Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts

Friday, September 10, 2021

Talking too Much

This may come as a shock, but there’s a whole-ass human being behind this screen. A human with messy thoughts, ideas, beliefs, ideologies, ethics, and a whole bunch of flaws. This human also has wisely or unwisely decided that story telling is their method of making sense of the world and this life. That means putting waaaaay too much stuff in writing and then lobbing it out into the world. The open question this week is whether we as authors believe we should tone down our individual thoughts and opinions in pursuit of offending fewer potential readers and thus securing more robust book sales. 

For my part, Imma talk. I’m going to talk about everything and anything that crosses my mind or that matters to me. Politics. Cats. Religion. Cats. Beliefs. More cats. Thoughts. Feelings. Holy cats, ALL the emo. Will I lose sales over this? Probably. Do I care? Not in the least. Because I AM a whole-ass human being with that long list of stuff packed inside. AND IT ALL ENDS UP IN MY BOOKS, ANYWAY. I’m going to talk about all the things on socials because it’s truth in advertising. If you hate what I say on social media, you are not my audience. If I can’t be a sterling example, I aim to be a terrible, stern warning. I am perfectly okay with waving people off.

Every single one of my books is political. Every single one. Social justice is a major theme throughout every story I tell. If those things chap your hide, I am not your author. Straight up. I do no one any favors by staying silent to hide these facts. So, I leave money on the table. I’m foolishly comfortable with that because I do not want someone to buy one of my books and be subsequently enraged by the viewpoints and content. Those sales would lead to poor reviews. Poor reviews drag an author’s store.

Maybe I’m too enmeshed in the romance community because I’m all in for enthusiastic consent. I want readers who ache to read about all kinds and shapes of humans, aliens, love, adventure, danger, and good triumphing in the end. Mostly. I’d rather have ten people grinning over my socially awkward humor and occasionally macabre posts rushing out to buy my books than have 100 people blindly picking me up. Those 10 people are going to be much, much happier readers and that will leave me a much happier author.

Friday, February 24, 2017

A Place for Politics

Remember group projects in high school? Or maybe it was in a college class. Or around the meeting table at your first job. You had an idea. A good one. You started talking. Everyone was looking at you. And then one of the other people started talking. As if you weren't speaking. All those people who you thought had been paying attention blink and turn away.

No one ever asked you to finish your thought. No one ever asked to hear your idea. It's as if you didn't even exist.

If you're  better human being than I am, you don't stand up and scream, "Oh my GOD WILL YOU LET ME FINISH?"  (FYI - this rarely actually gets your ideas listened to. It may get security called. Only once did a manager laugh and tell the developer trying to talk over me that he'd earned getting yelled at.)

If you've ever said "I wish *insert famous person name here* would stop talking politics and go back to . . . " you're guilty of doing to them what was to you. (Guys, help me out here - I have someone suggesting this being talked over thing only happens to women and minorities. Rebuttals??)

This is the long way of saying that my beliefs and I are a package deal. That's why if you read my books - especially my sci fi, you know my politics and most of my belief systems. If you're on my personal Facebook page, you know my politics. I won't hide because life is too short to live on mute. I mean to live my life out loud. Too much time and energy has gone to making sure other people were comfortable, whether I was or not. Maybe I'm just all out of fucks to give because my loyalty isn't to anyone party or person. It's to ideals. Rights. Equal protection for all people under the law. Very strict separation of church and state.

I think that one of the great things about living in the United States is that you are called by your civil duty to participate in the democratic process. Plenty of people abdicate that responsibility. Fine. That, too, is a right. But frankly, anyone with a pulse has the right to an opinion and the right to voice it. I suspect that when well-known people take heat for expressing their opinions, it's because someone envies the platform and reach (not to mention it's only when the opinion disagrees with someone's preconceived notions.) No one says, 'I wish famous person x would shut up.' when the opinions agree. Which is code for, 'I'm uncomfortable and I don't want to be forced to examine my thoughts and beliefs!' I get it. It's not easy. But the last time it was legit for any of us to express that kind of discomfort it was because we were doing unspeakable things to our diapers.

So you'll likely also see on my Facebook page that I don't shut down political opinions that differ from my own. Because I want my thinking challenged. Not that I'm above participating in the world wide call upon witches to spell cast Saturday. The stated goal is to bind the current US administration from doing any further harm. I prefer something more colorful, I think. Maybe a spell inspired by a new Chuck Tingle title. I'll leave the content of the spell to your imagination.

Any spell suggestions? Or requests? (Remember the genie in Aladdin - I won't kill anyone and I won't bring anyone back from the dead . . .)

Friday, July 8, 2016

Politics Optional

When two unrelated factions meet, the thing that keeps everyone alive to go home at the end of the day is politics. Unless you're George R. R. Martin.

Case in point: This photo is politics in action. Two felines, both alike in dignity, on the sunny dock, where we lay our scene. (With apologies to Shakespeare) Max (the boy facing the camera) is a neighbor who desperately wants to be accepted by my cats. He is particularly taken with Hatshepsut (foreground). She, being a decade older and wiser than he, has been known to shove him in the water. True story. This moment of détente brought to you by catnip. I'd make a joke about US politics needing some weed, but frankly, I think maybe anti-psychotics are called for at this point.

So there you have it. Do I include politics in my SFF? Absolutely. I contend that it's impossible to avoid

Humans are social animals, which naturally sort themselves into hierarchies as a matter of survival - this is the stuff hardwired into the oldest parts of our brains. When we were still cheetah-snacks wandering the savannahs, the social hierarchy determined who led a group. Who ate first. Who reproduced. Who lived. Who didn't. Jockeying for position within a given social structure is part of being human.

Since Science Fiction is as a genre, one big, open ended 'what comes next?' there's really no way to avoid politics. Which isn't to say that an authors personal political views ought to intrude. They shouldn't, however, I admit that my voice, my experiences and my world view are so colored by my beliefs/thoughts/ideals that I suspect it all bleeds through. If my characters hold political convictions, I want them to belong to those characters, not to me. I'm not writing to make my characters a megaphone for my own views.

That said. I have a fondness for shining light on certain marginalized populations. As a result, many of my characters hold alternative religious views, or are other-abled, or are non-hetero. In all those cases, there are politics surrounding the issues those characters face. And because I'm usually writing romance where HEAs are the expectation, my politics DO slip into the story - I'm going for acceptance and equality. Some days, like today, after more men were killed by police (and I freely admit I will never have the full story on those incidents, but the mounting death toll of young black men in this country is unacceptable) I wonder if inserting politics into writing isn't a duty - a way of saying something, as Elie Wiesel urged - a way of sounding the alarm at enough of a remove that the message of and for compassion slips in beneath a reader's skin and takes root.

I don't know yet how to respond to something that bothers me so deeply about my society. Maybe it requires someone more skilled than I. All I know is that I grew up on the golden-eyed optimism of Star Trek. Apparently, some of that optimism rubbed off on me. Because I do think politics end up in fiction anytime there's more than one character on a page. What I don't know is where the line in the sand lies. At what point does a socially conscious scifi story turn into a morality tale? I'd prefer to stand firmly on SFF side of that equation.