Not Reading Women Authors

The under representation of women authors in publishing and the debate between "Literary" fiction versus pop fiction are not new. Something happened a few months back that reminded me that Life Is Not Fair. And for folks slugging away at day jobs while their chosen art withers, it's flat-out mean.

I've been writing since grade school. I started getting singled out for praise by English teachers when I was 11. By the time I was in high school, teachers praising my writing got me bullied. In the 1990s, while in college, my leftist opinion column in the student newspaper got me stalked by fundamentalist Christians and other male critics who thought it was their job to shut me up.

Today in 2017, oh how I long for the days of unwanted attention and minor fame.

I took matters into my own hands back in 2015 after years of throwing away hard-earned dollars on entrant fees to: The Missouri Review, The Bellingham Review, Tin House, Fish Publishing, The Boston Review, Zoetrope and dozens of others I can't remember the names of. I did the obscure indy, indy publisher thing (Soft Skull Press). I did Project Greenlight. Twice. Back in 1997, I even "took a meeting" with a Hollywood producer by phone while living in a converted garage next door to meth dealers.

I was turned down by online publishers as soon as they sussed out I was a "woman" author. In summer 2012 I submitted one of my short stories, Object of Desire, to RedFez.net. I created a profile and listed myself as female. The rejection was quick and condescending. Several months later, after creating a fake profile for "Darren Kennedy" of Boston, Mass., I re-submitted the same story with a different title. RedFez accepted "Darren's" story in less than 48 hours. This is not new. I've been experiencing the gender apartheid of the literary world for years.

NOT your enemy.

Now I'm on Amazon, the pulp market where all writers go when they run out of contest entrance money and patience. The trouble is, including non-fiction, Amazon publishes roughly a million titles per month. Your fiction writing doesn't drown on Amazon, it disappears under the waves without so much as a ripple.

A year after publishing my short story collection, in between working one full-time and one part-time job, I started on the hamster wheel of self-marketing. I got a Twitter account. I harassed my handful of friends on Facebook for reviews. I got my yoga studio to put copies of my book in their lobby.

And neither is she.

 And then I read about a former instructor of mine in Seattle. I want to emphasize: he's a nice guy. I enjoyed his class and he had a wonderful collection of stories gleaned from years of reading The New Yorker. He turned me on to Lorrie Moore for which I am grateful.

He's published two novels, sold the film rights to one and done readings all over the country. His Amazon author's page is a sea of positive reviews. Last I checked, his first novel has over 29 five-star reviews.

My first thought when I saw the plethora of reviews was: How? Did he pay them, buy them lunch, dog sit? Did his publicist have sex with them?

But then he is a man. He is white. He is hetero, has the prescribed two kids and a wife. He's also about 15 years younger than me.

Here are some other things he has that I do not: a bachelor's degree from a prestigious eastern college and, of course, he has an MFA. He has run workshops, one of which I attended. He teaches creative writing in public schools part-time.

In 2012, I tried to get a job as a front desk clerk at the same writer's collective he teaches workshops at. It was answering phones and directing people to the right classroom. Over 170 people applied for this front desk job. They picked a young, white guy who was finishing his MFA to answer the phone.

A while back, this nice guy, this published author, won an artist's grant for $10,000. He had been applying for it for several years. He was interviewed in a Seattle weekly paper. He talked about misconceptions people have about published authors, like how they're all rolling in dough. He works multiple part-time jobs here and there but they are in his chosen field -- a luxury I've never come close to experiencing. He then mentioned that the ten grand would not cover a year of child care for one of his kids.

I can't even wrap my head around the sum of $10,000 but then I've been using food banks to fill my fridge off and on for several years. Every other week I have to decide what to do with five pounds of raw cauliflower, a bucket of cottage cheese and no garlic. Recipes, anyone?

I want to not criticize, but Jesus-fucking-Christ-on-a-cracker you won a literary artist's grant during a time when over half the bookstores in America are gone, most publishing companies have disappeared, fiction readership has sunk to a new low and MFA applicants like this young woman are saying they don't want to become "beach read" authors. In fact, she would rather go unpublished than become airport fiction, popular literature, or the ultimate put-down, "chick lit."

Well, fuck that.

