STATUS: Wednesday, August 10th

The Daily Report

August has proven to be a bad month for plans. Yesterday one item at the top of my list was to confirm my hotel reservation for WorldCon, after there were some shenanigans back in July with one of the convention hotels being still under construction and some other administrative screw-ups by the con itself. In the process, I found an email from Friday that got ignored as spam, saying that due to ongoing renovations at our hotel (not the one under construction!), we were being relocated to another one twice as far away. I think the reason it got filtered as spam was that there were several dozen other recipients CCed on it with whom I had never corresponded.

Yes. The hotel open CCed everybody affected, broadcasting our email addresses, situation, and the hotel we’re now staying at to a random assortment of strangers. It’s not too likely to result in anything bad, but that’s not really the point. It’s very distressing, and frustrating because it’s entirely the fault of the hotel/the person who sent the email, but there isn’t a remedy. The arrow cannot be called back to the bow.

Cue me dealing with the fallout of this, figuring out the logistics of two physically disabled people getting around downtown Kansas City, making fallback plans, talking to the staff at the hotels, and dealing with the shot of travel-related anxiety created by uncertainty and change.

After finding out as much as we can about the area (and realizing that I’d stayed in another hotel very close to it before, as a teenager), we did decide that the new hotel can work and we’re actually looking forward to staying in it. But it basically destroyed my work day.

I’m impressed with the staffer at the new hotel; less impressed with the one at the hotel that bounced us. It’s not so much the renovation thing. I do think it’s odd that they didn’t know they wouldn’t have enough rooms until less than two weeks before, but maybe something took longer than quoted and they were keeping their fingers crossed it would be done under the wire. I can roll with that kind of thing.

It’s the handling of it. It’s the mishandling of private, personal information. It’s the fact that the initial email on the subject contained multiple points misinformation that I’m not going to get into, but which the staffer at the new hotel had to immediately and very apologetically correct. She got left on the hook cleaning up a situation that was made messier than it needed to be.

Anyway. That was my day yesterday. Figuring out the logistics of downtown Kansas City and talking to hotel people about hotel things.

Considering the impact of WorldCon, I had already planned on putting Tales of MU on vacation for the two updates closest to it (the Friday I’m there and the Tuesday after I get back). The vagaries of the summer have already got it down to once a week for the end of July and August so far.

Given all this, I’m officially calling it a reduced schedule for August: once a week, irregular. I hate to do this so soon after establishing a regular update pattern (and it will mean less money, because of the Patreon model), but it’s better than burning out.

Financial Status

Not much to say here. September will be leaner than expected because of the reduction in Tales of MU output, though the continued growth of other revenue streams could help mitigate that.

State of the Me

Did not sleep well last night; combination of heat and anxiety.

Plans For Today

Going to be finalizing the judging of the stories for the first gender challenge, with an eye towards announcing the winners and posting the round-up today or tomorrow. Today is the plan, but lack of sleep may catch up with me towards the end of the day.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Gender-Free Story Round-Up!

Being the conclusion to the gender-free writing challenge I issued back in June.

Part I: Lessons Learned

First, a bit about lessons learned.

Not everybody who sent a story in mentioned explicitly how they would like to be credited, and some of the published entries bear credits while others don’t. Accordingly, I’m going to let the bylines the authors created speak for themselves.

When I do something like this in the future, I’ll make more of a point about standardizing entry formats so we can capture that kind of information. I’ll also try to make the constraints more clear. The original post called for “a story of any length with at least two characters and no references to their gender.”

What I meant was (and this was clarified later) that no character who appeared or was referenced should be gendered in the text, but I saw some people boosting the post explaining that the requirement was “a story where at least two of the characters don’t have gender”. I didn’t get any stories that had a boy and a girl and two gender-nonspecific people in the background, thank goodness, but there was at least one submission where an arguably pretty clearly gendered character is referenced at multiple points. I’ve left that in the link round-up, because of the initial ambiguity.

I did remove entries I considered to be overtly hurtful to a group of people. I wrestled with myself over this (it’s one of the reasons the judging is coming as far into August as it is), because I didn’t mention any such criteria when I laid out the challenge. But one of the points of this challenge is to encourage greater gender (and to an extent, sexuality) diversity in writing, to help make non-binary and genderqueer writers and readers feel more welcome in the growing online literary world, and you can’t welcome one group by stepping on another, especially when the groups overlap.

The last lesson has to do with the deadline. About half a dozen people asked me if I would extend the deadline another month, and I did, but far fewer people took advantage of that extension than asked for it. The entries were pretty strongly front-loaded to the beginning of the period. Next time, there’s going to be a larger window (and quite a different set-up in general), but there’s definitely a thing to be learned here about deadlines and their usefulness.

Part II: The Round-Up

• Pie Day (Mention of assault.)
• Cat Simulator 2016 (Interactive Twine story!)
• Sexy Spandex (NSFW)
• On Finding Yourself In Bars
• So, How Was School Today?
• Steer Into The Weird
• 7 Questions for the Angels
• Orlando: A Scene For Two
• Nothing Else Is That Colour
• Pine Smoke
• After Work, Part 1

Thank you to everybody who participated!

Part III: A Winner And Such

It needs to be said that “On Finding Yourself In Bars” is one of my top picks of the bunch, but it’s also written by my partner, Jack Ralls, who helped organize all this, which is why we agreed it would not be up for consideration.

So who wins?

I’m going to give first place ($25) to “Pie Day“. Second place ($15) goes to “7 Questions for the Angels“. Third place goes to So, “How Was School Today“.

I enjoyed these stories quite a bit, but one of the things I enjoyed the most about them is how real to life they were (even the one with a couch-surfing God). They deal with the personal, the spiritual, and the everyday, and they do so in a way that shows how incidental gender can be and how arbitrary our assignments and assumptions of it often are.

We’ll be getting in touch with the authors of those pieces over the next day or so about the payout arrangements. If you’re one of them, feel free to email us back with your PayPal address, if that method is amenable to you.

Part IV: Looking To The Future

I want to do this again, but bigger and on a more formal scale, and possibly with more categories for different ways of playing with gender conventions. Basically, an annual awards deal, covering a year at a time, every year, in order to not shut out pro publications. This is going to take a lot of planning and coordinating (we’ll definitely need more help), but we have time to work it out. The first period of eligibility will be 2017, which means the award won’t be awarded until 2018. I will especially be looking for non-binary, genderqueer, and agender people to help judge. More details to come early in 2017!

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.