Twitter being Twitter means it’s an excellent place to rant about all sorts of things: politics and food and life and children and oh yeah also Ewoks. I found it randomly vital to leap to an impassioned, if sudden, defense of Ewoks yesterday, and I’ve gone ahead and Storified the shit out of it. Please to enjoy. Or despise it, I don’t care, it’s your life, man.

”In this thoughtful take on comic book tropes, queerness and superpowers intersect…. Everything comes together to create a real page-turning adventure in a setting that begs for further exploration.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

”Before you know it, Sacred Band builds a new reality around you – rich, detailed, with a seductive, immersive vernacular, it crosses the globe with confident, queer themes in a world of new media, new magic, and new metahumans.” — Steve Orlando, author of Midnighter, Justice League America

The golden age of heroes is decades past. The government could not condone vigilantism and now metahumans are just citizens, albeit citizens with incredible talent, who are assisted in achieving normal lives (including finding good fits for their talents employment-wise) by a federal agency. Rusty may have been a kid during that glorious age but he remembers his idol, Sentinel, saving lives and righting wrongs until he was outed in an incredible scandal that forced him into isolation. When a gay friend of Rusty living in the Ukraine goes missing, Rusty is forced to acknowledge that while the world’s governments claim that super teams are outdated and replaced by legal law enforcement, there are simply some places where the law doesn t protect everyone–so he manages to find and recruit Sentinel to help him find his friend. But the disappearance of the friend is merely one move in a terrible plot against queer youth. A team of supers may be old-fashioned, but this may be a battle requiring some incredible reinforcements.

Your Queerness is Magnified in the Public Eye

A super powered individual who happens to be queer will seemingly always have that queerness integrated into public opinion about who they are. When Sentinel — the flying, super strong leader of the Champions during the age of superheroes a couple of decades ago — was outed against his will, every narrative the media focused on from that point included the fact that he was gay. From very conservative talk pieces asking if he was truly a fit role model for American youth to liberal political groups who simply assumed that he was now a default part of their political activism, Sentinel was given no choice in his narrative from that point on.

Your Queerness Works Against You Sometimes

Though this particular point is something that nearly all queer people understand and have experienced to one degree or another, its effects are very pronounced with super powered individuals. In the wake of the international scandal involving Sentinel, Llorona feared that her queerness would only alienate her in her work. As such, she subsumed her personal identity into her efforts, becoming one of the best-known and most active members of the Golden Cross, an international relief organization that mobilizes super powered volunteers to deal with natural and wartime disaster mitigation and engages in missions of mercy, some of which take place where it is illegal or even dangerous to be openly queer. Of course, the grief attached to that past and to her super powered origins make that all the easier — there are some things that she wants to forget, and if philanthropic work helps her do that, then that’s what she’s thrown herself into.

Others Take Your Queerness as Permission to Intrude

The details of a queer super powered person’s private life become inexorably attached to their deeds. It doesn’t matter that Deosil is a very respected pagan blogger and public speaker, with a unique view about how her elemental powers fit into her spirituality and esoteric practices. An interview with her is all too often taken as carte blanche to ask about her private medical history as a trans woman and even the name she was assigned at birth, even by very well-meaning interviewers. The fact that none of these have anything to do with her calling — or with her later super heroics — is moot. Her personal queerness seems to always be taken for granted as an open topic because of her presence in the public sphere.

Your Queerness Can “Sully” Your Superheroics

Just as with celebrities, public super powered individuals’ youthful indiscretions are fodder for consumption and gossip. As a new adult, Gauss may have made some decisions he now regrets, but unlike so many others who’ve dabbled in adult entertainment, there is no way anyone is going to let him forget about that particular blue movie he made. After all, he was the first super powered individual to star in one! As a result, he knows that as far as the public is concerned, he’ll always have that one performance lurking in his background, despite what feats of heroism he may also perform.

