a genre question

I’ve started reading Dorothy Sayers recently, and it made me reflect on something.

In the genre of romance, the vast majority of the writers, and especially the big-name ones, are women — to the point where (so I’ve heard) a man who decides to write romance will almost invariably do so under a female pseudonym. In fantasy and science fiction, the big names in genre history skew male instead, and we still have periodic slapfights about insufficient recognition for female writers.

In mystery, it seems to me that there’s something more like balance.

You still get splits along subgenre lines; noir is more associated with men, cozies with women. But in the genre as a whole, if you start lining up the big names both past and present, you’ve got Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Sayers, Elmore Leonard and Sue Grafton, and many, many more. There are a lot of acknowledged and admired female writers, without mystery/crime/detective fiction being viewed as inherently a “female” genre.

Or maybe not. I’ve taken occasional dips in the mystery pool, but it isn’t a genre I read extensively. So tell me if I’m wrong. But it really does seem like mystery, of all the genre categories out there, does the best job of balancing this factor. Does anybody else think the same?

on a brighter note, ICFA was great

I was going to post some lengthy ruminations about travel problems and how people respond to them, but y’know, I’ve lost steam on it. I’m currently parked in the lobby of my hotel, since they have free wireless, comfortable furniture, peace and quiet, and nobody tripping over my suitcase, none of which the Atlanta airport can supply. So now seems like a nice time to talk about ICFA.

First things first: the Super-Sekrit Awesome Jacket was a resounding success. I bought this thing last summer and test-drove it at the Dickens Fair in November, but the real idea was that I was going to debut it publicly at the ICFA banquet. There will be pictures eventually, I’m sure — even if I look like a radioactive ghost in most of them; ye gods have I gotten pale — but in the meantime, I can say that it is a black brocade jacket of Victorian appearance, wide-necked with satin lapels, a narrow double-breasted closure just below the bustline, and then tails in front and back. I wore it with an underbust corset (since the front is cut high enough that it needs some kind of waistcoaty thing to look right), a semi-vintage shirt, and a long skirt, and got many admiring reactions. Unfortunately, as it came from Black Peace Now, which is the goth end of a Japanese fashion boutique that has an outpost in San Francisco, nobody is likely to be able to buy one for themselves.

Other than that, I read “The Last Wendy” and got fewer laughs than usual, but I think we just had a non-laughing audience; Eileen Gunn said the same thing about her story, which was quite funny. Then I socialized a bunch and hung out by the pool (when it wasn’t raining) and went swimming, which I kept thinking of as My Ankle’s Last Hurrah, seeing as how it’s about to spend four weeks in a plastic boot. The socializing was also key, as I won’t be going to karate for a couple of months (thus removing two social events per week) and may not be able to drive while I’m in the boot (thus removing my ability to get to where other people are).

It was a good ICFA, too. The topic this year being “Race and the Fantastic,” it provoked a lot of good papers and discussions, and Nalo Hopkinson’s luncheon speech was amazing. Sunshine and seeing friends aside, this is what I really love about ICFA: the chance not only to geek about SF/F, but to do so in a critically thoughtful way, among people who won’t look at you funny if you bust out the theoretical jargon. (My jargon is on the rusty side, of course, but still. I like to flex it occasionally.)

That’s pretty much it for con-reportage, I suppose. (Confidential to people who saw me obsessively checking e-mail while I was there: alas, no dice. Got my reply this afternoon, and will be sending the story elsewhere once I get home.) Now I continue to entertain myself for another four hours or so, until Airtran’s one daily flight to San Francisco rolls around.

Well, I made it as far as Georgia.

3:30 p.m. — leave Orlando hotel.

1:15 a.m. — arrive in Atlanta airport hotel.

