Monthly Archives: June 2016

Sad Puppies Review Books: The Giving Tree

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

giving treeTHE GIVING TREE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

The so-called Social Justice Warriors always say they want strong female characters and realistic role models for women but they once again prove that SJWs always lie by ignoring this book, which provides the most complex, intricate, and yet startlingly true-to-life depictions of females of any book I have read or will ever read.

The Giving Tree is the story of a real man, a red pill-downing alpha male who knows the importance of maintaining frame and consistently demonstrating value to any tree he wants to fuck by being confident and taking what he wants, then leaving her alone so that she knows his time is valuable and that he is not to be trifled with. This pleases her because as a female tree it is her biological imperative to find a male with a high sexual value. It is so refreshing to finally see a believable depiction of a woman like this.

The tree supports her man through all his endeavors. Whether he is working hard to sell apples, harvest lumber, building a house, or cutting down the tree to make a boat to get away from the shrew of a wife and the children she no doubt conceived to entrap him into marriage, she leaves him alone to get on with the hard work and the sacrifices he makes to achieve his dreams.

As vivid a portrait of the female psyche as the tree paints, though, it is the man’s wife who steals the show. She is first deftly foreshadowed when the man shows up at the tree explaining to her his plans to build a house. Why does he need a house? So he can have a wife and a family. This is the moment when we know our hero has slipped into blue pill thinking. When he was a child, before our female-dominated society had filled him with its propaganda, he was happy doing nothing more than going from tree to tree and having his fun with each one, keeping many plates spinning in the air, but when he grew up he drank the Kool-Aid and believed he had to settle down with any woman wily enough to steal his sperm.

And the wife. The story brings her to life in nightmarish detail. Overbearing, emasculating, controlling, frigid, and ugly but with an inflated sense of her own value given to her by feminism and its lies. The book almost spends too much time and detail making you picture her, and his life with her. You can’t get away from her.

Or can you?

Because our hero turns it around. He realizes he’s had enough, and he goes his own way. He takes the red pill. With nothing but his own two hands and the sweat of his brow, he makes a boat out of the tree and he sails away and we never have to see his wife disgrace the page again.

As satisfying as his escape from the clutches of her tyranny is, it’s almost too little, too late to save the book. She had too much of a presence in the book to begin with. The story is not about her, it’s about him. Why did they have to interrupt the fascinating story of this man in order to focus on her?

The ending of the book is a complete letdown, when the man who had gone his own way before comes back and settles down with the used-up old stump of a tree. Why? A man of his proven sexual value should never have to settle for a woman his own age unless he wants to, at which point there’s no reason for him to not keep a dozen or more plates spinning because men of his value become even more rare with age. This is the point where the book goes from grounded, realistic depictions of female existence into a flight of pure fairy tale fantasy, and it is the point where I check out.

Using strong, fully-developed female characters with personalities deeper and realer than I assume most actual women have and a classic tale of red pill redemption to sucker the reader in and then deliver this ending is such a classic example of SJW-style entryism that Saul Alinsky himself might have penned it.

Two stars.

Note from Alexandra: If you enjoy my coverage of the Sad Puppies and related nonsense, satirical and otherwise, please help me get to WorldCon 74 in Kansas City. For every $150 I collect towards my goal of $1,800, I will write another piece similar to this one.

Sisters, Salt, Shoes: A Review of “Left Foot, Right”

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

When I woke up this morning, the only review I intended to write was another satirical take from the point of view of Sad Puppy blowhard John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired). That’s sitting in a mostly-finished draft, as I try to work out the final flourish that will bring it home.

One of the things that happens to me when I go through a spiral of depression and close myself off is that I stop reading. I was sitting here thinking it would be nice to work on some poetry, and then I decided the first thing to do would be to feed my mind. So I picked a venue that was on my mind (Strange Horizons, because I missed their tea party this past weekend due to a distinct and troubling lack of time-turners in my life) and went to see what I’ve been missing recently.