Your Queer Activism Overwhelms Your Identity Sometimes

A super powered individual who does choose to engage in political discourse of some kind may find that work overwhelms who they are. When the action film star Optic was drummed out of the military’s Project: Seraph at the revelation of his queerness, he took up the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the American military as his cause célèbre. And though he got to see success while acting as the poster boy for that effort — and even managed to leverage that public regard into a career in film — that activism has led to a lot of assumptions about the realities of his sexuality and identity, ones that he’s not even entirely sure how to manage.

At the end of the day, Sacred Band is totally about a group of costumed superheroes righting wrongs and beating up bad guys. But I also hope it’s about putting into context the lived experiences that some queer folk have, in a way that makes them accessible and maybe even enjoyable to read about. In a lot of ways, Sacred Band is one author giving himself over to that old “write what you know” wisdom-nugget, and seeing what comes out the other side of doing so. Hopefully the end result is enjoyable and memorable, and also true, in its own fashion.

(I am also willing to admit that though I did not set out to write a book that would allow me to use the hashtag #superqueeroes from the start, I take no shame in admitting a great deal of pleasure doing so ever since.)

* * *

Joseph Carriker is the developer for Green Ronin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, as well as the adjunct Chronicle System line of game supplements.

He has been writing in the gaming industry for sixteen years now, and has worked on a variety of game lines over those years, including most of White Wolf/Onyx Path’s World of Darkness, Exalted and Scion lines, Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition line, and Green Ronin’s Blue Rose and Mutants & Masterminds in addition to his work on A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying.

He is an outspoken queer gamer, having helped organize and take part in the annual Queer as a Three-Sided Die panels at GenCon. He has also just published his first novel, Sacred Band. Joseph lives in Portland, Oregon with his two partners A.J. and Chillos, and likes to believe he does his part in Keeping Portland Weird.

Joseph D. Carriker, Jr.: Website

Sacred Band: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Alyssa Wong, who is awesome and just double-fisted a couple of Hugo nominations for her continued stellar work, posted the other day on Twitter:

We are so obsessed with youth & success stories. “I published my first novel at 19! This bestseller is in his 20s!” I wonder about that.

— Alyssa Wong (੭ㅇㅅㅇ❀) (@crashwong) April 3, 2017

I wonder about it, too.

I wonder if it’s the result of a youth-obsessed focus, or a dismissal of age and experience, or if it’s something that offers a narrative — and when we see a narrative, true or false or partly-imagined, we give it the spotlight whether or not it’s deserving of one.

You should go to her tweet and read a lot of the responses.

What you’ll see, quite correctly, is a lot of authors who came to this game seemingly late — in their 30s, 40s, even 50s. I had my first published novel hit shelves when I was 36 — and I’ve written 20 total, since then, in the last four years. That’s not meant to be a boast, though I’m obviously happy with it. I can’t speak to the quality of those books, I can only speak to the fact that by most metrics, I am a successful author, though certainly not anywhere near the most successful, and not even as successful as I hope to one day be.

There’s a whole lot of stuff going on here to unpack, and it’s surely worth unpacking. First, it’s not odd that authors find success in later years, because writing and storytelling is often one created on a wave of experience, discipline, and focus, and those things are sometimes likelier to come with age. You live more, you do more, you know more (even as you know less), and so there’s simply more to say. When you have more to say, that cup is brimming over, and it spills out onto the page, and ta-da, you write it all down and contextualize it through (again) narrative. That’s not to say you don’t have a lot to say when you’re young, either: I was fired up and full of shit when I was younger, and wrote a whole lot, too. I just didn’t have much success with it in the novel sense, because I was still working my way through how to write a novel. I instead turned it to short fiction or to freelance game writing, and that worked fine.

