The bolded sections represent quotes from the criticism he received. All the z-snaps are in order.
Your characters are unrealistic stereotpyes of political correctness. Is it really necessary for the sake of popular sensibilities to have in a fantasy what we have in the real world? I read fantasy to get away from politically correct cliches.
God, yes! If there’s one thing fantasy is just crawling with these days it’s widowed black middle-aged pirate moms.
Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women, they were vicous rapits and murderers and I am sorry to say it was a man’s world. It is unrealistic wish fulfilment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates, especially if you want to be politically correct about it!
First, I will pretend that your last sentence makes sense because it will save us all time. Second, now you’re pissing me off.
You know what? Yeah, Zamira Drakasha, middle-aged pirate mother of two, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. I realized this as she was evolving on the page, and you know what? I fucking embrace it.
Why shouldn’t middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfillment character, you sad little bigot? Everyone else does. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” I can’t think of anyone to whom that applies more than my own mom, and the mothers on my friends list, with the incredible demands on time and spirit they face in their efforts to raise their kids, preserve their families, and save their own identity/sanity into the bargain.
Shit yes, Zamira Drakasha, leaping across the gap between burning ships with twin sabers in hand to kick in some fucking heads and sail off into the sunset with her toddlers in her arms and a hold full of plundered goods, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy from hell. I offer her up on a silver platter with a fucking bow on top; I hope she amuses and delights. In my fictional world, opportunities for butt-kicking do not cease merely because one isn’t a beautiful teenager or a muscle-wrapped font of testosterone. In my fictional universe, the main characters are a fat ugly guy and a skinny forgettable guy, with a supporting cast that includes “SBF, 41, nonsmoker, 2 children, buccaneer of no fixed abode, seeks unescorted merchant for light boarding, heavy plunder.”
You don’t like it? Don’t buy my books. Get your own fictional universe. Your cabbage-water vision of worldbuilding bores me to tears.
As for the “man’s world” thing, religious sentiments and gender prejudices flow differently in this fictional world. Women are regarded as luckier, better sailors than men. It’s regarded as folly for a ship to put to sea without at least one female officer; there are several all-female naval military traditions dating back centuries, and Drakasha comes from one of them. As for claims to “realism,” your complaint is of a kind with those from bigoted hand-wringers who whine that women can’t possibly fly combat aircraft, command naval vessels, serve in infantry actions, work as firefighters, police officers, etc. despite the fact that they do all of those things– and are, for a certainty, doing them all somewhere at this very minute. Tell me that a fit fortyish woman with 25+ years of experience at sea and several decades of live bladefighting practice under her belt isn’t a threat when she runs across the deck toward you, and I’ll tell you something in return– you’re gonna die of stab wounds.
What you’re really complaining about isn’t the fact that my fiction violates some objective “reality,” but rather that it impinges upon your sad, dull little conception of how the world works. I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all. I’m not writing history, I’m writing speculative fiction. Nobody’s going to force you to buy it. Conversely, you’re cracked if you think you can persuade me not to write about what amuses and excites me in deference to your vision, because your vision fucking sucks.
I do not expect to change your mind but i hope that you will at least consider that I and others will not be buying your work because of these issues. I have been reading science fiction and fantasy for years and i know that I speak for a great many people. I hope you might stop to think about the sales you will lose because you want to bring your political corectness and foul language into fantasy. if we wanted those things we could go to the movies. Think about this!
Thank you for your sentiments. I offer you in exchange this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill, suitable for framing.
Here follows is a non-comprehensive list of historical female pirates and sailors, women of color first:
Ching Shih (1775-1844): controlled south China seas, had 80,000-man fleet at her disposal, outlawed rape, extorted retirement package from the Chinese government.
Sayyida al-Hurra (1482-1562): Pirate queen of Morocco who bedeviled Portuguese and Spanish fleets after being kicked out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in her youth.
I’ve been wavering back and forth on whether or not I should post this because it’s very personal and possibly not as informed as I would like it to be. And it requires a little prefacing.
I’m nonbinary.
I write nonbinary characters. (I don’t have a single story which doesn’t include at least a protagonist or love interest who’s nonbinary, usually with a number of nonbinary supporting characters.)
And these nonbinary characters come in all forms and styles and pronouns and self presentations, from humans who believe they aren’t defined by anyone else’s perception of their gender, to characters whose entire society doesn’t differentiate between male and female, to agender demi-gods who use gendered pronouns because they feel like it and their to genderfluid parents who wear dresses to the opera.
