This one is from someone who calls herself the mean fat old bat, which gives me the impression that she isn’t automatically this nice about everything 😉
So, months after I started my petition to ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to intervene in the plans of Uganda to bring in the death penalty for gay people, I still haven’t reached 100 signatures. I have to admit, I am disappointed and perturbed. Fortunately, other secular petitions have had much more success and the bill has been shelved again, but that hasn’t stopped me from wondering where all the liberal Christians are, and why we seem so reluctant to stand up for what we believe.
Possibly the problem is that the fundamentalists know exactly what they believe and can point to the biblical passages they think support them. They have no doubt, because that’s the comfort of fundamentalism – clear rules, black and white morality and no need to figure things out for yourself.
I’m pretty sure the Bible refers to that kind of legalism as being something suitable for a child – something that has to be outgrown when the believer becomes mature enough to make their own decisions, hear God’s spirit for themselves and learn to understand the principles behind sin and grace, evil and good so they can guide themselves like a grown up in the world.
So, let’s go back to the idea of executing someone because they take part in a sexual sin. What is the Christian position on this?
First of all, we’ve got to ask ourselves, are we sure that being gay is a sin at all? For my own part, I’m convinced by arguments like these http://whosoever.org/bible/ that it is not. I feel that if we’re not 100% sure that something even is a sin, it’s a travesty of injustice to punish it as if it was equivalent to murder.
But what about those Christians who are not convinced by the arguments that being gay is not a sin at all? What should be their position on the idea of capital punishment for sexual sin?
Fortunately we have extremely clear guidance on this question. I would hope there could be no better guide for Christians than Christ himself. What did he do when he came across a group of people trying to execute someone (by stoning) for a sexual sin?
He said “let him who has no sin cast the first stone.”
His hearers were wise enough to realise that none of them came into this category. Gradually they figured out that they didn’t have a leg to stand on when it came to thinking they were so righteous they could afford to condemn anyone else. Eventually they became so ashamed of themselves that they slunk away and left the poor adulteress unharmed. Then Jesus – who was without sin, and had every right to judge – said “neither do I condemn you”, suggested she might like not to do it again, and let her go.
How anyone could get from this to “slay all the sinners!” I have no idea. But to my mind, if we know what Christ would do, and we decide we know better – if we think we are more righteous and have more right to condemn our neighbour than Jesus, who refused to do so, I venture to say we’re doing it wrong.
And if we think our brothers and sisters in Uganda are doing it wrong, is it not our duty to say so? Is it not our duty to help them to be merciful? Is it not our duty, in short, even if we think being gay is a sin to oppose the brutal punishment of sinners, because that’s not Jesus’ way?
And if we think being gay is not a sin, then shouldn’t we be furious and appalled that people think it’s somehow Christian to murder people for no damn good reason whatsoever? I think we should. As they say – for evil to triumph it is only necessary for good people to do nothing. It’s time us non-fundamentalists stopped silently shaking our heads and started at least saying ‘no’.
Admittedly, because we all have to make up our own minds we will never have the united voice the fundamentalists have, but even that – even hearing a chorus of Christians who think many different things and disagree with each other – will do something to reduce the effectiveness of the apparently unified voices calling for intolerance and oppression.
Besides, how can we live with ourselves if we sit back and say nothing?
Blessed Isle embarks you on a grand adventure around the world. The delivery is inventive and full of humor. You will fall under the spell of this poetic forbidden love story. I will definitely read more books by this author.
It started off on Saturday, which was unfortunately also the day of this year’s Straw Bear festival. I was in that half way state where you know you’re ill but you don’t yet know what it’s going to be when it’s fully manifested itself. So I dressed for dancing, then added several more layers of jumpers and a sheepskin coat and went as a musician who might dance if absolutely necessary.
The layers were all very needed, as it was perishingly cold, but it was also sunny and clear. Perfect weather 🙂 I haven’t got much more to say about it than I said last year or the year before, but it was a good one, which I will remember fondly.
It was the first showing of my new purple waistcoat 🙂
More photos than anyone other than a member of the Riot could ever want to see:
I spent Sunday hacking my lungs out. But I felt a little better on Monday, so I started the week determined to stick to my New Year’s Resolution of writing 4,000 words a day. This I managed on Monday, and on Tuesday. By Wednesday I felt awful again and wrote nothing. 3,200 on Thursday, and I told myself “you’ll feel even better by Friday. You can do the 4000 and maybe even an extra 700 to make up Thursday’s total. Thus, having jinxed myself, I feel terrible again today and need to sleep.
OTOneH, this push of over 10,000 words has brought me *this close* to the end of The Glass Floor – I only have the finale to write now. OTotherH, it’s so frustrating to know I could have done more.
Still, what I did manage on the non-writing day that was Wednesday was a complete revision of the plot plan, to make the whole thing tighter and more exciting. I suspect that ought not to be sniffed at as an achievement either.