Point is, your age is pretty irrelevant when it comes to writing and storytelling. It’s not about how old you are. It’s about who you are, and what you’ve got to say, and how willing and able you are to say it. Maybe age brings confidence and a certain unfuckwithable-ness. Maybe youth brings fire and vigor. I dunno. We’re all gonna die. That’s a fact. Not a one of us is immortal — EXCEPT YOU, DRACULA JOE, I SEE YOU OVER THERE DRINKING THE BLOOD OF THE NUBILE. For the rest of us, this carousel ends at some point, and so we fill our lives ideally with as much purpose as we can while we can. If you wanna be a writer, then hey, that means writing. That’s your purpose. That’s your legacy. A tombstone made of stories.

Write if you’re gonna write.

You’re never too old to write.

And you’re also never too young to start.

But don’t wait. That’s the caution. That’s the danger.

Don’t sit on it. Even if you’re likelier to be more successful later, that later-in-life success is often built on the heaps and mounds of a lot of unsung, unpublished work in your youth. Use that time to build a mountain of glorious failures and fuck-ups. You only get to know what you’re doing by not knowing what you’re doing. You only get to the rarified air of success by climbing that mountain of shit work and fuck-uppery. It’s not a waste of time to write badly. It’s no waste to write in the wrong direction. The path may be circuitous, but the path is still the path. And writing is how you walk it.

The work won’t come to you.

You gotta go do the work.

That’s true whether you’re 16 or you’re 60.

So go do the work and stop worrying about age.

Better yet, don’t compare yourself to others. There’s always somebody out there doing it differently, and doing it better. Always someone younger, older, with more books, more awards, better sales, nicer hair, whatever. What they do isn’t what you do. Who they are isn’t who you are. Their path ain’t your path. Scrap all that worry and write.

Picture credits: Kalaiarasy, “Durian: the King of Fruits, Malaysia”

It is time for Aliette de Bodard, author of the newly-released The House of Binding Thorns, to speak of uncanny punctuation. Adjust your semi-colons. Prepare your emdashes. 

* * *

(With thanks to Fran Wilde)

Semicolons are a bit like durians.

Now, I don’t mean that they’re a fruit, that they’re spiky or that they have a particularly distinctive (and lovely!) smell. What I mean is that they seem to be a hate-it-or-love proposition among writers: some people will fight to the death on their behalf, and some others will immediately turn away in disgust when presented with them.

I’m in the camp of people who love durian, and you can have a guess as to where I fall on semicolons!

All right, I’ll give you a clue. Here’s a formative text I read as a child: the beginning of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, describing hero d’Artagnan.

A young man — we can sketch his portrait at a dash. Imagine to yourself a Don Quixote of eighteen; a Don Quixote without his corselet, without his coat of mail, without his cuisses; a Don Quixote clothed in a woollen doublet, the blue color of which had faded into a nameless shade between lees of wine and a heavenly azure; face long and brown; high cheek bones, a sign of sagacity; the maxillary muscles enormously developed, an infallible sign by which a Gascon may always be detected, even without his cap–and our young man wore a cap set off with a sort of feather; the eye open and intelligent; the nose hooked, but finely chiseled.

And a passage a little further on:

[Athos] added that he did not know either M. or Mme. Bonacieux; that he had never spoken to the one or the other; that he had come, at about ten o’clock in the evening, to pay a visit to his friend M. d’Artagnan, but that till that hour he had been at M. de Treville’s, where he had dined.

(…)

Athos was then sent to the cardinal; but unfortunately the cardinal was at the Louvre with the king.

This is where my love affairs with semicolons started, and I’m afraid it’s never really abated. Rule #1 of my personal operating manual: if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, and it’s hard to argue with the author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and countless other classics I reread so much the binding started giving out.

Semicolons help my prose by letting it breathe. I like long sentences, and there are cases when a comma won’t necessarily do, because I need a hierarchy of pauses: if you look above at the first sentence I quoted, you can see that using only commas would have made it very confusing. It could have been punctuated slightly differently, by removing nearly all the commas and replacing the semicolons by commas (aka “downsizing”, a trick I often use when I need to prune out semicolons), but it wouldn’t have been the same sentence, either (actually, parts of it would need to be rewritten). The way it’s punctuated makes it flow differently.