Instead of opening their poetry page, I found myself clicking on a link near the top of the front page for a short story by Nalo Hopkinson, an author similarly on my mind from WisCon, and I then found myself reading it, and then, eventually, glad that I had, albeit let me tell you that there were more emotions along the way to that gladness. They were all good emotions, in the sense of being well-made, sturdy, and suited to their purpose, but they were not all happy ones.

The mental and emotional state in which I exist right now is one that my partner, Jack, has accurately described as “having more feelings than sleep”. This is either the best or worst place from which to read a story such as “Left Foot, Right“. This story seems to have originally (or at least, previously) been published in an anthology called Monstrous Affections, two years ago, but can be read for free at Strange Horizons.

Let me start by saying that the shortest way to bore me to tears is to tell me a story about something spiritual and transcendent and make it mundane, to focus on what I call the “scienterrific” details that power a haunting, animate the undead, or make magic work.

This story, thank goodness, does not do this.

Good fantasy and good horror should be rooted in the real world, sure, but not in quantum fluctuations or viruses or electromagnetic energy or other things that plainly exist in the real world but just as plainly do not, in the real world, actually work that way.

No, the grounding of a story that touches another world should be found at a more liminal point, a point where the physical, tangible world around us already intersects with the unseen, with things that do work that way. Things like: memories. Feelings. Trauma.

This is a story…

I do not write many reviews. I would like to write more of them. It is difficult to describe what this story is or what it does without committing the sin of simply telling you what happens in it, stripped of context and robbed of emotion. A story is never simply the sum of the events within it, though. A story is not just what happens, it is the story of what happens, and you really have to experience it as intended to get the full effect.

This is a story about loss and regret and guilt and shame and trauma, and letting go, which is to say that it is a ghost story. That’s a bit reductive, of course, but most labels are. All stories are products of a time and place, and of those who tell them, both within the story and without. This is a story that is not concerned with the logic of the dead, but the logic of the survivor, of the living. I’ve often heard it said that funerals are for the living, for those left behind. I have never before considered that ghost stories might be, too.

The realness of the story’s depiction of emotional damage leaps off the page in the opening scene, with phrases like “before her world fell in” and “when she needs to fake normal”. If you’ve been there, you know. If you haven’t, you might be lucky enough to learn from a story from this before you find out some other way.

From that initial scene, the tale unfolds in a structure that will be familiar to many TV viewers: we see scenes from a life that contain haunting hints of something, things that trigger memories within the viewpoint character, which bit by bit, fill in the blanks until finally we have something like the whole story, just in time to make a kind of sense of what we’re seeing at the end.

Not everything is explained; certainly nothing of the supernatural is explained away, nor does it need to be. There are elements for which I no doubt lack the necessary cultural background to understand the significance of, but the story of what is happening still makes perfect sense even to me as an outsider invited to look in. It all fits together. It all comes to bear.

The looping structure of the story is hardly unique to the screen, but it is one of which the screen is that much more forgiving. It is hard to pull this off well in text. You either must be able to move fluidly from present-detail to past-memory, stepping backward and forward through moments in time with a deft, purposeful touch, or you have to use the literary equivalent of jump cuts, interrupting your prose with rows of asterisks or an extra line break. The latter is a serviceable solution to translating this form of nonlinear (or maybe superlinear) storytelling; the former is more satisfying when it works, but less likely to do so.

Nalo Hopkinson takes the former tack, and succeeds so beautifully I’m not sure it was the more difficult approach. I believe this is because she understands that this sort of storytelling is not exactly nonlinear, as I suggested in the previous paragraph. There is a line, a constant thread, running from moment to moment. While we are riding along with her viewpoint character, we follow that thread as she does. We learn of events that happened before, but we do not see them in flashback; we experience them in the present as the character experiences them. We learn of what she has gone through the way we might, if we could know her in real life: bit by bit, and only by hints and inference at first.

If you think about a richly layered musical piece that starts with a single voice, a single instrument, quiet and plaintive but hitting a few piercing notes, which weaves a theme that is then echoed and layered over by other voices, as motifs are woven in and it builds to a crashing crescendo and then the song recedes, and we’re left again with the quiet stillness of the opening movement, albeit transformed by what has happened along the way… if you think about that, if you have ever experienced something like that, then you will have an emotional picture in your head of the way this story unfolds.

