Some very wise thinking
Mar. 12th, 2009 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesThis articles on authors who blog and recent nastiness regarding George RR Martin by Guy Gavriel Kay (author of Tigana and more recently, Ysabel) seems very wise and reasoned to me.
As a yet unknown, unpublished hack who blogs about her unknown, unpublished hackiness, I have to say that I agree with Kay when he says:
For those who don't know, a long while back I had one LJ for everything. Life, fandom, professional writing. Then I made the decision to split those into three journals. One personal, one fannish, and one for pro writing and reading of books and my pursuit of publication. I did this largely based on the fact that it occurred to me that if I took my f-list and I split them into people who were there because they were personal friends, fannish friends, or people who I'd met through communities and other places focusing on professional, non-fannish writing, I'd have three pretty distinct lists with minimal crossover.
There are, of course, some bits of crossover, but only about five or six people that I can think of who have friended more than one of those journals.
At the time, I didn't do this with any forward thinking implications in mind or because I was even particularly smart. I did it because I thought it would increase blog readership. I thought, "Well, if the people who only care about my fanfiction don't have to put up with updates about my job or home, they'll probably be more likely to friend me."
The reason I figured this to be the case was because I realized that many times, if I went to a person's journal for fanfiction or some pro-writing thing and then found that there were lots of entries in between about their dog or their spouse or that really cool restaurant they went to with those really cool people (none of which meant a thing to me) that I was less likely to friend them.
I realize this is a matter of personal taste on my part, and that there are plenty of people who like hearing about the personal lives of the writers or fanwriters that they friend and follow on blogs.
But given Kay's article, and the events of RaceFail09 and the utter storm that's surrounded some of the industry professionals (which has pretty much exclusively taken place in the blogosphere), it seems to me that I've unwittingly made a rather wise decision. Not because I'm wise, but because I accidentally did something good.
The reason it seems to me that it's a good idea to keep my peas and potatoes on opposite sides of the plate, as it were, besides feeling that people who come to hear about my unpublished nobodiness have no real interest in my vacation photos, is that I also feel part of being a professional is not making everything personal.
I don't just want to be a writer. I'm already a writer. A writing writer who writes. What I want to be is a professional writer, not just in the sense of being someone who is published and paid, but in my attitude and actions. I want to be consummately professional.
Part of being professional, at least in my image of it, is leaving home issues at home. I think there is high value in being able to compartmentalize without being contradictory.
When I was an intern at the Publishing Company That Shall Not Be Named, I did an interview with a woman who held a pretty high ranking executive position in a major company (they too, shall remain unnamed) as part of one of our books and for our website. And during that interview we discussed how it is that she kept a "work-life balance" (which is one of those corporate culture buzzword like "growing your potential"), and in that interview she mentioned that she uses her commute and the walk from the train station to her car to help her do that by using that walk to transition from being a professional executive to returning to being a wife and mother.
And this lady was one sharp lady, and that part of her interview always struck me as being evidence that she really had it together, that she knew what she was doing in life.
Especially since, in the course of other interviews, it became clear to me that women who were satisfied with their jobs and positions and who were the most successful almost always had really good, detailed, lengthy answers when asked about how they dealt with trying to make time for it all.
Sad to say, most of the men seemed to think that balancing work and life meant checking a checklist and saying "oh, I went to a ballgame" or "I attended my kid's play" or "I picked up that thing from the grocery store my wife wanted" and not much else as far as work-life balance went, as though the raising of children and having of a marriage were a series of events and not a holistic, daily process. But that's a whole other discussion for a whole other journal.
Forgetting inherent gender differences, I think what the women had figured out, especially the very savvy ones, was that you have to different chambers and different doors. Some doors need to stay tightly locked at specific times. They understood that being professional meant understanding that in order to make more universal connections and make relationships with people outside of a personal context, that cooperation had to be based on something besides liking the person as a friend.
They seemed to have an intuitive sense that there was no reason on Earth why some person who's flown in from L.A. or Tokyo or London to talk about marketing strategy and profit losses should care that their kid just finished toilet training or that they had seen a great movie last week or that they were having their period and they just fought with their husband. Sure, there's room for small talk in the corporate world as in any place when people interact, but the women seemed to get that you have acknowledge and understand what people are coming to you, why they're there, and what that entails respecting in your relationship. They seemed to understand that if they're not there for personal reasons, then you have an obligation not to make your personal issues their problems in a professional space.