I also like rhythm in my shorter sentences, and there are also cases where I need a longer pause than that indicated by a simple comma.

For instance, here, in my book The House of Binding Thorns:

You’re jealous, Thuan thought. They’re closer; closer than you are to your mother.

I could most certainly get away with a comma instead of the semicolon, but the text doesn’t quite read the same. The longer pause means the last clause has a stronger highlight, and that’s exactly what I need here, as it’s the key to the relationship between the characters. I could also have used a period for emphasis, but again it’s not the same effect.

The most common objection to use of semicolons I see is that they’re clunky; the second most common is that their usage should conform to style guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style, or various grammar manuals.

I did say I was in the camp of fighting to the death for semicolons, right? Let me get out my trusty sword [1].

All right. *flourishes sword in a vaguely threatening manner* [2] First off, no such thing as clunky: to be sure, you can use semicolons to excess (true story: all my drafts go through a semicolon removal pass where I ruthlessly uproot the tangle of excessive punctuation in order to let the remaining semicolons and em-dashes shine [3]). But to simply remove them altogether from the writing vocabulary is a little like saying you’re never going to use a drill with a hammer action to affix something to a wall — it’s fine until you actually hit the concrete wall!

And second off… Rigid grammar is possibly fine for non-fiction, when the prose is meant not to get in the way of the content. But fiction is about the prose (in many ways it is the prose). The existence of the prose is a defining difference between fiction and other media such as movies. It’s very easy to set the scene in a movie by panning over a background, impossible to go as fast or give quite the same impression using prose. But prose can get into a character’s head and render thoughts into words seamlessly, whereas movies have to resort to voiceovers for this.

Writers can make a deliberate choice to not let the prose get in the way of the plot (which is a prose choice, not a natural or necessarily desirable thing. It really depends on the story and the writer). I’m subscribing to the “nice effects in prose” school of thought: I like my prose poetic, an integral part of building atmosphere. Usage manuals aren’t meant for novels–or no one would ever have written Les Misérables or Ulysses, or even Ursula Le Guin’s or Patricia McKillip’s books; and for me, if rigid grammar gets in the way of prose, then I know where I stand [4].

Rule #N in my operating manual [5]: be ready to bend or break the rules if a. fully aware of the consequences and b. sufficiently experienced. In fact, for me rule #(N+1) is “breaking the rules is often necessary.” Novels are vast and complicated and organic, and you can’t write one by ticking checkboxes or following all the rules on some invisible list.

Writing fiction is when I play with prose. It’s not a demonstration of how good I am at using the language “correctly” (I got over that when I left high school!); it’s a demonstration of how good I am at using it, full stop. It’s about stretching the language if needed, in service to the work.

Rule #(N+2): semicolons really are like durians. I really like using them, and you will pry them out of my cold dead hands.

What about you? What do you think about semicolons? How do you use them (or not!) in your own writing?

*assumes battle stance*

*gathers up allies*

Sketch: Fran Wilde

[1] It is actually my sword, though it’s a ceremonial one associated with my alma mater.

[2] I have a sword. I never said that I knew how to use said sword!

[3] The quick and dirty way to remove semicolons: am I ready to break up the sentence? If yes, replace with a period. If not, can I replace it with a comma (and possibly suppress commas to help legibility)? If still not satisfactory, would a colon help?

[4] I’ve kept my sword. One can never be too careful.

[5] Shh. I’ve lost count of how many rules I actually have.

* * *

Aliette de Bodard: Website | Twitter

The House of Binding Thorns: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

I’m going to give you ten one-word titles.

You will pick one, either by choice or by random generator, to be the title of a piece of flash fiction for this week’s flash fiction challenge.

You’ve got ~1000 words, due by Friday, April 7th, noon EST.

Post the story online.

Link back here.

Here are the ten one-word titles.

Do not combine them.

