Joanna Russ, a feminist critic and science fiction writer, died on April 29. I have been meaning since then to write about her, and I find myself completely inadequate to the task. I never read her novels; all I ever read of hers was a single short story, and two nonfiction books. But if that were all that Russ had ever written, it would have been enough.

Last year I wrote a guest post at the Story Siren about reading Russ’s story “When It Changed” for the first time. I was fourteen; I had just finished my geometry final exam. It must have been almost exactly fourteen years ago. Almost exactly half my life. I think it must have been the first fiction I ever read that had a gay main character.

I am so thrilled that the Stonewall award has been established to acknowledge YA fiction that deals with LGBT experience. But it gave me a moment of pause when I heard the committee head’s words: “The ones who are perhaps going to identify as LGBTQ persons are comforted by reading about people who are like they are. Friends of GLBT, especially teenagers, are comforted by this, they learn a lot.”

Comforted. An interesting choice of words. “When It Changed” did not comfort me. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It was more like a hurricane or a wildfire that clears out all the dead brush and, doing so, opens up patches for new things to begin growing. I didn’t read YA fiction then. I didn’t want to be told that things were going to be okay, and I didn’t want to be told to resign myself to things not being okay. What I wanted to be told — though I didn’t know it — was that things were not okay, and therefore, fight like hell.

In college I read How to Suppress Women’s Writing, a polemic on all the ways that women’s writing has historically been devalued and discounted — and continues to be. There are still people who believe that Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. There are still people who speak derisively of chick lit, as if everything women think about is less serious. More than any of my professors, it was Russ who made me think critically about what criteria we use when we say that this is good and that is bad; this deserves to be taken seriously and that is just fluff. It made me aware of just how much bias can be perpetuated without intent, with just going along with the way things always have been.

In To Write Like a Woman, Russ writes, “I think from now on I will not trust anyone who isn’t angry.” I read that and I thought of myself at fourteen, angry at the world and with no idea what to do with my anger. I thought of how passionately I wanted to live in a bigger world than the one I lived in. How freeing it was to be told that I wasn’t wrong for that, that it wasn’t for me to do a better job fitting into the boxes of my school; it was for me, perhaps, to do a worse job.

And not stop fighting.

Thank you, Joanna Russ

This is what a revision looks like.

Well, a revision and a knitting bag. I trust that you can tell the two of them apart.

This is half of the wall in sticky notes. The other half is somewhere over to the left, and it does take up the entire wall. That’s the thing about novels: it’s so hard to be able to step back from them and get a really clear idea of the structure of it all at once, in a way that you can hold in your head. When you can’t do that, then you fall down on things like “Does this make sense?” and “Have I set up this part adequately?” and “Is there something in there that I haven’t explained at all?”

Which is why I outlined the whole thing on sticky notes, after the fact.

A revision also looks like yelling at things.

After I finished my revision, I went back to the first draft of the novel I’m working on now. It’s a dark fairy love story, very intense (I hope), and I was astonished at just how bad it was.

So here’s to revising. I may not like it, but it tends to make the book a lot better than the first draft was. Plus, I get to do up my whole wall in sticky notes!

I’ve just turned in a draft of the novel I’ve been working on for a very long time. It feels like crawling out from under a rock.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve been writing a fantasy novel, and it was very deliberately an attempt to write a fantasy novel in a style that wasn’t all “thee” and “thou” (ten points to a fantasy writer who can ACTUALLY USE THEE AND THOU CORRECTLY!) and fancy poetic language. The main character is a factory worker who doesn’t have more than a fourth grade education, and the style, I think, reflects that.

Among people who want to be writers, who doesn’t say, Oh, I wish I could write like her! Oh, I could never in a million years write like her!? And it doesn’t take much to make that inadequacy stand out. Last night I went to read at an event called “Just Working On My Novel” at a Brooklyn bookstore, where I was invited to read along with several unpublished writers. And because I have been an unpublished writer among published writers, I guessed at what they were thinking:
If she can get published, I can. I can write circles around that.

Insecurity, let it be said, makes you a less nice person.

But I find as I get older that the insecurity means less than it used to. It’s not that I think I’m a better writer, and it’s not that I have more self-confidence. What I am finding is a sort of faith in my own words. I love Angela Carter or Dostoevsky but I don’t necessarily want to write like Angela Carter or Dostoevsky. I want to write like me. I am uncovering, piece by piece, what it means to write like me.