After decades (I'm 51) of working endless temp jobs to keep a roof over my head, I'd happily join the ranks of E. L. James or Stephenie Meyers. I'd give my left tit for one-tenth the financial success that either of these women have achieved just to be able to pay off the inch-deep stack of bills on my desk, move to a nicer apartment or, quit my day job and become a for-real writer. Who cares if they write about sparkly vampires or four-hour sodomy sessions. The point is, they're writing and they have readers. They have enough readers to fill the convention center in Seattle to overflowing. In the end, pop fiction writers are doing what all writers, if we have half a brain, should be doing -- they're getting their stuff read. I will never jump on the Hate Wagon for James or Meyers. They understand that writing, like everything in our consumer society, is a business and they're good at it.

I suspect 20 years from now, nobody will remember my former instructor or his two published books. Holographic screens, direct brain feeds, whatever we're using in 2037, will not carry his writing. But people will know who the two most hated female authors of the last 10 years are just as we know of Charles Dickens. Or Harper Lee. Or Danielle Steele.

Or Jo Rowling.

If you're a man and you write book reviews and/or you're a published author you don't need to be a misogynist to keep women shut out of literature. You probably don't have a bigoted bone in your frumpy Hipster body.

If, like my former instructor who won the grant, you have a daughter, you probably have contemplated the idea that her life might be a tad harder than yours. The hurdles and obstacles laid out for her may be more numerous and higher than the ones you've encountered. You'll contemplate this possibility ... and then you'll forget about it and go back to re-reading David Foster Wallace, Brett Easton Ellis or Jack Kerouac. And you will continue to unconsciously do what you've been doing all along: not reading women authors and, by example, encourage others to do the same.

Thirty minutes of your time

Four of my short stories are available on iTunes and Audible right now. If you'd like a freebie code to download and listen to any of them, please comment on here and include your email address so I can send the code. In return, I just need a 20-word review on Amazon or iTunes. Your pick.

GATOR COUNTRY

BRAVE SUCKER

THOSE LITTLE DEATHS

LAND OF NOD

GATOR COUNRY and BRAVE SUCKER are narrated by the straight-shooting John Tambascio. THOSE LITTLE DEATHS was narrated by the crazy talented Virginia Pettis. And LAND OF NOD is narrated by the king of cool narrative Phil Martin.

Suffice it to say all of these voice actors have made me reluctant to ever read my own writing again. They're that good.

Land of Nod

Beginning March 5th, my short story LAND OF NOD is available for free download on Amazon Kindle.

It's also available as an audio book on Amazon Audible and iTunes.

Read them or hear them

 

My short stories GATOR COUNTRY and BRAVE SUCKER are available on Audible and iTunes and they are both available for FREE on Amazon Kindle right now!

Read me, see me and hear me

Thanks to a publishing-savvy friend I'm getting all the stories from my short story collection, WEST OF YOU, up on Audible/iTunes. Via the Audible site I discovered some incredible, amazing voice actors who are producing the short stories. The first one, GATOR COUNTRY, is up and running on Amazon and iTunes.

Narrator John Tambascio does a flawless Canadian cowboy. Check it out.

The Rules Don't Apply to Him

Congratulations America, you did it. Once again, you proved to the rest of the world you are the functionally retarded kid sitting in the back of the class ... eating paste.

In January of 2003, when I was in the UK, I had to answer the same question over and over: "No I did not vote for him (George W. Bush)." Usually followed by "Yes, he IS a complete idiot, isn't he?"

Again, in late 2003 when I was in Australia for four months, I had to field all sorts of snide remarks about the Rodeo Clown and his burning need to impress his Daddy and Uncle Dick by invading a country that never attacked us (Iraq) and bombing it into a social stone age. The awful division between the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites is worse now than it ever was under CIA-backed, petty dictator Saddam Hussein.

I had to confirm for baffled Brits (there are a lot Down Under) and perplexed Aussies that "Yes, 'Murika really is THAT dumb!" Dumb enough to believe whatever lies the Republican party and FAUX News shit out every day.

