Tag: rant

Rama Lama Whippity Ding #1

I met with an agent

AI slop

Recently, I had a speed date-style Zoom meeting with a generalist/genre book agent. It was an interesting and informative experience. I’d even say that on the whole it was a good experience. But it was also awkward and distant, and a little bit depressing. I’m clearly not the author this agent wants to represent, that’s the first thing to say. And I’m OK with that. As with any speed dating sort of situation, you’re looking for something to click.

When it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a thing, I asked a couple of biz questons and they were open and honest with their answers. Helpful. Cheerfully so.

more AI slop

I asked about how it is out there for trans authors these days. I was told that trans adult fantasy authors can pretty much do what they want, it doesn’t seem to matter. But kidlit is getting hit pretty hard, lots of bannings, lots of pushback.

I guess we’ve found the actual canaries in the coalmine. If you’re a trans-inclusive YA or middle grade author, you’re having a rough go right now. I don’t think that points to a winner in the contest, but it does make it clear that it IS a contest. There’s a war being fought out there. And if the trans kid’s authors lose, I’m next.

further AI slop

What the agent kept repeating when asking me to talk about my project is “What are the stakes? What’s the thing I can’t walk away from?” This caused me some cognitive dissonance because the whole idea of my novel is the protagonist walking away, over and over. And it’s not that my main character is an anti-hero. Sometimes Rose walks away from things by choice, sometimes she walks away because she’s forced to. Sometimes she’s kidnapped. Sometimes a disaster happens, either on a large or a small scale. Sometimes it’s her fault. Sometimes she’s a victim. Sometimes it’s a sacrifice she makes. And that’s a story too. It’s a story I feel personally, because it’s how my life has been.

My perception of the general run of fantasy novels these days — and I’d have to say that most everything I’ve read in the genre for the last ten or so years fits into this formula — is that you start with an action sequence, it sets up a conflict and some tension, the bulk of the book is the main character on the run and under the gun based on the conflict/tension, but also there’s some guy or girl who is very very annoying until they’re not, then there’s an aha moment when the protagonist figures out what’s really going on and consequently how to win, and then there’s a huge high-stakes battle, like a multiple orgasm of crash! bang! pow! as big as whatever the author can imagine, then a few pages of happy every after.

Such AI, much slop

Whose life is like that? Having read a hundred iterations of that, who needs it again? I think this is a problem, and it’s not something I want to “create” the next iteration of, although I will say the story I’m working on actually does follow that formula to some extent, though it doesn’t have that ratchet-up, ratchet-up, and ratchet-up-again thing going on.

At some point during the interview, I began to imagine the novel I would write to meet the standards of this era of fantasy fiction. The title would be “Rama Lama Whippity Ding #1” and the first sentence would be “How do you like your steaks?” I bet I could get a few thousand words out of riffing on that.

Clearly, I wasn’t made for these times.

last bit of AI slop… for now.

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Things One Can Do With Language

Order dinner
Find a bathroom
Listen

Make a phone call
Write a blog
Talk to the press

Interview a subject
Deny
Affirm

Tell the truth
Tell a lie
Create a web of lies

Come out of the closet
Be your true self
Hide from yourself

Fall in love
Marry
Divorce

Tell your grandkids
What it was like
In the good old days

Break the law
Write the law
Change the law

Be a slave
Own a slave
Outlaw slavery

Run for President
Start a war
Stop a war

Invent God
Follow God
Refute God

Chant
Sing
Write

Dear Editors: I Am Not My Transition!

I’ve heard back from more than one editor, and a couple of agents as well, that a story about my childhood that I’ve been sending around is “just a chapter” because it includes a scene of me directly trying to deal with my gender issues: they all seem to want to make the whole 6,000 word story I’ve submitted about that one page-long scene. I don’t have the opportunity to explain that the story I’ve sent them doesn’t really have anything to do with “transition” per sé, because cover letters need to be brief and professional. If I did take the space to try to explain this, it would feel like I’m apologizing for my work if I were to drill down into aspects of my story in a preface that only the editor will ever see. A story needs to stand on its own.

So I’m writing this post.

I’ve been told to just leave that part of the story out, but that seems just as unreasonable. Physically, it would be possible to do that, and while that would certainly bypass the issue of my “problematic” identity, to leave that important part of myself out of my story would feel like I’m retreating into the closet that I’ve fought so hard not to be trapped in. From my point of view, the choice I’m being presented with is either to leave out this important aspect of who I am or focus my story on the expected trope of transition.

