State of the Sooky

Writing: Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, next to soccer. I spent the evening destroying the United States. My brain is toasty.

got some crochet done.

Got paid for a commission piece. Will yarn shop tomorrow. Local WalMart not carrying the colors.


So I am off to bed. Tomorrow, auditing Go Pro displays and setting up a Dyson display.

My tweets

• Wed, 02:15: State of the Sooky http://t.co/u9PcNyHW6S

I'm Not the Princess: Writing Women of Size

At jimhines, Jim Hines is running essays on diversity. One was about a young lady who never saw herself in SF/F because she was overweight. Fat girls not allowed in space or on the unicorns.

It got me thinking.

I grew up thin. I was tall and curvy but thin.
I don't come from the same place she does.
However, I was tall. Like towering tall. Like back row of every picture tall, a head taller than my classmates, "You're so big, what grade did you fail?" tall.

Five pregnancies, a sedentary life, and a minimal food budget (heavy on pasta and rice) have resulted in the picture in my icon. I'm not thin now.

I'm 6' and 300+ lbs of intimidating Mother Trucker. (even if I am doing merchandising work)

I don't know what it's like to try on my boyfriend's jacket and be swallowed by it. I don't know what it's like to have everyone in the room be the same size as me, or up to a foot taller. I've very seldom been carried.

And I was never the Princess.

Being the princess was for petite girls, pretty girls, girls who weren't able to look over their rescuers' heads and shoot the bad guys, girls who could be picked up and carried.

When I write female characters, I come at it from my perspective. They tend to be taller than average. I don't write five-foot nothing wisps. They tend to be broad and strong. DJ Admire is taller than most women, and plain. Yolanda in the trucking series of shorts is a larger lady. Several of the women in Adventuresses come in large size. Only Carla in Fruits of Thine is explicitly fat.

I'm working on a story where the lead female is ordinary sized. It's awkward, remembering she is shorter than the men around her, that she can't just loom and bark and intimidate like DJ can. And her female lover is a little bit of a thing, but all temper and strength and power. She may come up to their shoulder, but she scares the daylights out of the men around her.

I was going somewhere with this and totally lost track.
Let's call it To be continued.

Time for a 101 Class

All right. Another day, another article expressing shock and surprise.

Let me walk you through Male-male Romance 101

1) Most of the readers, about 90%, are women. Male readers have been slow to adopt the genre. It was not created for them. It is not targeted to them. Women, studies show, read more than men anyway.

2) Most of the writers are women. M/m romance comes out of slash fiction, created by female fans in the 1970s. In the early 2000s, fans started their own presses, began publishing original slash-style fiction. Some male writers of gay romance have started drifting over to genre, tired of having their work whacked to nothing more than anonymous sex scenes by editors.

3) Most of the female writers are straight, but a significant portion, about 30%, are bi or lesbian. This is based on numbers from a survey done in Buffy fandom around 2002. These numbers may have changed. There are a few genderqueer writers in there as well.

4) Many of the writers are married and have kids. Nothing about being a mother makes you automatically hate sex.

5) Most of the publishing houses are owned by women.

In short: This is a genre created by women, written by women, published by women, for women readers. We use male bodies, as media has taught us, to tell stories, because they come unfreighted with all the baggage of female bodies. We write sex because we like sex. A good portion of us find men sexually attractive and understand what sex with a man is like.

Now, can we move on to other discussion rather than the "Why do women like this stuff, hyuck, hyuck?"