(Black) Women in Horror Month: How What We Think Horror Is About Determines Who “Writes” It (Part 1)

When it comes to Horror written by “minorities”, one has to wonder: just what are we afraid of?

During this Women in Horror Month we cannot help but look to our most obvious problem: exclusion of writers of color – especially noticeable in the volume of work not-included in the Horror genre… So here we are also in Black History Month in the United States. And here the twain will meet…

Because the off-putting drive to keep contemporary Horror tied to the white Weird Fiction of Lovecraft and not let it breathe and grow is perplexing. The message is clear: keep it clean, guilt-free, and colorless. Write for that prepubescent white male and yet produce “original” fiction – just not too original.

Why is it we still believe that no one wants to read Horror written by women or writers of color? Why is it we still believe that there are no people of color who want to read Horror?

At what point do we just do the math and see that the potential audience for Horror is far larger among both females and people of color than it is among white teen and preteen boys?

Perhaps it is really a confession that women and people of color – being the poorest paid and most frequently impoverished – are not worth courting for those precious “expendable” dollars… But if so it is stupid. Because for most of us living on less than white male counterparts live on, the only simple and affordable pleasure is the occasional paperback offering.

And if the argument then becomes that women and people of color just don’t like reading or writing Horror, you haven’t been paying attention. On purpose.

Scandal at the HWA: How Big is Too Big?

It may seem peculiar, but I go long periods ignoring the Horror Writers Association.

It’s not really a big mystery: I don’t belong to the Horror Writers Association, and I confess, I have no professional interest in it.

While some may say it is because I have not been professionally invited (not having sold the “easy to achieve” $25 in professional sales – a statement, by the way, I contest and protest), it is more than that. After years of watching the HWA, I grew to dislike the cachet of the association.

And after a recent attempt to visit the HWA website to “see what’s doing” among the “Professionals” (a somewhat annual task I perform and one which typically leads to my quick exit with an eye-rolling angst), I discovered that scandal – yes scandal – was brewing. Had brewed. For the last two decades.

And I missed it. The question is: should you?

 

What’s On YOUR Resume?

Now, it is important to note than any organization with the sheer numbers of membership and length of existence as the Horror Writers Association and which manages its history without a major public scandal is doing pretty darn well.

And it is also important to state that any organization of this breadth and depth is also the mirror of every other governmental entity it is fashioned after – responding to insinuations or outright accusations with denial, defensiveness and eventual action. Typically, such an organization seems to move at glacial speed when immediate speed would be better for all. And perhaps that is why the scandal (as it were) took wing at all.

Then again, important accusations were made.

And if you are a writer whose goals include becoming a member of the illustrious HWA, or if you proudly already include it on your resume, perhaps you should make yourself aware of the observations of malcontents and decide for yourself. Because if you are a writer, you should not only have principles, but stand by them. And if you join an organization, any hint of scandal or complicity becomes all yours by association.

As a writer, critical thinking goes with the territory.

This means you take nothing for granted – especially the more sensational something is rumored to be. However it also means being aware that one is responsible for one’s own decisions, and that sometimes those decisions carry consequence.

There was, in April of 2016, an eye-opening post from established writer and Bram Stoker Award winner Brian Keene titled, “Why and When I Will Begin Boycotting the HWA (UPDATED x3)” at http://www.briankeene.com/2016/04/13/why-and-when-i-will-begin-boycotting-the-hwa/

I was astounded to find a legitimate laundry list of unsavory allegations with regard to the operations of the HWA since the early 1990’s.

In this case, the scandal is really about an observed and disturbing pattern of behavior noticed by some members who objected strenuously enough to them to distance themselves permanently from the HWA.

And while some might call them “mere” allegations, these allegations are no joking matter.

They include allegations of embezzlement, and assertions of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in prestigious award nominations, as well as those which include abuses of trust, the breaking of organization by-laws, exposure of the membership directory to a known stalker, and adulterated awards voting process, missed office elections, and more (according to a blog post by author Brian Keener). And they are – to some folks – serious enough in mere allegation form to warrant not only disappointment, but to generate real professional differences in what is acceptable, forgivable, and even forgettable.

I am thinking the HWA should be adult enough to handle that, and would wish dissenting members well in their departures. And then perhaps would also take a serious look at how the ivory castle might be viewed by outsiders looking in…at least for the sake of the future and its future members. And while officers of the HWA did respond to the allegations AND the post, one cannot help but also feel a bit underwhelmed.

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2018/02/trey-gowdy-says-adam-schiff-obstructed-justice-in-attempts-to-block-courts-from-releasing-fusion-gps-3592352.html

 

There inherently remains a professionally imposed chasm… a qualifying of complaints, as though only “approved” peers of the HWA might have legitimate opinions, or may voice concerns. It is that ever-present sense of superiority that clings to the HWA which is not only hypnotic, but strangely repellent.

For example, as an occasional visitor and potential member, I have always felt “dismissed” by the organization’s public face, a consequence of that persistent and elitist tone. Whether the HWA is right for the genre or for other people, I cannot say. I can only say it is clearly not right for ME. Keene’s observations only confirmed the existence of ghosts I whose presence always seemed to loom large behind the professional tone of the organization.

These are not ghosts which should be exorcised with denial. Rather, they should be met with apologies, and revised procedures, with real attempts to mend fences.

So I find Keene’s comments vitally important –especially to writers like myself who (for whatever reason we are not widely published at the moment) are left feeling uncomfortable at best with our impressions of the HWA.

Says Keene of his catalog of allegations: “The list is to demonstrate that somewhere along the line, the train came off the tracks and it has remained there, regardless of which administration is in power. I stand by my assertion that it is important to list these, as it demonstrates a pattern. And as Jeff VanderMeer said on my public Facebook page, ‘ I’ve had nothing to do with HWA for more than 15 years because of the pattern.’ The pattern is the entire point.”

