I’ve been quizzed before — in fact, I had an almost identical conversation at the same event last year — but never so blatantly, and with so little offered in response.

Thanks to The Mary Sue‘s discussion of the Fake Geek Girl problem in science fiction fandom, I know that this behavior has a name: Microaggression. And wow, it’s really frustrating.

What’s probably going through the man’s mind is: I want to make sure the project/my work is accurately represented.

Here’s what the woman hears: I want to make sure you’re qualified to talk to me.

I had similar conversations with women and with men who weren’t posturing as gatekeepers to the community, and there are two key differences. First, there’s give and take. My conversational partner asks questions, and is no doubt evaluating me based on my answers, but s/he offers information in return (“I’m speaking too, on [___]“). And second, we congratulate each other on being asked to speak in the first place (“You’re speaking? That’s great! What’s your topic?”) instead of treating the opportunity as our due. These tiny conversational cues make a huge difference.

I had dozens of hallway conversations, of course, but this one stuck in my mind. If other women who are newer or less confident of their place in the community met with similar microaggression, I hope they, too, were able to brush it off and enjoy the rest of the event. I certainly found lots of more pleasant people to talk to, but I know all too well that having the gates of the community slammed down in your face repeatedly can make you decide that this group neither wants nor needs you, and your free time would be better spent on something else.

In case you were wondering, ladies: you are welcome here, and we definitely need you.

It’s a real book, and not just files on my laptop!

So I’m sort of amused that not one, but two blogs I follow published articles on this topic last weekend.

First, Foz Meadows wrote The Truth of Wolves, or: The Alpha Problem. It’s fantastic. She takes down urban fantasy authors not for perpetuating the old science — that part is, in her view, entirely forgiveable — but for using the alpha/beta/omega structure as an excuse to write romantic heroes who are sexist assholes.

More specifically, we get the Alpha Problem: endless tracts of sexism, misogyny, female exceptionalism, rigid social hierarchies maintained through a combination of violence and biological determinism, inescapable mating bonds, and a carte blanche excuse for male characters to behave like cavemen (and for female characters to accept it) on the slender justification that, as alphas, it’s both in their nature and what’s expected of them. And the thing is, I love urban fantasy, and I also really love shapeshifters. But it’s not often these days that I get to love the two things in combination, because apart from not being able to deal with the sheer profligacy of the aforementioned problems, I also can’t get past the fact that the logic on which they’re predicated – the logic of wolves – is overwhelmingly inaccurate.

A day later, io9 published a similar piece, Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong. This digs into the literature a little more and focuses entirely on the wolf packs, leaving it to the commenters to draw the connections to current urban fantasy.

The sheer alpha-ness of the alpha heroes is starting to overshadow my enjoyment of Patricia Briggs’s work. I adore the Alpha and Omega novella especially… but yeah, very much predicated on some discredited science. I’m amused to see via the io9 comments that Kelley Armstrong (whose series I haven’t kept up with recently) handled this by saying, more or less, “Yeah, but werewolves are different,” and moving on with the story. That’s an awesome retcon.

The question remains… was everyone else Googling wolf pack structure the same day I was?

This kind of crap went on and on. It was exhausting. Exhausting to figure out how to respond to the relentless misogyny from men who are otherwise kind and educated, who would never think of themselves as chauvinist assholes. … A big pile of reasonably aware and well-intentioned people doing thoughtless shit creates a solid set of stairs for unreasonable, ignorant assholes to say and do what most of us (men and women alike) would deem shockingly destructive.

– KMA Sullivan, “Women are Bitches”

Not surprisingly, seeing as writers lie for money, we lie to ourselves all the damn time. You start off pretending a project doesn’t mean that much to you, or that you’re writing it to learn, or that you’re writing it for art, or that you need to do something during your lunch break. You tell yourself that your book is genius, that you’re a genius, that if not this book, then the next one. You send stories or novels out and start getting in rejections, and that’s the icing on the lie-cake — maybe my protagonist looked like that editor’s ex-wife, maybe I formatted it wrong, maybe space opera isn’t in (again) this year.

