Sometimes I miss Usenet

I'd really like to be able to initiate a discussion about the thing I wrote about the other day--how language about inclusion can either support or undermine inclusiveness--but there's no actual venue for doing that now. Either you have a widely-read blog, or you talk to five people. The problem with usenet was, of course, that if I started such a thread, on, say, rec.arts.composition, within two days some person would be saying that what I really wanted to do was Regulate Language and Institutionalize Literature and, of course, Execute Kulaks (I am not kidding. I once said that I approved of better traffic planning and it was not long before a particular person who many remember as "the reasonable, polite, and humane conservative" was drawing a connection between the statement and Stalin's actions in the Ukraine, not at all subtly accusing me of complicity in the latter  by my support of the former). Which is why we've become atomized.

I could say something on an open thread at Making Light, but the format for comments is only amenable to short notes. And I think a comment to the extent of "Some of these publications have really murky and unwelcoming language which I thnk undermines their expressed determination to bring underrepresented writers into the fold" is really not enough.These ideas need more room for developing. So, here I am, hoping that someone with a wider-read blog will become interested in the subject and bring it up, so that we can all talk about it.

The example I brought up the other day was not the worst. There's one out there which is so specific in its demands, and yet so long-winded, that I gave up before I had read the whole thing. Many guidelines are simply too long, which dilutes their message. Others include in-jokes or unlinked references to possibly famous pieces of critique. Excessively specific peeves and favorites are not as helpful as the editors think they are.

I do have some positive suggestions. It would be nice if I had any way of talking to the editorial world in general, because I'm certainly not going to copy this and send it off to all the editors who inspired this. I'm not out to pick a fight, I just want to have a better time submitting things.

Here are the things I've been thinking about, which I think would make things better:

One: write short guidelines. You do not need to write out a detailed and descriptive list of every trope you don't like very much if you're going to write over and over again that you could be persuaded by the right story, You could list maybe three things you really don't want to see, and three things that are "hard sells," but don't go on and on about them. The reason is not that writers don't want to know whether you want to see the kind of story they write: it's that all of that stuff runs together when there's too much of it and they end up confused. Just like it does in fiction, see?

Two: if you want to include your critical or political jargon to send a message about the tone and aspirations of your work, don't assume that everybody knows it as well as you do. You don't have to be condescending in defining the terms, just scaffold them (that is, embed the definitions in the text).

Three: when you post your formatting demands, try to make them possible. One venue out there demands that the writer use style sheets, which I don't think very many writers know how to use. Yes, Word does them. But most writers only use them passively by way of the automatic scripts that Word employs by default. Writers who use other word processing programs may not be able to use them passively like that. Along that line: don't demand docx. Not everybody can give it to you. Accept doc or rtf files too, and you're golden.

Other publications which have been accepting (sometimes only) electronic submissions still talk about the manuscript format as if it were on paper. This can be frustrating as the writer tries to figure out how to translate your directions into what's going to happen in the text file.

That's the most important part. On thew tone front, some of these guidelines sound like the person who wrote them hates writers and also like they hate other publications in the genre. That's a little daunting. When you've got an idea for a theme you think is underrepresented, why not just say "We can never get enough of this" or "We want to see more of this" or "This is what moves us," along that line, instead of saying it's never been done before, or never been done well before? Because you're most probably wrong on that front. When you talk about what you do and don't want to see, try not to make it sound like you have only seen two good stories ever.

Anyway, that's what I would be saying to the SF community in general, if I had a way of addressing the community in general. I'd want to talk about how the writers most vulnerable to the discouraging effects of these things are the writers that we've lately been talking about wanting to recruit in larger numbers, and I'd want to say that my suggestions are not difficult to implement.

radicchio triumph

So, my Grey Bears bag this week consisted of two large bags of baby spinach (which I can't eat ever since I had an intestinal infection three years ago), two heads of radicchio one of which was as large as a standard head of cabbage and bitterer than almost anything I have ever eaten, a couple blood oranges, some potatoes, some yellow onions, a medium portabella mushroom, and a tiny anemic heart of romaine, This may sound like I am going to be complaining, but no! I am going to brag.

I gave away the spinach and set about concentrating on the radicchio. It comes about its bitterness naturally: it's one of the chicory cousins and it inherits bitterness as a birthright. So I set about reading radicchio recipes online, finding that most of them are rather better suited for the milder instances of the herb rather than the bitter manifesto I had in hand. But I found one recipe that intrigued me. It called for radicchio to be sauteed with mushroom, onion, garlic, and walnuts, and finished off with lemon juice and parsley. So I made that and it was still too bitter (I mean this. I like bitter, so if I say something is too bitter, I do not say it lightly). Well, I was not done. I thought about what Jozseph Schultz said in his mushroom cookbook about how to adjust for flavors that are too strong in the balance, and started tinkering. My roommate who will never get that being pre-diabetic means that I am screwing up when I use sweeteners suggested honey, but I went with raisins (which have sugars in them but also fiber and delicious, delicious nutrients) (also notice I don't say I never use sweeteners, only that I am screwing up if I do: but I don't feel I am screwing up if I make jam, wine, etc., because I can use these items to deal with the human need for sweets while exposing myself to less actual sugars). Then I served this delicious but still too-bitter concoction in a quesadilla and the extra blandness from the tortilla and the cheese put it right over the edge into heaven territory.

Today I have more radicchio, but no more raisins or garlic, and I don't want to use a tortilla because the ones we have are for Keith and they are white and I'm trying to be a little better every day. So I had the idea of putting sliced potato in for blandness and torn-up dried Satsuma plum slices for sweetness. I also had the idea of putting in kabocha squash to help with umami, blandness, and sweetness, but that got sidetracked because I was so hungry when I was cooking (it was eleven and I had not eaten yet), so I just ended up microwaving (shut up, it's actually a good technique for vegetables you want moister than grilled and drier than steamed) the kabocha squash (half of a tiny one) and eating it plain plain (soo good while it is still hot) while I cooked and now I am too full for the radicchio so I can't tell you how today's came out until supper time, when I will reheat it with (meyer) lemon juice, parsley, and cheese, and that will be my dinner.

On a related note, I have a wild mushroom cookbook in French. I find that with my forty-five year old high school French I can actually read some of it in a useful way, but if you are fluent in French and would like a wold mushroom cookbook, let me know and I will send it to you.