I mean if our patterns of being unpublished writers matter…

Sometimes an organization becomes too big to save. The question is: is the HWA there yet?

Sometimes such an organization becomes everything it claims to warn and fight against. And when that happens, leaders within that organization have only themselves and their own hubris to blame.

And then in November 2017, there rose the spectre of the sexual harassment dismissal of a prominent writer/editor discussed in the post of blog File 770 titled “Horror Writers Association Bans CA Suleiman from StokerCon” authored by Mike Glyer at http://file770.com/?p=38766

As a female writer of Horror, this comes as no real surprise, but a real disappointment… and yet another item to join Keene’s list of HWA public relations  and image problems.

And while the HWA has taken steps to correct the trajectory of such damaging allegations, they are a large organization and large organizations typically wake up late and under-achieve repairs in their attempts to be fair but litigiously aware.

For many, it just feels like too little, too late.

In self-defense mode, they do not see what outsiders see.

We have in this latest “scandal” an oblique- though-Science Fiction writer’s view of an HWA casting couch. One has to wonder, how long has that been there. But then, don’t we all really know?

Isn’t the lack of the elevation of women writers in our canon and the almost total lack of writers of color tell that tale?

Having prestigious female editors – no matter how accomplished – does not make up for that, and I will tell you why: if female writers or writers of color cannot get published in the handful of “acceptable,” HWA-approved,  sometimes-appearing-in-literal-print magazines, they do not get paid that “easy to achieve” $25 minimum in sales to warrant membership in the HWA, which in turn limits further acceptance in publications, which in turn limits nominations to or acceptance by HWA-sponsored or infused awards, or Best Of publications.

The drowning of real voice continues. The banishment of dissent is complete.

And if the officers of the HWA are slow to rise, or are inadequate in their rising to act on such patterns, such accusations, such scandal…doesn’t that in itself suggest that the HWA has perhaps made itself obsolete?

I would hope not. There should be something salvageable in a noble purpose…

No, I would hope that it is all about wariness of legal reprisals.

But for the world it looks like too much tolerating of an obnoxious and unwelcome relative at the holiday gathering. It looks, smells, and tastes like complicity.

And it looks like arrogance.

 

https://www.tumblr.com/search/nuclear%20wars

The HWA & the Future of Horror: What’s In It For You?

I want to make clear I am not seeking to participate in the “bashing “of the HWA, but I do agree with many of its critics that we all need to be paying attention here, because they have the reputation of representing the entire genre.

I think the idea behind the formation of the HWA was not only honorable, it was timely. And I do think that in their own way and at least initially with good intentions, the HWA has thought itself to be the best bet for the genre to offer a guiding hand if not a guiding light as to how the genre can grow itself, sustain itself, and monitor itself.

However I also think that power corrupts, and that the bigger a group gets, the harder it is to truly vouch for the reputations and honor behind its members and their actions. I do think it is possible for such a group to become too large to be serviceable to its original mission statement, and I do think the capacity for ego-led behavior to become self-endorsed increases the more exclusive and elitist the group makes itself.

The HWA was founded by writer Robert R. McCammon in 1984, a writer of the 1980’s boom times who had the foresight to see the genre needed a sense of direction.

Precisely at this time, Literary Critics were starting to founder under the weight of the 1970’s explosion in publishing of all genres and the internal discussion of the inadequacies of either Literary Critical Theory, contemporary writers, or both. The ability of Critics to help guide professional direction of national writers was simply overwhelmed. The capacity of the public to “weigh in” on a book’s popular value and potentially its quality had begun to erode the very concept of an “establishment’s” authority.

For those reasons, the HWA was needed as a mitigating source of information and recognition.

But with the onset of the Internet Age, the bomb-throwing began, and the victims are not only publishers, editors, Critics, booksellers, and writers – it is also those organizations like the HWA that are taking it in the teeth.

The simple fact of the mere size of the organization that may be a contributing factor to its undermining by scandal. But leadership cannot escape the taint of its members’ misbehaviors, nor absolve themselves of their own sins.

Because where ever there is absolute power, there is also the potential for just such a group to decide it is running things – all things – having to do with the genre. They can drift in their moral imperative until they become a parody of what they intended.

When that happens, it is typically accompanied by the sensation (and then the declaration) that they are responsible for the inherent production of all quality work in the genre, that they are the rightful judges, juries and executioners, and that they are entitled to omnipotence, to proper deference…

But I say that because you are fortunate enough to find a professional paycheck in traditional publishing, mentoring by old school traditionalist editors, and/or the promotional luck of traditional publication… this is not qualification enough.

Many more of us would have joined those ranks long ago if traditional publishing had not undergone an evisceration of its way of doing business to begin with. For those of us in the genre who would be interested in becoming editors, professional writers, or working anywhere in the old traditional system, the door is firmly closed and locked. Permanently.

To claim our unemployment and lack of mentorship means we neither have the dedication, the talent, or the value of those who benefitted from that older system is a dangerous fallacy to launch in the genre.

And I say, you are not Literary Critics. Therefore at best, you think yourselves better.

In a few decades, Critics will let you know the truth of it.

But I digress…

When it comes to being a Horror writer, there has – for many years – been nothing more prestigious than the credential of belonging to the Horror Writer’s Association. For some, it means a second look by editors, perhaps a qualifying reason to be considered in an anthology or a contest or an award, and always a validation of belonging…

There is also a titillation and ego-stroking moment when one considers that not just anyone can belong to its exclusive membership. Certainly there are now (after either pressure, financial incentive, or both) associate-style memberships – the chance to lay about on the periphery with one’s nose pressed up against the glass. But I am talking bona fide membership with all of its promised perks.