When I, as a reader, friend or follow a livejournal/blog, I do so not because I thought that the author was, personally, such a terrific person. I don't do it because I'm so fascinated by that author that I simply must know when they clean their house, what movies they see, and what they buy at the grocery store. When I follow that blog, it is because I found a creative, literary based thought process in them to be so interesting that I want to hear more about how they write, how they think creatively, how they edit, what their plans for the next book are, how they deal with agents and editors.
In short, when I go to a writer's blog, I want to hear about writing. Which is why there are writers who I have defriended or stopped reading because they seem convinced that the world at large needs to know about the most minute details of their lives, however tedious or - in the case of the author who posted a picture of her warped foot - disgusting. It seems to me to be the height of arrogance to believe that such things about you are so important that they deserve to be posted.
This is not to say that I believe authors should never talk about anything personal, but I would appreciate it if those personal announcements were either of such importance as to matter in a larger context (getting married, a relative dying, the birth of a child, etc) or some how related to the writing. I don't mind a writer noting that they've paused writing to go on a trip, or that life issues are keeping them from writing and how that relates to their writing.
What I do mind is an author who posts about going to lunch at a place I'll never go to, with a bunch of people I don't know (complete with the five rows of namechecking), with nary an explanation of why I should care or who these people are, or an author who posts about the details of a non-writing related hobby that are so esoteric to any outsiders that it practically has it's own language and lingo.
Because there is this assumption in the public posting of such things that I will be interested, and that these things somehow hold greater importance than if some random, unpublished guy named Bob posted about his life and going to lunch with Fred, Larry, and Moe.
Which is why I don't read blogs like that where I can help it. I can't say, that being an unwashedpublished, unknown hack, that I have any space, really, to tell an author how to conduct themselves. After all, who the hell am I? Some lilly white shmuck(ette? is there a feminine of schmuck?) on the internet who's passably intelligent enough to chew bubble gum and walk and maybe type wurds real gud on the inturnet.
I don't like the implication that when you write a book, your grocery list suddenly becomes more important than mine.
Therein, I think, lies some of the stickiness during RaceFail09. Given that these things are all being discussed and happening on blogs - with some ugly threatened and alleged forays into offline life by people who are guilty not only of unprofessional conduct but conduct unbecoming of a human being - there were a lot of professional authors who conducted themselves badly out of a sense of personal insult and anger, and thus conducted themselves reactively, defensively, and badly.
It is to the great credit of the anti-racist side (and yes, there are sides) that by and large, they have checked personal things at the door. I've found surprisingly few personal, intimate references in the posts by the PoC and their allies. And while I'm no expert, and certainly not past racism 101 in my own development, I think it speaks to a rather intelligent understanding that when we talk about racism in SF/F we're not really even talking about an individual-level problem.
Racism in SF/F is an endemic problem, and it is a group-level issue. It is about the way groups of professional are conducting themselves in their professional behavior, or fans are conducting themselves in their fannish behavior. Yes, there are individuals doing this behaving, but the effect is cumulative. This is about a group culture. This is about professional decisions, decisions about who to publish, what to publish, how to publish it. This is about how groups respond to those publications. This is about how professionals are reacting to criticism of their professional actions.
Yet, many of these professionals are not acting at all professionally.
Many of them seem to have forgotten that they are professionals at all, and seem to have forgotten that while being a published, well known author doesn't mean you lose all rights to a private life or to having the right to speak about it or blog about it - it does mean that you need to be wary that when you blog about things, especially when you blog straight from the Id, rather than filtering your online words with the same caution you would if you were making a statement for the press or at a business meeting.
A lot of these errant professionals reacted as though someone had come into their living rooms and slapped them and then started calling their best friends terrible names. I'm sure it looked a bit like that to them, seeing as they treat their blogs much like one big, cozy party being held in their homes.
But this is where the PoC and allies have a far keener, more sophisticated understanding of the situation.
These professionals use their blogs at networking tools, as cheap (even free) marketing for their books, their appearances at cons and signings, as free ways to pimp the books of their professional friends. They can treat them as personal spaces as they want, but the fact remains, that these blogs are not personal journals. They are professional tools. These blogs are a way in which these authors are garnering fans (thus, profits).
So when the PoC and their allies complain about an author, a well known author, who has thousands of individuals hooked into their networking tool, is using that tool in a way that really hurts them, they have a completely valid point.
When an author can count how many people are reading their blog, and having that number well known or at least readily available, uses that readership to shame someone else, or to out them, or just to call them liars and extremists, they can't then fall back on the argument that they're just speaking personally in a personal space. They can't use a blog as a cyber megaphone and then complain that they're being accused of drowning out other voices. They are. That's the point.
Nor can authors complain that they're unfairly held responsible for the actions of their fans and followers when it's very clear that they've more than taken on that responsibility when they call for their fans to do other things.