This story is published in both text and audio form, with a play button embedded near the top of the page. I read the prose version so that I could follow the looping thread of the story at my own pace, soar and swell and unfold and spiral downward and inward and outward with it. I did not regret it. My mind rebels at listening to a story when it could be reading it. Other readers may find it useful to indulge themselves in the audio version, though, to not just read the story but hear it told, as I think that the aural medium might well serve it best for many audience members.

STATUS: Thursday, June 2nd

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

 

Well, yesterday’s schedule was complicated because of post-con stuff and the fact that I decided to kick things into high gear around here on what turned out to be my first day back. To focus on the positive: I did update Tales of MU at a time when it was still Wednesday, June 1st in most of the United States?

I like the chapter. I think the start of the new book is a good introduction for new readers. I’m excited about it and the story and the world and the characters in a way that hasn’t happened organically in a long time. Through the auspice of Patreon, I also know that I’m getting paid ~$39 for it, which should come to me at the start of next month. That’s about a penny a word, which isn’t great, but having that much more of a direct connection between writing and getting paid does wonders for the motivation.

Financial Outlook

Not bad for now. It’s weird to come back from WisCon with some padding rather than a deficit. I’m really curious to see how the Tales of MU Patreon does when I’m getting more updates up. Best case scenario: it goes up. Long term, I’m going to need more sponsorship per chapter to keep going. I really hope to have $50 a chapter by the end of the month and grow from there. I think that’s doable, especially as I get back to focusing on the kinds of stories I want to read, which are the stories I’m best at writing and the ones that resonate the most powerfully with others.

The State of the Me

While I had my best post-con day yesterday, con living caught up with me unexpectedly when I absentmindedly drank two caffeinated sodas and a coffee with dinner. I stopped drinking caffeine past the early afternoon quite a while ago, but that habit goes out the window at con time. So I was up until something like 4:45 in the morning, and am fairly tired right now.

Plans For Today

I have a good start on a draft of a Sad Puppies Review Books, and I’m reaching out to a couple of people regarding collaboration opportunities. I’d like to get a few blog posts up, but I also might wind up taking a nap in the afternoon.

WorldCon plans.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, until about two weeks ago, the notion of me attending WorldCon in August, when it’s hosted by Mid AmeriCon II in Kansas City, was a pretty distant dream. This weekend, I made tentative plans to attend WorldCon 75 in 2017, when it will be in Helsinki. This possibility was not even on my radar, to the extent that I told one of the chairs of WorldCon 75 that I had supported the Helsinki bid, even though there was a close to 0 percent chance that I could make it there. This turned out to be the most awkward thing I could have said at that moment, because it turned out she had approached me to extend a personal invitation for me to be there.

Now, before certain conspiratorial tongues begin wagging, let me explain a few things about how this works in the real world. When I say that she invited me personally, I mean that she said to me, as a person, “You should totally come!”, a statement which grants me no perks or privileges beyond those of any individual who is aware of the con and its attendance policies. When I say I was invited, what I mean is I was invited to purchase transportation to Finland, membership in the convention, and food and lodging while I am there.

I say this not to shame her for expecting me to pay my own way, but because I am an adult human being who understands how things work in the real world. The chair of a convention has very little power and very much responsibility. She cannot waive the con’s fees that pay for its existence and operation. She cannot access some bottomless pool of money to pay for things beyond the con’s control, like airfare. A literary sf/f con does not have the budget of a big media con, and even big media cons wouldn’t last if they paid for the appearance of people who do not bring in even more money for the convention in return.

Yet there are people out there who don’t know how the world works, but who imagine they do, and who imagine that these affairs are endless circles of cliquish nepotism where insiders pay each other to travel and lounge around and speak as experts. Two years ago there was a trumped-up tempest in a teapot “outrage” where people who had barely heard of me and only just heard of WisCon believed I was being paid to fly in and speak about “Social Justice” because I was on a panel about internet culture. This year someone interpreted my announced plans to be at World Con to mean that I was likewise a paid guest, and that’s the charitable interpretation where that rumor didn’t start as a deliberate lie.