As a writer, one must weigh whether this is what one wants or needs on one’s resume. And while many novice writers are star-struck at the possibility of sharing community – even if it is in another room of the same house – with the likes of the Stephen Kings of our genre, hobnobbing with famous editors, and potentially sharing a publisher with someone special – one really should think about what joining means.

Oddly, writers are not typically joiners. So it is to me amazing that like lemmings, the HWA is the cliff we are naturally expected to flock to. To desire. To covet. To lust after.

Perhaps this is because I simply do not. In full disclosure, I have no interest in the HWA.

There is nothing personal in it. I simply want to do whatever I do on my own merit, free of fetter, rebelling against my own people-pleasing gene by not-adding more people to please. And my ego is just fine, thank you, without any stroking or promises of inside knowledge and secret handshakes.

Part a very important part of the reason I chose to abstain from pursuing the goal of HWA membership (of any kind), is that I have seen and read essays on the website which I found to be dictatorial, harshly critical, and elitist in tone.

And while I am familiar with the “editorial voice” (which conversely, many editors in their very tech-writing kind of thinking is bare-bones and to-the-point, void of sugarcoating and razor sharp in its directness) completely fail to hear themselves… What I read was – at least to me – patently arrogant. They included rants and polemics about the audacity of the unpublished to call themselves writers, about the absence of concern for quality or craft, the invalidity of online magazine publications, the conceit of self-made publishers and the self-published, the self-aggrandizing pats-on-the-back…

For an organization overseen by professional, traditional editors and writers we are led to believe embody the Establishment, the lack of listening to one’s own tone or the arrogance of thinking such a privileged position is ultimately validated either by years of experience or personal position in that very organization is flat-out offensive.

Furthermore, the constant redirection of our genre by way of the HWA’s endorsement of conventions, awards, publications, publishers, writers, contests, and literary-style criticisms seems to present a conflict of interest. By their heavy artistic influence, are they not dictating the very future of our genre instead of being a forum for diversity and growth? Shaping what will be allowed to see the light of day?

While I don’t mind reading opinions, when those very opinions are not only cloaked in the guise of the HWA’s official “position,” but wield unfettered the Sword of Publication and Awards… well, things look subversive. Contrived. Controlled.

I see such overreach as a way to manipulate the type of Horror we see being published – as just another version of the Good Ole Boys’ system long lambasted about by the very writers and editors and publications the HWA is supposed to represent. When we limit the number of editors and slap a definition on “established” authors in the genre, I believe we limit the genre.

 

https://twitter.com/maggiejank/status/668053570638364672

 

For example, we look to the HWA for our Best Of anthologies, for rankings of Horror publications, and Horror editors. We also tend to only see criticisms of independently published or self-published works and self-publishing authors – because those HWA editors and publishers and writers are the ones getting the readership boost of traditional publishing. This leads newbies to the assumption that all things flow through the magic hands of the HWA, or they are renegade, unendorsed rebel works of little or no merit.

For example again, it is from the HWA that we have seen a consistent criticism of contemporary, non-HWA writers and their works. These are the writers and works (we are told) which do not conform to craft, genre conventions, or literary standard. This is (we are told) what is bringing our genre down, ruining the genre, giving everyone a bad name which Literary Critics have been complaining about.

But the HWA – like MFA programs everywhere – are ignoring what else the Literary Critic is saying: we have too much repetitive drivel pouring out of published Horror. We keep reinventing FORMULA instead of story.

(As an under-published, unknown Horror writer, you can leave me and my work out of this. But you cannot exempt the HWA or MFA programs, or traditional publishing. Sorry.)

Literary Critics don’t have the time to troll the waters of us lesser-knowns, of small press publications, graphic novels, and comic books. What they are looking at is the Big Names of contemporary Horror and all of their followers… at the very traditionally published which the HWA spends so much time lauding above the rest of us.

And regardless of the status and glory of those Big Names, Critics are not at all happy about the (perhaps) better written Horror they have inspired, because as any reader can tell us, the storytelling is just not there and we are still consistently missing the Literary mark as a genre.

We do not improve that by making a Professional Writer’s association more exclusive with a centralized star-making power machine.

We do that by educating our writers earlier…when they are still in elementary and high school. When we actually separate writers from readers and teach elements of CRAFT.

We do that by getting our hands dirty. By trolling about in pulp and bad writing and honing rusty skills, milking the story-telling gene until we rediscover how Literature works within the subtext of our genre. We do that by random publication of stories in cheap magazines, by recreating that fertile field of creativity and writing mills that enabled stars like Lovecraft, Poe, and even Stephen King to rise to prominence.

I personally do not see that endorsed by the HWA. And what I have seen or sensed, has led me away from any interest in the HWA.

The bottom line is that whenever you trust groups of people, those with subversive agendas will eventually ruin everything – or attempt to. You should always look carefully at groups and professional organizations before you join…perhaps even hang back and study them and their doings for a while.

Ask questions:

• Is the administrator/president someone who has been around awhile, has developed a reputation, and is someone with some kind of verifiable experience or track record?
• Is there more than one way to find or contact this person?
• Do you have enough information about the group to reasonably find it again if contact paths go silent?
• If you submit work, is there some sort of arrangement in place to ensure that it is not shared without your permission? And how is it disseminated and handled if rejected?
• Do you know other members, trust other members, or are you among the first members?
• What are the net benefits that you receive as a member, and are they worth your trust?
• Are you asked to pay dues, and if so, what do you get in return?
• Is there legal accountability in the organization?