I'm sorry, but if you used your blog to try to get a group of people to do something you wanted done (like say, buy your book or support a cause you do care about, or in the case of other professionals mentioned in Kay's article, to go after your detractors), you can't then say that you have no obligations as far as the actions of those fans go, especially when you're the one who provoked that response in the first place.
You can't be the Pied Piper, and happily lead all the rats down to the river, expecting payment for it, and then complain that you had no control over the rats and people are out of place to criticize you for the way you play your music. When, demonstrably, the point of you even playing that music the way you did was to make the rats follow you.
And trying to claim that, "Oh, all these kids just followed me down here, even though I was playing the same tune that made the rats follow and I'm very clearly angry at you" is not only disingenuous but deeply stupid.
If you're conducting the orchestra, then, yes, you are responsible for the music going sour, even if you're not the one individually playing the instrument.
Now, I want to be clear. I do not think these examples negate the responsibility of readers to look closely at those writers they admire, and the actions those writers take. Nor do I think it excuses fans for acting like rats and following a writer down to the river whenever they play the right tune.
If anything, I think, knowing that you're going to be approaching someone who can and will try to exercise that kind of influence over you should make fans, readers, and followers even more wary. I know that since RaceFail, I've become a lot more cautious of giving writers any kind of devotion or loyalty in that way. I've become wary of being a fan who'll buy anything by someone I like.
But I think to ignore that humans are social animals, and that it is really quite easy to get people to follow you if you make the right moves is stupid. We're pack animals, people. We work in groups, and part of that is that most of us have some desire to follow a leader.
We're also rational animals who can overcome base urges. But that doesn't excuse those who use those base urges to their own ends.
It certainly does not mean they can call up the fans like a flock of trained birds and then deny culpability when that flock goes pecking out people's eyes.
There's a reason we have laws against inciting a riot. Sure, every single individual in that riot could have walked away and not rioted, but the person who gathered them together and stirred them up, knowing how to do so and what to have that mob do, has an additional responsibility for what happens in the riot.
I think I've repeated myself enough on this.
My bigger point is that this is why I get so fed up with some of the more clueless folks in RaceFail09 who make this issue inappropriately about them and make exaggerations about what the goals, aims, and actions of the PoC's and their allies have been.
I have yet to see a single post (and I've read quite a few, via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rydra_wong and her linkspams on the issue and other sources) where a PoC/ally has said, "We're going to come into your house, and if you don't have at least five PoC friends and a shrine to MLK and Obama and Gandhi, we're going to hit you with sticks and go around booing you in the supermarket and at your job!"
In fact, I have seen posts where people on the anti-racist side have patently said they do not approve of anyone taking this fight to a personal level, of anyone on their side trying to get someone fired, or sending hate mail. You can go throughrydra_wong's posts to find just how many there are.
What I have seen are PoCs/allies saying, "You've been using professional tools and professional connections to do things that hurt us, to reward those who say things that hurt us, to damage our ability to work within this profession and this subset of this profession, and to keep perpetuating the stereotypes, attitudes, and behaviors that have not only hurt us professionally and kept us from publication and acknowledgment in SF/F literature. Therefore, we will take professional actions. We will engage in the same public sphere you have to say that your public actions are publicly wrong."
Furthermore, I think it smacks of entitlement and hypocrisy that a lot of these posts got started by authors who were responding to criticism of themselves and their friends on other sites and blogs than their own or their friends. Until many of these authors opened the floor, most of the commentary was taking place elsewhere. It seems absurd to me that an author should react to others criticizing them and their friends elsewhere, but then use their own blog to dismiss or drown out that criticism.
Especially when the power of that blog and the readership they gained were, in some ways, garnered using racist, exclusionary methods. As though they're somehow entitled to extend to favorable (and yes, unconsciously racist) environment of their "living room" style blog to the entire internet. That people owe them as much deference and respect when commenting in their own blogs as they do when commenting directly to the author's face (or on their blog).
In case you didn't notice, I consider that to be completely untrue and a rather obnoxious stance to take.
Let me also note: I'm blown away by the poise, professionalism, and utter grace shown by the PoC's/allies. I'm blown away by how they dealt with all this in the face of what has to be frustration the likes of which would make most folks to volcanically explode. Even the angriest, most intense responses have been better than some of the whining, entitled responses from the Flocks of the Clueless.
While I regret that so many people have gotten so hurt or had to be so exhausted by other people's unwillingness to learn, and their entitled attitudes, I do not regret that I've been show that these people are the sharpest, brightest, and best.
So what does this mean going forward?