Beginning writers do a lot of stuff by accident; all beginners do a lot of stuff by accident. You can’t keep your hands and your eyes coordinated to juggle all the balls you have in the air and the choices you make are the haphazard ones, the obvious ones, the ones you’ve learned from Hollywood or the ones you’ve picked because you want to offend somebody. Consciously or unconsciously you write parodies and pastiches of other writers.

It takes time and practice to get to know who you are as a person and a writer. And slowly, slowly, you start to learn how to say: You might not like this. You don’t have to like this. But I am doing the work that I intended to do. I am doing it purposefully.

I am writing me-style. And that is something that cannot be taken from me.

There’s an idea in social psychology that some people believe they have control over what happens in their lives — they have a high internal locus of control — and some people think it’s up to fate and chance and more powerful people. Research suggests that people who believe they’re not in control of their own lives are lower achievers, more stressed, more depressed.

But I wonder.

When I started working as a librarian, I had to loosen up on what I believed I could control. Some days someone comes into the library in an awful mood and they’re going to yell at you no matter what. Some days you’re going to get yelled at because you don’t have this textbook or that bestseller, and you can’t exactly apparate it out of thin air.

And writing? Writing is alchemy. You make little black marks on paper and someone else reads them and they turn into images and stories and feelings in someone else’s head. In between, there’s a mysterious black box. You can control what goes into it but you can’t control what goes out.

You can work on your craft. You can polish your sentences. You can edit, again and again, and turn your writing brighter and sharper. But ultimately — for the sake of your own mental health — you have to accept that there is a part there that’s mysterious and not in your own control.

Otherwise there’s just blaming yourself for everything that doesn’t go exactly the way you want it to — a bad review, sales figures that aren’t what you want — and thinking, oh, if only you could work harder, if only you could think harder, hit upon the right ideas, everything could go your way.

Someone asked me last week if I thought I was a good enough writer to make a living at it. Not to pick on the person who asked, but I’d rather not think of it in those terms, taking it as a personal statement about my writing any time I got a bit of good or bad news.

Am I a good enough writer? Yes.

Will I make a living at it? It’s not in my hands.

And I’m a lot less stressed that way.

Bruce Cockburn sang in a song called “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?”:

We’re the insect life of paradise
crawl across leaf or among
towering blades of grass
glimpse only sometimes the amazing
breadth of heaven

It hadn’t occurred to me until just now that writing a novel is very much like that. You spend your days in the trenches of words and sentences, piecing them together one by one and just holding on to the faith that you are moving towards something that is larger than sentences, something that holds a larger and brighter meaning.

Apologies for radio silence. I am on a mission.

I’ve been thinking about e-books, and what’s going to happen if Amazon takes over the world and the vast majority of publishing moves to digital formats.

Traditional print books are great at filtering customers based on their demand and their resources. When a new book comes out, some people are going to buy the hardcover new, some people are going to wait for the paperback, some people are going to wait to find it in a used bookstore, some people are going to get it from the library, some people are going to borrow it from a friend, some people are going to find it in a box on the sidewalk ten years after it originally came out. And the person who finds it in a box on the sidewalk might be someone who never had the money to buy it when it was in hardcover — or it might be someone who didn’t hear about it, or wasn’t sufficiently enthused about it, the first time around. And this is a model that WORKS. A person who’s willing to pay $26 or $27 can have a new book in their hand the day it comes out. A person who’s willing to pay 50 cents, or 25 cents, or nothing at all — which may be either “Meh, the book doesn’t look THAT good” or “I don’t have the money, PERIOD” — can still find books at the library, at GoodWill, from their friends.

I’m the kind of person ebooks work really well for. I buy very conservatively — I buy based on friends’ recommendations and starred reviews, and I rarely buy a book unless I have a very good hunch I’m going to like it. I’m rarely wrong. So I typically buy few books — one or two a month — and buy them new because if I really want a book I don’t want to go chasing it around at a used bookstore; and if I’m buying a book at all, it’s probably at least in part because I want to toss a dollar the author’s way.

My friend B, on the other hand, buys a ton of books, shops heavily at used bookstores, and is a lot more willing to buy something on a whim than I am. If you give us both $25 for books, I’ll buy one or two that I’m certain I want; she’ll buy seven or eight that look kind of nifty. Her reading is adventurous in a way that mine isn’t, and she’s the one who’ll recommend me something off-the-wall-brilliant. She wouldn’t be well-served by e-books, and that’s not just because they don’t get cheap enough for her (except for self-published books and out-of-copyright books). The different web sites’ interfaces for ebooks are, as far as I’ve seen, terrible unless you want one of the hundred most popular books of the moment, or you know exactly what book you’re looking for. Last year I was traveling, and looking for an ebook I could put on my iPod, and I skimmed through the Kindle store going “Boring…boring…boring.” (I’m a very picky reader).