If you are joining a writers’ group, there is an element of trust you have to be willing to extend – especially if it is a critique or professional group. As the administrator of a Horror writers’ APA, I suggest you not only ask the above questions, but that you participate by monitoring your first work exchange or submission within the group – how it is received, processed, handled, and/or returned. Are you treated with respect? Is your work treated with respect? Is the end result not what you want – but what you need?

You have the right to the assurance that someone is taking reasonable responsibility for the protection of your reputation and your work as a member of that group – even if it is the HWA, and especially if you are paying dues.

I truly believe that being an officer of a group of writers is a position of trust – not a reward or proof of popularity, wisdom or righteousness. There is an inferred and innate obligation to look out for both the organization and the writers within it… to guard the mission.

If the HWA can’t or won’t do that…if it is too icky to handle scandals and accusations, maybe members should wonder where their money is going.

Isn’t it supposed to be about the genre? And isn’t that by default – you?

Some writers won’t mind the fallout. Some will decide to join the HWA despite any hint of scandal in the hopes that they will only have great things happen as a result. To them I say, bon voyage. Just go in with your eyes wide open.

After all, no one ever plans to be the victim of misadventure.

 

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canuck-the-crow-flies-off-with-knife-from-crime-scene-in-vancouver-1.2918801

 

  

Greater Rocky Mountain Horror Writers APA welcomes writers of all stripes and levels, currently at no cost. Visit our recruitment and club webpage at https://grmhwapa.wordpress.com/

 

Caution: Tentacles May Deploy Without Warning (or, How Your Age Informs Your Fiction Writing Success)

When I was a teenager, I loved horses. I rode competitively briefly, showing other peoples’ hunters… and I desperately wanted one of my own.

Standing next to a fellow rider once, I was asked if I had my own horse. I replied, no…but I hoped to have one someday. The girl snorted, looking down her nose at me. “If you really wanted one,” she said, “You would have one by now.”

Little did I know, this was how the world would be looking at my writing forty years later.

If you were any good, you would be published by now…

To my Horror, I actually believed that for an ungodly long time.

 

The Truth About Age in Fiction Writing

I have often wondered why no one ever discusses age (like race) as a contributor to Horror fiction.

I have often wondered why once we are ensconced (read trapped or buried) in other careers, relegated to merely dreaming about our writing, we stop believing publication is possible. Or viable. That we come to believe success in writing is only for the young among us.

Some of this is the fault of the marketing machinery of Big Publishers, who like to advertise new writers as “the next Stephen King”… implying that such a writer is a youthful puppy, a keeper, a long termer, a veritable gold mine of future works to be immortalized in film. And sometimes this is because Big Publishers NEED another Stephen King… because some day they will have to navigate our genre WITHOUT him…

But many times it is also because those of us who are right now the Old Writers struggling in the genre grew up with a totally different concept of success – actual examples of lives lived writing… even writing even mediocre Horror fiction. We grew up with the 1970’s Boom, and so to us, success means writing a novel or two in our twenties and transcending into being a Professional Writer. To us, success has been painted as being able to not only make a living off our work, but living well…

Yet if that scenario failed to play out, we start doing the math. After years of listening to the many criticisms and following the life-plans dictated by other people, we wonder: is there still time? Will we live long enough to woo Big Publishers into paying us Big Money contracts (the kind that don’t exist anymore), and didn’t we miss the boat already if we can’t be young and flaunt it? To do all of the things we wanted to do as rich, successful authors?

Old writers are often their own worst enemy…

But then we have had a lot of help in twisting our own self-images.

Because I have also wondered when it became okay to associate older, unpublished writers with failure…to make it an inside joke.

And why is it “proof” of talent or vision to not only get published, but to be young and rich and published? Only some of us are old enough to remember when that was even possible…

It’s not like editors know the ages of submitting authors either… So it must be coming from ourselves.

We have bought into the mythology that unless we are published when we are young, and are thereby a “Professional” (and rich) Writer well before we are thirty, we are simply not good enough…We didn’t want it badly enough. So now we don’t deserve to associate with Real Writers…

Suddenly there is an accompaniment of snorts and sideways, condescending glances… Suddenly we are out of the loop, out of style, and unable to gauge exactly when that moment of stellar success was supposed to have happened.

To make things worse, we keep moving that secret Age of Success, the one that marks the moment we should resign ourselves to other jobs and other careers… Whose idea is that?

Writers of our genre come in all genders, ages and colors, all geographic locations and climates, all political and religious bents. Yet time and again we are given a prepared profile of the Professional Writer… in our genre, typically still a Caucasian male, young enough to remember his youth and still writing about it and his own young adulthood.

Women writers of Horror, it seems, are more readily painted as Young Adult writers, or writers of fantasy. We are to be seen and not heard, demure… nurturers of young readers. We have, apparently, even lost our genre identities as the mistresses of the ghost story. We are not to be taken too seriously.

It gets worse the older we are…

Collectively, we have lost our voices as men and women unafraid to write as older men and women. It is kind of like being in Hollywood… as though we are being (in not-so-subtle ways) coached to disguise our ages (when not our genders) by writing about youth, as though the only ones interested in reading Horror are the very young people the Establishment tends to claim don’t read anymore…

These are all lies, I tell you…lies!

Not only is Stephen King the proof, but so are writers like Ramsay Campbell, Anne Rice, Richard Matheson, Dean Koontz, Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Bentley Little, and Robert R. McCammon… all of them “vintage” and still carrying our genre…even in backlist titles.