Well, for me, it means that I'm going to continue keeping my peas and potatoes on the opposite side of the plate. It means that I want to keep these things I've said in mind, in case the fates should shine upon me and I should find professional success and suddenly, instead of the tens of people who actually read what I have to say, there are hundreds or even (eep!) thousands.
It also means that I need to make sure I keep focusing on making sure that the things I'm doing in a professional, public way are not damaging to the very people I hope I'm an ally to.
On a side note: I'm not sure when one, as a white person, gets to call themselves an ally. I know that I want to be one, but I don't feel I'm nearly educated, experienced, or even worthy of that title, of that trust. Maybe five years from now? Ten? I consider myself to be pre-racism 101.
Hopefully, one day, I will have achieved that worthiness. Hopefully by following my own advice, by remembering to be professional, to be as graceful and poised as they have been, even while expressing intense anger and hurt.
On a less-about-me note, I think it also means that the there need to be serious questions asked by blogging authors about what their goals are and what their responsibilities are, and what the appropriate rules of engagement.
I noted, a long time ago (practically the Archaic period as far as the internet is concerned) about the whole Nightshade press and the all-male cover of an anthology that was half male and half female writers thing that one thing I was really disappointed with was that the person in charge of the press actually was responding in comments on people's LiveJournals.
That struck me as unfair, and rather unprofessional. To my mind, it seems like when you are someone who wants to run a professional business operation, there are certain avenues that just aren't appropriate. Especially as a creative professional. I find it very wrong when an author even so much as acknowledges Amazon.com reviews or LJ reviews.
There is such a thing as author's privilege where creative works are concerned. The author owns and controls that, yet in sharing it, wants the cooperation (read: loyalty and money) of the fans. Therefore there is an interaction in which the author is privileged somewhat over the readers.
I think given that privilege, there are spaces the authors and professionals of this industry ought to stay out of. Fan review sites and messageboards and the like are some of those. Fandom is a community built around creative works, and that community best flourishes where it can grow organically, when it can go in all the wild directions that fandom inevitably takes. Having an author, who is like a giant playing in a playground with very small children, trouncing about, easily able to step all over people, stunts that growth. And furthermore, it's a case of "pick on someone your own size!"
You're a published author. Yes, that does come with status and some extra muscle to flex. So what is it to you that Lisa from Montana said she didn't like that book, or that ten or twenty Lisas didn't like it and posted it on Amazon.com? What is it to you that some fans got together and decided that they wanted a different ending, so wrote it and shared it among themselves on a whim on some messageboard? This is, of course, when no money changes hands and it's a completely free endeavor. When money comes into the picture, it's different.
I acknowledge that these things can affect how much money you make, but considering that these very people are the people you want to make that money from, it seems to me that it behooves an author to let them be, to leave them alone, and to, well, get back to work. You're the writer, not the Creative Police.
If you want to share a work, you must relinquish some measure of control over it and how it is interpreted. Complete control is also complete privacy. Which I think is what is so troubling about many privacy issues in America today, but that is so another entry for another day when I don't have a ton of stuff to do.
As a yet unknown, unpublished hack who blogs about her unknown, unpublished hackiness, I have to say that I agree with Kay when he says:
Disturbing as this is, in some ways, I find it difficult to come down hard on readers of a writer who has steadily made him or herself "available" to them.
For those who don't know, a long while back I had one LJ for everything. Life, fandom, professional writing. Then I made the decision to split those into three journals. One personal, one fannish, and one for pro writing and reading of books and my pursuit of publication. I did this largely based on the fact that it occurred to me that if I took my f-list and I split them into people who were there because they were personal friends, fannish friends, or people who I'd met through communities and other places focusing on professional, non-fannish writing, I'd have three pretty distinct lists with minimal crossover.
There are, of course, some bits of crossover, but only about five or six people that I can think of who have friended more than one of those journals.
At the time, I didn't do this with any forward thinking implications in mind or because I was even particularly smart. I did it because I thought it would increase blog readership. I thought, "Well, if the people who only care about my fanfiction don't have to put up with updates about my job or home, they'll probably be more likely to friend me."
The reason I figured this to be the case was because I realized that many times, if I went to a person's journal for fanfiction or some pro-writing thing and then found that there were lots of entries in between about their dog or their spouse or that really cool restaurant they went to with those really cool people (none of which meant a thing to me) that I was less likely to friend them.
I realize this is a matter of personal taste on my part, and that there are plenty of people who like hearing about the personal lives of the writers or fanwriters that they friend and follow on blogs.
