Mystery -- ancient and modern.

London: Unreal City

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:21:14 GMT

This article originally appeared inVector , the journal of the BFSA. I’ll be discussing imaginary cities with Kit Caless on Resonance FM at 3 today, so I thought I’d post it here.
London is fractal.

It’s dark and I’m walking a route north from Deptford that I’m sure I’ve taken before, but this time it doesn’t seem to be the same.I feel I’m getting further inward rather than further along, deeper into one of the city’s spirals, rather than closer to the Thames. Between here and the river, there shouldn’t be enough room for this many convolutions, this much detail. I recognise that old scrapyard – nothing but trees within the walls— but where did this little garden with its frozen pond come from? Why does the Gerkhin, occasionally looming on the horizon, above the lower, closer heights of Rotherhithe, always seem to be apparently in the same place, the same distance away?

London is full of alternate realities: you can’t travel through it without brushing against them. In the once-Blitzed streets where 17^th century livery halls abruptly give way to brutalist concrete , you can see a confluence of Londons conquered, complicit or blissfully untouched by the third Reich. London has time travel: the resurrected Globe; the temple of Mithras dragged up from under Walbrook Street to Temple Court; the anonymous remains of Tudors, Romans, and ancient Britons that the Thames sometimes recedes to show preserved in the mud. From the Thames Path, you can peer through a rank of blackened Victorian arches sprouting buddleias, at the bright, sterile palace of Canary Wharf. A green laser divides the night sky above Christopher Wren’s domes, marking the Greenwich Meridian. There’s nothing to unite these fragments except the modern heir to the Victorian smog, the ubiquitous fine black dust that coats nostrils, nail-beds, and penetrates even closed and untrodden rooms.

The skyline only began to climb only in the sixties, but now it’s hard to imagine it static, London is always climbing itself up the ladders of swivelling cranes, always tinkering with itself. Very tall buildings are, apparently, a reliable indicator of an economy approaching crash. Just completed, the Shard shimmers above the recession it predicted. Below, the beggars that faded from the bridges and underpasses for a decade or so are back in force.

London is a godawful mess. It offers beauty only in patches and shifts of light, rarely in steady, reliable expanses. It’s no surprise that its masters have never been quite satisfied with it. The city owes itself now not only to disasters overcome but to endless attempts to make it more like somewhere else. More like an ancient Greek agora, more like a continental cafe culture, more like a monolithic fortress on a distant planet… architects have shuttled it back to a romantic past or hurried it into an imaginary future.

The Olympics, the chunks of Soho have been carved away for Crossrail, have been only the latest attempt to shift the place’s identity, to tidy it up a bit; now. In the long term, London can probably stand the loss and the waste: it has absorbed far worse, and you can’t ruin a city this jumbled. For now, though, there’s only the spectacle of a government amusing itself by writing dystopian sci-fi it into the actual city: a missile-bearing warship to be moored in the Thames and criminal sanctions for using the words “Twenty Twelve” the wrong way on pub signs or on the internet.

London has something dreamlike encoded into it. It will readily lend itself to visions of Hell, and it will never credibly give you Utopia, but it has infinite room for the weird. Shelley and Eliot saw the abyss in its massive, relentless busyness, Dickens imagined dinosaurs roaming up the Strand. Virginia Woolf gave Clarissa Dalloway a perfect summers’ day in a London at its freshest and most glittering, but always on the point of hallucinatory metamorphosis: a London populated, in the visions of a shell-shocked war-veteran, by dogs about to turn into men, birds singing in Greek, while even the ostensibly sane wonder if perhaps at midnight the city reverts to the ancient landscape the Romans saw. Arthur Conan Doyle subtly inserted imaginary squares and stretched Baker Street more than double its length to accommodate Sherlock Holmes (The street numbers only went as high as 85 in the 1890s, it was only extended up into the 200s later.)

London imitates fiction imitates London. The city lives and breathes – sometimes literally – its own mythology. Once a huge slab of fog settled on the Thames as I was crossing Tower Bridge. Suddenly this truly was Unreal City — landmarks were reduced to transparent outlines, people to spectres – and they loved it: every cluster of people I passed was happily chattering of London’s legends and how this was just like them; they were delighted by the heightened sensation of walking from a workaday pavement straight into story. Does anywhere else open so many portals back, forwards and sideways across time and into? Other cities are grander, many are a fusion of ancient and modern, but are any so varied as to allow for the underworlds of Neil Gaiman and Ben Aaronovitch, and Philip Reeve’s ambulatory predator-city, and Mary Gentle’s magical Tudor capital, and Susanna Clarke’s Regency scientist-magicians, and Anthony Burgess’s ultraviolent wilderness, and J.G Ballard’s submerged ruins?

But are we getting to know the multiple Londons too well? It’s been joked that adding “in London” to the blurb of a book has become the genre equivalent of adding “in bed” to the prediction of a fortune cookie. For instant awesome, shake freeze-dried werewolves and vampires, and just add London! Are London’s dark places – abandoned tube stations, ancient catacombs, labyrinthine sewers –becoming too frequented? Need we fear that the shadows and ghouls that live down there are growing exhausted by the number of visitors?

It’s true that there’s more to the world of the strange than London. Lauren Beukes gave us a brilliant, grimy, complex Johannesburg whose traumas haunt its residents as a fantastic menagerie of animal familiars. Anil Menon’s Beast With Nine Billion Feet is set in a 2040 Pune whose citizens exploit advanced genetic engineering and escape their dissatisfactions into “Illusion” pods. Ekaterina’s The Secret History of Moscow explores a world of folklore beneath the gloomy post-Soviet streets. And the Anglophone writers have also explored the fantastic side of Venice, Paris, Istanbul … but with so little of the world’s modern literature is translated into English that it’s hard to know, from here, what else might be out there.

But while I hope more of the outer world flows at last into this country and this city, I don’t think writers need to worry about digging too deep, or loading too much into London.

London can take it. London always has more.

Originally published at Sophia McDougall. You can comment here or there.

TWENTY-ONE TIPS TO MAKE YOUR BOOK BETTER, for new writers

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:30:31 GMT

For the last year, I’ve been working for a literary consultancy. I read unpublished novels and try to help their writers make them better. In the course of doing this I have observed certain things, and also, in my time on earth I have read and watched many things that did get published or aired, but were unnecessarily annoying in certain respects. Here, therefore, I offer you a small bouquet of wisdom collected from this experience.

(All points are mandatory and legally binding for everyone reasonably defined as ‘a new writer’ with immediate effect).

1) Cut the elves.

2) (Elves called the Bla’fla-tra-la-la, which, in their ancient language, means the Shiny Superior Magical Pretty People Who Are Better Than You are still Elves. THEY SHALL DIMINISH AND GO INTO THE WEST AND GET OUT OF YOUR BOOK FOREVER THE END.)

3) Your book shall contain the minimum level of magic possible to maintain its existence.

4) Your book shall likewise contain the minimum possible level of rape to maintain its existence. (Yes, that certain novels treat “magic” and “rape” as likewise irresistible bothers us too).

5) A novel is not the means by which you get revenge on all the hot people who cruelly failed to find you attractive.

6) No, not all novels need likeable protagonists. Yes, your novel needs a likeable protagonist. You want to write an unlikeable protagonist? Wonderful. First write a likeable protagonist. And another one. And another one. And maybe one more after that. And then, when you know you can keep a reader interested in what happens to a character, (which is difficult even when that character is not a tremendous sack of shit) you can think about trying to convince the reader that time with a mopey, genocidal bastard is time well-spent.

7) Do not assume that your character is coming across as likeable just because you based him on yourself.

8) Or on Batman.

9) When your character cooks something it is not required that you take us right through the recipe, including cooking times and gas marks.

10) Your erotic imagination is not wholly separate from the rest of your imagination and that is fine. But bear in mind: readers can tell when the author has one hand in their pants.

11) Your heroine may have violet eyes, or she may be called Persephone, but not both.

12)‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ is the only work to which retroactive permission is granted to end in the following manner: with the hero or heroes on a stage, receiving a medal, being applauded by a whooping crowd of friends and erstwhile enemies, basking in the glow of how fully their awesomeness is finally acknowledged. This shall not happen to your heroes. It makes me hate them.

13) Likewise your favourite celebrities shall not enter the work to tell the protagonist how great they are. It makes me hate them.

14) Your villain is there to make things difficult for the protagonist, not to be your punching bag. Your villain shall not have every trait you despise, nor shall every character in the novel be talking about how awful they are, nor shall they fail at everything. Your story will be boring because the villain will clearly not be a threat and your protagonist will coast to easy victory. But also I will be sorry for your villain, and I will want to take them out for cocktails.

15) Likewise you shall not write random annoying people into your novel just so your protagonist can complain about how awful their tastes and manners are: it will makes me perversely fond of the supposedly annoying people and hate your protagonist more.

16) Your protagonist shall go to places and do things without always needing to be told by someone else where to go and what to do.

17) Things shall be difficult for your protagonist and they shall suffer, however…

18) Your initially interesting protagonist may not become the most tortured person in their world. COUGH DEAN WINCHESTER JACK HARKNESS GREGORY HOUSE.

19) All your secondary characters shall have interests other than your protagonist, your protagonist’s destiny, and your protagonist’s smouldering good looks. They shall not apparently have spent their entire lives before the story started sitting around waiting for the protagonist to turn up. They shall have goals and intentions that are not about the protagonist. This shall be especially true of the male protagonist’s female love interests. PLEASE.

20) You shall ask yourself, is it possible I am writing terribly racist things and have never noticed it? BECAUSE YES. IT IS POSSIBLE.

21) (I still see elves there).

Originally published at Sophia McDougall. You can comment here or there.

Comment Policy

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:15:18 GMT

My last post has 97 comments at the time of writing. While I did think a post with the words “rape” and “James Bond” in the title might get more attention than I’m used to, this was unprecedented. And, as I do not write and put things on the internet with the intent that nobody shall see them, I’m very pleased about this! Thank you, to everyone who linked it around and almost everyone who commented. However, it does raise some issues that I haven’t had to think about much before. As far as is possible, I want this not to be a “don’t read the comments” kind of place, and I am distressed that to some extent, last week, that was the kind of place it became, with people who would like to discuss sexism without being subjected to sexism reporting feeling tense, saddened and excluded from what was in many ways a great discussion, and a minority of obnoxious and denialist comments getting more attention than the thoughtful, knowledgeable ones.

So, although I am a sporadic blogger and thus unlikely to be able to host a regular commentariat here, and it may well be that nothing I write explodes like that again, I think I need a comment policy. So here is one.

All comments will continue to go to moderation by default. Nothing gets though unless I approve it. This way, people can comment and discuss (albeit not at high speed) and if anyone does anything particularly ghastly, it’ll quietly gather dust in my inbox, unseen by anyone else, rather than sitting there on the page upsetting people until I can nuke it.

For the most part the rules here are pretty standard. You can’t be racist, sexist, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, generally a bigoted bastard here. You can’t be abusive. Very egregious examples may get kittenhammered because kittenhammering looks like fun and I would like to try it. On this occasion I let every comment through, (until one gentleman decided that being asked to modify his behaviour in my space was an outrageous imposition on his liberty and therefore chose PRINCIPLED DEFIANCE, it was a little like the last hours of Joan of Arc) because I didn’t think anyone had overtly broken the letter of those as-yet-unspelled-out rules, even if some strained the spirit. No one actually lapsed into hate speech. But going forward there’s going to be an additional rule, and commenters will have to pass a slightly higher bar than “not actually and obviously abusive”:

Here it is: You cannot attempt to substitute condescension for an argument. There are areas of my life where I can’t stop people patronising the fuck out of me, or out of others, at least not without having a lengthy, energy-consuming argument. But here I have this beautiful “trash” button, and I am going to use it, and I am not going to waste time justifying it. You can go to your own blog or anywhere else that will have you, and sigh and tut and fume. But you can’t do it here.

