The World Needs Female Rock Critics

Reading this article, I noticed a lot of the same “fake geek girl” tropes that have launched so many discussions in SFF fandom, and which never really made sense: beautiful women faking interest in SFF to get attention from male geeks? Why? Seeing this, though, I’m working it backwards and realizing that a certain subset of male SFF fans took the tropes of groupies and other assumptions about women in rock & roll and applied them to their own fandom, probably as part of a larger fantasy that they and their heroes in SFF fandom were in the same league as rock gods and therefore should relate to women in the genre the same way (regardless of whether that was right even in the original context).

Genre-bending

Articulating a conversation with my mom:

Literary fiction, if necessary, is happy to sacrifice plot for voice. In fact, if a writer is too focused on the character taking action for their goals, it’s considered gauche.

Speculative fiction, on the other hand, will sacrifice voice for plot. In fact, if a writer has their character sitting around thinking and feeling for too long, we get twitchy.

The best literature, across the board, successfully uses both skills, voice and plot, to create characters and tell an amazing story. But which sacrifice you are willing to make determines which conversation you are in.

Thoughts?

Losing my mind

I’m wrapping presents for my cousin’s bar mitzvah, and I decide I want to do something special: an origami pleat in the wrapping paper that I learned at my first job fifteen years ago, working at a Barnes & Noble during the holiday rush. I used to be able to bang these things out in under thirty seconds, and it adds a little flair to an otherwise ordinary-looking package.

And I can’t remember how to do it. I screw it up, over and over. I can’t even quite remember what it’s supposed to look like, let alone how to get there. Finally I give up, smooth out the paper, and do my best to hide the creases with the simpler, traditional folds.

There was an age when everything I had ever learned, everything I had ever experienced, was right there when I needed to remember it. I was aghast at the thought of adults who couldn’t rattle off their bat mitzvah portions from memory, or recall in detail every book they’d ever read. That memory made me a prodigy, a bright kid. It was a core part of my identity. And now, I don’t know if it’s just that too much time has passed and worn away the details, or if I’ve learned too much and my brain has triaged whatever I don’t use that often. But I’m suddenly painfully aware of just how much I used to know that’s now evaporated. I’m not that person anymore. And I wonder what else I’ll lose, and who I’ll be then.