As a reader of many of them, I have watched a good many protagonists creep up in age… leaving behind that New Adult thing that has tried to insert itself between Young Adult and Real Adult fiction. Our own writers have tried to drag Horror back into the Adult arena, dancing with Literary values by writing stories which are in themselves proof that some of the best Horror gets written after we grow up. Everywhere there are signs being downplayed and ignored… Horror is growing up.

So why does the myth of youth persist when defining New Writer Success in our genre?

Who has commandeered the profile of writers to suggest that if a writer has not “made it” by the time they are in their twenties and “established” by their thirties, then Fate is telling you they are not worthy?

The truth about age in Horror fiction writing is this: youth is where we learn about what scares us the most; old age is where we learn about confronting that fear… So while we may have great scary ideas as young writers, and we might write boldly about those things, as older writers we know how to throw and receive a punch. We are, in fact, more likely to generate Horror fiction with Literary elements.

Why?

Because it takes some living to write what you know.

And it takes even more living to write what you believe.

The truth about old writers, published or not?

Writers, like fine wine, improve with age…

Getting Past the Stereotypes

Like most Horror writers, I started writing pretty early – toying with ideas when I was a teenager, heavily influenced by the many writers of our second Golden Age of Horror and Science Fiction in the 1970’s Publishing Boom. This was the time of the paperback – what book peddlers call Mass Market paperbacks, and what was then bursting onto the scene as “Pocket Books” – those small paperbacks for under $5 that were on racks and spinners in every grocery store, hospital, drug store and airport.

This was when fiction was so mass-produced that the impression was left on many a young writing hopeful that there was a living to be made writing fiction and an unending world of story to be savored out there. Who would have thought it was a phase? Who would have thought that pulp stories would be pushed out of our immediate consciousness and that book prices would rise precariously, nearly putting fiction out of reach entirely, and severely limiting our choices both professionally and as readers?

Sadly, the demise of the age of the Mass Market paperback came with another price: the end of the Mid-List Author, the complete and utter destruction of writing careers, of publishing careers, of…writers.

Many of us were left adrift with our dreams. We had nowhere to go… And when former industry standards are being laid off, let go, and dicked over, when top editors are being unceremoniously dismissed… What hope is there for unknown writers?

Most of us were forced to abandon our dreams, to sell them out for “real” jobs, coerced into believing that because “anyone can write, writing is no worthy talent.”

So we spent decades writing stellar letters, correcting CEO’s bad grammar, creating easy to understand Standard Operation Manuals and Employee Handbooks. Later, we did some awesome presentation materials, edited scientific reports for style and grammar, we made the coffee, we cleaned the bathrooms.

And all the while Stephen King kept writing, kept being published, kept proving that it’s the story, dummy… it’s all about the story…

So pardon my generation if we took a little while to find our way back to sanity. It only took being sold out by every generation that went before and half of them coming after, by losing our alternate “careers” and retirement savings and being passed over for real jobs no matter how often we returned to schools and collected degrees, and maintained GPA’s our younger classmates seldom did.

It took realizing that we have been had… that we have been cheated and tricked and bribed out of our real purposes in life…

It took realizing we sold out…

That means that yes, my generation is in the midst of an epiphany.

And no matter what other well-meaning folks or scheming cads intended by saying what they said to us… We did this to ourselves. We abdicated…

And we are all the more miserable for having done so.

I think if older writers have one message for the younger ones shyly coming up behind us it is this: stop listening to the “experts.” Especially today, the rules are being rewritten, flaunted, disposed of.

Make your own. Take your own life by the horns and don’t look down, don’t look back, don’t let go…

This means that just like this old Horror writing woman, you have to decide what will be important in your life: holding onto what makes you, you… Or pretending that “someday” will come before you die.

It means whether you are male or female, you cannot believe in stereotypes… like old people will only write fiction other old people will want to read (like filling a niche is a bad thing), or that old people can’t write fiction that relates to younger readers.

Pish tush.

It only means we really, really shouldn’t try to write in “modern” slang, to believe our own stereotypes about young people.

We Ancient Ones have had quite enough of the stereotypes, anyway. And if you are a woman, chances are you have been hearing them since you lost that 20-something baby fat and your front end alignment started needing annual adjustment.

The Eldritch Uprising

You may not have noticed, but there is a movement afoot. A bunch of old folks have gone rogue and started looking for “second” careers… (I am on number 39, thank you, Silicon Valley.)

We have realized that we are NOT our jobs, but our jobs may in fact be US. Who we are at the end of the day comes down to what we believe about ourselves, about happiness.

So many of us who tried to be writers just in time to become other cogs caught in other machinery have begun to come home. Just in time, too… because now we don’t need the Mass Market boom, or the classy sassy editor, or the big New York publishing machinery – it would be nice, but we don’t need it.

Because the same technology that vampirized our savings accounts and fake careers, has also provided us with the ultimate put-up-or-shut-up opportunity: self-publishing.

And ironically, what we hear from traditional publishing is a whole lot of whining about quality.

For sure, the price of self-publishing sometimes comes at the sacrificial altar of quality… But if we apply what we learned working in all of those endless clerical jobs about editing and presentation and layout and marketing…

Come on. You fellow old folks know exactly what I am saying… we already ran companies, offices, projects…

And if we can do them for others we can darn well do them for ourselves.

We just have to keep ourselves from getting giddy – drunk with excitement and anticipation, blinded by the possible rose-colored glasses of delusion.

Sure maybe we are J.K. Rowling’s long lost Literary Twin, the New Stephen King…

But most likely not.

So our rebellion must be tempered with humility. Don’t rush to publication. Don’t assume your writing is “good enough” without having others (who don’t care about your feelings) read it. Pay people to judge it. And learn how to fix the things that are found to be wrong…

As Eldritch Ones, we must realize that we may indeed have missed the boat in the quest to have our work to be well-read and to die famous, to quit the day job and live adequately on Social Security.