In between, a couple of hours of sitting in the Orlando airport, three hours or so sitting on the airplane hoping Atlanta’s weather would stop sucking enough to let us go there, a brief departure from the plane to grab food, a mad dash out to the runway, some more sitting, a quick flight, a bout of circling Macon, a landing, a leisurely and frequently-interrupted taxi to the gate, an unpleasant stay in line with lots of pissed-off passengers with strange ideas of what airlines “should” do when these problems arise (“they have the planes, just sitting around; they should put them in the air!”), a freezing wait for the hotel shuttle, a shuttle ride, a protracted stay in line while the one hideously overworked concierge tries to clear out this shuttle load before the next one arrives, and then an elevator trip and a long hallway to my room.

In a moment, I will investigate the hotel and see if there is any food to be had, and maybe even a hot tub. I’m dubious on both counts, but apparently today has not ground all the hope out of me yet.

This one goes out to Mrissa

Time for my post at SF Novelists again. Up to bat this month: the First Girl Ever. You know, the Amelia Earharts and Alanna of Trebonds that blaze the way into a new field — but more importantly, we’re also talking about what happens after them.

Comment over there, as per usual.

pardon the (impending) dust

The process of website improvement has started. So far, the only change is that I’ve moved the entire site down a level: everything that was swantower.com/marie/* can now be reached at swantower.com/*. Soon — possibly later today — kniedzw will be helping me set up a redirect so that anybody who’s bookmarked a specific page will get bumped along to the new location. After that, the actual revamping will begin.

If you notice anything broken on the site, drop me a line at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

How much of a geek am I?

I suspect the answer lies in the way I’m grinning over my latest acquisition, a book called Cockney Past and Present, which was written in 1938 and apparently remains one of the best histories of cockney speech.

Sheer. Brilliance.

From mrissa and janni: Tattúínárdœla saga

In English, The Saga of the People of the Tatooine River Valley. An analysis of how George Lucas’ science-fictional adaptation of a Middle High German epic (the Himelgengærelied or Song of the Skywalkers) differs from the earlier and less corrupted Icelandic saga text.

I do wish Lucas had chosen the Icelandic text for the exchange between Veiðari and Lúkr — much less whiny, much more badass and amusing at the same time. (You’d be hard-pressed to beat the Norse for deadpan reactions to doom.)

more pictures

Okay, I finally got off my butt and finished sorting through my hundred and hundreds of pictures from India to cull them down to the 100MB I could upload in a month — only to discover that I’d hit the limit for publicly-available pictures (200), and if I wanted the oldest ones (the Midnight Never Come research set) to be visible, I’d have to either delete some of what I just posted, or upgrade my account. So I upgraded, and now I don’t have to worry about that 100MB limit.

Oh well. It’s probably better for your sanity and mine that I restricted my choices that sharply; otherwise this could be the Photoset That Never Ends. Instead it’s a selection of the better results. I hope you enjoy.

Since setting up a photo gallery on my own site is one of the things I intend to do with the redesign, please take a moment if you haven’t already and give me your thoughts on what the new look should be.

Impending website redesign

Poll time; please take a moment to answer this, as the more responses I get, the better.

I’m preparing to do a fairly substantial redesign on my website, including (among other things) a visual facelift. I always meant to make it more colorful, but never did decide where I was going graphically — which, as it turns out, is the subject of this poll. I know I want to change the color scheme and provide some kind of image at the top and/or side(s), but I frankly have no idea what that should be. So I’ve put together this handy poll, to see what ideas you all have, and whether those nudge me out of my current waffling and into a useful direction. Check as many boxes as you like; if you like several but prioritize one choice over the others, say so in comments.

Feel free to get as detailed as you like in the comments. (And if you’re coming here from outside LJ, you don’t need an account to comment, though it will help if you sign some kind of name.) This is a mass brainstorming session, basically, so let’s bounce ideas around until something comes out.

someone who understands me!

From ellen_kushner, a fabulous website on the topic of long hair. And by “long,” I mean that my own hair (down to about my hips) is maybe on the short side for what she’s talking about. It’s a great site overall, with very common-sense advice for many types of hair (not just long straight Caucasian hair like mine), but what I love it for is this page, with various possibilities only marginally more complicated than my usual braid, and more interesting to boot.