I’m the person the publishing industry is more likely to take seriously, because I buy books the month or year that they come out, because I’m aware of publishing news and spend a lot of time in bookstores, because I’m happy to buy a hardcover rather than wait for the paperback. (This isn’t because I have a ton of money, but to me it’s a justifiable occasional frivolty, like a restaurant meal or a couple of movie tickets). But I do think that the book industry is going to be in trouble if books get marketed and sold in a way that shuts out other ways of buying books, and I think that people who can only buy books if they can get them at GoodWill for 50 cents are going to get shut out too.

At one level I would love for ebooks to succeed. I’m absolutely unsentimental about paper, and considering how often I’ve moved in the past few years I feel that the best book formats are the ones that don’t weigh anything. But if the ebook revolution is going to leave behind people who can’t afford to buy new books, people who rely on serendipity and chance to discover new books, and anyone who doesn’t fit the industry’s model of what a good book buyer looks like… it’s not my revolution.

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend and Will Grayson, Will Grayson reviewed in the New York Times!

Read This Book! has interviewed me, and is having a giveaway.

Literary Life interviewed me as well.

1. A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend is now officially out in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand! I had a wonderful release party on Thursday and I hope to tell you all about it when I get the pictures. But today is not that day.

2. On Sunday I had two computers, an iMac and an itty bitty netbook. By Wednesday morning I had zero computers. Karen Healey says I should tell more embarrassing stories, but I think this is “cringe embarrassing” rather than “funny embarrassing.” Nevertheless I will tell the story to strike fear into the heart of everyone who doesn’t have up-to-date backups. (Do you have up-to-date backups?)

Early Tuesday morning I woke up to my iMac’s hard drive whirling around and around uselessly. This was a Bad Sign. Furthermore, I checked my backups on my netbook. The most recent one was over a month old.

(By the way, cats and kittens: there is a very important lesson here. As my sister’s animation teacher used to say, if it doesn’t exist in three different places, it doesn’t exist at all. A hard drive can fail suddenly and with very little warning… I’m not sure if I just didn’t hear its death rattle over the sound of my air conditioner or what).

After some little attempts to make things better, I brought it in to a technician, who said that the computer was an ex-computer and there was nothing to be done but to try data recovery at a rather expensive price. But there was no way I was going to rewrite 15,000 words from scratch if there was anything I could do to avert it.

So, my Mac is in the shop, and I was down to my netbook. Which is running Linux, and has a few little quirks. That night I thought, “Well, if this is going to be my only computer, let me see if I can fix those little quirks.” This involved downloading the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. I’ve done it before. It’s not so complicated. But… something went wrong. The next morning it wouldn’t boot up again. And I didn’t have a recovery disk. Oops.

(Here’s another lesson: have a recovery disk.)

There was only one thing I could do. Schlep over to my sister’s house, watch home renovation shows on her cable, and download a new recovery disk.

It took several hours, and more than a few frustrations, but I now, at last, have Ubuntu running on my computer. And hopefully I will be able to get back to writing… and hopefully I won’t have to rewrite those 15,000 words just yet.

It’s been a wild, wild week. It can get less wild any time now.

1. WisCon
This weekend I’ll be at WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m hosting the Fiber Circle as part of the Gathering on Friday afternoon (1:00-3:45) — come say hi, and if you knit, crochet, embroider, macrame, spin, et cetera, this is the place for it!

Aside from that, I have three panels:

Teamwork: How Anime and Manga Fill a Feminist Void in SF/F (Saturday, 10:30-11:45)

Feminism is more than just a belief that women and men should be treated equally. At its core, it requests a change in power dynamics that allows all people to be equal. American SF/F frequently rewards solitary heroines and heroes, or portrays partners who happen to work side–by–side. In anime and manga, characters are constantly participating in cooperative training, teaching, and learning from one another. Are those characters more feminist?

What is Feminist Romance? (Sunday, 8:30-9:45)

Romances in short stories and novels often follow traditional patriarchal rules, even when feminist individuals are writing. What does a feminist romantic storyline look like? Do we see these or are they rare? How can writers who consider themselves feminist avoid falling back on the old standbys?

