Four Angel Plotlines That Make Me Wonder

It isn't a surprise that people like writing about angels. I like writing about angels. But sometimes when I'm reading angel story descriptions (especially among the unpublished), there are some eyebrow-raisers:

• Angels are frightened that humans will find out they're real. I hate to break it to them, but all that talking to shepherds stuff outed them some time back. They tend to burst from the sky, glowing with holy light and singing. It's too late to decide they want to stay hidden.
  
  And if someone isn't a believer, yet sees an angel, it's not like it's a bad thing. People have the warm fuzzies about angels. It's "ooh, an angel" not "argh, a giant tentacle monster". Out of all the worries an angel could have, this one isn't high on the list.
• Guardian angel falls in love with his charge. So an immortal angel watches a girl grow up. Then when she hits her teenaged years, and she's almost legal, uses his knowledge of her life to seduce her. This is portrayed as being highly romantic.
  
  I realise I'm not the most romantic person out there, but am I the only one that finds that creepy?
• Angel has trouble learning to fly, so visits Earth. I don't know what it is about Earth that makes it easier to fly down here. Maybe Heaven has really high gravity. Maybe Earth has all the best angel flying schools. It's a mystery.
• Angels can turn humans into angels. There are various theories about angels. The religious view was they were all created in one batch, so there are never any new ones. A more modern view is that dead people can become angels. The idea of angels doing something to humans (other than murdering them) to make them angels is rather more recent... it usually involves swapping essences/souls/spirit pieces. There might be a way to write this without it screaming 'vampire', but most stories don't make it.

Most of these come down to the author going "vampires are so last year, but I want someone unattainable, immortal... aha, angels". Only without actually changing any of the vampire-specific things to angel-specific things (other than adding wings and a tendency to wear white)*.

Angels can be awesome in stories, but not when they're just feathery vampires.

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* The learning to fly example is more specifically angelish, but is often an excuse to get the angel to Earth to have romances with teens, turn people into angels and worry that people will find out angels are real.

Short Fiction and Poem Link Love

I was recently tagged by Milo for a blog award thingy. I don't like doing those, but I said I'd do something else to pay-it-forward. So this post is all about link love, with a science fiction and fantasy theme.

Short Stories

These shorts are a few of my favourites available online. I've linked to some of these before. Others I haven't. A lot of them have a more literary vibe (which isn't to say that's the only thing I read, but more of the online 'zines go that way. The explosions tend to be in print).

Nira and I (Shweta Narayan) - Strange Horizons published this story of a society surrounded by mist.

Brass Canaries (Gwendolyn Clare) - Clockwork flash fiction.

All the King's Monsters (Megan Arkenberg) - Everyone has a monster. A tale from Clarkesworld.

Practicing Perfection (Cathy Freeze) - A story of angels and giants at Fantasy Magazine.

From the Lost Diary of Treefrog7 (Nnedi Okorafor) - Set in the same world as her novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, a pair of jungle explorers record their journey.

Alligators By Twitter (John Wiswell) - Something a little lighter to finish with... a Twitter story published at Flash Fiction Online. They also published it on a special Twitter account, if you'd rather read it on Twitter.

Poems

The poems are more balanced between the serious and the silly.

(UNTITLED SPECULATIVE HAIKU) (Greg Schwartz) - A bit of silliness from Every Day Poets.

Train Go Sorry (Peer G. Dudda) - From the first issue of Stone Telling, this poem is about the difficulties of being between the hearing and Deaf communities. Not speculative, but much of the magazine is.

Grey Goo (Jonathan Pinnock) - There aren't many poems about nanotechnologists.

Snow White to the Prince (Delia Sherman) - Based on the fairytale, but a slightly different twist.

Other Stuff

If you'd like to include a link to something neat in the comments, feel free (and it can be yours). Literature, art, writer's blogs, cute kittens... those sort of things are great. Make money fast, vanity publishers, hate sites... not so much.

Homeless Invisibility in Fiction

There are times when news stories highlight writing issues. The Bethany Storro acid attack hoax is one of these. Not because of the attack itself, but one of the details in the story.

Storro applied drain cleaner to her own face, before walking into a park and falling to the ground screaming. She claimed an African-American woman had thrown acid at her and run away.

The hoax was premeditated. She must have looked around to check there weren't any witnesses too close by... except she missed some. There were homeless people close to her.

A blog post at the Vancouver Voice offers the follow comment:

Two of them stated Storro was clearly alone when she dropped to the ground screaming. Alone. As in no one attacking her and especially no African-American female being in the area, let alone fleeing the scene after the attack.

The two alleged witnesses are members of the park's homeless crowd and only gave their street names, "Kiddles" and "Rajazz." Several others in the homeless clique at the park made similar accounts of the events of that night. They cited a fear of the police as the reason for not coming forward.

Dwayne Stewart, also homeless, was the first person to reach Storro and went for help.

They were invisible to Storro. They remained invisible to many of the early commenters, who didn't believe the accounts of homeless people counted. They were seen and dismissed.

Writers often make the same mistake. A portal to a demon dimension will open in a park. The only witness will be a business man who happened to be going for a late night stroll*. In the minds of many writers, there aren't any homeless people in the park, despite this being a common sight in city parks.

