Welcome to the Dark Underbelly of Social Media

@elizabethforma Rock on. So proud that you are my Senator!

— LJ Cohen (@lisajanicecohen) August 9, 2016

I should have expected this. In fact, I'm pretty surprised I hadn't experienced anything like it before, given that I've been fairly active on social media and the internet for over a decade. But until this week, I've never experienced being targeted by strangers on the 'net because my beliefs disagree with theirs.

And I recognize I've been lucky. Most of the nasty tweets directed my way were scattershot, rather than personally targeted abuse or direct threats. Other women have been 'doxxed' and harassed and threatened for their mere existence.

But this week (among other things) I've been called 'retarded', 'brain dead', a communist, and outed as Jewish by a self-described anti-immigration, anti-islamic twitter account that bracketed my name in triple parentheses.  That last one is pretty bizzare. My last name is Cohen. It's not at all a secret that my heritage is Jewish. Which has nothing to do with my activity on twitter.

And what did I do and say to attract such nastiness? I retweeted some of Senator Elizabeth Warren's tweets and then made my own tweet to her appreciating that she was my senator.



Apparently that was the last straw.

Apparently hordes of anti-everything folks watch the public twitter timelines looking for anyone who uses Elizabeth Warren's name in a tweet and then start the rude message brigade.

I don't understand what these people hope to accomplish or why they targeted me this time. I'm not someone famous. I'm not a spokesman for anything other than my own mind. And I will say what I say because I have the right to say it. If someone doesn't like what I say publicly, they have the right to either block me, ignore me, or enter into dialogue with me about it.

Pro tip: telling someone they are wrong/evil/awful/stupid is really not the best way to change their minds.

— LJ Cohen (@lisajanicecohen) August 9, 2016

I'm a grown up. I can disagree without denigrating someone or threatening them. I can even carry on a reasonable conversation with people I disagree with. Shocking! Right?

All the accounts that have sent rude tweets my way have been pseudonyms with either 'blue eggs' or logos as photos. I use my real name and my real photograph. (Hey Twitter! I'm actually a real person. Why won't you allow me to go through your verification process?)

And I still come back to the main question: What do they hope to accomplish? I'm not going to have some sudden epiphany and decide I support hatred, prejudice, and misogyny. I'm not going to delete my social media accounts and be silent. I'm also not going to attack or otherwise engage people who have already shown me they have no interest in dialogue.

What I will do is report and block, though I know it doesn't address the bigger problem. And then I'll move on, because I have better things to do than name-calling.

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Confused thoughts on representation

We all live at the intersections of multiple identities. Most of mine happen to be privileged or relatively so in our society. Some are not. Some vary, depending on context. It's confusing, messy, like all things pertaining to people.

Some of my identities include (in no particular order and certainly not an exhaustive list):  white, cis-female, heterosexual, Jewish, American, feminist, neuro-atypical, and writer.

I include writer here because it's not just what I do, it's interwoven with the way I process the world. If I want to understand how I think about something, I write.

This post is an attempt to work my way through an enormously important issue that pertains both to myself as a writer, but also as any of my identities; that of representation in fiction.

Once upon a time, a white, cis-het, female writer wrote a space opera series. 

That series contains an ensemble cast of a half-dozen principal characters, each of whom gets 'screen time' as a point of view (POV) character. Unless that cast consists of clones of some version of the writer, that means said writer is creating characters outside of her own direct experience. Not only are there male characters in the cast, but also characters from non-white backgrounds. There are also characters who are not heterosexual.

The writer did not create this cast as an exercise of filling out some kind of diversity bingo sheet. She grew up on the original Star Trek (albeit in syndication) and imprinted on the message (albeit somewhat flawed in the show) that the future was for everyone. And when she grew up, those were the kind of stories she wanted to tell.

Speaking for one, not for all

So, it's pretty obvious that writer is me. And in crafting the series and its characters, I worked hard to balance honoring the (not) diverse (enough), (not) inclusive (enough)  world I live in with my vision/hope of a future that is more so. I was aware the identities that bring me privilege also put me at risk for drowning out writers with less. I was also aware it was not my place to speak for someone else's experience, especially when someone from an identity different than mine could speak with their own voice. And yet, I also knew that creating a future with a cast of characters who were all cis-het and white would be erasing the reality of the majority of people on the planet.