But given Kay's article, and the events of RaceFail09 and the utter storm that's surrounded some of the industry professionals (which has pretty much exclusively taken place in the blogosphere), it seems to me that I've unwittingly made a rather wise decision. Not because I'm wise, but because I accidentally did something good.
The reason it seems to me that it's a good idea to keep my peas and potatoes on opposite sides of the plate, as it were, besides feeling that people who come to hear about my unpublished nobodiness have no real interest in my vacation photos, is that I also feel part of being a professional is not making everything personal.
I don't just want to be a writer. I'm already a writer. A writing writer who writes. What I want to be is a professional writer, not just in the sense of being someone who is published and paid, but in my attitude and actions. I want to be consummately professional.
Part of being professional, at least in my image of it, is leaving home issues at home. I think there is high value in being able to compartmentalize without being contradictory.
When I was an intern at the Publishing Company That Shall Not Be Named, I did an interview with a woman who held a pretty high ranking executive position in a major company (they too, shall remain unnamed) as part of one of our books and for our website. And during that interview we discussed how it is that she kept a "work-life balance" (which is one of those corporate culture buzzword like "growing your potential"), and in that interview she mentioned that she uses her commute and the walk from the train station to her car to help her do that by using that walk to transition from being a professional executive to returning to being a wife and mother.
And this lady was one sharp lady, and that part of her interview always struck me as being evidence that she really had it together, that she knew what she was doing in life.
Especially since, in the course of other interviews, it became clear to me that women who were satisfied with their jobs and positions and who were the most successful almost always had really good, detailed, lengthy answers when asked about how they dealt with trying to make time for it all.
Sad to say, most of the men seemed to think that balancing work and life meant checking a checklist and saying "oh, I went to a ballgame" or "I attended my kid's play" or "I picked up that thing from the grocery store my wife wanted" and not much else as far as work-life balance went, as though the raising of children and having of a marriage were a series of events and not a holistic, daily process. But that's a whole other discussion for a whole other journal.
Forgetting inherent gender differences, I think what the women had figured out, especially the very savvy ones, was that you have to different chambers and different doors. Some doors need to stay tightly locked at specific times. They understood that being professional meant understanding that in order to make more universal connections and make relationships with people outside of a personal context, that cooperation had to be based on something besides liking the person as a friend.
They seemed to have an intuitive sense that there was no reason on Earth why some person who's flown in from L.A. or Tokyo or London to talk about marketing strategy and profit losses should care that their kid just finished toilet training or that they had seen a great movie last week or that they were having their period and they just fought with their husband. Sure, there's room for small talk in the corporate world as in any place when people interact, but the women seemed to get that you have acknowledge and understand what people are coming to you, why they're there, and what that entails respecting in your relationship. They seemed to understand that if they're not there for personal reasons, then you have an obligation not to make your personal issues their problems in a professional space.
When I, as a reader, friend or follow a livejournal/blog, I do so not because I thought that the author was, personally, such a terrific person. I don't do it because I'm so fascinated by that author that I simply must know when they clean their house, what movies they see, and what they buy at the grocery store. When I follow that blog, it is because I found a creative, literary based thought process in them to be so interesting that I want to hear more about how they write, how they think creatively, how they edit, what their plans for the next book are, how they deal with agents and editors.
In short, when I go to a writer's blog, I want to hear about writing. Which is why there are writers who I have defriended or stopped reading because they seem convinced that the world at large needs to know about the most minute details of their lives, however tedious or - in the case of the author who posted a picture of her warped foot - disgusting. It seems to me to be the height of arrogance to believe that such things about you are so important that they deserve to be posted.
This is not to say that I believe authors should never talk about anything personal, but I would appreciate it if those personal announcements were either of such importance as to matter in a larger context (getting married, a relative dying, the birth of a child, etc) or some how related to the writing. I don't mind a writer noting that they've paused writing to go on a trip, or that life issues are keeping them from writing and how that relates to their writing.
What I do mind is an author who posts about going to lunch at a place I'll never go to, with a bunch of people I don't know (complete with the five rows of namechecking), with nary an explanation of why I should care or who these people are, or an author who posts about the details of a non-writing related hobby that are so esoteric to any outsiders that it practically has it's own language and lingo.
Because there is this assumption in the public posting of such things that I will be interested, and that these things somehow hold greater importance than if some random, unpublished guy named Bob posted about his life and going to lunch with Fred, Larry, and Moe.
Which is why I don't read blogs like that where I can help it. I can't say, that being an un
I don't like the implication that when you write a book, your grocery list suddenly becomes more important than mine.