But we have not missed anything of Life. We still have the capacity to break barriers, to create something new in the vacuum of modern genre writing, to be… rebels. Old rebels, but rebels nonetheless.

Maybe that’s especially true for older women…Maybe nobody ever suspected you had Horror stories tucked away in your cookie-baking apron, or that you’ve fed every co-worker who ever got you laid off to the most unspeakable of monsters…

The bottom line is this: when writers get old, they write what they think. It’s a miracle. We stop caring what other people think.

 

Your writing is what you say it is, not what others say it is. It is also where you say it is… there is NO timeline, no age limit constructed by people with questionable motives and possible psychological issues of their own.

We also come to realize that by doggies we have opinions that do not have to conform, that we are as writers generally not conformists as a rule… that maybe, just maybe we should have been torching our own underwear with protest groups a long time ago instead of letting the Herd think for us.

Maybe that is how we turn it around. We realize maybe to our own perverse shock and joy that all of these years we really were feminists, or conservationists, or advocates for the unlikely and un-preferred.

And then things like Literature begin making sense… becoming even more mysterious, carrying codes and secret language we never before picked up on. And we realize with giddiness that we can write that way too…that it is the unwritten, unspoken challenge of the profession to do so…

Suddenly we realize we have actual opinions about the way things have played out in wars, in society, in the ways we treat each other right here in our own generational decades.

Suddenly our age informs our writing… and we cannot stop it.

And we begin to build monsters, looking for ways to say what we have by evolution come to realize: that we are where we are because we did not speak up when it counted, when it was for ourselves. We believed the mythology. And there is only one way to break out of our self-imposed misery…

We write. We are writers. That is what we do.

Don’t be surprised if there are tentacles.

We warned you.

 

In Search of the Interdimensional Beings of Horror: Where Are Our Writers of Color?

Most of the time, when we read Horror, we are simply looking to be spooked – to be creeped out, to be disturbed. That superficial-ism is largely the damage done by the 1970’s Horror Boom, when we rediscovered how very fun it was to turn out the lights and scare ourselves. I was there, reading and keeping myself awake nights by suspiciously regarding shadows that seemed to move when they should not.

It never occurred to me to look beyond the pages of the books I was reading to the race of the author, or to wonder why minorities – if they appeared at all – appeared primarily as characters in cameos, as early-plot monster-fodder, as the sinister representatives of secret, exotic societies of monster worshippers – but hardly ever as writers.

It simply never occurred to me to wonder why…

Waking Up the Sleeping Princesses

It is like minority voices and/or those of people of color belong to some Lovecraftian interdimensional place in undefined space, beings who we cannot see, do not engage with, and cannot relate to except when they reach through that thin veil of our reality to hurt or insult us.

But it also like we have fallen asleep in our own fairy tale.

Hmm…. Perhaps WE are the problem?

No, of course that couldn’t be it; after all, the Publishing Industry has long been telling us why things are inevitably the way things are – because the voices of color “simply aren’t telling stories The Market will bear…”

“In terms of my own justifications, I find marketing interesting—that’s in Apex Hides the Hurt and John Henry Days. The marketing of culture—how we relate to it, how it finds us—is something that preoccupies me.” Colson Whitehead https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/colson-whitehead-on-zombies-zone-one-and-his-love-of-the-vcr/246855/

Oddly, when minority writers turn up writing Horror stories, they are inevitably consigned to the general fiction section, pitted against the whole of Literary Writing as though it has already been decided that minority writers don’t write Horror; therefore minority writers must be Literary instead. So minority-written Horror becomes all about “slumming it” in the genres.

Way to insult the both of us – genre writers and Literary writers. Are we supposed to be jealous or critical of these “outsiders” come to create in our genre? And why is anyone making it matter?

Rest assured, ‘Publishing has its reasons,’ we are informed; most of them dollar-informed reasons.

And indeed, in Publishing there are many arguments made and offered up for why minority writers are not as prominent. For example, we are often told not as many of them are writing. But isn’t that in defiance of where so many of our stories came from?

What are the odds, I wonder… that so many minorities do not produce published writers because the seed of storytelling is not in their genes…

Talk about your fairy tales.

And to brand all minority writers as Literary because they can’t help but write about minority experience which includes any number of fine Literary Theories, is – well – awfully racist sounding.

Are we revising minority voices out of our fiction?

Every culture in the world has stories. Every culture in the world has had them ripped off in some manner or other by modern-day published writers… From The One Thousand and One Nights, to the Aboriginal Dreamtime to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, we have been ripping off campfire stories since Homo Erectus rubbed sticks together.

No, I cannot believe that there are not people of color telling stories meant to be heard, inspired as every writer is by older, traditional tales. Right now, as they always have been.

We are also told that minority writers tend to tell stories that are not-inclusive of the bulk of The Market… But isn’t that in itself the purpose of good writing – to write to and for an audience that is known? To educate the rest?

I mean it seems racist yet again to assume that I as The Market’s pristine representative want to be catered to, and see no merit in “Other” or “Ethnic” writing.

Aren’t writers supposed to speak to an audience they know firsthand and cherish? To provide them with a warm blanket of prose and poetry with which to endure and navigate the world? Pardon you for speaking for me… someone smart enough to recognize that the work in question was not written specifically for me, and here I am the Other, open to giving a story its own space to inhabit…

Furthermore, are Publishers really going to suggest that there aren’t enough minorities to support (at the very least) a healthy niche Market of publishing if They are not as The Market seeks to define Them?

And why is anything in today’s business environment a failure if it at least breaks even or makes a modest profit? And what about all of those sermons to writers about the quality of the work for the good of humanity if Publishers won’t stand behind it, loss accepted?