Imagine requiring a story about a black kid to include some kind of resolution to the “problem” of their blackness, or else leave that out of the story entirely. Such an expectation from an editor would immediately brand them as racist. And yet, any time I have heard an actual critique of the piece I’m discussing, this is what I hear back.

I’m trans every day. Getting my hormone prescription was only one day, one story. There have been so many stories in my life: I was trans in all of them. My being trans is just a trait, not my whole identity. I am not my transition. That’s not the only story I have to tell. Surprisingly, the vast majority of what’s happened in the time I’ve been walking the Earth has nothing to do with a particular course of medical treatment.

I refuse to accept that any memoir I write needs to either deny who I am or be about the gatekeepers who OK’ed my medical transition. I am grateful to them, but at least one of these people has had me sign an NDA. They don’t want the publicity, and I’m OK with that.

This particular memoir piece is a story about a kid who is being bullied. The fact that the main character is trans is important, but not central, and the resolution to the story is not going to come from waiting the thirty seven years it took me to get my medical transition started: the situation is much more immediate than that, so the resolution must be, too. That resolution must be about being bullied and how the central character, who happens to be trans, deals with it.

By the logic of these literary gatekeepers, no story can be self-contained, because there is always some central issue in a person’s life that won’t resolve into a nice little package with a ribbon and a bow on it. Requiring a self-contained solution to such a global problem as gender incongruence is unreasonable. Conversely, you can live with such an unresolved issue for a very long time, while many other things happen. I can tell you that this is so from personal experience.

Unfortunately, it’s been a major obstacle to getting my work published. It’s quite frustrating.

The End of an Empire

In the example of the medieval Roman Empire, I see lessons for us in the modern era.

It took centuries for the Byzantine Empire to fall. In fact, Constantinople was sacked on 4 separate occasions: in 1081 when Alexios I Komnenos wrested power from Nykephoros III Botaneiates, in 1204 when the Latins — agents of the Holy Roman Emperor in Rome — took the city from the Byzantines, in 1261 when the Nicaeans under Michael VII Palaiologos retook the city and made it once again the seat of the Empire, and then in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed II finally ended the Roman Empire for once and all time.

I have been thinking about the process by which the Empire failed, and trying to contextualize what happened nearly six hundred years ago against what is happening here and now, in the US. There are a few points I linger over: things that cause me both trepidation and hope.

When Alexios came to power, some of the factors that led to the demise of the Empire were already in place. The Empire had been stable for centuries in part because succession to the throne was generally orderly. Alexios took power by coup: he had been a successful general, and from that platform was able to raise enough support from the army to mount an attack on the capital. For most of the history of the Empire to that point, civilian and military leadership had been kept separate. Alexios was one of a stream of Generals to have risen to power in the years preceding his ascension to the throne. One thing that can be said of Alexios is that he fostered a period of apparent stability: he himself held power for almost 40 years, and his next two successors had similar reigns.

In addition to altering the power structure of the Empire, Alexios also created a situation, out of apparent necessity, which contributed greatly to the eventual demise of the Empire. The Emperor Nykephoros, whom he had supplanted, had drained the Empire’s finances. At the time that Alexios took power, the Empire was facing an invasion threat from Robert Guiscard, a Norman who had risen to power on the Italian peninsula and then set his sites on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. In order for Alexios to meet the threat of invasion by Guiscard, he had to negotiate help from another foreign power: the Venetians, who had a substantial navy. He made certain promises to them, including the privilege of importing and exporting goods to Constantinople without paying any tax. The Venetians also gained control of a section of the capital. Eventually, similar deals were made with other Italian city-states, including the Genoans, and the Pisans. This caused the Empire to lose a crucial revenue stream, and they were never able to recover from the loss. In the end, it also gave the Latins entrée into the city so that they could take it from the Byzantines themselves in 1204: the second sacking of Constantinople.

Yet even from this, the Empire was eventually able to reconstitute itself for a time. Remember: they were Romans. That identity sustained them through some serious crises, and even an apparent collapse. I don’t wish to draw the parallel too closely, but my take on this story includes the suggestion that a great country like the Byzantine Empire, or the United States, does not fall easily or quickly.

That demise the Byzantines ultimately faced at the hands of the Ottoman Turks was centuries in the making. Perhaps the alarmists and naysayers in our own time are too pessimistic. Perhaps this country is not so near its end as they might suspect. And perhaps, given the will and the force of commitment to our better natures and our strengths as a nation, we might yet survive and even thrive in the coming centuries.