Interesting side note: FAUX News, the LA Times, and I forget how many dozens of other Fourth Estate participants, are all owned by a white Australian billionaire who has publicly admitted his goal is to push politics as far right as possible to instigate some sort of global fascism so he can be the new Fuhrer's Joseph Goebbels. Anything to defeat the fake boogeyman of communism/socialism and any sort of labor organization. He bought nearly every newspaper in Australia and New Zealand decades ago. Ditto the UK. Guess what? All those gun-owning, Harley-riding, he-man Aussies -- none of them read the paper. They're too smart for FAUX News. As one said to me in Perth while pointing at the newspaper stand: "That's all bloody Murdock's crap. We don't bother with it."

Once again, conservative America's unexplainable phobia for women in pants suits, gay marriage and articulate black people has pushed the dumbest of us to elect an Orange Troll Doll and military school dropout who shamelessly dodged the Vietnam draft five times. A preening narcissist who refers to himself in the royal "we", has had every single opportunity handed to him on a silver platter, including the opportunity to not pay most of the construction contractors and service employees who have worked for him over the years. He's burned so many millionaire investors and Russian mobsters I won't be surprised when they finally come for his knee caps. Don the Con is a fat old man who has slobbered over so many wanna-be Miss America contestants and mail-order brides he makes Jabba the Hutt look classy. I would not want to be a female employee in the White House mail room come January.

The greatest tragedy to befall conservative America is the fact 90% of you are too poor and dumb to have ever traveled overseas, especially to another democracy. Too bad because you can't hear the roaring laughter coming from places like Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Canada, Japan, Spain, and yes, the UK, where 49% of their citizens allowed the other 51% mostly geriatrics to vote in favor of Brexit, a referendum that will surely be repealed in the next couple of years or England will face social and economic chaos. Just like we're facing now.

America: the only democracy in the world where stupidity is celebrated via millions of re-tweeted racist cartoons. America: where intelligence is viewed with scorn and suspicion and blustery 14-year-old bullies are elected to the most powerful position on earth. The Orange Troll Doll's sweaty tiny hand will soon be holding the "football", the brief case every president has held since the Cold War. The one that allows him to order a global nuclear missile launch.

The Donald embodies what our society has told white male heterosexuals for decades: that the rules don't apply to them. Rules are for broads, brown people, the handicapped or crippled, queers and other whiners.

If you think you've got it bad now, conservative America, what with the Affordable Care Act finally forcing your insurance provider to pay for your chemo, banks having to adhere to at least some vague regulations and the fact that the employees at your neighborhood WalMart are getting EBT cards so the Walton heirs don't have to pay a living wage and the employees won't starve, wait till we're all standing in a pile of radioactive rubble and neither Canada or Mexico will come to our aid. Because in the end, all you can do with the stubbornly stupid is leave them alone until they die out.

Misogyny compels thee!

When I was eight, The Exorcist came out in theaters in Reno, Nevada. The book had been floating around (no, not levitating) a few years prior. I remember my teenage neighbor showing me the passage of the book where little Regan masturbates with a cross. I couldn't comprehend it at the time but when I hit puberty I thought: a cross, really? It's telling that a man wrote this book and this was the worst thing he could think of happening ... to an object that hangs on a wall.

Years later, when I was in high school (after becoming well versed in masturbation), I finally saw the movie on cable TV. After years of exaggerated publicity it was a letdown. I don't know what I was expecting but a basic horror movie with dark lighting and a moody soundtrack just couldn't live up to all that hype. The scene where Regan is bowing down before the hazy green demon? I'd seen better special effects on Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

I now see The Exorcist for what it was: fear of a teenage girl's sexuality.

Correction: terror of female sexuality.

How many demonic possession films have been made since? Twenty at least. How many of these feature pubescent boys as the main possessed person? Almost none.

As recently as last year, a horror movie set in 1700's New England came out where the rosy-cheeked Puritan girl at the end not only has sex with Satan (who is dressed as Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow, go figure), she literally flies afterward. Flying being a clunky metaphor for orgasm. She also has to help kill her entire family. The bias is clear: female sexuality isn't just something to be feared, it drives people to murder.

In demonic possession films the victim is always female because teenage girls are terrifying. And the exorcist is always a man because he represents the dominant paradigm: white, male and heterosexual (yet weirdly celibate and supposedly immune to the girl's sexuality).

In yoga this is Seated Twisting Triangle pose.