Then we are told that (just like with our own rejected writing) only the Best find publication – as though we should overlook but subordinate the implication that minority writers tend (like all of us currently rejected) to not be good writers.

But how many really good writers do you commonly encounter who cannot or will not fit the whimsical parameters of a fickle, one-trick-pony Market? Does artistic choice make a writer truly “bad” or “unmarketable”? Or just make The Market and its machinery lazy and unimaginative?

No More Excuses: Now We’re Talking Kids, Futures, and Dreams

We are too often told that their children do not read, and so they do not read as teens and then as adults… therefore, there is no real Market for any of their fiction which may surface, or it is too negligible to finance.

Now this really ticks me off.

And which summons the paradox: do minority children read less, or read less when they discover they are not being invited to participate as readers? And then would they read more if we gave them more relevant stories to read? Would that in turn lead to more adult readers? And fan the already hot teen market?

Clarifies Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, “Children the world over delight in stories and start shaping their own pretend worlds as toddlers. Story is so central to the lives of young children that it comes close to defining their existence. What do little kids do? They do story.” (7) And eventually, they do us. So why are we processing writing through a filter of white culture that ignores all others?

And exactly why the heck do we always expect minority children to identify with white characters, and believe it either doesn’t happen or shouldn’t happen the other way around?

Debbie Weldon/AP http://www.phillyvoice.com/boy-trying-trick-teacher-haircut-goes-viral

“In this Feb. 28, 2017, photo, 5-year-olds Jax, left, and Reddy smile after Jax got a haircut similar to his friend’s at the Great Clips in Louisville, Ky. The story about the two boys and their racial harmony went viral online after Jax told his mother that he wanted to get his haircut like Reddy so that their teacher wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “

Ah, don’t tell me children don’t get the real story…

But the rumors don’t stop there. They go on to sprout the theory that even if more minorities did write stories, the Market wouldn’t be able to interpret them – laced as they would be with cultural jargon and slang, and life-situations that The Rest of Us simply could not relate to… like Straight Outta Compton, the message would be lost on The Market, with no chance of Recognition or award; that the characters would not be identified with.

But at what point does something become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Wouldn’t it be truly amazing if we could learn something about each other through our art?

And that quickly, we are right back where we started…campfire myths.

Only this time, the Neanderthals are us.

Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.

The Publishing Industry is first an industry: it aims to protect itself by serving a market it perceives to want certain things.

It self-censors…

Maybe it even believes its own manufactured trends…

But it endlessly quotes what it refers to as “Market Demand” or “Public Interest.” Now, part of this is fairly and rightly rooted in a publisher’s need to make money, because making money allows for the payment of authors, artists, printers, editors, warehouse folk, transportation folk, bookstore folk, library folk, etc. But it is also rooted in a very dated idea of just who “The Public” and “The Market” really is….

For example, we hear how “people don’t read print books anymore” and that “people want certain types of books with certain types of heroes – read: stories about white heroes in white cultural situations…

My life has been so full of white people, I never noticed…Worse, I never noticed that people of color had little choice but to read the same…I’d like to think I was too busy reading, but the unavoidable truth is that somewhere in my own egocentrism, I chose to not-see.

And it is past time we started to realize that there is a whole universe of beings out there that we have been relegating to the fringes of our publishing dimension.

And some of them just might be…gods… Perhaps, crusty, cranky ones like Lovecraft’s versions…but perhaps ones whose voices we need to make us tremble in awe…

I look with the eyes of a white child raised in the 1960’s and 1970’s, whose father fought in Vietnam, and who accidentally encountered a Vietnamese-American writer like Violet Kupersmith, only because someone left her book at the desk to be re-shelved… It was Horror – told the old-fashioned way, cloaked in traditional myth and storytelling.

Her bio: “Her mother’s family fled the country by boat following the communist takeover of Saigon in 1975. Her parents met in Houston, Texas, where her father was a librarian and her mother was living in a convent… Violet attended Mount Holyoke College, where she injured herself many times playing rugby and began writing the ghost stories that would eventually become The Frangipani Hotel.”) http://www.violetkupersmith.com/violet/

I wonder what I am supposed to not-get as a representative of The Market. What was I supposed to resent? Why wasn’t she in my genre? We need voices like hers.

I get it.

I got it.

I loved it.

Like it or not, our world is changing. We are homogenizing, we are beginning to see enough value in each other that color is beginning to fill our families with rich, new cultural diversity. You can rejoice, or move to another planet.

The question becomes:

Are “people” not reading anymore because less people are exclusively living the white experience? Do today’s potential readers want to see themselves in books that are NOT being published?

One has to wonder. Even I wonder… And working in a bookstore, I can testify that yes, it appears that Publishers are right, and our customer base is largely white…

But then who wants to come into a 50,000 square foot bookstore and be directed to one tiny little section devoted to history, or sociology/cultural affairs, or psychicly deduce which writers of the rows of stacks are of a given color, and which of those were “allowed” to depict true characters and real experiences?

Listening to the Flutes and the Chanting

What is blatantly clear to me, nested all comfortable in my Horror genre, is that writers of color – especially in Horror – are excruciatingly hard to find.

From educational disparities, to vacuums of encouragement and mentoring, to “pressure” from the Ivory Tower (pun intended) to congratulate the self on “rising above and never looking back to save the drowning people who will surely overturn the boat,” people of color face unique challenges – additional challenges to being published that those of us in preferred shades of color do not.