Through the process of writing these characters I’ve subjected them to quite a few beta readers. And what I see in my feedback is a consistent trend of binary readers worried over whether my portrayals of nonbinary character might come off as offensive, while nonbinary readers don’t bat an eye.
Now, I’m certainly not saying that it’s bad for people of binary genders to be critical of how nonbinary characters are portrayed, because I love having people watching out for me and my nonbinary fam.
But I’m also worried.
I’m worried that binary writers aren’t writing nonbinary characters because they’re afraid of getting it wrong.
If binary writers are worried a nonbinary writer is getting their own representation wrong, then how much more are they criticizing themselves for perceived flaws in their own nonbinary characters?
Please: Write nonbinary characters. Specifically, write nonbinary protagonists and love interests.
There is such a broad scale of nonbinary identifying individuals, who’ve all had very different experiences, who all present themselves in different ways, with different pronouns, for different reasons. We are more diverse than you can imagine.
And yet we have essentially no representation. We are dying, dying, for characters in fiction who’s similar to us. The most devastating way you can mess up is to not care enough to try in the first place.
Edit:
I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts for a day because I needed to edit it and boy. Boy am I pissed.
Just fucking pissed.
After having a binary person (one who only writes a nonbinary villain no less) attempt to call out my #ownvoice representation, I couldn’t be more angry.
(I mean, I could be more angry, as proven by that time a TERF broke into my personal messages to write me two essays on why my identity isn’t real and I actually just hate myself enough to pretend it is, but that’s a different story altogether.)
So I amend this:
Please, please write nonbinary characters. But please, for the love of all things good, don’t try to tell other writers how to write these nonbinary characters if you aren’t also nonbinary.
Write us characters but don’t fucking step on us in the process.
friendship ended with the creative process, now gay sex is my best friend
i hate the way they framed it as “oh he had sex and then stopped writing” when what happened was he carried right the fuck on writing (and the works are now available) he just stopped publishing because he was writing explicitly gay shit because he was tired of writing about things he didn’t care about and felt like he didn’t have to any more
*pulls up to the fanfic drive-thru window* uh yeah, i’ll take a fake relationship with a side of mutual pining and thinking the other isn’t interested, thanks
sometimes i wish writers could do live streams like artists, but then realize that, even if there were a way to make this not boring as fuck, the act of having other people watch me write would reveal that my writing/plotting/editing techniques are horrific and should not be witnessed by any living human
a normal artist streaming: doo dee doo gonna go through this process in a logical order and show off my skills isn’t this fun?
me, a Word Goblin: and here’s the part where I delete five paragraphs for not making any sense and then start jotting down unrelated plot ideas in an incoherent form of shorthand
Oh! And let us not forget all the weird, embarrassing, and sometimes (incredibly) sketchy things I have to google in the middle of writing a sentence. No one needs to know how long I spent researching the Vietnam draft lottery or trying to find that oneword I know that I know but can’t think of by going through ten layers of thesaurus.com
The only reason no one usually sees my weird google searches while I’m streaming is because I have 2 monitors and the stream is only capturing 1 (one).
…..TWO MONITORS WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT
I’d do a writing stream but people would get like 10 min of writing and then 45 min of my tumblr dash. With about 15 min of thesaurus.com sprinkled in there somewhere.
I mean I actually did this once and like, one person showed up as I was getting ready and then left so I never did it again. I was like. I can write alone and fuck around on Tumblr without also streaming it
I feel like this is something you can only do with really close friends usually who are actually writers. It isn’t streaming, but I do write in googledocs with people using the chat feature, but not a fun showing off way. More like ‘a dear god can you help keep me focused long enough to finish writing this piece’ sort of a way.
I’ve written more
about Sherlock Holmes than the man who created him.
Books, fan
fiction, articles, essays; more than three quarter of a million words.
The thing is, I
almost stopped so many times. Because I write professionally, people pay me to
write about flu jabs and saving for retirement but they didn’t pay me to write
hundreds of thousands of words of Sherlock fan fiction.
So I tried
quitting. Tried to focus on ‘real’ writing. Yet every time I turned in an
article on feral cats or baby colic, I’d start another chapter on another fic,
muttering I shouldn’t be doing this, this
isn’t paying the bills. I was always promising myself I’d quit.
I didn’t though,
and there was a reason for that: Writing fic about men in love and lust made me
happy. Giddy happy. Excited happy. Run round the room fist-bumping myself
happy.
Yet, because I’m
duller than the average deducing bear, I still tried to stop. Each time I did,
I’d grouse and grumble, and each time my friend Tony would encourage me to keep
going.