There has never been a horror movie where a possessed male victim writhes and howls sexually while tied to a bed as a female exorcist watches. This is because male sexuality isn't feared: it's humorous, it's mocked, it's every day. Female sexuality is covert. Until the likes of Broad City, it was hidden, ignored or dismissed. All the way into the new millennium scientists and social commentators were questioning why women even had orgasms. What was the point? Female sexuality is that unnecessary to the patriarchy.

Possessed female characters in horror films are always restrained because their sexuality must be. Between being tied to a bed, "burned" with crucifixes and holy water and flat-out punched (see: Cinemax's Outcast) what happens to them isn't just sadomasochism, it's full on assault. And the assailant, the exorcist, is the hero! Violence against women is re-envisioned as religious suffering.

So it was with trepidation that I watched the first couple of episodes of FOX's The Exorcist. Once again a teenage girl is getting backhanded by grown men in uniforms. Uniforms which today are more likely to get them compared to pedophiles than angels.

Surprisingly, so far the show has not fallen straight into this misogynistic trope. I mean, it has Geena Davis in it.

Mind you, the trope is still there. The possessed, Casey, is harassed on a subway and nearly raped. In response, she lets the demon possess her and reek unholy vengeance on the slimy sports fan who gropes her. Go Team Demon! But afterward, Casey is so overwhelmed by her new found dark power that she wets herself. This is keeping with the scene in the original Exorcist where little Regan pees herself after mockingly telling a guest "you're going to die." Peeing is a metaphor for menstruation, the undeniable red flag of a woman's virility and sexual maturity. But it's also a sexual fetish for the Male Gaze, see: golden showers.

The patriarchy still needs to rein in Casey's sexuality via burning her with a curling iron but thankfully, the plot is not true and straight. It's serpentine and that's good. Father Marcus is so mistreated by the juggernaut of Catholicism, you wonder why he even bothers to do good. Casey's older sister might be a lesbian, a lipstick one at that, and that's something she could be ex-communicated for. Remember what Monty Python taught us: God loves every sperm.

The third episode introduced a whole bunch of new characters and I pray we'll see more of them. There's a bad-ass nun who performs exorcisms and encourages Marcus to get in touch with his feminine side. Hallelujah! And there's a New Age tour guide couple, Cherry and Lester Rego, who steal the show with their unflappable humor when dealing with homeless Father Marcus. Yes, the Church so mistreats him, the poor guy doesn't even have a place to sleep.

In the latest episode, were given all the tie-ins to the original film's myth arc. Casey's mother, Angela, is really little Regan all grown up. The ending is a nice kick in the nuts of the possession trope with Sharon Gless filling in for Ellen Burstyn as grown-up Regan's mother. But instead of Burstyn's shrill panic, Regan's Mom is now a potent force, a re-envisioned matriarch hiding under the cloak of the patriarchy. She looks completely masculine in the closing scene under the obligatory flickering street light.

I was ready to dismiss this show and it's tired old box of misogyny until this. Now I think I'll sit in the back of the Rego's bus and let the tour unfold. And I'll save my questions for the end of the ride.

Expose yourself ... to the library

I have no idea if this will work but I signed my short story collection up on SELF-e. I gotta say, the Washington state library system produced a super nice glossy tri-fold brochure ... that explained nothing. They didn't even get the damn website address right. Anyhoo, other authors might be interested, especially if they already did the Amazon thing and got a ISBN:

SELF-e Library Journal

Another freebie

My short story BRAVE SUCKER is available for FREE download on Amazon starting today. You don't even need a Kindle, an iPad, an e-reader, nada. Just a computer with a screen, download it and away you go!

Still more FREE !

My dark satire short story OBJECT OF DESIRE is available for FREE right now, right here.

Still more FREE

Starting June 22nd my short story LAND OF NOD is available for FREE on Amazon. This sci-fi near-future dystopian story is creeping up the Kindle download bestseller list. Snag it while it's free!

Free ebook, that's right completely FREE for 48 more hours

People,

Snag this short story collection while it's F-R-E-E. Don't need a Kindle, a Nook, a nanny, a hall pass, or even matching socks -- just a computer screen with which to download and read these totally FREE short stories.