I’m talking about things like this:

“Secondly I think that you don’t understand the concept of ‘realistic fantasy’” (I have published three books that could quite reasonably be described as realistic fantasy).

“Maybe you want to re-write this piece now after doing a bit of actual research.” (I did plenty of research, and you don’t set me homework, thanks.)

“Its the “Nights Watch” in ASOIAF not the “Black Watch”. If you can’t get a very simple fact about a book series then how can you expect people to take you seriously?”

(All right, this one was sort of adorable, and I would let it through again, but it’s probably not a kind of adorable we aspire to be, is it?)

I’m also talking about things like this.

In summary, if you find yourself tempted to address me as if I’m a disappointing student and you’re a professor I’m anxious to please, unless you are in fact Dr Sally Mapstone (who can talk to me however she wants) spare us both the time. If your absurdly condescending comment is unintentionally hilarious it is possible I will let it through to hold up to public mockery, but you can’t count on it. And if you have got through, but I warn you to stop doing something, take it seriously if you want to go on posting here.

The same principles apply to other users, and other forms of “’splaining” — If you want to explain something to another commenter that you don’t think they understand, be very sure you’re neither lecturing them on their lived experience nor assuming you have greater expertise when what you actually have is more maleness, whiteness, straightness, cisness or other form of privilege.

If you don’t think you broke any of these rules and can’t see your comment it’s probably just that I haven’t got to it yet, or conceivably that it got mislabelled as spam. If it’s been a while, you can try reposting or ask me to look for it.

With all that understood, welcome, please have at it.

Originally published at Sophia McDougall. You can comment here or there.

The Rape of James Bond

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:18:50 GMT

On Sexual Assault, and “Realism” in Popular Culture..

This essay discusses rape of both women and men throughout. No specific real-world cases are mentioned nor are any scenes described graphically, however as it’s about realism, it does necessarily shuttle rapidly between incidents in fairly silly texts and grim facts about the real world.

Spoilers for Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and minor spoilers for various older texts.

Last year, halfway through the second book of the series, I gave up reading A Song of Ice and Fire. I had enjoyed the first novel very much – I liked the sense that the fantastic elements were providing a different lens on the Middle Ages, removing the sense that there was something default or inevitable about mediaeval European culture, and re-revealing the fundamental strangeness of a world of knights and kings. I enjoyed the resonances with specific episodes in real history – the War of the Roses, the Jacobite rebellions. It reminded me of the songs by the Corries that I, a fake Scot, grew up on. I even enjoyed all the freaking heraldry and food.

That sense of history seemed to be dwindling away a bit in the second book, but in the end, that wasn’t what drove me away.

Instead, it was all the rape.

This surprised me. After all, I’d known going in that there was quite a lot of it, and though I was prepared to find its treatment at least somewhat problematic, I’d also expected to be able to handle it. I’m usually able to read fairly graphic scenes without getting more distressed than the story called for, and friends of mine who I thought were more readily upset by that sort of thing had read the books just fine. And, as it turns out, a lot of the rapes in A Song of Ice and Fire aren’t graphic at all.

But.

There.

Are.

Just.

So.

Many.

Of.

Them.

And occasionally they are really graphic. But that they’re mostly not almost made it worse for me. That made it possible for the narrative to load that many more of them by the casual handful into chapter after chapter. Rape as backstory, as plot point, as motivation – however badly handled, I can usually cope with it.

I found I couldn’t cope with rape as wallpaper.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Sophia McDougall. You can comment here or there.

Sophia, Agent of SHIELD

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:24:30 GMT

DUDE.

Look at this.

Just look at it:

[View the story "On names..." on Storify]

[View the story "\"You are an Agent of SHIELD.\"" on Storify]
How cool is Paul Cornell? So cool. SO COOL.

Rationally, of course, I am aware this means no more than the fact that I named one character in my short story, MailerDaemon after a little girl I heard chatting to her friend on the tube (Grace) and another after a handsome fellow I’d noticed working in my local Morrison’s (Jawad). The characters have nothing to do with the real people; I just needed names.

But, that out of the way, I do not really care about being rational here: I AM AN AGENT OF SHIELD. HE SAID SO. I KNOW WOLVERINE. I AM PROBABLY BEST FRIENDS WITH ALL THE SUPERHEROES.

I MAY BE TOO COOL TO TALK TO YOU NOW.

If it turns out Sophia the SHIELD agent is in fact, evil and smelly and nobody likes her – well, of course, evil, smelly, unpopular characters need to get names from somewhere too, and I shall not take it personally. Naturally I kind of hope she is MEGA AMAZING. But whatever she’s like, and even if she only exists for a couple of panels, it’s such a nice little bit of writerly trivia to be part of. I only started reading comics back in the summer, which now seems like ages ago, and have been mainlining Marvel in unhealthy quantities ever since. Paul’s been amazingly enabling nice about this, pushing me gleefully into penury this wonderful, mythic soap opera full of LOFTY HEROISM and sarcasm and angst and ridiculous outfits. Getting to say “that SHIELD agent is named after me” — ever, let alone when I’m a fairly new addict cult-member fan truly feels like living the geek dream and I am full of grateful glee.

Last year was, honestly, pretty dreadful. Now I have a new book deal and I am an Agent of SHIELD. And it’s only February. These feel like good signs!

(SOPHIA THE SHIELD AGENT PRONOUNCES HER NAME PROPERLY THE WAY I DO, I.E LIKE THIS. At least in my head.)

Originally published at Sophia McDougall. You can comment here or there.

The Next Big Thing — Mars Evacuees!

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:06:02 GMT

It’s been a long time! I’ve been very busy on this book here (this one. The one I’m trying to tell you about. Wait a minute, and it will become clear) And though I have some 2/3 finished blogs on my computer called cheerful things like “On Suffering” and “Rape in Genre Fiction”, I really wanted my next post to be this one.

The “Next Big Thing” meme was doing the rounds among writers MONTHS ago; I got tagged (very kindly!) by practically EVERYONE, but I couldn’t bring myself to take part until I knew if this little book I’ve been struggling with was ever going to find a home.

Well, at last it has. I’m very happy to say I’ve agreed a deal with Egmont for my fourth novel, and the one after that.

Thanks so much to my new editor, Sarah Hughes at Egmont, and my wonderful and formidable agent, Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan.

1) What is the working title of your next book?

Mars Evacuees. It’s about evacuees, to Mars!

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Well, it’s hard to remember exactly, because I was nine. I was fascinated by Michelle Magorian’s novels of children evacuated to the English countryside or to America in WWII, and I wondered, in a future war, where else could you send people? Obviously Mars. And what would happen to them next …? Well, that was the difficult part, of course. I began composing an audio-book, which seemed to me to be an exciting technological medium for a story about the future, but as I was nine and had no idea what was going to happen, I soon gave up. I had another go at the idea when I was fourteen, envisioning a massively depressing Young Adult story in which not only most of the main characters but most of humanity died, (SPOILER: Mars Evacuees is not actually like this). Defeated by this in turn, I then shelved the idea until such time as I should get round to it, which turned out to be about seventeen years later.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Children’s sci-fi. Of which there’s oddly little in prose fiction, isn’t there? Plenty of films, computer games, TV. But not many books.
4) What actors would you choose to play the parts of your characters in a movie adaptation?

I’m going to take this as an excuse to introduce the characters to you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Sophia McDougall. You can comment here or there.

June is the Busiest Month, and In Praise of Saga Norén

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 19:49:44 GMT

June is shaping up to be busy. I’m just back from the How the Light Gets In festival, (yes, this was supposed to be finished and posted before then) tomorrow at 3.35 I’m modding a panel on Colonialism and Sci-Fi with the SFF/BFSA mini-convention at Burlington House, Piccadilly , and on June 30^thI’ll be at the Small Press Expo at Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’ll have two stories on sale there – ‘Bells Ringing Under the Sea’ in Dark Currents with Newcon Press, and Not the End of the World, which is going to be available by itself, for the first time, in a very limited edition chapbook! Bells is the most modern story I’ve had published yet, and my first shot at doing a very blokey, first person male voice, which I rather enjoyed. It’s about a man thinking about the sea and the woman he loved and the reasons neither is currently in his life. Not the End of the World, on the other hand, focuses on two women living in a boarding house, in the last days of Nazi Germany, dealing with guilt, terror and love as strange presences walk the upper floors and impossible tunes are heard through the walls.

Living in the future is a strange: The How the Light Gets In thing happened because SAMIRA ACTUAL AHMED, of whom I have been a fangirl this many a year, read my post Capes, Wedding Dresses and Steven Moffat about heroines and the lack thereof in pop culture, and she liked it and told the organisers. So I met all these awesome people like Samira herself and Giles Fraser and Brian Millar and Julian Spalding, and I got to talk about heroes alongside Peter Actual Tatchell and I read Aragorn’s “Men of the West!” speech and I was so impressive a woman fainted and the whole thing had to be called off halfway through.

Or possibly that was a coincidence.

In that post, and in Girls, Heroes, and Boob Jobs, I mentioned the fact that female heroes, when we get them at all, are rarely allowed to be strange, difficult, anti-social, or eccentric, as opposed to sensible, normal and down-to-earth.

If you’ve read that post, and if you’ve seen The Bridge, it may not surprise you much that its main character made me very happy. OH MY GOD DID YOU WATCH THE BRIDGE? If you didn’t watch The Bridge, you need to rectify that immediately, and heroine Saga Noren is the reason why.

I know I’m a bit late to the party when it comes to Scandinavian crime dramas -- I missed The Killing and am now in that awkward "do I watch the English language remake first or is that a bit crap?" phase. But in the meantime, Oh, Saga Noren, you are the one I have been waiting for. At last you have come to me, my eccentric, difficult, unpredictable crime-fighting heroine, who even has a, dramatic coat, which is far better than BBC Sherlock's coat. It does not, for starters, make its wearer look like a centaur.

The Bridge begins when the lights go out on a bridge between Denmark and Sweden. When they come on again, a corpse is lying in the middle of the bridge, right across the border between the two countries. Only, it turns out, it's not one corpse, but two, a Swedish politician and a Danish prostitute, cut in half and put together.

I hadn’t really intended to watch the show, it just happened to be on, but at that point I thought, “I believe you have my attention.”

Enter Saga Norén, Swedish investigator, confidently stomping into her proper domain with her peculiar stiff-backed, toy-robot gait. She’s brilliant, she’s beautiful, she’s very very odd, she loves her some crime, and she doesn’t like it when other people intrude their little problems like “cardiac patients in ambulances” into her crime scene. Where as many a TV detective abhors the rules Saga is devoted to them and it’s a conflict with warm-hearted, shambolic Danish cop Martin Rohde who’s more than willing to go off-book from time to time, that begins their patnership. Saga takes what’s usually a straight-man characteristic – Just-the-facts-ma'am, by-the-book thoroughness to such an extreme it becomes a maverick trait. Martin takes the role often filled by a woman – the normal one, the kind one, the one who keeps the brilliant/eccentric character grounded among their fellow humans, who introduces them to things like friendship and being nice to people. Occasionally I wanted to cry, “Stop letting him teach you to care, Saga, you’re fine as you are!” but really their relationship is complex, touching, and -- despite married Martin’s roving eye and Saga’s crystalline good looks -- always wonderfully platonic.