Now, I want to mention the fact that a chair of World Con 75 personally invited me to fly out to Helsinki and participate because, heck, let’s face it… that’s pretty cool, isn’t it? She told me, in so many words, “You’re part of this. You’re part of this world, part of the community. You’re the real deal. You belong here.” That’s cool.  Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the chair of a WorldCon has the authority to act as gatekeeper for who belongs in sf/f fandom, because she doesn’t. The chair of a convention basically only has the authority to throw a convention, and that only just barely. But anybody has the power to give another human being validation, and I got some from a person who is helping to head up the 75th World Science Fiction Conviction in Helsinki in 2017, and that’s something worth mentioning.

It’s just a shame that I can’t mention it without translating for those who fevered imaginations have overcome their grip on reality. Just you watch, come next year or even as soon as WorldCon 74 is over and I begin firming up my plans for 75, there will rumors swirling about what I’m being paid or what’s being paid for. I’d give even odds that someone even links to this post with a claim that if you “read between the lines” it says this, or there’s a “clear implication” it says that… I mean, we’re talking about the people who took David Gerrold’s ironclad (and very proper) insistence that all nominees and winners would be accorded all decorum and respect at the WisCon 73 Hugo ceremony last year as an open promise to do the opposite.

This is probably the last time I’ll bother qualifying something neat like “a WorldCon head personally told me she’d be jazzed if I were there” by explaining the real world to dedicated denizens of a carefully constructed artificial reality, for the simple reason that I know it doesn’t work. It’s more my fascination with the disconnect between actual reality on the ground and the stories that swirl based on a few glimmers of that reality and much speculation that prompts this post.

What a different world we live in than the one that is ascribed to us.

An observation.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

I used to have a lot of stress whenever I would notice two of my friends didn’t get along. I’d start wondering which of them I should be supporting, what each of them would think when/if they saw me retweeting/reblogging or talking to the other, stuff like that.

I’d see people about the internet get in these huge blow-ups around this kind of thing, and when I was younger I was certainly friends with people who would actively divide any community in which they entered into sides labeled “with me” and “against me”. Without putting it into words, I had internalized the notion that this is a thing that happens, that it’s part of the nature of friendship.

I recently came to a stunning realization that changed how I see the world and my place in it, though: I’m not friends with anyone who thinks this way. I actually have friends—good friends, very good friends—who have bent over backwards to avoid even the appearance of telling me who I can be friends with, who have kept their grievances against other people quiet around me out of deference for my friendship.

And the thing is, there have been cases where learning about the way one person I call friend treated other people (sometimes but not always other people I called friend) did change how I felt about that person to the point that it cooled or ended the friendship. But that’s me making the free choice about how my time and energy and affection are spent, not someone leaning on me to make me pick a side.

At WisCon this year, I spoke on a panel geared at “social justice newbies” about curbing the desire to pick a side and saddle up and ride when you see a conflict. Which is not to say don’t have principles or don’t stand by them, it’s simply to say: resist the temptation to reduce a situation to a battle between sides. I wasn’t thinking of this at all in terms of interpersonal relationships, but it’s there, too. Just because two people appear to be in opposition doesn’t mean it’s a battle and it doesn’t mean they need an army. They might just be two friends who have a difference of opinion or  a lot of feelings or even a friend who wronged a friend and who needs to make it right… but in that last case, what probably needs to happen first is for them to back away and get out of a defensive head space and the last thing they need is for someone to come along and join in just when it’s all dying down.

Or they might be enemies. They might have a deep philosophical difference that can’t be bridged. One or both of them might have wronged the other so badly they can’t possibly get along.

But if they’re not asking you to take sides, they probably don’t want you to and they certainly don’t need you to.

Nothing here against people who do ask for support when they’re having difficulty with another individual. Nothing here against people who point out that when you prioritize making someone’s abuser or attacker feel welcome in a shared/public space, you make them unwelcome and the space unsafe. Nothing here at all against the idea of making a stand or being choosy about with whom you associate based on how they treat others.

But, man… letting go of the idea that the world is made up of sides and the only way to interact with a situation is to pick one is just so terribly freeing.