Do not speak them aloud because they may be a magic spell or launch codes.

CHOOSE.

1. Holiday
2. Undulate
3. Juniper
4. Jumper
5. Permanence
6. Ossuary
7. Supernumerary
8. Sidereal
9. Bushcraft
10. Tourmaline

Lilith Saintcrow is bad-ass. Fireside Magazine is also bad-ass. Hence they are a bad-ass team-up who will use your soul like a soggy dishrag. Lilith is here to talk about the rough birth of a short story — and what happens when that short story isn’t the end of the story.

* * *

When Fireside asked me to do a short story for them, I was both thrilled and somewhat nervous. I had this idea — a woman, detached from almost every emotion, suddenly presented with a job she discovered she didn’t want to do.

There are some writers who find short stories somewhat easy. Not quite taking a fully-fibered-up crap, but close, with very little straining.

I am not one of them. My short story process generally goes like this:

Someone wants me to write a short story! Hooray!

Wait. Wait a second. That means I actually have to write a short story.

Goddammit.

…okay, I can do this. Maybe.

Throw myself at the idea four or five times, writing a substantial chunk each time.[1]

Toss them all into the Story Graveyard[2] because said ideas are either too complex for a short story or I decide they’re hideous. Throw myself at another two attempts. Toss those out too.

Frustrated weeping.

Staring into space. One or two more attempts, also tossed out.

Deadline approaching. Panic.[3]

Go back through every single attempt I tossed away. One or two hold promise.

Start from scratch. Story suddenly slides out like a watermelon through an episiotomy, looking completely different from any of the prior attempts.

Finish a draft of the story, go looking for bourbon or chocolate, don’t look at draft for a week.

Go back and discover that I’ve written a short story, and now all I have to do is wait for the editor to tell me they hate it, but that will be all right because after all that agony, I hate it too.

All of the above is to say I envy those who actually like writing short stories, or choose to work in that medium instead of just doing it because you know it’s good for you. Like exercise, or eating broccoli.[4]

But Fireside needed the story, I’d already agreed, and there was no retreat possible. I also didn’t want to send the money back.

Hey, I have kids, and they need to eat.

So I began feeling my way around the edges of the story. Mostly, I wanted to explore the idea of motherhood from inside the head of a woman who didn’t believe in anything but efficiency of emotion, efficacy of movement, and a complete lack of qualm over murder.

The more our society puts motherhood on a pedestal every May, the less attention is paid to the fact that it’s a dirty, dangerous, exhausting, thankless job.[5] There is a certain incandescent relief when someone openly admits as much; it validates one’s own less-than-Hallmark experiences in the parenting field.

At first, the mother in the proto-story had a name, and the child she found did not. As I made attempt after attempt, I began to realize that was the problem. I was fucking around with archetypes. Slowly, over various drafts and attempts, the picture shifted.

Normally a character’s name is part and package of the whole-soul deal one makes, a la Henry James and his characters — “Actively believe in us, and then you’ll see.” In this case, it was an impediment.

So I threw away everything I’d written so far, and all of a sudden, the story began to breathe.

She was a cyborg, you see. When you’re functionally immortal and just as functionally enslaved by a corporation that made you that way, deciding not to waste energy on emotion is a smart move. When, all of a sudden, you’re presented with the one job you told your handlers you would not perform, what do you do?

Thus was born Maternal Type, the short story. Fireside readers liked it, and in talking to Brian White, Fireside’s editor, I inadvertently let slip that it was only the beginning of the story.[6] The real fun, I had discovered, happened afterward, out in the radioactive waste with cowboys, mutants, cyborgs, hiveminds, corporate mining towns, and gigantic worms probably showing up because I’d reread some parts of Dune during the months of wrestling to write the goddamn short story and it had lodged firmly in my subconscious, as things tend to do when you jack into the ether and dredge fiction up from swirling, dangerous depths.