If only BBC's Sherlock was more like The Bridge, I would be all over it. Saga shares some of the updated sleuth’s characteristics -- low on empathy, lacking in social awareness, obsessive, doesn't see why anyone would bother eating or sleeping when there is fascinating, gruesome, complicated MURDER going on and how is it RELEVANT that it's five in the morning?! But unlike Sherlock (and, actually, like proper canon Sherlock Holmes) she's ruthless, but never cruel. She thinks nothing of - gently -- hitting a semi-conscious poisoning victim in the face to keep her awake to answer questions, but while she doesn’t intuitively understand and is often vaguely irritated by people’s boundaries, she does respect them. “Okay!” she’ll respond brightly, when asked to do/stop doing something because she’s at risk of upsetting people. Once a newly-widowed character whom Saga has seriously upset refuses to talk to her. Sherlock would have eviscerated her; Saga accepts without question, and it’s up to Martin to point out that the woman didn’t refuse to talk to him and Saga can always listen. “Am I annoying you?” she asks Martin occasionally. She knows she can annoy people; she doesn’t know when or why she’s doing it, and it doesn’t upset her unduly, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to her at all. Increasingly, Martin finds the answer to the question is “no.”

She’s not a genius of perception, especially when it comes to people. “I don’t pick up on signs,” she says flatly. She’s a genius of persistence, of staying up all night staring at the evidence, of committing information to memory and working it out later, of keeping going past the point of healthy self-preservation.

She's a little like Lisbeth Salander if Lisbeth were happy. Well, relatively speaking – no character who’s perfectly content can remain compelling for long, and we do duly discover there is some pain and insecurity lurking in Saga’s backstory . But it's delightful to see a heroine for whom "unusual" is not synonymous with "damaged." She doesn't fight crime to fill a hole or bandage a psychic wound, she's whole already. She does what she does because she really likes it. Because she’s good at it. And another surprisingly refreshing quality of the show is this is recognised, not by a rare few but by nearly everyone, and though it’s rare for anyone to get close to Saga as Martin does, she’s not an outcast, and he’s not the only one who sees what the audience sees, and duly warms to her. It’s also refreshing that though Saga’s closest relationships are with men, she’s only one of a number of women on the international team hunting the serial killer. Martin’s boss is a briskly competent woman, and Saga has several women working for her who both appreciate her talents and are unfazed by her strangeness.

Colleague: Saga… I just wanted to say, you’re doing a great job.

Saga: Yes.

Colleague: And if anything comes of this… you’re doing really well.

Saga: Yes.

Colleague: And if anyone can catch him, it’s going to be you.

Saga: Yes. I think so too.

Some reviews have annoyed me, like this one:

And on the Malmö side of the bridge there's Saga Noren, a Porsche-driving ice queen, so devoid of empathy or any kind of social skills you have to suspect she's on the spectrum.

Yeah, I so believe he complained Sherlock or Batman were "ice kings" who are "hard to love," don't you? And isn’t it lovely how he treats being “on the spectrum” as a character flaw?

In fact, Saga Noren is indeed pretty clearly “on the spectrum”– the actress Sofia Helin confirms this was deliberate, though the writers didn’t see Saga herself as being aware of it. I’m not sure I find it entirely credible that someone wouldn’t have suggested it at some point -- but my mother tells me she worked with someone in the Home Office who was successful, undiagnosed, but widely thought to have Aspergers. That must have been well over a decade ago, though. In any case, the fact Saga’s particular brain make-up is an integral part of her without ever limiting her, is another breath of fresh air:

“The reaction from those with the condition has been overwhelmingly positive, [Sofia Helin] says. "One man from Norway wrote me a 20-page letter about his life living with Asperger's. It was so touching. I also got letters from the Asperger's Society in Sweden. They are happy, because she is not judged just because she is different – she is the hero."’

The Bridge is filming a second series. I’m a little concerned that reuniting Martin and Saga to fight crime again might be contrived. But for the most part: I don’t care, gimme more Saga.

If you watch, you’ll have an idea of one kind of hero I've been holding out for (till the end of the night. But don’t watch because of that. Watch because it’s awesome. That’s what it’s always really been about .

How the Light Gets In

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:52:41 GMT

[You might be seeing this for the second time as it was originally posted on my nice new site that actually works now: www.sophiamcdougall.com There'll be automated cross-posting soon, and you can, of course, read or comment in whichever place you like. This is late showing up here because I've been very busy with a story, moving house and, as mentioned below, not having internet.]

I'm really excited to be part of the How the Light Gets In festival, happening alongside the Hay-on-Wye festival, in, as you might expect, Hay-on-Wye.

(I love that it's called that. I love that song, and the consolation of that idea).

I'm on three panels, and they are:

Tuesday 5th June

2.30pm New Heroes - a reconsideration of what the hero means for us today and for the future

Wednesday 6th June

10.30am State of Innovation - the role of the state in commissioning creativity and whether it works

2.30pm Imagining the Metropolis - visions of the city

The New Heroes one doesn't seem to show up on the page, but it is going to happen, I swear! My job will be to say, "excuse me, but what about HEROINES?" a lot. Peter Tatchell will also be there, his job will be to be A Hero.

Hope to see you there. I want to say more about heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses, but I have recently moved house and am thus dependent on the unco-operative wifi of a library that I think might be about to close.

I'll be back soon.

Hurried post of Eastercon

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:44:23 GMT

So, EASTERCON. I shall be there. Along with pretty much everyone else of a speculative fictional type persuasion. I am on two panels, one talking about genre boundaries and the crossing of them, and another about writing long series. I am trying to think of something useful to say about the latter that isn't "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAthud *sob* where is the rum?"

The full programme is here...

...WAIT WHAT? I'M ON A PANEL WITH GEORGE R R MARTIN?

But I am as a tiny baby in the ways of writing incredibly long books that you can't produce as fast as you want compared with G R R Martin!

I can't complain about what a slog it is and how you need to have a plan and how it isn't your fault that you had to kill all those people besides George R R Martin!

Maybe he has special rum.

All right, I've spent a little time running around the flat, and now I'm back. On with the post, I guess.

I am posting this now because there are apparently only hours left to book tickets and you can't buy them on the door! Eastercon will see the launch of the anthology Dark Currents, featuring my story Bells Ringing Under the Sea, AND the novel The Outcast and the Little One for which I supplied the cover art -- my first ever pro art gig. Fittingly, it depicts a thirteen-year-old girl fighting a giant metal snake.

See you there, I hope!

Winners!

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:44:04 GMT

Slightly belated because yesterday went all to hell.

While the history jokes and pictures of animals with silly hats were impressive, and while I VERY much appreciate Cara Murphy plugging my book on the Arthur C Clarke Award "guess the shortlist" post, ultimately I cannot choose between 's cute drawing of herself holding Savage City (on New Roman Cursive background) and Glen Mehn's adorable list.

Congratulations! Let me know your address and the book you want, and it will soon be yours!

An audience with Tanith Lee

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:05:05 GMT

First of all, I need to remind you that the book giveaway thing is open until midnight tomorrow.

The Kitschies held a Gothic Evening at Blackwells the other day, which, apart from anything else, obviously provided an excuse for dressing up, which is not something I like to miss.

Besides, there would be brilliant authors being brilliant and, completely unrelatedly, free rum.

And Tanith Lee.

I loved Tanith Lee during my teens (and badly want to catch up with her works for adults). I have a very badly abused copy of Prince on a White Horse which you should read because it is hilarious. But I had no idea until quite recently that she was 1) English and 2) living in freaking Hastings. I only found that out when I was about to move AWAY from Hastings. And now she was here in Blackwells, all small and pale with copious, artfully styled grey hair, and huge jade-green eyes which match the huge green gems on her fingers and the various greens she has painted her long nails. This is exactly what Tanith Lee ought to look like.

And so, after my flatmate Camille prodded me past my shyness in approaching her, this happened.

Sophia: Oh, wow, you're Tanith Lee, oh goodness. I'd like to fangirl you please?
TANITH LEE: THAT JAWLINE!!!
Sophia: ...?
TANITH LEE: YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. WHEN YOU ARE 100 YOU WILL STILL HAVE THAT BONE STRUCTURE.
Sophia: Well, this is not what I expected from this encounter, but that does not mean I'm not okay with it.

[During this, Flatmate Camille is hovering somewhere behind me. Suddenly Tanith Lee's vatic, pale green focus is upon her]

TANITH LEE: YOU.
Camille: Hello.
TANITH LEE: YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. YOU MUST READ MY BOOK. THERE IS AN AFRICAN GODDESS IN IT. DO YOU HAVE AFRICAN BLOOD?

[Camille does indeed have African blood and this is fairly obvious]

Sophia: Shit, is this okay?
Camille: She's calling me pretty, it's fine.
TANITH LEE: YOU ARE LIKE A GODDESS. TURN YOUR HEAD. YES, LOOK AT YOUR NECK. YOU ARE AN ARISTOCRAT! [to me] AND YOU ARE A FRENCH BLONDE FEMME FATALE.
Camille and Sophia: This can go on as long as necessary, really.

It did in fact go on for quite a long while. We have no complaints. So yes. I copiously congratulate Anne and Jared for organising a wonderful event, but I really have nothing else to say about the Gothic or anything else. (My novelette, Not The End of the World is sort of WWII gothic, I guess, though). We got Tanith Lee'd. That dominates your memory of an evening.

Book Giveaway -- MCDOUGALL-PLEASING STUNT contest #2!

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:08:51 GMT

So, the paperback of Savage City is coming out, and I have a large cardboard box of books on my living room floor, and nowhere to put them. So I did a giveaway on Twitter -- you know, a fairly standard thing -- "I will give signed books to a random 4 out of the next 26 people to follow me!" It worked perfectly well. Books heading your way soon, winners.

Except, several of my existing followers turned wide and tearful eyes upon me and asked WHAT, SAVE YOUR SCINTILLATING WEB PRESENCE, DO WE GET FOR OUR YEARS/MONTHS/DAYS OF WEB-LOYALTY???

So FINE. Here is your chance. Perform a Sophia McDougall Pleasing Stunt and if I am sufficiently pleased, I will give you the book (by me) of your choice, signed and drawn on and whatever. You have until midnight, March 11th. Pretty much the same deal as here, you might want to check it out for inspiration.

PLEASE ME AND MAKE ME WANT TO GIVE YOU A BOOK. You can please me by promoting my book in some way, you can also try to please me by telling me a joke or posting a picture of you gurning, if you're really good at it. You must either comment here or link me to your SOPHIA-MCDOUGALL PLEASING STUNT on twitter.

I will not be pleased by illegality or grossness, otherwise you make the rules. I will send the person who strikes me as the most delightful a unique signed, personalised book.

And if there are no McDougall-Pleasing Stunts, then it is I who will turn wide and tearful eyes on you and then where will you be?

Final -- and I do mean final -- comments on the SFX Weekender thing

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:38:02 GMT

Hello all. Some of you are new people! Settle in, new people, make yourselves at home!

I knew in theory that the post about the Weekender might get more attention than I was used to. But I didn’t know it would and the reality of a thing is always pretty different from the expectation anyway.

As it was -- Baby’s first internet kerfuffle!