Therein, I think, lies some of the stickiness during RaceFail09. Given that these things are all being discussed and happening on blogs - with some ugly threatened and alleged forays into offline life by people who are guilty not only of unprofessional conduct but conduct unbecoming of a human being - there were a lot of professional authors who conducted themselves badly out of a sense of personal insult and anger, and thus conducted themselves reactively, defensively, and badly.
It is to the great credit of the anti-racist side (and yes, there are sides) that by and large, they have checked personal things at the door. I've found surprisingly few personal, intimate references in the posts by the PoC and their allies. And while I'm no expert, and certainly not past racism 101 in my own development, I think it speaks to a rather intelligent understanding that when we talk about racism in SF/F we're not really even talking about an individual-level problem.
Racism in SF/F is an endemic problem, and it is a group-level issue. It is about the way groups of professional are conducting themselves in their professional behavior, or fans are conducting themselves in their fannish behavior. Yes, there are individuals doing this behaving, but the effect is cumulative. This is about a group culture. This is about professional decisions, decisions about who to publish, what to publish, how to publish it. This is about how groups respond to those publications. This is about how professionals are reacting to criticism of their professional actions.
Yet, many of these professionals are not acting at all professionally.
Many of them seem to have forgotten that they are professionals at all, and seem to have forgotten that while being a published, well known author doesn't mean you lose all rights to a private life or to having the right to speak about it or blog about it - it does mean that you need to be wary that when you blog about things, especially when you blog straight from the Id, rather than filtering your online words with the same caution you would if you were making a statement for the press or at a business meeting.
A lot of these errant professionals reacted as though someone had come into their living rooms and slapped them and then started calling their best friends terrible names. I'm sure it looked a bit like that to them, seeing as they treat their blogs much like one big, cozy party being held in their homes.
But this is where the PoC and allies have a far keener, more sophisticated understanding of the situation.
These professionals use their blogs at networking tools, as cheap (even free) marketing for their books, their appearances at cons and signings, as free ways to pimp the books of their professional friends. They can treat them as personal spaces as they want, but the fact remains, that these blogs are not personal journals. They are professional tools. These blogs are a way in which these authors are garnering fans (thus, profits).
So when the PoC and their allies complain about an author, a well known author, who has thousands of individuals hooked into their networking tool, is using that tool in a way that really hurts them, they have a completely valid point.
When an author can count how many people are reading their blog, and having that number well known or at least readily available, uses that readership to shame someone else, or to out them, or just to call them liars and extremists, they can't then fall back on the argument that they're just speaking personally in a personal space. They can't use a blog as a cyber megaphone and then complain that they're being accused of drowning out other voices. They are. That's the point.
Nor can authors complain that they're unfairly held responsible for the actions of their fans and followers when it's very clear that they've more than taken on that responsibility when they call for their fans to do other things.
I'm sorry, but if you used your blog to try to get a group of people to do something you wanted done (like say, buy your book or support a cause you do care about, or in the case of other professionals mentioned in Kay's article, to go after your detractors), you can't then say that you have no obligations as far as the actions of those fans go, especially when you're the one who provoked that response in the first place.
You can't be the Pied Piper, and happily lead all the rats down to the river, expecting payment for it, and then complain that you had no control over the rats and people are out of place to criticize you for the way you play your music. When, demonstrably, the point of you even playing that music the way you did was to make the rats follow you.
And trying to claim that, "Oh, all these kids just followed me down here, even though I was playing the same tune that made the rats follow and I'm very clearly angry at you" is not only disingenuous but deeply stupid.
If you're conducting the orchestra, then, yes, you are responsible for the music going sour, even if you're not the one individually playing the instrument.
Now, I want to be clear. I do not think these examples negate the responsibility of readers to look closely at those writers they admire, and the actions those writers take. Nor do I think it excuses fans for acting like rats and following a writer down to the river whenever they play the right tune.
If anything, I think, knowing that you're going to be approaching someone who can and will try to exercise that kind of influence over you should make fans, readers, and followers even more wary. I know that since RaceFail, I've become a lot more cautious of giving writers any kind of devotion or loyalty in that way. I've become wary of being a fan who'll buy anything by someone I like.
But I think to ignore that humans are social animals, and that it is really quite easy to get people to follow you if you make the right moves is stupid. We're pack animals, people. We work in groups, and part of that is that most of us have some desire to follow a leader.
We're also rational animals who can overcome base urges. But that doesn't excuse those who use those base urges to their own ends.
It certainly does not mean they can call up the fans like a flock of trained birds and then deny culpability when that flock goes pecking out people's eyes.