STATUS: Wednesday, June 1st

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

Well, as frequently happens this time of year, I just got back from my best WisCon ever. I felt weird initially, as it felt like something was subtly off about the con or the reception I received there. It wasn’t hostile, wasn’t even unfriendly, just different in a way that initially registered to me as colder. When it settled into me what had changed, though, I realized it wasn’t a bad thing: I wasn’t giving off any “lost/newbie/overwhelmed” signals so no one was coming to my rescue or acting to put me at my ease. Because I didn’t need any such attention, I didn’t miss it, but because it had always been a part of my initial con experience each year, I did notice a difference.

As soon as I realized what that difference was, I made a point to pay things forward. I looked for people who looked lost. I listened for questions in crowded hallways. I broadcast on Twitter when we would be going to the pool so that other congoers would know 1) there is a pool, 2) they wouldn’t be the only con folks there if they went, and 3) they wouldn’t be the only trans and/or queer people in the pool, if applicable. I made a point to make myself available to people who felt alone or unsafe. I think in doing so I made at least one really good friend of someone I was only sort of tangentially in generalized internet/fandom contact with before.

When I lay it all out like that in paragraph form, it sounds like a job in the sense of a thankless chore, and while it is certainly labor that takes time and energy (and labor that is worth valuing as labor), it’s not a matter of “I did this instead of enjoying the con and hanging out with people”. It was the structure by which I spent some of my time enjoying the con and hanging out with people.

Because I saw this con from a very different perspective than previous ones, I also came from it with what I feel is a better understanding about certain dynamics. I will write a bigger blog post about this in more detail in the near future, but the short version is that I’ve realized the merit of doing fan events in giving people who admire and enjoy one’s work a context and framework in which they know that stepping forward and interacting with you is not just acceptable but welcome.

So that coupled with the knowledge (pointed out by Jack) that next summer is the 10th anniversary of Tales of MU’s launch led me to an off-the-cuff Twitter announcement: next year, at WisCon 41, I will be hosting a 10th birthday party for Tales of MU. Or maybe a 10 year class reunion. I don’t know. We have a year to sort that out, and if you’re a MU reader and/or a fan of mine who has been interested in coming to WisCon and/or meeting me, you have a year to plan your trip. WisCon always takes place on Memorial Day weekend, always in beautiful downtown Madison, Wisconsin, and is always is held at the Madison Concourse Hotel (so if you’re early enough in reserving your room that you can get one in the main hotel, you do not have to worry about travel logistics or going outside to get to the main con events).

Economic Outlook

Pretty good! I had really been hoping my Patreon would blow up before the end of the month in a way that it didn’t, but my WorldCon fund did in a way that I really didn’t think it would. I have everything except for the hotel taken care of, will be buying memberships as soon as funds clear.

I do have to unexpectedly buy a new bluetooth keyboard, as my old one died during the con. That’s a minor expenditure.

The State of the Me

You know, when I announced that I was going to get Tales of MU running on a multi-update basis again on June 1st and when I decided I was going to start all these cool new things in June, I was under a mistaken impression about the distance between the con and the end of May. I was figuring that would give me a bit under a week of recovery time and padding between the end of the con and when I needed to kick things into high gear. I’m not sure from where I got that impression, but I had it, and it was wrong.

Turns out that’s okay. Despite having come back to a house that was swelteringly hot and has very little of the sort of food that I need to be eating, despite having had a fairly restless night, today, the day after I got home, I am feeling pretty good. This is my best post-con day ever. Mentally and physically. I can feel the touches of fatigue, but I’m not exhausted, there’s not all-encompassing cognitive fog, I haven’t forgotten all my big plans and dreams, and I’m ready to go on putting them in order. I’m a little unfocused, insofar as I wrote most the daily report section of this post then got caught up in household-organizational stuff (putting things back in order after almost a week with other people living here instead of us) and talking on the twitters about the free speeches.

Plans For Today

Okay. So. Today’s the beginning of the next book of Tales of MU. Big doings there in the afternoon. Between now and then, I’m going to be blogging a lot, though I’m not yet sure if it will be lots of small posts or fewer, bigger ones. I have a lot to say.