Some of you have left great comments on the original post that are various flavours of wise/thoughtful/supportive/wanting to know more.

I want to thank you for them. I would normally go through and reply to all of them and I just want to ask you to forgive me for the fact that this time, I’m not going to.

The fact is,I’m tired, I’m behind on work, I have a stinker of a cold that’s also making me throw up for some reason, and I’m still trying to bounce back from various fun things like a death in the family that did a number on my brain over Christmas. I went through a long, and I think, ultimately productive twitter and email exchange with an SFX team member before Dave Bradley stepped in, and now I don’t feel I can afford to outlay any more energy on this. Of course, no one needs my permission to keep talking about this wherever you like. But I don’t think I’m going to be part of the discussion any more. Not, at least, until we’re getting closer to the next Weekender. I said what I wanted to say, it did get listened to, and now I’d really like to get on with this book I’m supposed to be writing.

(And to stop throwing up).

Oh – one more thing I am going to do, and urge you to do, is to write to Chic Festivals about the dancer situation. info@chicfestivals.com and lisa@chictalent.com are the email addresses Lizzie Barrett of the British Fantasy Society has been using. As I understand it, Chic Festivals work with, rather than for, SFX – I guess as partners? – in making the event happen. So they’re not being paid by SFX, and they send those half-naked stiltwalking girls to all their events. I’m told that SFX has raised concerns about them before, and Chic Festivals hasn’t listened. I’m not saying this lets SFX off the hook – the event bears their name, after all – but still, these are the people who think silent half-naked women and no silent, half-naked men at SFX Weekender is good idea, and going directly to the source of the problematic entertainment may be a useful next step.

A response from Dave Bradley, of SFX.

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:12:07 GMT

Dave Bradley, editor of SFX magazine just posted this on my Facebook. I think it's a really good response and am encouraged for the future (though saddened to see that many publishers are apparently forgetting their own female writers in the run-up to cons).

-------

So here's the thing: I am sorry about the male:female imbalance on the panels. It's of course more to do with oversight than discrimination, although I naturally appreciate that's no kind of answer and we should have taken more care on this issue. Organising the Weekender is a total headache and some of what Paul [Cornell] alludes to is true - in most cases, people were on panels because their publishers asked us to put them there. A lot of our planning is led by who publishers tell us who they're bringing along. I suspect what we are guilty of is passivity in not pushing for more. To the best of my knowledge, I think I was able to find an opportunity for every female guest who contacted me directly in advance to ask if they could help; some contributors like Juliet E McKenna, Karen Grover and Jaine Fenn were not proposed by their publishers but were invited onto panels after conversations with us. We tried hard to make space for people who stepped forward and approached us, but we realise we should be more proactive. Danie Ware we know very well but I understood that her primary responsibility was on the Forbidden Planet stand, and she described her event to me as being very successful. In one instance, I admit China Miéville pointed out there was a panel with no women on it at all (due to swaps and cancellations) and he graciously agreed to step down so we could rearrange - ridiculously we hadn't noticed since by that late point the panels had become logistical puzzles rather than anything else, we were gutted when China pointed it out and of course re-planned the panel.

Should SFX have done more? Yes. Will SFX do more next time? Yes, we will approach it differently. I thank you all for your incredible patience with us as we stumble year on year towards something better. My email is david.bradley@futurenet.com if anybody wants to contact me directly with feedback and suggestions.

Update to my last post

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:48:17 GMT

I have to acknowledge something I got wrong in my last post: I've discovered that my initial query to SFX about appearing on panels didn't arrive, and that was down to me messing up. So it wasn't SFX's fault that they didn't reply to that message. I apologise for misreading that situation.

I stand by my overall point that when there are numerous female writers available, not even to get to 20% female authors speaking while maintaining 100% female silent half-nude dancers and stilt-walkers, isn't good enough.

SFX Weekender and the Nudes in the Metropolitan Gallery

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:24:39 GMT

There’s going to be a hefty ‘but’ dominating this post, so let’s start by saying I had a great time at the SFX weekender. I made (I hope!) new friends. I played ridiculous games with old ones. I discovered how some of the biggest names in the industry are also the nicest, friendliest people you could ever hope to meet. There was joyous spontaneous Doctor Who line-dancing. There was copious booze. And I danced with Giant David Bowie, so my life is pretty much complete.

SFX deserves a tonne of credit for being awesome and imaginative enough to make all of that happen, for creating a little enclave of crazy wonder and excitement in the bleak Welsh winter.

But here’s the ‘but’.

I wrote to the SFX team expressing interest in appearing on panels. I did several pretty successful ones last Eastercon, so I think that was a reasonable thing to do? I wouldn’t mind the fact that I didn’t even get a reply if I hadn’t turned up to find that the writer panels featured, at my count, 46 male writers to 8 female writers, with two all male panels. (This is counting bloggers and SFX reviewers) I wasn’t the only female genre writer/blogger who was definitely available because she was there, by the way. There were also Suzanne McLeod, Alex Bell, Amanda Rutter, Kim Lakin-Smith, Fran Terminiello, Ro Smith (Ro and Fran write for The Girls’ Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse. Oh and talking of apocalypses, Anne Perry was there, she just co-edited an anthology on that very subject! There was a panel on the apocalypse in genre! It was one of the all-male ones!) Lou Morgan was there, as was Danie Ware. I think Elspeth Cooper may have been there or at least wanted to go-- if she didn’t make it in the end perhaps an invitation would have helped! And that isn’t anywhere near a comprehensive list -- these are just ones I happen to know about, and there were thousands of people there. I’m sure there were more. As for women writers who might have been able to attend if asked, who knows?

...And I wouldn’t mind that so much if I hadn’t watched a steward at a panel hand the mic only to male audience members, walking right past several women with their hands up, when the panel was thrown open to questions from the floor.

And I wouldn’t mind that so much if there hadn’t been all those half-naked women on stilts, (not cosplayers doing it for the thrills, entertainment paid for by the con) roaming around, and no half-naked men on stilts. And I wouldn’t mind that so much if there hadn’t also been girls wearing nothing but flashing lights strapped to their breasts and groins, dancing on the stage for the crowd’s edification at the final disco.

All of that put together, I minded quite a lot. I started thinking of the slogan “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” provoked by the fact that women made up 5% of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and 85% of the nudes. I started thinking of this comment on Ta-Nehisi Coate’s blog: “Rule of thumb: If you do not see as many naked men as naked women, and/or if the men are not equally as exposed as the women, you're being pandered to, not told a story. Also you are being assumed to be male.”

I went and collared the hapless, woman-blind steward, by the way, and said how disappointed I was at what I’d just seen. He said he was sorry and he hadn’t meant to do it. Of course he didn’t mean to. Some people do mean to make women feel ignored and unwelcome, of course, but well-meaning thoughtlessness will often get the job done just as well. There is only one remedy for unmalicious, unthinking prejudice, and that is deliberate thinking.

And hey, SFX, you know what, I spoke to a lot of men who were thoroughly uncomfortable about the objectification of female bodies going on, who didn’t like having half-clothed female bums, however shapely, at eye level. Some of them said they’d even raised the issue before. So even if your primary aim is to keep the men entertained and happy, there are plenty of men (China Miéville, Ian Sales, Jared Shurin -- list, again, not comprehensive) on whom it’s definitely not working.

The thing that makes this so frustrating is SFXweekender could so easily be light-years ahead of this. It has an incredibly energised, youthful, diverse, creative audience in the thousands, who are enthused enough to come all the way to sodding Pontins in Prestatyn in February. As Jaine Fenn, one of the few female guests says here, you look around SFX weekender and the future of geek culture looks bright. And with all that potential at your disposal, SFX, you’re still going to the same tired old depressing TITS OR GTFO places. It would take so little thought and effort to fix this.

2012 wasn’t the year for that to happen. Let’s hope 2013 will be.

(N.B, I don’t want anyone to think that I didn’t notice or care that the panels were also overwhelmingly white. I think that given the current state of the industry, that’s harder to fix and not so much SFX’s fault, whereas the gender thing could be fixed or at least greatly improved so freaking easily. But I’m very open to comments/ideas/contradiction on that score.)

CORRECTION: It's been pointed out to me that the apocalypse panel wasn't in fact all male -- Sam Stone was on it. Apologies to Ms Stone and partial apologies to SFX, though the schedule I was going by here shows only men. The final ratio must have been 4:1 or 5:1 male to female, roughly in line with the con's selection of guests overall.

Also a couple of the women I thought were there couldn't make it, though they were interested. I don't think this takes much from the overall point, as I dare say a number of the male guests wouldn't have come without an invitation and the paid-for accommodation that entails.

McDougall Versus the Ice Giants

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:17:30 GMT

~~Terrified~~ Undaunted by reports the night temperature may drop to MINUS TWELVE, I repair to Prestatyn for the SFX Weekender. In a glorious display of ~~herd mentality~~ commonality of purpose, pretty much the whole of the science fiction industry will be there too. Why Prestatyn? Why a Pontins? These are question for the bards to ponder down the ages. What will we do there? Well, mostly sit around, drink, talk shop, establish whether the Doctor or River Tam would win in a fight, watch the ladies in gold spandex on stilts and the animatronic trolls pass us by, and posibly desend into cannibalism. See you there! Or if you’re not coming, pray for us.

I will be the one in the big pink coat. In usual circumstances, I tend to feel that these days I am a little old and sensible for the big pink coat, but thse are not usual circumstances and the big pink coat is ankle length.

Award Season

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:12:02 GMT

It’s award season in SFF land -- theres the Hugo, the Sidewise (for alternative history), BSFA, the Kitschies, the Arthur C Clarke ... and there’s a bit of debate in the ether about a) the meaning and value of literay awards and b) whether it’s okay for writers to go ‘hey, if you liked my book, remember nominating it/voting for it is an option’, or whether that’s terribly undignified and turns the whole thing into a pointless popularity competition.

Unfortunately, after rather a gruelling Christmas, my brain is not going high or fast enough to have anything sophisticated to say about either a or b. All I know is that no award is perfect, but they can do good in bringing attention to deserving works, and as Niall Harrison says on Strange Horizons, they can help shape a communal sense about where the genre is going. Or, giving up on analysis entirely, I think Lauren Beukes winning the Arthur C. Clarke award for Zoo City was a very good thing, because Zoo City is really good, and as for me, I can certainly live without winning awards, but I can’t pretend I’m so busy living on some artistic astral plane above such things that I’d be indifferent to it either . And as for whether it’s kosher for writers to mention their own works for awards, I can’t get much beyond: Scalzi does it. Must be okay.

So...

Savage City is eligible for Best Novel/ Long Form

Not the End of the World would be eligible in the Best Short or Best Novelette category, depending on the award (it’s 11,500 words).

People who liked Savage City and/or Not the End of the World! if you have a say and you liked them enough, well... you know what to do. (Or if you don’t, click on the links above and it may become clear – though I confess I don’t know how all the awards work.)

When are you going to leave the Coalition?

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:39:48 GMT

This letter was prompted by this.

I've sent it to my local party, to Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes, Sarah Teather and Vince Cable. If you've ever voted Liberal Democrat, I urge you to write to them too.

-----

By post and email.
Mr Nick Clegg
Deputy Prime Minister
70 Whitehall
London
SW1A 2AS
leader@libdems.org.uk

Dear Mr Clegg,

When are you going to leave the coalition?

I have voted Liberal Democrat in every election since I came of age. I come from a family that has been Liberal for generations. There are stories passed down from my great-grandfather of the election victory in 1906. My late grandfather campaigned for the Liberals in the early 1950s, when the party was close to extinction. He was proud of his party, and I used to be proud of this legacy.