There's a reason we have laws against inciting a riot. Sure, every single individual in that riot could have walked away and not rioted, but the person who gathered them together and stirred them up, knowing how to do so and what to have that mob do, has an additional responsibility for what happens in the riot.
I think I've repeated myself enough on this.
My bigger point is that this is why I get so fed up with some of the more clueless folks in RaceFail09 who make this issue inappropriately about them and make exaggerations about what the goals, aims, and actions of the PoC's and their allies have been.
I have yet to see a single post (and I've read quite a few, via
rydra_wong and her linkspams on the issue and other sources) where a PoC/ally has said, "We're going to come into your house, and if you don't have at least five PoC friends and a shrine to MLK and Obama and Gandhi, we're going to hit you with sticks and go around booing you in the supermarket and at your job!"In fact, I have seen posts where people on the anti-racist side have patently said they do not approve of anyone taking this fight to a personal level, of anyone on their side trying to get someone fired, or sending hate mail. You can go through
rydra_wong's posts to find just how many there are. What I have seen are PoCs/allies saying, "You've been using professional tools and professional connections to do things that hurt us, to reward those who say things that hurt us, to damage our ability to work within this profession and this subset of this profession, and to keep perpetuating the stereotypes, attitudes, and behaviors that have not only hurt us professionally and kept us from publication and acknowledgment in SF/F literature. Therefore, we will take professional actions. We will engage in the same public sphere you have to say that your public actions are publicly wrong."
Furthermore, I think it smacks of entitlement and hypocrisy that a lot of these posts got started by authors who were responding to criticism of themselves and their friends on other sites and blogs than their own or their friends. Until many of these authors opened the floor, most of the commentary was taking place elsewhere. It seems absurd to me that an author should react to others criticizing them and their friends elsewhere, but then use their own blog to dismiss or drown out that criticism.
Especially when the power of that blog and the readership they gained were, in some ways, garnered using racist, exclusionary methods. As though they're somehow entitled to extend to favorable (and yes, unconsciously racist) environment of their "living room" style blog to the entire internet. That people owe them as much deference and respect when commenting in their own blogs as they do when commenting directly to the author's face (or on their blog).
In case you didn't notice, I consider that to be completely untrue and a rather obnoxious stance to take.
Let me also note: I'm blown away by the poise, professionalism, and utter grace shown by the PoC's/allies. I'm blown away by how they dealt with all this in the face of what has to be frustration the likes of which would make most folks to volcanically explode. Even the angriest, most intense responses have been better than some of the whining, entitled responses from the Flocks of the Clueless.
While I regret that so many people have gotten so hurt or had to be so exhausted by other people's unwillingness to learn, and their entitled attitudes, I do not regret that I've been show that these people are the sharpest, brightest, and best.
So what does this mean going forward?
Well, for me, it means that I'm going to continue keeping my peas and potatoes on the opposite side of the plate. It means that I want to keep these things I've said in mind, in case the fates should shine upon me and I should find professional success and suddenly, instead of the tens of people who actually read what I have to say, there are hundreds or even (eep!) thousands.
It also means that I need to make sure I keep focusing on making sure that the things I'm doing in a professional, public way are not damaging to the very people I hope I'm an ally to.
On a side note: I'm not sure when one, as a white person, gets to call themselves an ally. I know that I want to be one, but I don't feel I'm nearly educated, experienced, or even worthy of that title, of that trust. Maybe five years from now? Ten? I consider myself to be pre-racism 101.
Hopefully, one day, I will have achieved that worthiness. Hopefully by following my own advice, by remembering to be professional, to be as graceful and poised as they have been, even while expressing intense anger and hurt.
On a less-about-me note, I think it also means that the there need to be serious questions asked by blogging authors about what their goals are and what their responsibilities are, and what the appropriate rules of engagement.
I noted, a long time ago (practically the Archaic period as far as the internet is concerned) about the whole Nightshade press and the all-male cover of an anthology that was half male and half female writers thing that one thing I was really disappointed with was that the person in charge of the press actually was responding in comments on people's LiveJournals.
That struck me as unfair, and rather unprofessional. To my mind, it seems like when you are someone who wants to run a professional business operation, there are certain avenues that just aren't appropriate. Especially as a creative professional. I find it very wrong when an author even so much as acknowledges Amazon.com reviews or LJ reviews.
There is such a thing as author's privilege where creative works are concerned. The author owns and controls that, yet in sharing it, wants the cooperation (read: loyalty and money) of the fans. Therefore there is an interaction in which the author is privileged somewhat over the readers.