And we don’t want to admit it because doing so makes us feel like that much more of a failure for having the advantage and still not getting the job done…

This is a tool our own race uses against us constantly to exploit our own sense of inadequacy, and to keep our heads turned, our noses to the altar stone. We are teased by an implied if not implicit wink and a nod… even as we are rejected. Always it is the fault of …The Market, the one god in this dimension whose whims select but a few for Eternal Fame.

Daniel José Older photographed by Ashley Ford.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/daniel-jose-older/

Says Daniel Jose Older in a wonderful essay on the matter titled, “Diversity is Not Enough: Race, Power, Publishing”:

“The publishing industry looks a lot like one of those bestselling teenage dystopias: white, and full of people destroying one another to survive.” (238-239)

It’s true: look at how the acolytes of The Market, the would-be priests to the beast, rip apart and publicly dissect even the successes in our industry. Look at the sour grapes and the bitter envy.

Meanwhile, locked outside are writers and readers of color – a whole ‘nother Market…

I don’t tend to think that this is insidiously planned, although I could be wrong. I think we have become insidiously institutionalized to believe that this is the Way Things Are and that Nothing Has Changed. We have been asleep at the wheel , waiting for the kiss of the prince– even if not especially – at the wheel of the Horror Van.

Horror has long been a Literary tool for expressing dissent with the norm, with exposing the horrors of real life by the manufacture and exploitation of monsters. It has been the venue for feminism and civil rights, for truth-telling and condemnation of unacceptable social behaviors. So why have the most powerful voices of those issues been largely silenced or minimalized to the point of pulps and limited interest publications? Why do we label authors and not works? Why do we not trust readers to find the works designed to speak to them?

I can’t help but think this is a self-perpetuated problem inherent to the Publishing industry.

Older continues, “The publishing industry, people often say as if it’s a gigantic revelation, needs to make money and as such, it responds to The Market, and people don’t buy books about characters of color. This is updated marketing code for ‘you people don’t read,’ and its used to justify any number of inexcusable problems in literature…” up to and including commentary such as “The Market, I am told, just doesn’t demand this kind of book…because white kids won’t buy a book with a black kid on the cover – or so The Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way…” (237)

Older further states that when agents and editors are typically asked what they might do to mend the lack of diversity in publishing, the conversation degrades into a blame-the-victim mentality, deftly managed with comments such as, “the change is going to have to come from within those who are affected” which as Older clarifies, “is the language of privilege – the audacity of standing at the top of the mountain you made on the backs of others and then yelling at people for being on the bottom.” (237-238)

Where publishing argues that people of color do not read, perhaps the substantiating argument is backward. Perhaps people of color would read if there was something out there that they could relate to.

More importantly, why isn’t it important to publishing to inspire people of color to read, to improve reading scores because reading stories that matter to them naturally leads to reading more, more often and better.

We must admit, there is nothing – and I mean nothing – more frightening to white privilege than an articulate, well-read person of color who can aim their vocabulary with laser precision at issues of social concern. But it seems sad to think that this is why “of 3,200 children’s books published in2013, just 93 were about black people according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Books Center at the University of Wisconsin.” (236)

And yet if the question is occurring to me, I have to wonder what people of color are thinking…

So how do we fix this…really fix this?

http://www.azquotes.com/author/44523-Judith_Ortiz_Cofer

Dimensions Are Right Next Door

Unfortunately, the editors and agents may be mostly right. Change will have to start with writers of color, and the motivations of their intended audience. But they are wrong to think it stops there.

It stops with US. It stops when we don’t see the potential rising right in front of us and give it a chance.

In an essay by Laura Tohe titled “The Stories From Which I Come,” we see how what we start in the classroom is framed by Publishing choices. Tohe states:

“In the early 1960’s I didn’t read indigenous writers; I didn’t know any existed. Every day at reading time, out came the further monotony of Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot…Hearing and reading stories in English regularly, I thought only non-Indians were writers or could be, even though when I was twelve, I secretly longed to be a writer. What stories could I tell? Who would be interested in my stories? How does one become a writer? Instead I told my parents I wanted to be a pediatrician when I grew up.

I didn’t realize until much later that my writing life really began with my mother’s stories and the stories my relatives told as I was growing up. Not until I graduated from university with a degree in psychology did I stop writing ‘in secret.’“ (176)

Imagine how she might have soared being seen and nurtured as a young writer. And how many others just like her are in classrooms right now, or lost to other “professions” by hopeless default because their writing doesn’t “fit” a myopic, colorblind Market?

http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2015/151104/comm-laura-tohe.html

I love Horror. I don’t care who writes it, as long as it scares me. I love it when I learn something in addition. I cannot imagine that I am alone, and if even a percentage of The Market as currently defined agrees with me, then why aren’t we all worth courting?

Perhaps publishers are thinking that now is just not the time to take that kind of a chance… But I can’t help thinking maybe it is precisely the time. Here we are in the bonanza of all marginalist times since the 1800’s, with antagonism and horror being done to so many people of color and differing religions and cultures… when coincidentally and suddenly The Market isn’t buying much of anything at all…

Why not give the new majority something to read, to talk about, to inspire and educate the rest of us? And why not market to this Market?

So where are our writers of color? Right beside us… Where they have always been – pushed into an alternate dimension by our own desperate jostling for recognition. The question is more accurately not about where they are, but why isn’t their own voice, their own way of storytelling valued for what it can teach the rest of us?

Pucker up. I don’t know about you, but I feel horrified. And maybe even a little cheated.

References

Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston: Mariner Books, c2012.

Older, Daniel Jose. “Diversity is Not Enough: Race, Power, Publishing.” Manjula Martin, ed. Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, c2017.

Tohe, Laura. “The Stories From Which I Come.” Janet Burroway, Ed. A Story Larger Than My Own: Women Writers Look Back on Their Lives and Careers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c2014.