On the 6^th of May, 2005, the morning after the election, my mother and I were driving through some country town in Sussex. I think Tenterden. A group of boys – perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old – were playing on the grass verge, brandishing a “Vote Lib Dem” sign at the slow-moving traffic. Although I wasn’t quite sure whether they were serious or just messing about, I punched the air and said “Yeah!” as we passed. They fell about laughing (which was the main thing I was hoping for) and then ran after the car. We were stuck in a traffic jam so it wasn’t hard for them to catch up.

“Did you? Did you?” they asked, pointing at the words ‘Vote Lib Dem’. My mother and I both said we had. They looked overjoyed. “Four more years!” they crowed. “Then they’ll get in!”

They were young and full of hope and the very opposite of apathetic. It was until quite recently a lovely memory.

It was five years, as it turned out. Those boys would have been old enough to vote at the last election. They will have seen unemployment for their age group soar, university tuition fees treble, and the NHS under attack. And the Liberal Democrats, who filled them with such enthusiasm in 2005, have been complicit in it all.

When are you going to leave the coalition?

Today, I read that your governments hopes to save money – not by targeting the billions lost in tax-avoidance by rich corporations, but by stripping some cancer sufferers of their benefits.

Does it really need to be spelled out why putting more stress and fear in the path of cancer patients is wrong? Does the government you are part of seriously need to weigh the pros and cons of compelling a dangerously sick person, undergoing one of the most gruelling possible forms of treatment, to leave their sickbed to search for non-existent jobs?

Chemotherapy is incapacitating in itself and severely damages the immune system. No patient will benefit from the exposure to infection of repeated trips to the Jobcentre or to Back to Work sessions.
Professor Harrington, the government’s adviser on testing welfare recipients, has said: “Macmillan provided me with compelling evidence that different cancer treatments can have an equally – and varied – debilitating effect on individuals. However, I agree with the government that forcing people to a life on benefits when they want to work is wrong."

This statement is absurd. As if there were some present system in need of overturning, whereby cancer patients were unfairly forced to quit jobs they felt fit for. In fact, if you are able to work with cancer and can find or keep a job, you are of course perfectly free to do so. By definition any cancer patient currently seeking benefits does not feel well enough to work, as is hardly surprising. Why does this painfully simple state of affairs need further investigation? Does anyone really think there are legions of hale and hearty chemotherapy patients who must be weeded out of the system? Do you believe anyone receives a diagnosis of cancer and a recommendation of chemotherapy with “Goody –this’ll get me out of work! What’s a little cancer compared to that?”

If this proposal is enacted, inevitably some cancer patients will lose their benefits and some will share in the present fate of many other sick and disabled people – being found fit to work when they are not, and getting trapped in a costly of appeal and reassessment -- cruel for the claimant and costly to the taxpayer. Even patients whose unfitness to work is confirmed will be forced through the stress and danger of being made to justify themselves when they should be resting.

Work capability assessors are not doctors – indeed they routinely ignore doctors’ diagnoses and recommendations and are frequently shockingly ignorant about the conditions they encounter, and they already cause a lot of suffering. A dear friend of mine was left temporarily unable to work by nerve damage. The injury caused her so much pain she could scarcely even type, and the treatment made her confused and disorientated. Between the two, what could she do? The assessor pulled her about until she was crying with pain, advised her to overdose on her medication (thinking this would somehow make her more functional) and snorted and rolled her eyes when my friend reminded her she would far rather be working than claiming benefits. My friend says she was moved to tears by the thought of any cancer patient going through such a painful, stressful and humiliating experience at the lowest point in their life.

In May 2010 I was intensely relieved that the party responsible for the war in Iraq and complicit in torture had at last been voted out. I was optimistic about the coalition. I hoped that working in tandem, Conservatives and Liberals together could steer a better course. I had actually somewhat believed in Cameron’s promises to protect the NHS and I thought you would be able to counter the party’s most reactionary policies. I had entirely underestimated the Conservative’s apetite for war on the poor, on the young, on women, on the disabled and on the sick. Until today I would still have thought they would draw the line at people undergoing chemotherapy. I would have thought such an obvious – an almost cliched -- badge of suffering would be respected.

Instead, while your government sledgehammers thousands to be sure of crushing a handful of benefit frauds whose cost to the taxpayer is proportionately small, the bankers who caused the crisis, and who owe their continued existence to taxpayer finance, remain unaffected by the age of austerity, awarding themselves further billions in bonuses.

I am not writing to ask you to do everything in your power to obstruct this monstrous proposal. Even if it never comes to fruition, that will not be enough.

You may have prevented or mitigated some Conservative predations. But your presence enables them to do far more.

Recover some dignity. Show there are some depths to which you will not sink. End the power of this vile party to ravage the vulnerable.

When are you going to leave the coalition?

Sincerely,

Sophia McDougall

Pandemonium!

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:33:29 GMT

Stories of the Apocalypse has a release date! Now I can blog about it properly!

November 4^th.

This is my first post-Romanitas publication so I am very excited about it. Stories of the Apocalypse will be available for Kindle and other e-readers through Amazon and pandemonium-fiction.com. Even for Americans.

And furthermore, there is going to be a party. At the Tate. And if you want, you can come! Apocalypse is primarily an e-book, but there will be a very limited edition hardcover print run through the Tate.

My contribution, Not the End of the World is the final short story in the collection. Although, well, it’s me, and I appear to be terribly bad at “short”, so this is a very long short story – technically, it’s a goddamn novelette. And it’s in pretty amazing company – Lauren Beukes! Jon Courtenay Grimwood! Jonathan Oliver! plus some new writers like Tom H Pollock and Lou Morgan, who’ve recently been picked up by Jo Fletcher Books and Solaris respectively. I really want to see what they've come up with, but here's what I can tell you about mine:

Not the End of the World is a ghost story (...sort of) and a love story between two women (definitely!) and it’s set in a house filled with desperate people, in an unspecified German city, close to the end of the Second World War. The house is a strange house; there shouldn’t be bubbles floating past the windows or footsteps on the upstairs floor, but sometimes there are.

It’s about guilt and fear and denial, but also about love.

This story had three points of origin.

One was a one-line comment on a discussion on the writers’ research community, Little Details. Someone -- not me -- was writing a story set in the last days of Berlin, and an anonymous somebody else reminded the writer that, for the city’s inhabitants, “this was the end of the world.”

That idea stuck in my head.

Then there was a conversation I had with my grandfather, now 93, shortly after my grandmother died. My grandfather was terrible at taking care of himself. (He lives with us now so it’s no longer a worry) He barely ate, but would hoard food until it turned black. Well “until”, makes it sound as if he then threw it away He didn’t. My mother and I were trying to persuade him to stop doing this. Grandpa insisted that he didn’t like to throw away food. We pointed out that he was a wealthy man (he was sitting on a fortune worth about a million), he could afford not to starve himself and he was allowed to throw away the disgusting remains of anything he wasn’t going to eat. Quite suddenly he blurted out, “But we had to save food during the War!”

I replied “The War is over!” and the words felt incredibly strange coming out of my mouth. For a moment, it was as if the sixty-plus years since VE Day were nothing, nothing at all, not even time to get your breath back.

And then there’s a book I would force you all to read if I could -- The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg, a memoir of an Englishwoman’s life under the Third Reich. It’s amazing enough as a record of the desperation and courage and despair of people peripherally involved in the July 20^th plot, but perhaps more fascinating as a lens on daily life on the wrong side, the side that must lose.

And that’s, ultimately, what this story is doing in a book of stories of the apocalypse.

What if your world has to end?

Here’s a short extract. Elly, the protagonist, has just been through an air raid with the other lodgers.

They’re still alive. They still have to do it all again.

Elly’s colder than the narrow bed with its thin coverlet can possibly make up for. And the noise feels ground into her like poisonous dust, stiffening and tightening her skin, so the joints won’t work properly inside it.

“Off to bed now, dear,” Frau Holl urges as the other lodgers file up out of the cellar. “You’ve work in the morning, haven’t you?”

Obediently, Elly drags herself to her feet and follows Frau Holl and her candle up the steps.

She can hear Herr Schnepff gasping for breath in the dark behind her.

But Herr Schnepff was ahead of her on the stairs.

Elly stops, just as Frau Holl disappears with the candle through the door at the top of the steps and leaves the cellar in blackness. Elly’s hand fuses to the banister, her feet to the brick. She tries to force herself to move with the same urgency she tries to will away the sound of footsteps, lurching unsteadily across the cellar’s concrete floor.

There’s no hidden way into the cellar. There couldn’t be, even with all that junk piled up in there.

“God,” the man in the dark is whispering, and it’s not a voice she’s ever heard before. “Oh, my God.”

He’s blundering towards the cellar steps, and Elly drags icy air into her lungs and at last begins to move, her own footsteps echoing off the cold brick. “Who’s there?” cries the man. “Please, bring back the light.”

Elly gains the top step, swings round into the deserted hallway, hurtles towards the front door. For a moment she almost believes that escaping the cellar should have restored sanity, that whatever’s chasing her must have slipped back down the stairs into dark and non-existence. But no, he’s still coming, heavy boots on Frau Holl’s hall carpet, as Elly pelts to the door, slams into it, fumbles for the lock. She hasn’t yet made a sound.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m here – please!”

Elly catches the terror in the voice behind her and even while she’s dragging the upper bolt out of its barrel, she decides must have misunderstood the dimensions of the cellar; there must have been a hiding place there among all that junk; Frau Holl must have been hiding somebody; there are people, everyone knows, who do that. It isn’t warranted, then, this horror. She looks back at last over her shoulder.

There’s a soldier stumbling along the passage. He’s soaked to the skin, water glistens on his helmet and his face. His green uniform is daubed all over with mud, his boots are caked with it. He’s tall, but with a dreadful adolescent gawkiness, hands and feet still puppyishly too big for the skinny limbs. He’s pointing his rifle at nothing and everything, Elly included, and though he’s trampling mud over the carpet, there’s a light on him that doesn’t belong inside, a dull grey shine, like moonlight through rain. His face is twisted in utter desperation, and he too is in the act of looking back, along the hall as if something far more terrible than a man with a gun were rushing towards him, up the cellar steps, into the house.

Everything has gone wrong, everything.

All the locks are open, but the door won’t move. It does not even rattle or shift in its frame. It stands utterly solid and fixed, as if Elly were clawing at a granite cliff. The soldier closes the last few feet that separate them, and Elly shrieks at last when he touches her, a large, chilly wet hand grasping her shoulder.

“Please,” he begs, “I won’t hurt you, please, help me, it’s so close now.”

Unable to move forwards or back, Elly crumples to the floor, and he drops to his knees as well, cowering against her, turning his head again to look back –

The light changes – the door to the parlour has opened. Someone else is approaching down the hallway.

There’s an immense explosion, somehow very far away and yet inside the house. It feels like a flutter of warmth on Elly’s face, a breeze in her hair, yet it presses her back against the door, weightless and deadly at the same time.

A silly post of mostly musical ROMANITAS autodorkery.

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:43:33 GMT

I haven’t been posting for ages, or even tweeting much, partly due to the travails of trying to move to London – which, it turns out, is VERY DIFFICULT and I don’t know how so many people appear to have managed it -- but also because of an exciting project I’ve mentioned before but will be going into more detail about soon. Before that, I want to get a lot of entirely self-indulgent thoughts off my chest. In a way, it's about saying goodbye to the trilogy, which I do find I miss. I've been having dreams about it lately. (Una. In the snow. With giant robots. No, I don't know.)

