Becoming More Myself

So I started writing a blog post for this week about a month ago. I came back to it a few times and edited it, but it was never quite feeling right. I talked through it with my husband to no avail and last night I realized what the problem was. The post was too much of a rant, me complaining about the world and my own opinion of how things ‘should be’. And when I stopped to think about it, I remembered that that’s just not my style. The whole reason I have such a problem with writing blog posts in the first place is because I don’t feel comfortable stating my opinions as ‘right’.

And I’ve struggled a bit with the idea that I’m only careful with putting my opinions out there because I’m a woman and yada yada. But that’s the same trap I found myself falling into for those years when I thought I wasn’t female enough. I was listening to people ‘out there’ tell me how I should react to the world around me. I thought because I don’t like jewelry, or bags, or makeup that I wasn’t female enough. It actually got worse with the “me too” movement because suddenly there were more opinions out there about what women should do or be like. At a certain point, I finally had to decide: ‘screw that’.

I think I’m finally making that same kind of distinction here. I write my journal entries that are basically just that, journal entries, because I want people to be able to read about the struggles I have in my every day life, see how I deal with them, and perhaps find something that will help them in their own lives. Giving my opinion on how people should deal with their feelings (that’s what the failed blog post was about) was outside of that. I don’t want to tell people how they can have a better relationship with their own feelings. I’d rather show them my own relationship with myself and my feelings and let people draw their on conclusions.

And finding that this is part of who I am has been a lot of trial and error in learning to distinguish between when something is hard vs when something feels wrong. I could never begin to tell anyone else how to differentiate that for themselves. The closest I’ve come is a set of posts I wrote a while ago that talk about feel and awareness.

Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness

Though even in these posts I focus mostly on the process I used with a few suggestions of how it could work for someone else. These are the types of posts I like to write, I guess I just needed the reminder. Now I just need to wait until the next thing goes wrong in my life so I can talk about how I respond to it. Shouldn’t be too long.

World Fantasy Con 2017

So a week ago I went to San Antonio for World Fantasy Con. It’s my first year going, and I basically decided to go because I heard it mentioned on Writing Excuses and I wanted to get some experience with specifically fantasy focused conventions.

I was rather apprehensive because, while I’ve been rockin’ the convention scene since 2000, with Otakon and a few other anime conventions, I’ve never been to one focusing on books and truthfully I didn’t know what to expect. Otakon is huge and so my biggest change in expectation is that I knew it wasn’t anywhere near that large.

On the first day I was able to talk to someone who had been there before over breakfast, and she told me a few things to expect, like there is very little cosplay at WFC, (which is a change from Otakon) about the con suite (where the serve you food), and the readings.

After I got my badge they directed me to a room where I got a shoulder bag full of books. I was pretty surprised and happy, even though I couldn’t take them all home on the plane. I read several of them before I left and had to leave the others behind. The ones I did keep/read were enjoyable, and it opened me up to some books I wouldn’t have picked up on my own.

I went to the Opening Ceremony Panel where they had their guests, Martha Wells, Tananarive Due, Karen Joy Fowler, Gregory Manchess, and David Mitchel, all talk a bit about secret history, which is the theme of the con. It was a good introduction.

I then went to a reading by Curtis Craddock, who read from a swashbuckling style book called An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors which was a very intriguing read. I went to his reading just because there wasn’t a panel I wanted to attend at that time and I wanted to experience some live readings so I have ideas for mine in the future. And now I am adding that book to my ‘to read’ pile.

There was a panel called Beards and Intrigue: Queering the Historical Fantasy where the discussion was on LGBTQ+ protagonists in fantasy. The panel itself was great and the panelists included in their introductions their gender and sexual preference and it wasn’t until question and answer time that someone pointed out how cool it was that they had done that, and the entire audience just accepted it.

But that really was an overall theme that I noticed for the weekend. Fantasy people …I dunno, we’re just hardwired to accept things. We’re so used to reading about protagonists that are different, if they’re even human at all, and then being drawn into a story where we sympathize with those characters. So it gives us a leg up on the ‘live and let live’ style of existence.

The next day there was Exploration of Gender in Fantasy panel, where I found out about the Tiptree Award, which is “an annual literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender.” (from wikipedia).

And there was a panel Hild and Hilt: the Female Monk, the Lone Woman Protagonist where they talked about what it took to be a ‘lone woman protagonist’ and how that was different from a male protagonist.

I went to a number of other panels and readings and really enjoyed most everything I interacted with. And at the end of it all, when I was at the Awards Banquet and I was listening to Martha Wells speak, I realized something about the weekend that had sort of flitted at the edges but not really hit me. Unlike writing conferences I’ve been to, these were my people. I could feel it in the air and in the way everyone interacted with each other. Everyone was interested in fantasy books, they read them and brought them up as examples, and talked about them with such fervor; unlike at conferences where I feel like genre sort of sits on the sidelines and sometimes gets mentioned and usually by lumping fantasy together with science fiction. (Not that I have anything against science fiction, but it is different.)

After the Con was over, I had some extra time to go around San Antonio and experience the Riverwalk, which was amazing. Unfortunately I got sick on the way home and I still can’t breathe through my nose, but it’ll pass. But all in all, I was very glad I went and experienced it, and not only because of the free books.

Review: Moana

I went to see Moana a few weeks after it came out. Disney’s been doing a good job with movies recently, but with the complete glut of movies, it’s hard to find time to get out to see them all.

Anyway, Moana is a story about a young girl who is next in line to be the chief of a tribe on a Hawaiian island. The tribe has everything they need, but Moana really want to be a sailor, only her father, the current chief, is super against it.

Moana’s grandmother encourages her by showing her that their tribe did once travel the waves, moving from island to island. Cue Moana heading out on her own to find a demi-god who needs to replace a magical stone.

Overall, a wonderful movie. I loved the whole thing (except for the crab) and the ending was spot on.

Meta talk: Hero’s Journey straight up. Also, really? Could you have been any more obvious that the pig is only there to sell stuffed animals?

Also, there is no love interest. That’s right, ladies and gentleman: this story has no love interest. Just a girl out there being awesome.

I was also pretty happy with how realistic the body types were (ignoring Maui, who is a demi-god). No unreasonably skinny waists in this movie. And yet you can’t argue that Moana isn’t attractive. I’m really hoping this trend will be continued.

Gender Bending

One of the things that I am playing around with in The Storyteller are gender roles, because it’s something I’m interested in. I’ve always been a tomboy and unlike many girls, I never really grew out of it.

Both of the main characters in The Storyteller do not conform to standard gender roles. Tabitha was raised as a Prince Charming. She is dashing, brave, and kind, the ideal prince. She just happens to be a girl.

Wildrose is In Touch with his Feminine Side. He is a man who does not play to typical masculine traits, and is just as comfortable playing the role of a woman as a man.

Wonderfully enough, TV Tropes (which I introduced you to last week) has a page for discussing gender roles. (It is a long read, just warning you.) The article exists to help people write characters of opposite genders, and as such is a neat compilation of the differences between genders, with the necessary disclaimer that it’s hard to make blanket statements about genders.

What gender roles do you like to bend or break, and which do you tend to conform to?