There are a few exceptions, but they also reinforce a view of not being entirely visible**:

• A token drunk will be asleep on a bench. The reality of homeless people gathering for protection isn't shown. Nor is the diversity of homeless people, who can be any sex, age or profession. They might be on the streets due to substance abuse, running from an abusive home or losing their job (among others).
• There will be many homeless people, so that they can be victims. This has some realism, because if you're going to kidnap someone for your evil experiments, a homeless person is less likely to be noticed. However, it's often done in a way that doesn't show individual characters and the hero / heroine will not come from within the homeless group being targeted***.

Not only does it lack realism to pretend some people don't exist, but it misses an opportunity to tell the story from a different perspective. The stakes are going to be much higher for someone who has nowhere to run and who knows they're unlikely to be taken seriously by the police.

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* Much as I enjoyed the series in other ways, The 10th Kingdom falls into this. Virginia hits a dog whilst riding her bike through a park at night. The park is remarkably devoid of people.

** Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman) plays on the idea of homeless people being invisible. Some manage to cross the boundary between London Below and London (such as a busker, who is noticed enough to earn some money), but most are simply ignored and forgotten about immediately.

*** Doctor Who's Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks shows homeless people living in Central Park during the Great Depression. Though this partly falls into the victim trope, there are notable characters from the group who are part of the eventual solution.

Pirates Invade Shopping Centre

Ahoy! Today (19th September) is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, where we get to romanticise pirates, drink rum and arr. Actually, I made up the rum bit. I don't think it's officially part of it, but I reckon rum helps you talk like a pirate (nothing beats giving you a gravelly voice than swallowing rum too quickly... either that or you choke).

Anyway, some weeks back, pirates invaded the local town. Here are their banners flying in the shopping centre. They sang piratey sea shanties and scared children. The usual.

The odd thing is they finished invading before ITLAPD. Maybe they wanted to be done in time for the holiday? Arr!

Affirmative Action and Unintended Exclusion

Many times during my gaming life, I've seen blogs and websites started up for 'gamer girls'. In my earlier optimistic days, I'd check them out. I'd find a hot pink site with developer interviews asking "How are you going to make your game more attractive for girls?". Opinion pieces would say girls wanted fewer explosions and more fashionable clothing options.

I left those sites never to return, because I liked hitting things with swords and blowing stuff up. As far as those sites were concerned, I didn't exist.

It didn't stop me facing issues in the almost-all-male gaming environment*, or thinking it might be nice to talk to someone, but sites didn't exist for women like me.

When I see announcements for all-female anthologies**, I often get the hot-pink-gamer-girls sinking feeling. Submission guidelines discuss how the anthology will allow women to write the stories they can't write in male dominated environments. They'll talk about how women write so very differently from men.

I still like hitting things with swords and blowing stuff up. Women like me won't exist in the pages.

People come up with excuses for why this is okay. Some of the most common...

• Non-feminine women get treated like men anyway. A sexist person will be sexist based on physical sex, not gender role. Using masculine themes in stories doesn't make sexism disappear***.
• Non-feminine women don't face the same issues. Both true and false. Sexism applies to all women. Discrimination based on gender role does vary. A feminine women faces discrimination for being seen as weak/inferior. A masculine or androgynous woman faces it for being seen as unnatural. Neither of those is a good thing, and both are something that should be addressed.
• Non-feminine women can get their own anthology. For a start, it's just creating a different exclusion set, when all-female anthologies should really be talking up women as a whole. But it also faces the problem that a minority within the group may not have enough members to start their own anthology (I've yet to find an anthology call or similar aimed at non-feminine women only****).

There are other examples. It's not unusual for LGBT anthologies to end up all about the G (with maybe a little L). When talking about people of colour, the number of times it ends up being a discussion of black history/rights, and no one else's, is beyond measure.

Affirmative action has its place. There are many groups who aren't treated as equal in publishing. It can help highlight that such people do exist, are writing and are worth reading. It's not a comfortable place when it excludes some of the people it claims to highlight, however unintentional the exclusion may have been.

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* Though this is less true today, when I started gaming, the sex ratio was very skewed. To the point that I was accused of lying about my real identity on a regular basis. Things have come a long way since then.

** I'm using anthology loosely. The same principle could apply to theme issues, discussion groups, communities and other examples of affirmative action.

*** Reviews of books by women often focus heavily on the relationship aspects of the novel, even when they're a minor part. Women also seem more likely to draw criticism for including too much relationship or emotional stuff, even when their books have very little.

**** "The Girls' Guide to Robots and Explosions"*****

***** In real book musings, we had a book about carpentry for girls. Most children make something simple for their first project... a doorstop or bookends. The book's first project was a full-sized wardrobe. Yes, a wardrobe.

Maybe they were trying to discourage carpentry?

Writing Diary: Proof Without Pudding

Rambles

This has been a week of two things:

• Not being very well and my brain shutting down. A recent example was heading out to the kitchen to get ice cream, returning to the computer with a spoon... then looking at the spoon and wondering "where's the ice cream?"
  
  This story ended happily, because I did remember the ice cream on my second attempt.
• Proof copies. I had two proof copies come in, both with the same deadline for looking at them. What are the odds? Though not the best timed week, I'm pretty sure neither of them had errors. Hopefully.

News

Since my last post, where I vaguely mentioned a second professional sale, I've added it to my bibliography... I've sold a story to Nature. Yay! And it appears to be really real, and not a mistake, which is still taking some time to absorb.

There should be a poem and a piece of flash fiction out soon. Neither of those are free online, but I'll post the info anyway when they're around.

I totally failed to get into Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, but if you'd like to read my entry, it's here (along with all the other submissions).