So:
If you are a nerdy obsessive sort of person – the kind who has, for example, long conversations with friends and brothers about how to be a successful companion to the Tenth Doctor without getting your life ruined, embarrassing yourself or throttling him, then, if you also write fiction yourself, you are going to display similar nerdery toward your own creation.

YOU ARE.

STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT.

I mean, you have to be unhealthily obsessed with a story you want to tell, or you’re not doing it right.

Anyway, you already know how I draw my characters, etc. In fact, there’s this piece that I made for the Genre for Japan drive, which I don’t think I shared, and as it may be the last Romanitas piece I ever make...

Click here to see full size. It's Una in London, the day she escapes.

But the other thing is that...I HAVE PLAYLISTS. And oh hell, Stephenie Meyer does it, and lord knows I strive to emulate her in everything I do, so I’m about to dump those on you too. To get a little more serious and artistic about it all, music is often very important to me when I write: I play scenes in my head -- often long in advance of actually writing them – to the soundtrack that, to me at least, is just right and it helps fix the mood I’m going for, it helps keep me excited for when, at last, I get to write that bit and the music kicks in.

It’s also, of course, solace when everything’s going wrong. As I’ve intimated before, things got a bit messy between books 2 and 3, and while Shit Was Going Down I played Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible over and over and over again, wandering around town with a backpack on my back and 'Windowsill' in my ears, and the whole album, as far as I’m concerned, is Savage City music now and if I ever meet any of the members of that band I would like not only to fangirl them madly but to thank them for getting me and my books through.

So, uh, I made a youtube channel. And here are the playlists. And you can listen to them and then, should you wish to be, you will be inside my Romanitas-writing head.

ROMANITAS
ROME BURNING
SAVAGE CITY

Note, as with so much in my life this started out as a silly little game and got all kind ofserious as I went along, with the result that the Savage City list is the longest, the most detailed, and the most spoilery. Well, actually they’re all somewhat spoilery. You might want not to listen to the playlists for books you haven’t read, and particularly not to read the thoughts under the cut:

ROMANITAS

Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears). Everybody and everything, but epecially Marcus: “Welcome to your life. There’s not turning back.”
We Gotta Get Out of this Place (The Animals). Well, this works pretty well for almost the entire plot. But I associate it mainly with what happens to the characters in London.
Live in a Hiding Place (Idlewild) Una, who loves her hiding places.
Little Earthquakes Una again, who is rather spoilt for songs on this list, but needs this because the lst song sounds deceptively cheerful. “I hate and I hate and I hate”.
The Middle (Jimmy Eat World). Sulien and his –as yet – irrepressible optimism. Poor kid doesn’t know what’s going to hit him. “Everything, everything will be just fine. Everything, everything will be all right, all right!”
Like a Stone (Audioslave) Varius. My poor, bereaved, disappeared, certain-he’s-going-to-die Varius. “In your house, I long to be. Room by room, patiently.”
Crucify (Tori Amos) Dama. Oh come on, you know it had to be there. It’s not even the just the crucifixion, there’s also even spitting in faces!
Love Burns (B.R.M.C) Una and Marcus at the waterfall. “Never thought I’d see her cry and die/She learned I loved her today.”
Heroes (David Bowie) Una and Marcus. “And the guns shot above our heads/ And we kissed as though nothing could fall.”

ROME BURNING

Burning Down The House (Talking Heads) I like this song, but oddly, despite the vast number of songs about fire and burning and burning cities out there, I have had difficulty finding one I really think works. I might have preferred to put Rammstein’s Feuer Frei here, but not everyone is in the mood to be shouted at by a scary German man so I have put this one instead.
Private Universe (Crowded House) Una and Marcus. “I will run for shelter, endless summer lift the curse/It feels like nothing matters in our private universe.” You know, before everything blows up in their faces.
Your Stories, My Alibis(Matchbook Romance) Drusus. See, if I took this as the angry, jealous love song this is presumably meant to be, I would find it horribly whiny. Fortunately, it’s fixed in my head as a song about going to the Sibyl at Delphi to try and force her to say “anything to keep me breathing”, as which I love it.
Masters of War (Bob Dylan) The arms factory at Veii.
How Soon is Now (Smiths) Drusus again, still desperate and angry and impatient and human and largely unloveable.
I Wish You Were Here (Ryan Adams) Varius. Despite all the swearing and drugs (Varius does not does not do drugs!) it’s the resigned, weary grief of this that made me stick it to Varius with glue. Also there’s the resentment at being a very private person who knows everyone knows what he’s been through.
The Desperate Kingdom of Love – (PJ Harvey) Una and Marcus after everything has blown up in their faces.
37 mm – (AFI) Una and Dama. This came on while I was writing a climactic scene between these two characters and it was perfect and creepy.
Butterflies and Hurricanes – (Muse) Marcus and Dama. I could never quite decide who to give it to. Because as a call to action, to allowing yourself to be changed in order to achieve something extraordinary, it works very well for Marcus, but with the air of menace and the hint that what the song is calling you to do might be something terrible, well...

SAVAGE CITY

Intervention (Arcade Fire) Sulien. Well, everybody, the entire book. This meant more to me and to my writing than any other song on this list; I played it while writing all the time, I can play the whole thing in my head now and see an obsessively crafted imaginary fucking fanvid of the book and this may be ridiculous but you ALREADY KNEW THAT.
Summer’s Gone (Feeder) Una.
Keep the Car Running (Arcade Fire). Una and Sulien’s journey. The song seems to be about someone with an ingrained, irremediable expectation of having to flee, who is trying to reconcile someone else to the possibility of losing them. So mainly Una. “If some night I don’t come home/ Please don’t think I’ve left you alone.”
Out to Get You (James) Sulien alone.
The Missing Frame – (AFI) Crossing the frozen Rha/At the Colosseum. I know the “No one CAAAAAARES” stuff is a bit teenage, but I love the the mixture of exhaustion and self-destructive energy. “Will the flood behind me/ Put out the fire inside me? I’ll let you tear it up!”
Up the Wolves – (The Mountain Goats) And now they’re having a party on a yacht.
Soldier Side (System of a Down) Sulien going to war.
Talkin ’ bout a Revolution (Tracy Chapman) the movement in Alexandria.
21 Guns (Green Day) Sulien and the Onager.
Travelling Woman – (Bat for Lashes) Una and Noriko. I admit, this is a late edition, but I needed more songs by and about women and this is so right.
So Alive (Ryan Adams) Varius. I always meant Varius to end up where and with whom he does, and I always thought the joy-after-great-pain of this was just right. And I ended up setting the scene on a boat, which I hadn’t even anticipated.
The People have the Power (Patti Smith) Raid on Siphnos.
Weight of the World – (Editors) Una.
Anthem (Leonard Cohen) Everyone.

Bad Habits, Bad Days

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 13:57:42 GMT

[I wrote this in the immediate aftermath of Amy Winehouse's death when Livejournal was down.]

[Note 1: This post discusses addiction and eating disorders, particularly the dangerous appeal of the latter. If you are likely to be harmed by reading such content, please don’t read on. I would hate for this to hurt anyone.

Note 2: This post contains personal reminiscensces, but it is not a request for advice. Please don’t offer any. I know what I need to do, and for the most part I do it.]

I liked, rather than loved Amy Winehouse’s music. None of the genres she played with are really my favourite. But I couldn’t help but be aware of her talent, her mischievous, wounded lyrics; her huge, velvet-and-gravel voice. Of course, I was just as aware of her problems, the drink and drugs and misery, the emphysema and plummeting weight.

Nobody was exactly surprised when she died on Saturday, except in the sense that sometimes a very probable thing is perversely surprising when it finally happens. The longer a risk, however severe, remains unfulfilled the more it looks like scenery, a fact of life, not something that should genuinely be expected to happen, at any moment, right now.

Some of the reactions I’ve seen since did surprise me.

Druggies deserve it.
She brought it on herself.
Comeuppance.
Well *I* have more sympathy for...
Self-inflicted.
Self-indulgent.
It’s sad, BUT...
Poor ol’ Amy, eh? Hahaha.

The person who posted that last one could quite easily have come to serious harm by the drink and drugs I know he used to take when he was younger, which he seems to have forgotten.

And I could have starved myself to death. That, I guess, by the same logic, would have been just as self-inflicted, just as deserved, just as sad, but.

Don’t worry. I’m fine, and I feel confident in saying I’m never going to starve myself to death. That’s just what’s at lies at the bottom of my particular slope, down which I never slid all that far – and this is the point of this post -- everyone has one; an incline along the grain of the personality, down towards hell.

And if it doesn’t quite, as the Joker had it, take one bad day, several bad days can do it. Those bad days, for me, fortunately didn’t happen. Not enough of them, that is. The bad days at primary school, when meals were the worst time, they happened. But subsequent bad days, when I was older, adjusting to puberty, bad days at home with my family -- thank God, they didn’t.

I do, however, have days where eating is the last thing I want to do, where I can’t face it until well into the afternoon. Fewer such days than was once the case, and I’m now more likely to make up the calories later. I go back on forth on whether the way I am should be considered a medical problem. When I’m stressed, or bored, I don’t want to eat, so I’m thin -- am I that different from someone who responds to stress or boredom by eating a little more than is good for them, and is thus slightly – but only slightly -- overweight? And I’m pretty sure even without this I would be – I am -- “naturally thin”. My bones are very narrow. My brothers eat normally and remain very lean, the younger one sometimes dipping into “underweight”. And why should “naturally thin” not encompass a person’s psychological nature, in any case? For when I look back at the food-hoarders, self-starvers and bingers in three generations of both sides of my family, I have to conclude I was, on some level, “born this way”, even if the disagreeable experiences I had when I was seven set it off.

I’m wary about talking about this. I feel touchy about making my body the site of A Problem.

My body is not a problem. I can swim a mile, run up hills.

But you can see, in the knobs of bone at my wrists, the jut of my clavicle, where a problem brushed past me, left marks, but didn’t hit full-force.

At my absolute worst -- 7st 2 and 5’6 -- I found eating so difficult that I resorted to cutting a piece of bread and peanut-butter into tiny squares and swallowing them with water like pills.

“Is she on drugs?” hissed a friend’s mother, observing my wasted appearance and somewhat agitated demeanour.

No. It was never drugs.

That was twelve years ago. I was 20. I was at university, producing a play I had written, exhausted, and very, very stressed. I wasn’t normally that bad, and when the play was over I reverted fairly quickly to what was then normal – 7st 10. But I think it was around then, when I realised I’d been almost unable to drag myself up to the third floor of Blackwells bookshop, that I decided I’d get serious about getting over this. No more indulging that side of myself, no more pretending to believe things I was quite intelligent enough to know were lies, e.g that a couple of marmite toasties and a satsuma are all a person needs in a day to survive.

But some of my friends say I’d announced that resolution before, and nothing had changed. I would certainly have to make it again, and again. But that didn’t mean I didn’t try. I did. I stopped skipping meals, forced myself to eat when I didn’t want to. I made smoothies with whey protein powder. I scoured the internet for advice. I got used to counting calories and trying to make them add up to more.

It took ten years before trying made any appreciable difference, unless one counts the fact that I didn’t get worse, which one probably should.   I didn’t slip back, but I remained stuck at about 7.10 or 7.12. Sometimes I’d manage to struggle my way past 8st and then something would happen, I’d get stressed, or forgetful, or just tired of trying -- and it would all drop off.