Because on some level the self-denial does protect you, and you need it to survive.

– Cassie Alexander

Aside from the death threats, threats of self-harm, and scathing one-star reviews she’s receiving from fans who are upset either that the series is ending at all, or that its romance thread doesn’t play out the way they wanted it to, there’s this bit at the end of the Wall Street Journal’s article on the last book:

Ms. Harris’s editor, Ginjer Buchanan, got choked up while discussing the end of the franchise. “We would like it to have gone on forever,” she said. “I don’t think anything is going to be as popular as Sookie.”

What a godawful thing to say to an author! Nothing else you do will ever be this good. We’d rather have you do the same thing forever than grow as an artist and try new things.

I gave up on the series several books ago; her creative fatigue has been apparent for some time now, and I actually enjoyed her non-vampire mysteries more than the Sookie books. So I went over to Goodreads to find out the cause of all the readers’ ire. And… am I nuts? The romantic endgame was obvious to me from the second book onward (precisely where Harris says, in this article, she figured out where to end the series). It was not pulled out of her ass, as a few reviews so charmingly accused. The groundwork was neatly laid, and very clearly foreshadowed in the sixth book. I suspect readers got so wrapped up in their preferred ships that they overlooked all the big flashing signs that pointed elsewhere.

(Or maybe I’m just good at predicting Harris’s moves? I figured out how the romance and the missing-sister plots were going to play out at the end of the first book in the Harper series, and it turned out almost exactly as I’d guessed.)

At any rate, authors are not readers’ dancing monkeys. Or, as Neil Gaiman put it in another context, Charlaine Harris is not your bitch. Nor is she her editors’ bitch, and I’m glad she’s moving on to other projects. I look forward to reading them.

Most contemporary sales, marketing, and PR organizations outside of publishing use some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to coordinate their activities. Fundamentally, these are just databases that record all the different interactions that the company has with the people with whom it does business. [...] Right now, this stuff all lives in separate word-processing files and spreadsheets in different departments’ hands, which results in all sorts of bizarre occurrences that I see firsthand.

Accounting is pretty awful, too, but PR is the most visibly antiquated part of the industry.

This is the part I have a hard time explaining to well-meaning people who ask how my book is doing:

But a few lucky times, I was able to score a few free minutes for a meal or a conversation with friends, and the number-one-champion frequently-asked-question they asked me was, “How is the book doing?”

The honest answer to this is, “We’ll know in two to six months.”

That’s because bookstore sales are not reported to the publisher in real time. The reports are quarterly, which means the author sees the numbers the quarter after that, when the royalty statement shows up. Amazon’s Author Central provides some insight via BookScan, but even that is pretty vague, and delayed a week.

I remember Tobias Buckell and Teresa Nielsen Hayden discussing this on Twitter a couple of months ago; he pointed out that while many publishers are now asking authors to do a lot of their own publicity, the authors have so little data to work with (and none of it in real time) that they are the least well-equipped people in the publishing chain to evaluate which of their PR efforts are effective.

Back to Cory:

Even e-book reporting is frustratingly opaque: e-book retailers know which sites refer customers to their purchase pages, know those readers’ demographics and other purchases, understand which search terms direct the most traffic, and which subset of those terms generates the most sales. Publishers get little to none of this data. If I was negotiating with Amazon, Apple, Google, and Kobo, my top request would be realtime access to anonymized aggregate data from these services.

Yep. Access to live sales data from the ebook retailers (though not all the other analytics they have) is yet another thing that’s making self-publishing so attractive to marketing-savvy writers.

Men are used to carrying stuff in their pockets, you put money there, you put car keys there. With money and car keys come power and independence. You can buy stuff, you can leave. The idea of some women’s clothes not having pockets is baffling, but it’s worse than that — it’s patriarchal because it makes the assumption that women will either carry a handbag, or they’ll rely on men around them for money and keys and such things.

– Kyle Cassidy

This is part of the background noise of my life: most women’s clothes (business and dresswear, especially) don’t have pockets. I didn’t realize, until this post started making the rounds among my Twitter friends, that most men didn’t know this.