 Imagination can only take you so far

I chose to create a cast of individuals who came from different backgrounds and who lived at the intersections of their own specific identities. Each of these characters are uniquely themselves. They represent, not a race or a creed or a belief system in any way, but a richness of individualities.  They are each, based in part, on pieces of people I know who are themselves living at the intersections of many identities. I also draw on personal history and experience of simultaneously being privileged for some of my identities and disadvantaged in others. 

But you're not . . .

Fill in the blank: gay, Black, Latino, Japanese, etc. There are characters in the Halcyone Space book who have those as part of their identities. By far, the most criticism I get is why I chose to make Ro (Rosalen Maldonado) and Nomi (Konomi Nakamura) gay. I have been accused of "ruining" my space opera with some sort of homosexual agenda. Never mind that their relationship is primarily a deep emotional one, with little overt physicality. (The novels are SF, not SF/Romance.)

My answer is something along the lines of 'because you're still asking the question.' I live in a world where I joyfully attended the wedding of my sister-in-law and her wife. Where my dear friends Alan and Paul used to tease me that I was their token 'breeder' friend. Where my son carries the name of my husband's former boss and mentor, who passed away while I was pregnant and whose family had disowned him for coming out.

Because when I introduced Nomi to the story, she was everything Ro needed, but didn't know it yet. Because I couldn't imagine a future where love between two women would be anything to remark about. They are simply two people who care for one another. That is neither revolutionary nor particularly worthy of praise.

And yet, and yet, and yet. . .

I'm somewhat dismayed that it has become something to notice - that there is a gay couple in a space opera series.

This is a screen shot from this afternoon. DERELICT is the 2nd highest selling book in the LGBT SF category on Amazon. When I took this screen shot ITHAKA RISING was 7 and DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE 8. (It also made the hot new release category.)

On one level, I'm thrilled. I've worked hard on these novels. They are good stories.

On one level, I'm dismayed. First, that the bar is so damned low that a series with 2 woman in love as a very tangential part of the plot is enough to have the books rank this well in the subcategory. Second, that 3 of my books are in the top 10 of this list and I very well may be drowning out the voices of queer writers of SF in the process.

I don't know if I am or not. I do know I never marketed these books as LGBT SF. And yet, here they are. I can't pull them from the category and I wouldn't want to. I do know that I am proud of each of my characters and their individuality.

And I will continue to do my best to honor that little girl who grew up to believe that the future was for everyone.

#SFWApro

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Creating full characters, not strong ones

Cover art, DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE, Chris Howard copyright 2016

I write science fiction and fantasy stories. And in those stories are characters. They interact with other characters, move through settings, and deal with conflicts. They act and they react.

This is basic storytelling '101', regardless of genre.

Everywhere I look, I see articles talking about writing 'strong female characters', or praising them in TV shows or movies. It makes me wonder about the definition of strong and how media has limited the scope and range of ALL characters in elevating strength over all other aspects.

I understand where this push comes from. Looking at female characterization in popular media over the past few decades, for every Ripley or Sarah Connor or Peggy Carter are dozens and dozens of passive, poorly written female props, victims, and plot devices. And in an effort to change this, strength has come to mean the ability to fight against terrible odds and win.

But if you look closely at the three iconic female characters I named (and there are more, thankfully!), their power doesn't come solely from their ability to kick ass, but from their ability to be fully human and express both their strength and their vulnerability.

What made Agent Carter so compelling to me (and to many fans; just not to the networks, apparently) is that she is intensely real. She expresses a full range of emotions, including fear and uncertainty, and thrives within a context of solid relationships with the other characters around her. We see her vulnerability and root for her to survive, even as we recognize the sometimes outlandish plots and situations that the series placed her in.

Because she is so fully real, we are willing to suspend disbelief and enter into her world.

That is the difference in writing full characters rather than strong ones.

The character of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider movie was strong, but not full. I enjoyed the movie for what it was: superficial action, but never had any sort of emotional connection to it.

This created dichotomy between strong and full characters is not limited to the depiction of women on screen or in written work. The characters who stay with me, who resonate for long after I've closed the book or turned off the screen are ones who have a reality far beyond their story. Captain America in The Winter Soldier. Morgan in The Riddlemaster trilogy, Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings.