I often thought: this is like an addiction. It’s like I’m addicted to not-eating. Functionally addicted. Manageably addicted. Discreet-bottle-of-vodka-in-the-desk drawer addicted. Not blow-out, spectacular, stumbling-out-of-nightclubs and landing-in-hospital addicted. It’s just that it’s sometimes too hard not to let myself off this one meal. Or I honestly forget to eat. And honestly forget again. Or worst of all, trying to eat, wanting to eat, knowing I had to eat but my whole body clenching against what it needed in inexplicable rebellion, nausea cramping my stomach and throat. Sometimes I would spontaneously vomit up what I’d forced down – once within seconds of having swallowed, before I could even make it to the bathroom. It’s like an addiction, in that it’s incredibly hard to make it go away.

I have often thought: this could be so much worse. And it is not any virtue of mine that it is not. Because I know, in attempting to just do this simple, normal, everyday thing, that I fail a lot. (Ten years, before the successes started to outweigh the failures). Fortunately for me, when I fail, when this habit I have gets the best of me, it only means I look less attractive, have somewhat less energy though still enough to function, and pick up a lot of minor illnesses. But it doesn’t mean I die.

It could have meant that. If I had simply been unhappier at a critical time in my life, if I’d undergone worse and more enduring stress than just producing a university play. I could have been fighting not to live better but to live at all. And somehow I don’t think raising the stakes makes the game any easier.

I know I could have ended up, in less congenial circumstances, making the mistakes that turn a troublesome foible into a dangerous condition. There are things about not eating enough that I liked, and continue to like. For one thing, eating is just one more goddamn thing to do and I’m lazy. And I liked the feeling of travelling light, my body a minimalist support for my brain. And thinness was all I had ever known.

Are these reasonably sympathetic reasons? There could have been others.   Not wanting to ever be fat. Feeling a little bit special about usually being the skinniest girl in the room. Feeling that thinness was a kind of visible distinction, a marker of ascetic eccentricity. Knowing that privation was something I was potentially quite good at. These were not, I stress, actual conscious beliefs. At least 90% of me has always been entirely serious and sincere bout the gaining weight and being normal project. But they were there, seeds that, thank God, never quite germinated in a compost of bad days.

When I passed thirty, things started to get easier. My metabolism slowed enough that a flaky day, eating-wise, didn’t undo weeks of hard work. Some of the invisible barriers between being hungry and finishing a meal melted away, while the pounds I’d gained didn’t. I gained the capacity to eat (sometimes) on autopilot. Do you know how tiring it is when you have a conscious reaction, whether good or bad, to every bloody thing you put in your mouth? The antidepressants I was prescribed for a problem I considered unrelated, are, it turns out, often helpful to sufferers of eating disorders. I think that played a role though there’s no way of knowing how much. (I had, incidentally, been to the doctors a number of times asking for help, and had always been told to go away, except for the time I was offered Gaviscon—an indigestion remedy. As one of them said to me lately “when people come to us with a slender body shape and perfect blood pressure we don’t really think there might still be something wrong.”)

I wrote a good deal of this post when I knew I should have been eating. It was ten hours since I’d had a proper meal. Instead, I wrote on, letting the time slip towards midnight, more interested in the words and the thoughts than in the emptiness in my stomach. I felt, but only distantly, the blunt edge of hunger there, and a sneaking part of me enjoyed that feeling, enjoyed the perverse freedom of refusing to be controlled by it. And as long as I stayed put, behind the keybord, I didn’t have to face the risk that this meal was going to be one of those meals, didn’t have to go through trying and failing to be normal.

Then, dutifully, I went to the kitchen and made macaroni cheese, with full-fat milk and lots of grated cheddar, and onions and tomatoes because vegetables are important, and I ate it all, every bit. And I enjoyed it.

I’m not underweight any more. I could still do with gaining another seven pounds. I think I’ll always be fairly slim (naturally thin, remember?) and a bit erratic in my habits. But I’m okay. Being okay can look like lots of different things, some of them slightly odd. This is one of them.

But there’s some alternative universe version of me that is much thinner, not remotely okay, and I’m not better than her.

There’s some alternate universe where Amy Winehouse is still making her music, having managed to slog her way back uphill to recovery, or having never slipped down into addiction in the first place. The life that ended on Saturday was not worth less.

If, in a world full of sad news, you can’t spare any sadness for this one death, that’s fair. Everyone’s got finite resources of emotional energy and time. And yes, there are worse things than the fate of one person.

But in that case, you shouldn’t have the time and energy to announce how little you care, to tell the world how you are in fact amused, or satisfied in the sense of justice done. You should not be congratulating yourself on how your own superior sensibilities are too good, your rarified store of compassion too fine, to waste on certain kinds of suffering.

Do not try to tell me there’s not some other universe where your own life went horribly wrong, some slope you could have tripped and tumbled down and then never found the strength to climb back up. For me, down there at the bottom, it’s emptiness , I don’t know whether for you it’s drink, or pills, or razor blades.   Or perhaps you’d have done it the civilised way and filled your lungs with tar or your arteries with fat, knowing all the time that you ought to stop, trying to stop, or perhaps not mustering the determination even to try, failing. Or perhaps you still will.

In the meantime, if you think addicts freely choose dependency for the jollies of it, watch this film. The first five minutes, at least. Watch the upper-class man in the suit and the homeless man with the scarred face, talking on the bench.

There but for the grace of God.

Capes, wedding dresses, and Steven Moffat.

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 14:28:36 GMT

"There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married - we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands. ... Well, the world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level - except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male."

--Steven Moffat, in The Scotsman, 2004.

Oh Steven Moffat, let me serenade you in the words of Alicia Keys. I keep fallin’ in and out of love with you. Sometimes I love ya. Sometimes you make me blue.

Because you said... that. And not just that, but in interview after interview you go off on weird tangents about women crushing the proud male spirit under an avalanche of Freudian sofa cushions. But you’ve redeemed my Doctor from the ranting bloated cartoon Tinkerbell Jesus he had become, turning him into a subtle, dangerous, funny, vulnerable alien trickster he should have been all along. And yet, you’ve turned my beloved Sherlock Holmes into a sneering bully of women, more aggressively sexist than he was in the 1890s. And then you of all people are the one to give me a female, gay, alien Sherlock Holmes and dear Christ I love her please keep going. In Silence in the Library You presented me with River Song – a smarming, cardboard cut-out Mary Sue whom even you seemed to kind of hate – after all, you punished her for her pretensions to awesomeness by trapping her forever in an ersatz domesticity completely divorced from anything the character had ever seemed to want. And yet, then, later (and I really don’t know how you did this) you gave me River Song -- a complex, heroic, brilliant, unstoppable, spacefaring adventurer who is not one whit less feared, admired or wanted for being well into her forties.

You seem to be open to the idea of a female Doctor, but you’ve defined Amy Pond by her marriage, her uterus, and all too often her helplessness. You’ve given me the amazing sight of a little girl regenerating, yet every time you write a female character you seem to start by asking yourself, ‘what are her marriage plans?’

Sometimes I feel good. At times I feel used. Lovin' you, Steven, makes me so confused.

That Scotsman quote is just awful, of course. The world is run in men’s favour, except for Western, middle-class, educated, probably white men, who are of course the most abused and underprivileged on the planet. Will we ever see a middle-class, educated man as Prime Minister? One can only dream. If only middle class men could overwhelmingly dominate business, media and the House of Commons. There might then at last be some justice, some respect.

On the other hand, it was seven years ago and I’d like to hope Mr Moffat has moved on, at least a bit. At any rate, there are a lot of things in that quote I don’t want to talk about – because it’s been years, because it’s all been said, because it makes me tired and sad. But there’s something I do want to talk about that I don’t think has been addressed. It’s been brewing in the back of my mind for all these years and it came to the fore during that post last week about the lack of female heroes and the promise and disappointment of Lisbeth Salander.

We don’t, as little boys, play at being married.

I’d remembered that quote slightly wrong. I thought you’d said, getting married. And I still think that might be what you’re actually talking about because really – playing at being married? Playing at being a mother, well, some girls do that, and yes, there’s the fantasy of being grown-up and in charge...

We’ll get to that later. Let’s stick to the weddings for now.

First, it needs to be said, of course, that not all women played at weddings when they were little. I know plenty who didn’t. But I want to talk about the ones that did. Let’s assume I was one of them – I can’t completely remember whether I ever went as far as acting out a wedding, but I know I thought and talked to my friends about how I wanted my wedding dress to be. Long, swishy and dramatic, of course, but not white, because that’s boring! Why wouldn’t I want to wear my favourite colour? My wedding dress, I promised myself, would be blue – a deep, rich, bright blue.

But you know what I didn’t daydream about? You know what never entered my mind?

The groom.

Never, when I thought about My Wedding, did I promise myself that on this day of days, at last my innate female loneliness would be over. I never even imagined how handsome he’d be or how much he’d love me. Not even “He’ll be a kind, nice man.” The poor fellow never got a look-in. I knew he’d have to be there, vaguely, but that was a detail as negligible as the seating arrangements, and frankly, if I could have had the wedding without the husband that would have been just fine by me.

Yes, I am afraid, Steven, little girls’ wedding fantasies are not about you. You can relax; packs of little girls are not being reared from infancy to hunt you. It’s just the dress. That’s the fantasy. It’s about wearing an awesome outfit and getting to be the centre of attention.

Boys and men, of course, never daydream about wearing an awesome outfit and being the centre of attention...

Hmm...

Ah.

Nice coats, there. Long. Swishy. Dramatic.

Of course you never fantasised about Your Wedding when you were little! 1) The groom’s outfit is boring and he doesn’t get to be the centre of attention! And 2) You had Batman and the Doctor and James Bond and Indiana Jones! That’s also why you didn’t bother playing at being a husband or father. Why would you, when the power over a household and a child pales into inignificance next to power over a crime-ridden city, an ancient underground tomb or the whole fucking universe?

(I hope no one will argue that the fact the bride is typically the centre of attention at a wedding supports the idea of an “unfortunate lack of respect for anything male.” It’s one day. And it’s not our fault your wedding outfits are boring. If you don’t like it, don a cape.)

Now, find me six equivalent Awesome Female Outfits, readily available and visible in pop culture, which a little girl need merely sit down in front of the TV to see. And remember, the woman wearing the outfit has to be the centre of attention. Not part of a team, unless she’s the undisputed leader; not a sidekick, not a love interest, not an antagonist and not a feminised version of a male original. So no Batgirl or Supergirl, don’t come to me with any X-Ma... well, you see the problem there already. She has to be the lead. And really I’d prefer it if the said awesome outfit was a bit more substantial than underwear anyway. Something long, swishy and dramatic would be nice – I get the feeling we might share a taste for that.

Well, I can think of Wonder Woman, though she clearly fails on the last count. I wasn’t particularly conscious of her, growing up, and the lurid stars and stripes and the underwear would have made me feel that she was really aimed at somone else. Besides, she wasn’t on television much when I was a kid anyway.

I’m sure there were heroes you weren’t interested in either. Maybe you didn’t want to be Captain America, maybe he was a bit garish and goody-two-shoes and American for you, or maybe you weren’t exposed to him much, but that was okay because you could be the Doctor.

But if I wasn’t going to be Wonder Woman, what alternatives were left? Well, not nothing. There was Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast and Snow White – both the fairytales my parents read me and the Disney versions I saw -- and all those girls’ eventual triumph and vindication and happy ending involves getting married.