Also? It’s easier to separate a woman from her handbag than a man from his pockets. Once you’ve lifted her handbag, the woman is bereft of transportation, ID, money, and phone — that is to say, vulnerable.

It’s pretty brilliant. I’m not going to burble about the story — you can read about it elsewhere; there’s a huge community of fans on Tumblr. But catching up with it near the end, as I did, made me appreciate the logistics of a complicated transmedia serial, and I was constantly comparing it to the other brilliant serial I’ve been following, Shadow Unit.

This is going to get long.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries were primarily a weekly series of video blog posts. In between episodes, the characters would chat in real time on Twitter (teasing the audience, without spoilers) about the events of the story. They’d also post photos of things happening off-screen on Tumblr. I caught up with things the week the last episode was posted, so I just caught the tail end of all this, but it was very well orchestrated.

The LBD site has a Story page that lists all the pieces of the transmedia puzzle in order: not only the diary episodes, but the past Twitter conversations in between (via Storify) and the Tumblr photos. This is what makes it possible to do what I did: lie in bed all day and click each link in succession to catch up on the story all at once. If you didn’t feel like following all the interstitial social media stuff, you could stick to the video page or the YouTube channel to watch the main story play out in the videos.

Take a look at the home page and the story page, and then let’s compare and contrast a little bit with Shadow Unit.

Shadow Unit is described by its creators as fan fiction for a show that never existed, a profiler crime series about supernatural stuff — a cross between Criminal Minds and The X-Files. It’s a written serial that apes TV script structure: five acts per episode, eight to ten episodes per season. There’s fan art of the actors, who don’t really exist, and some of the “DVD extras” (vignettes and outtakes posted between the full-length episodes) reference conversations between these imaginary actors about the equally imaginary filming of the episodes. The show even has a theme song.

The transmedia elements are the characters’ LiveJournals and Twitter accounts (which I can’t find an index for). During the first season’s week-long finale miniseries (which was amazing), you could follow the characters’ increasingly frantic comments on each others’ blog posts each day, and you’d be on the edge of your seat by the time the episode was posted that evening. It was glorious.

But Shadow Unit is hard for a new reader to love. If you didn’t pause and go look at the home page, do so now. Does it convey what I just told you about the structure of the story and the mechanics of following along? Did you get lost in the context-free excerpts?

I adore the story, and I recommend it to almost everyone, but I have to write this long introduction (like the one above) and provide direct links to some points deeper in the site. Unlike LBD, the Shadow Unit site doesn’t have a single page that collects all the threads of the story into a table of contents that new readers can use to orient themselves. Such a thing does exist — on the fan-edited wiki. The site itself has an episode list (out of date) for the main story, an introduction confusing called “Sanding the Oyster,” (what does that mean? It becomes clear when you read it, but it’s not obviously an orientation page) and a Getting Started page, which is terribly out of date. The very old news on the home page mentions some bootleg ebooks, but not the official ebooks that are now available. For that matter, the ebooks are mentioned nowhere on the site. Given that almost everyone to whom I’ve recommended Shadow Unit has said, “… but I’m tired of reading things on the web! Isn’t there an ebook format?” you’d think that the creators would want to, I dunno, mention their existence on the front page of the site. But no, they’re a well-kept secret unless you follow the forum. Which… why would you, unless you were already invested in the story?

Which brings us to the issue of the schedule, past and future.

Now, I completely understand that the authors’ scheduling issues got the better of them, and that the weekly schedule of the first season was unsustainable. That’s fine. At two months between episodes, though, it’s hard to remember where we left off. What happened last time? What were the dangling plot threads from the episodes before that? What’s been revealed in the DVD extras in between? Again, a single table of contents would be helpful here.

But the bigger problem for me, as an already-devoted follower, is the upcoming schedule. It doesn’t exist.

