, and subtly flavored orange cream filling.

Back at the con, I totally missed Paul getting flash-mobbed with admiring Japanese fen when they realized he had an iPhone--since it hasn't been released over here yet.

But I did not miss an opportunity to get an autograph from paulcornell2--who was very amiable, especially when I mentioned that I was the one who'd called the two-parter of "Human Nature" and "Family of Blood" riveting--as had been mentioned to him in IM by mizkit! (As per my promise to her in email, that specific hour of today's fun must clearly be devoted to her. :) ) Later, he even found Dara and Paul and me in the con's wi-fi area and introduced us to his wife. :) I am quite thrilled and honored, and happy to have made my best Doctor Who fangirl moment for likely the next five years.

Over in the dealer's room we found yet more unmitigated awesomeness. Highlights include a full working replica of Nausicca's glider (with video of it in action!), cute little articulated, remote-controlled robots, a great booth full of Ultraman stuff, and another place to get sheets of stickers for trading. I turned out to be their first customer, and they were very friendly and eager to please even though communication was spotty between us. They even gave me my first sheet of stickers for free since they came out a little weird, and even nicer, let Dara and Paul print fresh sheets of their own stickers. So now we're all restocked, yay!

The cute little girls in costume came to me for sticker exchange, but sadly, I ran out before the second one got to me--so it's good we've gotten more stickers! The girls were darling in their costumes, though, it must be said. They were a robot maid and a robot fairy, maybe? Anyway, they were the first hall costume we saw.

Dara was quite happy that they had two newsletters going: the official one and a secondary one, which was coming out as soon as they got enough material to fill it. So far the examples we've been seeing are with a bunch of Japanese send-ins, a little English, and several anime-looking pictures.

Opening ceremonies for the con was fun. They got the mayor of Yokohama coming in on a rickshaw (and joking about taking that up more as an energy conservation measure) to tell us how honored he was to host the first Worldcon in Japan--and Asia in general. Very cool. :) Three of the GoHs were Japanese SF luminaries, and I haven't learned their names yet, but the old gentleman in the kimono (who quipped that he liked to wear it at conventions because it made him look cool) was neat. On the US GoH side, we had David Brin and Michael Whelan, both of whom gave their little speeches in Japanese and English both,which was neat. (All of the speeches were translated, in fact, and some of them by a young lady who said she was a voice actress. She did have a lovely voice. :) )

Fast running out of steam at this hour, and fighting down a headache besides; the one drawback to the trip so far is that the humidity is just kicking my ass. But the front desk gave me a pain reliever, so now I'm going to fall into bed and let it do its job.

More awesomeness tomorrow!

Originally written 8/30/07 1:25pm, transcribed from physical journal 8/31/07 8:03am, 12:37pm, 4:18pm

At Worldcon in Yokohama, finally! solarbird and spazzkat have gone to programming, of which there is lots, though nothing yet I want to hit. So I'm breaking in my new journal with the first of my Worldcon notes.

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I go clear across the country to Boston, and what do I wind up doing for the most part? Writing. Go fig. This caused me a bit of consternation actually, yesterday, as I wailed to solarbird that I wasn't sure why I'd bothered to come to this thing if all I wound up doing was sitting around on my duff typing away on my computer. There is one thing I have to make myself keep in mind, though--and that is that I've been writing. I have to remind myself that I should not be ashamed for actually exercising my muse.

Every so often I did emerge to do other things, though.

( Who we saw... )

( What we did... )

( Mary and the MFA... )

( Overnighting at Andor... )