Now do you see why, for a little girl with that human desire to fantasise about being visibly, recognisably awesome, while clad in something long, swishy and dramatic, the wedding dress might be the most readily available option? Do you get why it’s something she might play games about, at least once or twice? Maybe when she’s older she’ll ask why marriage has always been presented to her in this way, one day she might want to know why she’s been shown so little else to aspire to, but it’s a bit much to expect her to do that when she’s six.

Of course, we weren’t wholly limited to what we’re shown on television. There was also what we could make up ourselves.

And there’s a point. Perhaps at this point you’re getting a bit fed up. “Why come whining to me”, you may be thinking “A nice man like Steig Larsson tries to give you what you want and you still complain. You want women having adventures, whether in awesome outfits or not, then write them yourself.”

Well, I’m trying, and I’ll keep trying as long as I’ve got a keyboard in front of me. And of course I want to write fascinating male characters too! But I do have all these things to worry about that you don’t -- being warned not to mention so many authors of my gender as influences, being told that if there’s someone of my gender on the cover of my book, I can kiss the male market goodbye, Warner Bros openly deciding they’re not going to do films with characters of my gender in the lead. It makes me worry about what I can write, and still sell. I’ll keep trying anyway, though.

Never mind about that. For now, as you’re writing for little girls as well as little boys, and as I believe you don’t have little girls yourself, (though I must say I think you write them well) I would just like you to know what else they play at.

I liked swords and bows and arrows and treehouses as much as pink ribbons and unicorns (and oh yes, I liked those a lot).

I pretended to be a Knight of the Round Table (the first female one!)

I liked fishing for sticklebacks in the river.

My best friend and I told and acted out stories of slaves on the run *cough*, encountering flying boats and wizard cities.

We also told the tale of Ben the Boring Boy who somehow entered a magical world where he had to stop being boring or he would die.

I wrote for said best friend the adventures of the very decisive Princess Dilemma and her quest to rescue her sisters, Rubella and Amnesia.

When I was about 11, I had this shawl-wrap-cape thing– when I wore it, I pretended I could fly.

It was deep blue. I still love that colour. If I ever do get married, I might wear it. Rich, bright blue...

Other posts:

Girls, Heroes, and Boob Jobs.
On Slash
The Genre-Bashing Flowchart.

Girls, Heroes and Boob Jobs. (Also interviews, and half a year's reading)

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:02:16 GMT

“Do your hands and hair whirl wildly in the air when you talk about books, Sophia McDougall,” I hear you ask. “Do you think sexism is a bad thing? And is your forehead surprisingly huge?” The answer to all these questions is yes. But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself!

Here's another, more indepth interview I did with the generally excellent dolorosa12 , and seemingly forgot to link to before. Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 is a bit spoilery, especially the last question (15).

We’ve passed the midpoint of the year, so I thought I’d look back on the books I’ve read so far.

They are:

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – Stieg Larsson

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski,

Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones

Howl’s Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula LeGuin

The City and the City – China Miéville

Grandville -- Bryan Talbot

So Much for That – Lionel Shriver

Mortal Engines – Philip Reeve

I've also been reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale off and on, but I haven't finished it.

I want to write a little about all of them, but my thoughts on the Larsson books have splurged all over the place so everything else will have to wait.

Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

Let me say this about the “Men Who Hate Women” series. Lisbeth Salander was a character who needed to exist. Yes, being brilliant, eccentric, difficult, troubled and endlessly fascinating to everyone she meets, she’s clearly a wish-fulfillment character. But I cannot begin to count the fictional offerings focusing on men who are brilliant, eccentric, difficult, troubled, and endlessly fascinating to everyone. It’s a particular wish that women rarely get to see fulfilled; we get instead to see women be the representative of sane-but-boring normality, the earth from which the wild, maverick men take flight, the weeping wife complaining that her man cares more about the truth than he does about this family. But we too need our Byronic heroes, our Sherlock Holmes, our James Bond, our Cracker, our Doctor.

Salander gets about as close to this as I’ve ever seen (which isn’t saying a great deal). She’s not just intrepid, she’s not just brilliant, she’s odd; people aren’t just in awe of her competence, they’re always trying,to get to the bottom of the riddle she represents, but failing, because she can't be pinned down.

Unfortunately, Larsson begins declawing his own creation even during the first book, having her fall unrequitedly in love with his own transparent authorial stand-in, the affable journalist and mysteriously successful ladykiller, Mikael Blomqvist. And through the second and third, things go further and further off course. I nearly stopped reading when Lisbeth embarked on the second book by getting breast implants. Now, your body, your choice what to do with it and all, and in real life, if having small breasts makes you that unhappy, it might in some cases be be easier and more plausible to just get the boob job rather than dismantle all the cultural brainwashing that made you hate your body that much in the first place. Mental health first, saving the world from sexism later.

But there is no reason, except sexist cultural brainwashing, to hate your perfectly healthy small breasts, (assuming you are a cis woman, that is). And sexist cultural brainwashing is a bad thing. And to see our supposed feminist avenger so cowed by it – to see the woman who carved a message of defiance into her rapist’s body, going on to carve the patriarchy’s message into her own-- well, it’s not very inspiring. It’s like Rage Against the Machine selling mortgages. It’s like James Bond moonlighting for Blofeld.

We all want – well, what shall I say -- Inspirations? Vehicles for empowerment fantasies? Oh yes, that’s it – heroes. Sometimes, we want heroes from our fiction. By co-operating with the beauty standards of men who hate women in all their natural variety, Lisbeth Salander indicates she cannot be that for me. How can she be? I’m not exactly stacked myself, what the fuck am I supposed to think when I see her coong over the improvement to “her quality of life”, with the male puppeteer behind her in full support of the self-loathing that brought her to this point? Instead of using the freedom of fiction either to have his heroine triumph over her insecurities or just live with them, Larsson uses it to decree her implants look completely natural and hot and awesome and she has no visible scars or anything and she’s still otherwise tiny and waiflike but with boobs now and none of this has anything to do with getting author’s rocks off. HONEST.

(EDIT: I've just remembered that Larsson literally adds insult to injury by claiming Salander's natural breasts were "abnormally underdeveloped" and thus the surgery could be "medically justified." As anyone writing about the subject ought to damn well take the time to find out, even the teeniest AAs in the world are neither abnormal or underdeveloped; breasts' only biological function is to lactate, size has no bearing on their ability to do that, and clearly implants will not supply that ability if it is for any reason missing. Anyone suffering from insecurities about their breasts should look at 007b's gallery of Normal Breasts)

Salander’s viability as a hero is further damaged when Larsson decides to give her a fortune – or rather, allow her to steal it, and get away with it. I do understand the appeal of lavishing treats on a much-loved character, and there is a tenuous thread of moral logic here: the money belonged to a Bad Man who did bad things to women. Lisbeth has had bad things done to her by similar men. So there’s a certain rough justice in her taking his money away from him. But , apparently forgetting what’s supposed to come after “Rob from the rich,” Lisbeth does little with her wealth to improve the lot of any other wronged woman, (besides a couple of proportionately minuscule charitable donations and getting rid of some odds and ends she doesn’t need any more), instead spending it on luxuries for herself. Increasingly, I wondered why I was supposed to worry overmuch about the oppression of a selfish, super-rich island-hopper, whose life of leisure was merely interrupted by such adventures as she managed to have.

Worst of all, by Hornet’s Nest, despite the injections of saline and cash Salander has leaked so much agency that she gets sidelined for most of the book while secondary characters sift through mounds of paperwork trying establish whether the events of books 1 and 2 happened or not (SPOILER: they did). In book one, Salander and Blomqvist made a genuinely engaging team. I wanted two more books of them solving mysteries and kicking arse. They don’t even meet again (at least not while both are conscious) until the last page of Hornet’s Nest, an authorial tease extended far beyond the ability of the payoff to satisfy.

It took me literal months to slog through the longeurs of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest, It caught me in the trap of being just not quite tedious enough to quit. It has one really good courtroom scene, (through which Salander, yet again, is passive) a fairly energetic action sequence and a tolerably good ending. But it’s utterly lacking the drive of the first book. It spends its time sorrowing over how badly Salander has been victimised rather than letting her loose on the world, while between chapters Larsson, apparently feeling defensive about this whole female-protagonist thing, tries to prove a woman can totally do stuff, because hey, look at the AMAZONS --at which point you want to beg him to please stop helping.

However, despite his own serious blind spots, and even aside from the “misogynist serial killer” plot, Larsson is highly focused on women’s experiences of day-to-day sexism -- harassment on the street and tube, casual insults in the workplace, judgements from strangers. Even during the tedium of Hornet’s Nest, I appreciated Larsson’s perceptiveness in revealing what is often so pervasive as to be invisible. I’ve seen a lot of jokes from British and American men about how sexist the series suggests Sweden must be, how it should be renamed “Why no woman should ever visit Sweden” (You know, Sweden, which can also be a Feminist Saudi Arabia, if we’re having a slightly different conversation. That Sweden.) I have yet to see a woman make such a joke. Funny, that.

A Site, a Planet, a Picture

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:28:49 GMT

So first of all I finally have a website: sophiamcdougall.com . It's not completely finished yet, as you'll see -- eventually, I want to have the blog content there, although I've had this LJ long enough now that I'll keep it as a mirror too.

I had a birthday, and if I only had a camera I would show you the most lovely present I had from some wonderful friends: a SQUASHY PLANET MARS. You know you are totally jealous. I can use it for research and sleep on it! It is more or less cotton-stuffed heaven.

Continuing the planetary theme, On 23rd June, from 6pm, I will be signing Savage City at Forbidden Planet with a host of splendid writers such as benaaronovitch and Jaine Fenn aka maeve_the_red. Look, it's true. Afterwards the plan is to go to the pub! Come and play!

I've been doing a lot of art lately. I always used to say "Oh I'm a writer, I'm really not an artist", and I used to feel there was no point pursuing what I can do beyond "doodles" but that was kind of because... I always felt that if I wasn't effortlessly good enough to be hanging in the Tate, plainly I wasn't good enough to do ANYTHING. Which now reminds me rather of this (I've read that this particularly affects girls, but I can't find the link now). Anyhow, I've realised I want to do more visual art. And for now, finally I can post some of the art I made for the Genre for Japan charity auction, now the winning bidder has received his prizes. I was offering signed first editions with a "doodle" in the frontispiece -- my "doodles" were already pretty goddman detailed because that's what comes of an obsessive temperament, but I really wanted these to be special. I bought SPECIAL ART PENS.

The bidder asked for Una in one book and Sulien in the other. I put Una in Romanitas and Sulien in Rome Burning.

I drew Una on the day she escaped from slavery and goes off to rescue her brother from being crucified on the banks of the Thames:

This picture of Sulien is a mild distortion of what actually happens in the book, but you know, what the hell:

Finally -- and I'm sorry to continue a trend of concluding posts with massive non-sequitur downers -- , I urge all of you to raise as much of a stink as you can about the disgraceful ejection of Samira Ahmed from Channel 4 News. (Start by complaining here) Losing yet another intelligent female news reporter (or rather banishing to radio where no one has to look at her face) even before she starts to lose her pretty-young-thing looks -- that message of "women, you're not allowed to grow old. You're barely even allowed to grow up" -- depresses me more than I can possibly say.

But, hey. Come to Forbidden Planet. Cool books and cool people -- make it all better.