Brian’s editorial ears perked. Of course I could write more, I replied numbly, suspecting just what kind of trouble I was about to get myself into. The story had opened, like a puzzle box full of Pinheads just waiting to use hooks and chains and thinly veiled erotic horror to titillate a moviegoing crowd.

That’s part of my problem with short stories. They’re never the whole tale; they are the part of the iceberg you see. The rest — the chunk I founder on — lurks sharklike, ready to tear out your hull.

No, short stories are not really my cuppa. But a novel-length serial? That, I knew how to do.[7]

Thus was born She Wolf and Cub, my love song to (including but not limited to) Ogami Itto and Daigoro his son, cowboy movies, the Terminator movies, pro-choice protestors, every Wild Western trope I could lay my hands on, Kage Baker’s Company novels, and a mass of thoughts and feelings about motherhood.

Longtime readers will know one of the early attempts to write Maternal Type ended up as Pack, where the named narrator chooses to take on the burden of a half-feral child in a Cthulhu-infested postapocalyptic wasteland. That, in itself, surprised me — most of the short-story attempts end up in the mulch pile I call the Story Graveyard, sitting on my hard drive and fermenting, providing ballast and microbes to other works but not growing in their own right.

What also surprised me was that upon revising She Wolf for publication as a novel, I noticed things I hadn’t seen before. Like the theme of choice, of the liberating component of decision, like the idea that motherhood, when not forced upon a passive and resentful subject, is an active verb.

I tell new writers not to worry about themes. They are carrion eaters, showing up everywhere there’s food. You won’t be able to swing a dead operative in your cyborg-assassin-cowboy stories without hitting one, or two, or a whole passel of them. Like that other worry, voice, they will come if you produce enough work for all those things you think about, all those things you hide, every embarrassment and joy rub through one’s social persona to make you the person you are.

Storytelling is a continuous process of peeling back interior layers. Not that readers should confuse authors with their characters, no. Writing as an internal event strips those layers, and the multiple choices made — each word, each sentence, each event — echoes while they sandblast the inside of a writer.

Sound pleasant? No? Well, like parenthood, nobody ever said writing was easy.

The day I finished revision, dinner was pizza because my brain was fried. The kids love this part of the process. When copyedits or revisions land, the joy of Mum being too tired to cook is somewhat tempered by the fact that I will be in my office swearing as if I’m putting together Ikea furniture, often at top volume.

“So you finished?” my daughter asked.

“Yeah. I think.”

“So…” They tend to get them mixed up. “Which one’s this?”

“The cyborg western.”

My son’s ears perked up. “Oh, that one!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lots of murder and riding camels.”

“Both good things,” my daughter said sagely, taking a large bite of pepperoni-crusted cheese.

They, like the short stories, are sometimes difficult, but in the end, definitely my children, and no-one else’s.

Motherhood has its price. What is bought with that coin marks you forever. I knew that, but the cyborg didn’t.

Now, with the finished book out in the world, she does.

…

[1] Incidentally, this is the way I approach most things. I’m told it’s very amusing to watch.

[2] See below.

[3] This is where my writing partner gets tired of me.

[4] Before you yell at me for hating broccoli, look, I don’t. It’s just not a luxurious food I can roll around in. Like cheese. Or dark chocolate. Or Thai peanut sauce.

[5] See Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood.

[6] He may remember this part differently. I suspect bourbon was a component on both sides.

[7] Well, really, writing a novel doesn’t teach you how to write a novel, it just teaches you to write the one you’re writing now, and all that. But after having done it 50+ times, I think I can stumble through the process without too much frustrated banging my head on my desk. Maybe. Someday.

* * *

Lilith Saintcrow is the author of several fantasy, science fiction, romance, and Young Adult series. She lives in Vancouver, Washington, with two children, two dogs, three cats, a guinea pig, and various other assorted strays.

Lilith Saintcrow: Website | Twitter

She-Wolf And Cub: Amazon | Apple | Kobo | B&N | Goodreads