And yet, like
some sort of over-dramatic consulting detective, I’d lament: “But fan
fiction doesn’t earn me a living!”
Finally, Tony
responded with the two best words in the history of best words.
“So
what?”
*Blink* *Blink* So…………what?
Oh my. Oh my yes.
So the hell what?
Sure, maybe being
part of a fandom like Star Wars or Sherlock or Supernatural, maybe having a passion for writing fan fiction or
drawing fan art isn’t bringing a pay check. Well generally neither does petting
a kitten, going to the cinema, or having sex, and yet we manage to do and
delight in all of these things, finding fulfillment and joy.
That’s what
Tony’s so what taught me. Joy is
enough. Finding joy in a fandom is enough. Yet beyond that, being part of a fandom, drawing, writing, meeting people,
well these things give so. many. other. things.
A community. A
place to share ideas. A place to find new ones. A place to fan the flames of
your passion.
And that passion,
oh it’s powerful. With passion you write more, draw more, edit more fan vids.
And when that happens, something beautiful happens.
You get better.
Then better still.
If you’re me you
write even more stories and then you finally, finally, finally pitch a Sherlock Holmes book to a publisher.
And get accepted.
Without fic and
the Sherlock fandom, without years of encouragement from readers and fellow
writers, I might not have bestirred my damn butt from its metaphorical chair
and approached that publisher. I’d already pitched books to publishers you see
and like every writer I had a stack of rejections.
Then Jayantika
Ganguly, a Sherlockian friend, one day said to me, “I’d like to introduce
you to someone. You should pitch something to him. He publishes Sherlock Holmes
books.”
So, because
people loved my AO3 fic Well Met,
I pitched the publisher a book based on that concept. The Day They Met came out in 2015, The Night They Met was published a year later,both books inspired by that fan fiction.
Writing and
reading fic changes things. It changes you. It has power.
Let it power you.
This is an abridged version of
an article written originally for Powers of
Expression. Wendy C Fries also writes as Atlin Merrick.
-making the facial expression your character’s making and trying to describe it
-writing entire scenes in your head as you shower and not remembering most of it by the time you get to your computer
-deciding you can’t do something you’ve been looking forward to until you write what you told yourself you were going to write, resulting in you laying in your bed doing nothing
-having two completely different ideas for your story to go in and both seem equally good but you can’t do both and you also can’t choose
-having docs with stories you know you’ll never finish but not deleting them anyway, even if they’re only a couple sentences long
-getting random bursts of productivity that could go towards homework or cleaning your room or writing and you know you’ll only be able to do one
-getting inspiration from the most random things
-writing at inopportune times because a perfect line or dialogue just popped into your head and you have to get it down before you forget it
-“what are you writing?” “……..a story”
– “what do you want to do when you grow up?” “uunnghnnggguughhhhh”
-reveling in the embarrassment you put your characters through
He stopped in front of the mirror and sighed. His penis was just a little too large to be fashionable, and his balls were just a little lopsided. Most days it didn’t bother him, but today he pushed at his genitals, trying to make them look more normal, like the men in magazines. It was hopeless. He dropped his junk in resigned frustration. There were worse things than having too large of a penis, he thought.
While, granted, some writers do take the breast thing too far, this comparison doesn’t even make sense. Men don’t obsess about their genitals the way women obsess about their breasts because they’re not in your face all the time (in the case of large boobs). Breasts are just more visible (closer to eye level).
Newsflash! Women don’t obsess about our breasts.
No really, we live with them 24/7, we can see friends, and relatives breasts pretty much on demand, hell, we just have to go to get changed at the gym to be inundated with boobs. They are really boring to us (ad while we’re on it, nowhere near as sensitive as so many men seem to think!).
The only time a woman might obsess about her breasts is when they’re painful, such as when lactating or wearing an ill-fitting bra, and neither situation is at all sexy.
Men obsess over women’s breasts. Women don’t.
I’m just loling about supposedly obsessing over my breasts because they’re near my face.
“In your face all the time (in case of large boobs)”
So apparently large breasts are gravity-defying objects that rise up to our face until eye level, huh??
Any women out there willing to draw out how this guy’s version of boob reality might look like, because this is just too ridiculous 😂😂😂
I needed this belly-laugh, I really did, so many you did too.
I..am..idk
I am running around with D boobs. Do you really think I am obsessed with them?! The only thing I am obsessed with are big bras!
New study finally visualizes how the average woman perceives her daily life(24/7) with boobs, according to cis men
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 