It's this resonance and reality I strive for in all of my writing. In my Halcyone Space books, I have an ensemble cast roughly split between male and female characters. They all have moments of strength and moments of vulnerability. They all make imperfect choices and have to contend with the results. It makes for a much richer experience for me as a writer. I have to believe it does the same for the reader.

Dev, pictured in the artwork above, is a new addition to the series. She is smart and resourceful, but she is also hamstrung by her upbringing in the Settlements. She feels the sting of class prejudice very keenly and it colors her interactions. That makes her far more interesting to me than if she had had a privileged life. In fact, she would not be the character she is had she been raised otherwise. We see her vulnerabilities and want her to succeed. She is strong in the ways that matter, rather than in a purely cliched sense.

Strength that does not come from the fullness of the human experience is not true strength.

Who are your favorite characters who exemplify this kind of larger, truer strength?

#SFWApro

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Guest Post: Deviation, a Scifi book by A.J. Maguire

Wow - this cover is amazing!

Hey Blog readers - this is Lisa. Today I am thrilled to host writer, friend, and all around awesome person, A.J. (Aimee) Maguire. Aimee and I have been reading one another's work for crit for years now and it's been a real pleasure seeing her work get out into the world.

I had the privilege of beta reading Deviation, at an earlier phase of its development, and I'm very excited to read it now that it's complete. The story deals with issues of gender politics in a way that should be more prevalent in SF, but isn't. And yet Aimee managed to write a story that isn't a polemic against the patriarchy, but a thought provoking adventure in a unique SF world. In today's guest post, she talks a little about how she did that. 

Welcome, Aimee, and thank you for writing this guest piece for the blog.

Treading the Line

My new release Deviation just received its first review and one of the comments that the reviewer made was that the “philosophical and scientific topics” I explore in the book could have easily become a soap-box. To my relief, the reviewer expressed that there was no soap-box apparent in the book and that I had managed to convey this world without coming down on either side of things too heavy-handed. 

I admit that I was terrified I was going to press some “hot buttons” with Deviation. The world I created was very male-dominated, had women tightly subjugated and in robes – not to mention scarce – and had the potential to aggravate someone into thinking I was making some political statement. 

And who knows, maybe I’ll get a Reader out there who decides that’s just what I did and makes a big hullaballoo about it.

For right now, I’m going to rest assured that at least one reader/reviewer didn’t see it that way. I know there are some books out there whose sole intent is to make some kind of point like that, but I’m not that kind of writer.

So how does an author convey a realistic world without appearing to show their own biases, especially if they know that the subject matter is sensitive?

Well … 

I’ll tell you what I did, but it’s sort of a non-answer. 

I concentrated on the characters on the page. My story isn’t about the politics of the world I created, or the science that peppers the pages; it’s about the characters. 

Specifically, it’s about two women who are taken from their home and their desperate struggle to get back. Yes, the politics block their way sometimes (or most of the time, as it were) but the focus isn’t so much on how or why those politics got there. Rather, the focus is on the character’s reactions to being stuck. 

If you’re one of those writers who likes to make political satires or use their work as a means to expose the world as we know it, then more power to you. I have nothing against that, I just don’t write that way.

I’m talking to the other writers out there, the ones who find themselves in the nail-biting position I was in while writing Deviation. Concentrate on your characters and how they react to the world and everything should fall into place. 

Thanks, Aimee! If you have any questions for her about this, any of her other books, or anything else about Deviation, please ask away in comments.

A.J. (Aimee Jean) Maguire
A.J. Maguire is a consumer of stories. She thoroughly believes that stories are the bedrock of humanity, and that the answer to every question in life can be found in the tales that we tell. She also believes that spiders are the spawn of Satan and that her cat might just be the reincarnation of Dionysus.

If, of course, a Greek god were capable of being reincarnated.

Her writing runs the gamut between science fiction, fantasy, and (soon-to-be) historical fiction. She even has a semi-horror/ghost story in the works that she intends to release as a serialized novel during the Fall of 2014. Maguire focuses on complex female protagonists who are capable of laughter even amid tragedy, or sometimes in spite of tragedy.

Maguire is passionate about her craft and constantly working to improve. She'll probably keep telling stories long into her old age (which is still several decades off) and believes that being an author is the single greatest, most wonderful gift she has been given -- apart from her son. She looks forward to every story and hopes to release many more novels in the years to come.

