SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
|
|
This thread is for comments about the original article, SF & Fantasy in the New Millennium: Women Publishing Short Fiction, and its companion piece, SF and Fantasy in the New Millennium: An Update, both by Susan U. Linville.
|
Lit_Fox
New user
Reged: Aug 24 2007
Posts: 1
|
|
I'm not a fan of sweeping generalizations about things people can't control: i.e their gender. It might have been more apt for this article to compare quitters to non-quitters, totally apart from their gender.
1. Quitters are less competitive than non-quitters.
2. Quitters make excuses like "I have no time to write/submit stories, as I have to look after/support my family."
3. Quitters can be male or female.
4. Non-quitters can be male or female.
There are different degrees of non-quitter: Some people persist for a little while, enjoy a little success, then quit when they hit the first real difficulty. Others wouldn't quit if the world blew up around them and they were sitting on an island in the middle of nothing with no audience but themselves.
As a female author and non-quitter, I'd go toe-to-toe with any author, male or female who says they're more competitive than I am. Your article may help perpetuate the notion that I am the exception to the rule, but I don't believe that I am the exception. I do think that a lot of quitters tend to be more vocal about unfairness and gender-bias because by being vocal, they can distract themselves from the fact that they are not writing and not submitting. The louder they complain, the less they have to face the fact that it takes hard work and persistence to get published, and it's easier to whine than write.
-Lit_Fox
|
Robert E. Porter
Regular poster
Reged: Jan 18 2007
Posts: 27
|
|
I think it's important to speak out AND follow through. I agree with Linville. Everyone will benefit from equal representation. But magazine fiction hasn't recovered from the one-two punch of cheap paperback novels and television. Does it make sense to look for signs of social progress in a market whose best days are behind it? I don't know the stats on professional novelists and screenwriters, but romance far outsells SF novels and -- far as I know -- more women than men write romance novels. (Whether romance novels perpetuate gender stereotypes is a different story...)
|
Ben Crowell
New user
Reged: Mar 16 2008
Posts: 4
|
|
I'm a male writer of SF who started writing out of a desire to produce YA novels that might distract my daughters momentarily from Harry Potter.
Amy Hanson's comments about a bias toward action-adventure stories struck a chord with me. That kind of thing generally bores me to death, either to read or to write, but it's certainly the easiest to sell. It's great that there are three pro-level electronic magazines these days, but their flagship, JBU, is extremely heavily weighted toward action-adventure and military SF.
The speculation about jobs and economics in the article is also interesting. The article is restricted to data on short fiction, which isn't where the money is. I'm happy to write short SF as a hobby that doesn't increase my income significantly, but it is a time-consuming hobby, and I am lucky to have a wife who is willing to indulge me in it.
|
Previous
Index
Next
Threaded
Edit
Reply
Quote