That is, it does, but not on a single, easy-to-reference page, and certainly not within shouting distance of the table of contents. “What’s the most recent one?” and “When’s the next one?” are questions that should be easy to answer when you’re trying to follow a web serial. Instead, each episode has a thread in the season’s forum. The first post in each thread contains the tentative air date. If that date changes, that post usually doesn’t get updated to reflect the new expected date; you have to follow the later replies in the thread to see what’s going on.

Now. There are some big, big differences between these projects that I should point out here. First of all, LBD had a budget and a staff. Minions are invaluable when it comes to things like updating schedules, Storifying and linking to Twitter conversations, and generally keeping up with website maintenance. I know exactly how laborious that stuff is. Shadow Unit is done in its authors’ spare time, which is usually nonexistent. They did pull together the old blog posts (with relevant comments) for the ebooks, though, so a lot of the necessary work on that front has been done.

Shadow Unit started in 2008, and thus predates LBD by a lot. Its creators didn’t have a lot of models to go on, just a few pre-Kickstarter serials like Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Fledgling in 2007. Catherynne Valente’s very successful serial The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making came a year later. While those authors had a social media presence, the characters did not. The transmedia aspects of Shadow Unit were more or less unprecedented, and no one really knew how to put it all together. Storify and Tumblr weren’t around yet. New tools are available now, and everyone’s learned a lot.

So the thing that frustrates me, ultimately, is that Shadow Unit’s creators haven’t taken advantage of their successors’ lessons to improve their original project. Shadow Unit is still going, although it’s close to wrapping up. It has all the pieces in place to be truly great. But too few people know about it, because it’s so hard for new readers to jump in and figure out what’s going on.

And that makes me sad.

If you want to give Shadow Unit a try, which you totally should, it all starts with “Breathe.” The first ebook collection, containing four episodes and interstitial blog posts, is free.

(Yeah, the tot has an ear infection. It’s been fun.)

2. Copy insurance policy information from one member of the household/policy to another. When we realized that they needed to update my son’s policy, they asked me for my insurance card. I couldn’t find it, and asked if they could just copy the info from my account. They could… by backing out of my son’s prescription/profile/whatever entirely, finding mine, copying my info onto a sheet of paper (!), going back into my son’s account and reentering the data by hand. Halfway through this twenty-minute process, I found the required card in a forgotten pocket of my wallet. (Because, naturally, we don’t have one insurance card. We have three: the one we give to the doctor’s office, another one we give to the pharmacy, and a third one we use only for glasses and contact lenses.)

3. Switch one’s preference from arthritis-friendly caps to childproof caps. Sixteen months after the tot was born, having requested childproof caps on multiple occasions, I’m still getting the easy-open ones.

This is all nowhere near the level of stupidity Jay Lake encountered with his insurance carrier, and even that is nowhere near the horror faced by people with no insurance at all.

I maintain that anyone who thinks the American insurance system is superior in any way to a government-sponsored single-payer system has never had to deal with any health problem more serious than the sniffles — and believes they never will.

And, bringing this back around to the women in tech post, I’d like to point out something that came up again today in New Republic’s article on the implementation of Obamacare: until the rest of the law goes into effect in January, people who are trying to buy personal health coverage (read: freelancers) can be denied for a long and varied list of preexisting conditions… including pregnancy. (Past C-sections, too.) If you were wondering why a lot of women work for companies, or universities, or other people in general rather than going into business for themselves, there’s one big reason.

Medicine has been so focused on what doctors can do in the hospital that it has barely even begun to figure out what can be done in the home. [...]

This, too, is a legacy of a health system built for acute care. Hospitals make money when they do more to patients. They lose money when their beds are empty. Put simply, Health Quality Partners makes hospitals lose money.

—“If this was a pill, you’d do anything to get it,” by Ezra Klein

Since the first round ended, new ones have kicked off at irregular intervals; there’s often a New Year’s round from January 1 to April, a stragglers’ round starting in April, and a fall round beginning in September or October. The group that’s going right now started April 1.

My face-to-face group has been wanting to do this, but everyone had some work-related scheduling challenges (almost all of us work for the university in some capacity), and I had, you know, this looming deadline. So we postponed our start until May 15.

If your life runs on the school calendar, too, and you’d like to join us, come say hi.