Buy Links:
Amazon Home Page : http://www.amazon.com/A.-J.-Maguire/e/B004K5RHSY
Barnes& Noble Page: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/a.-j.-maguire
AJMaguire Website : http://www.ajmaguire.com/ 

On being told girls didn't grow up to be astronauts

Never noticed the similarities until today. :) Even though CONTACT is one of my all-time
favorite movies, I didn't create the cover art for DERELICT. Must be a 'GMTA' issue.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to grow up and be an astronaut. Which shouldn't be surprising for anyone of my generation when the world pretty much stopped for the Apollo missions and they wheeled huge black and white TVs into the classroom to watch live. Okay, true confession - I don't really remember the moon landing. I was a little too young and all the images from NASA missions got tangled up into one mental folder of 'really cool space stuff' that pretty much informed my childhood.


But I was female, and started kindergarten in a fairly conservative district in Long Island in the late 1960's, well before Title IX.

So what did that mean?

It meant that girls weren't supposed to grow up to be astronauts. That was a message I was told both implicitly and explicitly, even though I was a good student and smart, and did well in both science and math classes as well as language arts/english and history classes. I could both think analytically and quantitatively and articulate what I was learning. But, when I was picking courses in High School*, my guidance counselor steered me away from advanced math and science classes (since the boys needed them for college) and toward typing (so I could be a secretary - I kid you not.)

*Chronological aside: Yes, Title IX was passed in 1972, but I suspect my school system was living in some kind of time-warped 1950's dream/nightmare of strict gender roles and duties

Well, I did learn to type, but not because I was going to be a secretary. Luckily, my parents were very insistent on higher education and my older sister had warned me that college meant papers and papers meant typing. A lot of typing.

I ended up graduating a year early from HS and going to college in 1980 at the University of Rochester where HOLY SHIT (sorry!) I could take any class I wanted in a bazillion majors. And I was around other smart, interesting, motivated people. It was heaven.

But I was already at a disadvantage in being able to sign up for some of the classes I had wanted to take, since I didn't have the background knowledge. I ended up designing a major focused on the history of medicine and medical ethics, and then went on to become a Physical Therapist, earning my Master's degree in 1986. (About which, by the way, I have absolutely no regrets. I had a fabulous 20+ year career as a PT.)

I do often wonder where I'd be now if I had been in primary school well after the revolution of Title IX. With my interests and skills with computers, I might have studied artificial intelligence. Perhaps I'd be working at Google or Microsoft. Or if I'd been really able to pursue the science/math route, I might have grown up to be an astronaut, or maybe a scientist with NASA.

Now, at 50, I get to do all of that as a writer, and more, living vicariously through my characters. I can trace a line from my childhood dreams, to influences like Ellie Arroway from CONTACT, directly to the character of Ro Maldonado, in my most recent SF book, DERELICT.

I'd like to imagine that I would have been less 'prickly' than Ro, but I do like to believe that in some alternate future, I might have grown up to be the skilled computer programmer she is. (And I'm still holding out for the true heads-up interface with which she 'tickles' the AI.)

Seeing women active in science is an amazing thing. There really weren't a whole lot of role models for me when I was growing up.  Which is one of the reasons why I was so thrilled to find out that Ellie Arroway (the main character of CONTACT) was loosely modeled after a real life SETI astronomer, Jill Tarter, who was a friend of Carl Sagan's.

Things are slowly changing. Just the other day, I was chatting with a fellow potter in the ceramics studio and he was talking about his daughter who has a PhD in Food Sciences and does research in California. He is a middle school science teacher, working in an impoverished district and one of the things he does is invite his daughter into his classroom to inspire the next generation of scientists. There is more diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) today than ever before, but we can do much better as a society.

Our media and our fiction play a large part in this change.

When Nichelle Nichols was cast as Uhura in the original Star Trek, she became a role model for a whole generation of women and men of color. Mae Jemison, a former NASA astronaut, has acknowledged that as a child, seeing Nichols on the bridge of the Enterprise allowed her to believe she could go to space.

We need to be able to see possibilities for ourselves, in life and in art. This is especially important for young people, for children growing up in less advantaged circumstances, and for girls, who are still woefully underrepresented in STEM.

Representation that challenges stereotypes is vital and since I can't grow up to be an astronaut/scientist/computer programmer anymore, I'm going to keep writing about characters, like Ro, who can.