I think given that privilege, there are spaces the authors and professionals of this industry ought to stay out of. Fan review sites and messageboards and the like are some of those. Fandom is a community built around creative works, and that community best flourishes where it can grow organically, when it can go in all the wild directions that fandom inevitably takes. Having an author, who is like a giant playing in a playground with very small children, trouncing about, easily able to step all over people, stunts that growth. And furthermore, it's a case of "pick on someone your own size!"
You're a published author. Yes, that does come with status and some extra muscle to flex. So what is it to you that Lisa from Montana said she didn't like that book, or that ten or twenty Lisas didn't like it and posted it on Amazon.com? What is it to you that some fans got together and decided that they wanted a different ending, so wrote it and shared it among themselves on a whim on some messageboard? This is, of course, when no money changes hands and it's a completely free endeavor. When money comes into the picture, it's different.
I acknowledge that these things can affect how much money you make, but considering that these very people are the people you want to make that money from, it seems to me that it behooves an author to let them be, to leave them alone, and to, well, get back to work. You're the writer, not the Creative Police.
If you want to share a work, you must relinquish some measure of control over it and how it is interpreted. Complete control is also complete privacy. Which I think is what is so troubling about many privacy issues in America today, but that is so another entry for another day when I don't have a ton of stuff to do.
Friendly Counterpoints.
Date: 2009-03-12 03:46 pm (UTC)I post all kinds of crap on my LJ. Not because I think they're more or less important than anything. But because I feel like it and I paid for my LJ so I can do what I want (within legal limits).
But I'm not a professional writer.
I agree that your blogjournal compartmentalization is a good thing, and I know some writers on LJ use filters to do the same thing. But just because some writer blogs about every detail doesn't necessarily mean that they think those details are so important that everyone will want to read them. Maybe they just want to.
I am often inspired to play Devil's Advocate. I think it's a character flaw.
And I can't help but consider Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report when you speak of authors getting their fans to do stuff. If NASA lets him, he'll have gotten his viewers to cause the newest module of the ISS to be called "Colbert" instead of "Serenity"... And that's just his latest "trick".
Re: Friendly Counterpoints.
Date: 2009-03-12 09:10 pm (UTC)You know, honestly, it's never been something that's annoyed me about your LJ. I think there is an importance in the tone of it, too. Because I've never noted any whiff of "look, doesn't my grocery list make me cooler than you".
There are some authors who I suspect pick out details from their lives to share not because they just feel an intense desire to, but because they think those details will make them look more sophisticated, more cultured. I remember seeing an author (white author, for the record) who listed all the ethnic restaurants close to her house and talking about how much she frequented them. As though somehow eating Thai food makes you this multicultural savant or something.
Dude, I can stuff khao pad down my gullet all day long as still be as unsophisticated and "Joe Sixpack"-esque as the next guy.
And that sort of tone is what I object to sometimes as well. And again, not something I've noted with your LJ, which I do thoroughly enough.
Maybe they just want to.
True, and like I said, there's an issue of tone and motivation. I even occasionally do post something here that might not be completely relevant to writing (maybe political things or links or random speculation), and I don't think you have to be strict about your compartmentalization, but when the ratio of "My super awesome local restaurants that make me cooler than you" to "posts about writing" gets screwy, I get gone as a reader.
I am often inspired to play Devil's Advocate. I think it's a character flaw.
I seem to attract many Devil's Advocates in my life. I do not know if this says something good or bad about me, but I do know it keeps me on my toes, because I can't get away with nothin' around you guys. :)
Re: Friendly Counterpoints.
Date: 2009-03-12 09:23 pm (UTC)You're some kind of judge. Otherwise the Devil wouldn't need an advocate.
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Date: 2009-03-12 03:55 pm (UTC)Wish I could do that. No capacity to do that.
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Date: 2009-03-12 09:15 pm (UTC)In all fairness, I think a) you do it pretty well and b) it is not a natural skill. It is not even an easily learned skill. It's like playing the violin. Some people make take to it easier than others, but even those who take it to easier had to practice their asses off for eight hours a day, 7 days a week, for years before they got really good.
Those women I interviewed? Could tell tales about the failures and frustrations they went through before getting it right, and most said that it takes about a good decade of being a professional and a working mother/wife/etc before you really get the hang of it.
We're pretty young, relatively, you and I. Especially career wise. I'd wager most people our age have minimal talent for it or even realize it's something they need to do. The fact that you're so stunningly self aware as to realize that you may not be as good at it as you'd like speak volumes about how far ahead of the rest of humanity you are. :)
I'm pretty lousy at it, too. And I failed a lot during my internship at it. The advantage of a blog is that you don't have to do as much work at compartmentalizing. Just *don't* post about your personal shit in your professional blog and you're pretty much more than half way there.