Much of the long-hair advice is stuff I’ve been doing anyway — I don’t wash my hair every day (I don’t need to), I wear it in a braid (though not up) almost all the time, I don’t use a blow-dryer or curling iron or coloring products or anything else of the sort. I’ll probably try some of the other tips, though, especially since they’re generally in the vein of less maintenance rather than more. My hair is long enough already for my taste, but I wouldn’t mind making it even healthier for its length.

Icon needed.

My eternal gratitude to whoever can make me an LJ icon showing Inigo Montoya with the text “I hate waiting.” (Preferably him on the cliff, around about the point where he says that.)

Edit: And we have a winner! Thanks to greek_amazon.

more photos

I still haven’t sorted through my India pictures enough to post them (Bad Swan! No biscuit! Or whatever one feeds swans as treats), but it occurred to me I did have scanned-in copies of a few shots from the last photoset I took on film, during my 2002 trip to Japan. The scanning means their size and quality is not the best, but I put them up anyway for you to enjoy.

technical question re: websites

Is there any convenient way to do a mass-redirect on various URLs? Basically, I want to simplify the directory structure of my site, such that everything which used to be swantower.com/marie/X becomes swantower.com/X. But people may have bookmarked particular links, and I’d like them to be automatically redirected when they try the old URL. What I don’t know is whether there’s any simple method for achieving this. Help?

link roundup

Little-known fact: March 8th is celebrated in some countries (like the country of my office) as The Feast of Cleaning Up Your Browser Bar.

Con or Bust auction — this closes on the 13th. Bidding for a signed set of Onyx Court books is up to $25 $30, and the money goes toward helping fans of color get to cons they might not otherwise make.

Sirens conference update — I failed to post this in time for the chat on Saturday, but more info on getting involved in programming. Remember, despite the word “conference,” you don’t have to be an academic to participate.

Reproductive Justice linkspam — I hadn’t heard of this organization before, but basically they’re a group that looks past the abortion debate (which has a tendency to dominate the conversation in the U.S.) to broader issues of pregnancy, sexual violence, disability, transsexualism, immigration, economics, and pretty much anything else that affects the ability of women to decide what to do with themselves and their bodies. There are some really heartbreaking stories in there (like the one about confiscating an immigrant woman’s child on the grounds that her lack of English made her unfit to be a mother in the U.S.), and lots of opportunities to take action.

Ignoring people you don’t trust — an interesting look at how the sources of statistical information and analysis can, or should, affect the way you receive that information. On the one hand, the studies claiming smoking reduces risk of Alzheimer’s were mostly written by people affiliated with the tobacco industry; on the other hand, the earliest work documenting a connection between smoking and lung cancer was published by Nazis. So it isn’t a simple question.

A flowchart of where the Google Books Settlement could go from here — a simplified flowchart. Boggle at its complexity.

Johari Window — more than a meme, less than a psych study; click through to choose how you would describe me.

Alice in Wonderland

Spoilery thoughts will go behind the cut, but the exterior thought is this: that Tim Burton, working from a base of freaking ALICE IN WONDERLAND, has done a better job with the notion of “strong-minded female protagonist does protagonisty things, up to and including saving people and kicking ass” than most directors who set out to tell a story about a Strong Woman Kicking Ass.

The movie has flaws, but this aspect pleased me quite a bit.

Now, on to the spoilers.

I feel like a dork.

See, okay — I’ve known for a while that it would greatly simplify my record-keeping if I had a dedicated credit card for business-related purchases. And what with these research trips to London, a decent number of those purchases are made overseas. And, well, the terms this card offers for such things are actually pretty good.

So I’ve just applied for a <snooty tone> Harvard Alumni credit card. </snooty tone>

I mocked kniedzw for getting one; now I’m eating my words. But I’m still going to feel like a giant dork the first hundred times I whip it out to pay for anything.

Edited for userpic change: Because really, if I’m going to do the snooty tone, I need the image to go with it.