Other achievements this week – my youngest, having been told he wouldn’t get the grades to get into his 6th form college of choice, buckled down, pulled his finger out, and got those grades regardless. I am super proud of him.
I’m also pretty chuffed with this lovely review of Blessed Isle:
I’m slightly perturbed at the fact that the lack of sex is causing such problems for everyone. Are there really no other sweet m/m romances out there? What about Charlie Cochrane’s? But I am delighted that everyone’s enjoying it despite that 🙂
Heh, after writing that blog post about how to add more female characters to your novels, I immediately started worrying if I was a classic case of ‘do what I say, not what I do.’
With some relief I thought of Lady Farrant in False Colors, Emily in Captain’s Surrender, Krissy, Caroline and Alec’s mum in Shining in the Sun, Oonagh, Liadain, Grace and Phyllis in Under the Hill, Isobella in His Heart’s Obsession, Elizabeth, Mary, the ghost and Cook in The Wages of Sin, and Maria Cobham in By Honor Betrayed.
Surely after all that nobody would judge my feminist credentials on Blessed Isle, in which there are no speaking parts for women at all?
Hah. I should have known. Because here is a fascinating scholarly review on Romance Novels for Feminists of that very book:
It’s the nature of the writing beast that no matter what kind of writing you specialise in, someone will tell you that you’re doing it wrong. In the m/m genre they will also find numerous ways of telling you that you are doing it immorally. Either you’re being homophobic by exploiting gay men’s lives for the sake of straight women, or you’re being misogynistic by writing women out of your fictional worlds entirely. Or both at once.
Now I’m not sure how a genre can be simultaneously wrong by catering to women’s needs while also being wrong by being bad for women, but as is so often the way, there may be some truth in both things. So what can be done to minimise the problem? Well, we do what we can to make sure gay people enjoy our writing as much as straight women, and we make sure we have more interesting female characters, so women are well represented in our fiction.
Clearly the main problem in getting female characters into your m/m fiction comes from the fact that both of your main characters are men. Your viewpoints will be overwhelmingly male because your romantic couple are both male. And there’s nothing you can do about that without completely changing the genre to m/f, which rather defeats the object.
So if the nature of m/m means that both your main characters are male, what can you do to increase the presence of interesting female characters?
We could start off with the evil ex. Does main character A have a wife or girlfriend? She doesn’t have to be an evil bitch – after all, it’s no more fun for a woman to be married to a gay man than it is for a gay man to be married to a woman. So any breakup is likely to be both their responsibility. Maybe they separated amicably and are now working at being friends while raising their children together (or apart)? Or maybe she is an antagonist, but for perfectly good reasons, which can be addressed during the plot without blaming her for being some kind of monster.
Maybe the main characters both have evil exes, and they are genuinely moustache-twirling (what’s the female equivalent? Dog-fur-wearing?) villainess exes with plans to rule the world. Everyone loves a magnificent villain. As long as you have a woman or two on the side of the angels too, a genuinely, gloatingly, over the top villainess can be great fun.
We could also mention mothers. It’s a fair guarantee that every character will have a mother, and she doesn’t need to be dead or out of the picture. She could just as easily be funny and capable, or doing a glamourous or interesting job. She could be interfering, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Many people have sisters, and your main characters may be among them. Perhaps they have gone into business with their sister, or their sister has a problem they can help with, or their sister has a brilliant idea about what they can do to solve whatever their big plot problem is.
Maybe one or both of your main characters have female bosses? Maybe their bosses are rivals, and that’s how they get together – snooping around each others’ businesses in a series of acts of industrial espionage, and they can’t get together without talking the bosses into a merger instead of a hostile takeover. As long as neither boss is represented as an evil bitch, this could be a great chance to develop two strong female characters with a large degree of power and influence on the plot, who are still neither of them involved in the main relationship.
Along the ‘bosses’ line, your characters might also have female servants, whose below-stairs goings on affect their plotline. No reason why these shouldn’t be fully rounded characters too. A man’s nannies or cooks could run him ragged if both their personalities worked that way.
Your characters may work in a team and have female team-mates, whether this is one of a group of paranormal werewolves or werewolf slayers, or floor layers or architects or whatever.
If we’re talking a fantasy setting, ask yourself if your king really needs to be a king? Could she perhaps be a queen instead? If your lead characters are always having to deal with the queen and her (ninja magician) handmaidens, it will make it a great deal harder to end up with a book in which it looks as if you’ve killed off anyone in possession of a cunt.
If you find that, without realising it, you have written a novel in which there are no female characters at all, why not go the Ellen Ripley route, pick one or two of your most important support characters and gender swap them? Generally this makes no real difference to their characteristics or role in the story, and can be easily done. It may even bring some interesting freshness to your novel when the hard drinking, fist fighting, womanising best friend of the hero is a woman herself.