The Works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli (Sunday, 2:30-3:45)

Romances in short stories and novels often follow traditional patriarchal rules, even when feminist individuals are writing. What does a feminist romantic storyline look like? Do we see these or are they rare? How can writers who consider themselves feminist avoid falling back on the old standbys?

Word on the street is that in the dealer’s room, A Room of One’s Own is going to have some early copies of A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend. If you’d like me to sign a book, or if you’d like a signed bookmark, feel free to hit me up after any of my panels — I won’t be at the official signout.

2. Teen Author Reading Night at NYPL

Wednesday, June 2 at 6:00, at the Jefferson Market Branch of New York Public Library (at 10th street and 6th avenue)

Featured authors:

Cathleen Davitt Bell, Little Blog on the Prairie
Lila Castle, Star Shack
Susane Colasanti, Something Like Fate
Donna Freitas, This Gorgeous Game
Emily Horner, A Love Story Starring My Best Friend
Eliot Schrefer, The Deadly Sister

3. Release Party — A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend

Brooklyn Public Library — Central Library, 6:30, in the youth program wing upstairs.
At Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn — take the 2/3 train to Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum

There will be food and prizes! There will be ninja rubber duckies! We won’t have books to sell, but we will have books to give away as prizes, hopefully we’ll have books to lend out if you have your Brooklyn Public Library card, and of course if you pick up a book somewhere else I’m happy to sign it.

Hope to see you there!

…Is that where the zombie trend comes from?

I came back from Japan and right afterwards I had to start looking for a new apartment and then I had to move, and it’s been a hectic couple of weeks and I’ve just put “breathing” back on my schedule and I still have no idea where I put my whisk.

But anyway, I was reading an article in Salon about a new book that’s all about how the internet eats your brains, and it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately.

I love to read, obviously. I love to read fiction. But there have also been long stretches of time in my life when the urge to go clicky clicky clicky on Facebook or Livejournal or whatever was stronger than the urge to read a book. This is why I love the subway, by the way, and I’m going to hold out on getting a smartphone for as long as I can: it’s just too dangerous to be able to go clicky clicky clicky everywhere.

The flip side of this is, so often people in positions of power and authority have denigrated other people’s reading choices by saying “you’re reading the wrong thing.” Teachers and librarians have said it’s not real reading to read comic books or sports magazines or gossip magazines. Obviously it is real reading! And reading your Facebook page is real reading, and reading your Twitter feed is real reading, and intermixed with the clicky clicky clicky I read some intense and thoughtful essays. But I still feel like it’s something special to be able to sit down with a book for an hour or two and be swallowed up by it, and concentrate on just one thing.

And this is like ten times as true if you’re a writer. Every time I sit down to work at that seductive blinky box, it beeps at me that I have new e-mail, and then it occurs to me to check if there’s something interesting in my RSS feed, and then I come up for air and it’s an hour later and I haven’t…actually done any work.

For some writers, it works to turn off the internet while they’re writing. And this is a great idea, albeit one that doesn’t quite work for me. The thing is: it’s not about the internet. It’s not about Facebook, it’s not about Twitter. It’s about attention, and energy.

If I can quote a song I love by Bruce Cockburn, “Get Up Jonah”:

I woke up thinking about Turkish drummers
It didn’t take long, I don’t know much about Turkish drummers,
But it made me think of Germany and the guy who’d been in the Afghan secret police,
Who made the observation that it’s hard to live.

And I was reminded of the proprietor of a Vietnamese restaurant in Quebec who used to be head of the secret police in Da Nang,
And it occurred to me that I was thinking all this stuff to keep from thinking about something else.
Isn’t that just what secret police are all about, now?

I’m not really that entranced by whatever comes up on Facebook. It’s just the most convenient thing that’s easier than thinking about what I actually should be doing. It’s the most convenient thing that’s easier than confronting what I’m feeling about what I actually should be doing. If you’re scared about sitting down to work, then you can turn off all the distractions, and you can yell at yourself all you want, but you’re still going to be scared — and you’re still not going to be able to concentrate.

So I’m trying to spend less time yelling at myself about spending less time poking around on the internet, and more time relaxing. And I’m writing more because of it. Really! It turns out that when my brain is going “AUGH! AUGH! I HAVE TOO MUCH TO DO! WHY DID I SPEND SO MUCH TIME READING ABOUT THAT FLAMEWAR?” I’m not able to sit down and write. And when I stop yelling at myself, and let it go… I actually can write. Weird, huh?

It’s just worth keeping in mind that the internet isn’t the only thing that wants to eat your brains.

Also zombies. You have to stay alert for zombies.