Let's do this.

Au Revoir, Stump Town

After wasting 15 months of my life, I'm over Portland completely and utterly. No more Portlandia inspired daydreams for me. The last time I strolled across Burnside Bridge at sunset, it was not gauzy lighting and curious Hipsters on bikes. It was dirty, loud and dangerous, like I might be pitched into the beige cesspool of the Willamette the minute some aging infrastructure failed.

There were all sorts of red flags that I shouldn't try to live there, but I had my Carrie Brownstein blinkers on. My first mad attempt should have curbed all my future Oregonian ambitions.

I met a room renter on Craigslist in October 2013 and moved into her 3-bedroom, 2-bath condo the day I met her. Two weeks into our cohabitation, she lost her job thanks to the Government Shutdown and receded into her bedroom for two weeks of Zoloft-inspired texting to her online boyfriend. She emerged long enough to tell me -- without any warning -- that I had 48 hours to move.

Portland invented flakiness and shucking personal responsibility. Now throw in some real Great Recession angst and you've got a recipe for a thoughtless upper middle class ignoring a growing sea of working poor.

The second foray up to the Portland area was more promising. In January 2015, I had a temp job waiting for me and got into a rental share with a nice, level-headed lady who also had a 3-bedroom  this time in Vancouver, Washington, the suburban tumor that clings to the top of Portland like a plastic cowboy hat. All was well for the first two months. Then the elderly bat-shit crazy landlady below us decided on a Vicodan-induced whim that we had to move. This was my first no-cause eviction. I now know they happen all the time in the Portland area, which is second only to San Francisco in pitching tenants to the curb ... for no reason at all. (Really it's about money, rents are sky rocketing in the Cleveland of the Pacific Northwest).

I found housing in Portland to be depressingly like Seattle: slumlords were getting $750 for motel rooms with kitchenettes. First, last plus vague $400 "non-refundable" deposits. That's $1900 for a shed.

I scrambled to find housing, spent a while living with a mean dude who was a quart-of-vodka-a-day alcoholic and finally settled on the last room I rented for $600 a month: a 10 x 10 square foot in the basement of a 75-year-old tract home owned by an Asian Hipster chick who was the definition of Pretentious New Ager. One of her six day jobs was re-aligning chakras. Seriously.

At age 49, I took a job as a landscape laborer when my first temp job abruptly ended (they didn't want to spring for healthcare). I was 15 years too old for this dead-end job and Vancouver in June was 30 degrees too hot for that kind of work.

I interviewed for technical writing jobs at places like Intel where I was told over and over, "it was down to you and one other person." Stable, good-paying employment in Portland was like the summit of Mt. Hood -- pretty to look at and eternally out of reach.

Everyone had assured me that Portland and its surroundings were chocked full of Liberals. People who were avid recyclers, organic gardeners, Unitarian Universalists and believers in book sharing. I'd say this was true about 25-percent of the time. The rest of the time? It was Sacramento with more trees and angrier NIMBYs.

For a town of 75,000, Vancouver had a lot of skinheads. And in retrospect, Portland is a city where someone in a coffee shop can say totally straight faced: I'm a vegan and a white supremacist.

Black Pussy. Yes, there's a band in Portland that call themselves this. Read the drama here.

Overall, I found Portlanders to be insular and pretentious on a level Seattleites can only dream of. They're certain they're doing the right thing (their "thing") and they're certain everyone else is not.

Childishness isn't just endorsed in Portland, it's a valid lifestyle. People don't go to parties to drink and hear bands. No, no. They go to "art parties" to "engage in new mix medias". Think: birdhouses out of Popsicle sticks in the second grade. There must be 20 or so Meetup groups in Portland just for people who play board games. Not kids, but adults in their 20s and 30s lining up outside bars to play Clue or Jenga.

Forays into yesterday's fads like 80s culture is fine, but devoting all your free time to a past you likely were never a participant in, is just weird.

Get your own fucking style, poseur.

At least people who were into swing dancing in the 1990s understood it would only be trendy for about 15 minutes and then we'd all move on from the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

I suppose I have too close a perspective on Portland and its Hipsters because I lived with two of them for nine months. But one of them was a trust-fund cunt who had a day job as a Pilates instructor despite the fact she couldn't get sober long enough to teach P.E. to fifth graders and the other was the High Priestess of channeling money out of rich housewives from Lake Oswego.