Obviously, all of this is slightly more difficult when you are writing in an all male environment, such as in a historical – aboard a warship, inside a gentleman’s club etc. But usually even in those situations there were women invisibly doing their stuff, whom you can choose to make visible. Servants at the club, wives travelling alongside their menfolk in the warship, a doctor’s daughter serving as loblolly boy rather than being left destitute at home. And that’s without the many instances of women who passed as men to run off to sea/join the army/go to university etc.
Look closer at almost any situation and there will be women there, any one of whom might get involved with the plot. And yes, perhaps all she can do is be the washerwoman who scorched the MC’s breeches because he was rude to her, but even that shows there are women in this universe who have their own personalities and are not to be trifled with.
Even the small things can make a difference; the barmaid who offers the hero directions to the castle and grins behind her hand as he goes, the landlady who gets the bloodstains out of the cuffs with a suspicious look, the interior decorator who gets mistaken for a stalker when she tries to break in to replace that lamp…
In short, just because your main characters are both men doesn’t mean you can’t fill your world with interesting women. If you put effort into making your men believable, complex and non stereotypical so as to avoid the danger of offending your gay readers, why not also put effort into including believable, complex, non stereotypical female characters too, so as to avoid the danger of offending your female readers? You might even find you start liking them yourself.
because my reconditioned Cybook Opus ereader decided to give up the ghost in December, I have finally noticed the importance of the .epub format of ebooks. You can download an epub book straight from Goodreads to your Kobo, which is so convenient, and you can download any book in the Kobo library to your Kobo wherever you can find a network to connect to. It’s marvellous!
It also made me think “dammit, there needs to be a kobo/epub version of The Witch’s Boy.” So I found a tutorial about how to format your stuff for Smashwords and put the book up there too. It’s now gone through their clearing and testing process and – having passed the meatgrinder unscathed – is available in Kindle, epub, rtf, pdf, lrf and goodness knows what else.
I decided to keep the nice Black Hound cover for this version, just because it was so nice.
I’m very happy with my new Kobo, btw. Excellent battery life, I can put books on it from any retailer using Calibre, and if it’s too dark to read where I am, it comes with built in glow. And it fits in my pocket. It’s not as pretty as the Cybook Opus, but the light more than makes up for it.
If you are on Facebook, you have my apologies for the fact that I’ve ended up saying this twice. I forgot that if I updated Facebook and my blog separately, Facebook would get the content doubled.
That feeling you get when you open a mysterious cardboard box, unexpectedly delivered by the postman in the morning, and lift out the glossy-backed print copy of a book you wrote yourself.
Actually, there is something like it, and it’s the feeling you get when you hold your new child. Admittedly, the second thing is bigger and scarier and more life changing, but there’s something of the same disbelieving joy about both things. I did that! And behold, it was good.
I think the similarity between books and children is behind a lot of the antics of authors behaving badly on the internet. No parent is going to stand for it if some stranger insults their child. Most authors feel a similar surge of protective outrage on behalf of their books. Both sets of people eventually have to get out of it by accepting that a grown up child/story ought to be capable of defending itself… but now my metaphor is wandering off somewhere without leaving a forwarding address, so I will leave it there.
On a different note, I finally got a good photo of the new lighting effect. It’s not quite as 70s looking as this makes it seem, mind you!
And on a third note, I’ve been having an interesting conversation about Mary Renault’s The Charioteer and other books over on Goodreads. I had said I picked up a misogynistic vibe from The Charioteer which made me reluctant to revisit her other books, even though the historicals had been favourites. I didn’t want to risk finding out that they gave me the same feeling.
One of the comments I got in return said that Renault was just reflecting the authentic misogyny of ancient Greece, and I replied that, since an author could choose whatever they wanted to put in their own book, just because ancient Greece was misogynistic didn’t mean that she had to be. She could write against that grain. Coincidentally, but fortuitously, I came across a post on my friends list which said much the same thing, only better:
I’m sure it holds equally true for historically authentic sexism in historicals too. I know I’m constantly running into new research that undermined all I was taught about women’s roles in the past. Pilots, hermits, warriors, merchants, scientists, philosophers, poets, craftspeople, midwives, doctors, witches, pirates, queens… all of it rubbed out or defaced by history, where ‘history’ means ‘the stories we tell ourselves about the past.’ And you know what, wives are not bad things to be either. Mothers, sisters, aunts (maiden and otherwise), daughters and wives don’t have to be written as the stultifying forces of emasculating convention either. Lady Mary Wortley-Montague would have something very cutting to say about that, if she could leave off spinning in her grave long enough.
So, I noticed that nobody had posted on The Macaronis for a while, and thought that the blog post I was going to post today here would be probably much more useful to readers of that blog. (Because I’m sure all my friends are already perfectly aware of how to start a fire.)
But then I thought “but still, readers of my blog might be interested, if only for the laugh” so here’s the link 🙂
The Boat of Small Mysteries - A cozy mystery aboard a narrowboat, in which a murder and a disappearance keep our aroace detective from fully relaxing into the idyll of country life.