They talked about organic farming, helping the poor, seeing other people's point of view, blah, blah, blah. But scratch the surface and they were as typically bigoted and selfish as the yuppie Realtor in the Prius next to you in traffic.

Most people are generous and liberal until it's an inconvenience and then they're not. Ah, neoliberalism, you poseur,

Zombies: They're all in your head

I like The Walking Dead. I loved Max Brooks' World War Z, even met him and had him sign my copy of the book. I think Robert Kirkman is a great writer. I listened to his interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast and he was interesting. And he's a talented storyteller who, unlike a whole lot of white men, has no problem writing about black characters, strong female characters, gay characters, any ol' kind of characters you can think of. Awesome.

She can't be hungry, no digestive system ... at all!

Here's the thing about zombies and the entire sci-fi/fantasy premise: It's complete bullshit. When people die, they swell up because of all the microbes and gases in their intestines, sometimes they burst, they smell real bad ... and that's it. Dead is dead. The very absolute end. Period. I've seen dead bodies a couple times in my life. I saw my grandma when I was 15. My aunt and uncle made the faux pas of having her casket left open. She looked well made up, hair neatly combed, slightly plastic and very dead.

Another time I was working in a retirement home for something like four dollars an hour and one of the long-term vegetative geriatrics in the retirement home died. The charge nurse didn't notice for several hours because, well, he never moved and was always asleep. His gurney was wheeled out of his room and into a hallway. His body was covered in a sheet. Aside from the fact his emaciated chest wasn't rising and falling, it wasn't much of a change from his prior state of being.

Dead people are without exception always one thing; very still. They don't get up and dance and they certainly don't rise up and start roaming shopping malls for human flesh.

If you are medically brain dead, you have no lower reptilian brain. You have no desire or compulsion to eat, let alone breathe. You can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch. Sorry Kirkman, zombies can't "smell" fresh human blood.

Prior to AMC's extravaganza, there was a plethora of zombie flicks. Like The Walking Dead, many take liberties with making zombies look as comically gory as possible. Zombies without limbs come out with their teeth gnashing. Zombies without spines slither menacingly toward the protagonist. Even more improbable, zombies without abdomens come lunging out of the dark, hungry for flesh. The trouble is, nothing without a digestive system, along with that all-important nervous system and circulation, has an appetite. Even invertebrates like parasitic worms aren't interested in lunch if you cut them in half in biology class.

I can't write fiction about zombies or any sort of zombie-sponsored apocalypse because some part of me is still a 12-year-old biology student who is gunning for an "A". I understand the basics of biology too well to suspend belief and stop snickering over the silly premise.

 Totally REAL. Complete, absolutely real and occasionally ridden by Vampire Bill.

I would more likely believe in fucking unicorns living wild and free in Narnia or Middle Earth than zombies stumbling after their next "meal".

Now vampires, those I totally believe in.

"Wil" you write for free?

Ummm, no. I don't work for free. Awesomest post by Wil Wheaton in response to HuffingtonPost. This is great.

You Can't Pay Your Rent ...


And among the replies there was this awesome little social experiment:

Ask non-creatives to work for "free".

Object of Desire (a short story)

One of my short stories is going to be offered FREE on Amazon Kindle starting on Tuesday Sept. 15.

Science Fiction is B.S. - 1982

West of You: short stories

My short story collection is up on Amazon/Kindle and can be bought here: WEST OF YOU.

And two of my short stories are now available on Kindle.

BRAVE SUCKER can be had for the rock-bottom price of $1.29, less than a cup of coffee.

And LAND OF NOD, one of the short stories which previously ran in THE SUBTOPIAN: SELECTED STORIES VOL. 2 can be read for $1.59. That's less than the cost of bagel.

Subtopian

I've been published again. This short story anthology is an earnest labor of love on the part of Trevor and a couple of other people in Portland. You can find their online magazine here: The Subtopian and the print-on-demand/Kindle version of the anthology right here on Amazon.

Everything ...

... is now here on Word Press. I took a freebie class and discovered that Blogger is bad. :( That is all.