(My attempt in arranging a dead horse's limbs.)

If you are white, in a white-dominant white-normative culture, you reap white privilege. There may be other privileges which you do not reap. That's not the point or topic of that sentence. If you are white in a white-dominant, white-normative culture, you reap white privilege.

If you are a white woman, you may still be discriminated against on the basis of your sex, but you will still reap white privilege. If you are a poor white person, you lack economic privilege, but you still have white privilege. White privilege exists for you because you are white.

I recommend reading Peggy McIntosh's essay, "Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack," if you would like examples on what white privilege confers. It's an incomplete list, but it's an enlightening one (emphasis mine):

17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge", I will be facing a person of my race.

Note how it keeps coming back to race? That's because it's a discussion of racial privilege. If it were a discussion of sexual or economic privilege, it would keep coming back to that.

Saying "What about me? I experience this other type of disadvantage!" in a discussion about race is like telling someone who turns down a slice of lasagna because she's allergic to tomatoes "What about me? I'm allergic to dairy and that has ricotta in it!" It means that neither one of you will be able to eat the lasagna, but it doesn't mean you have the same problem or that you'll experience them in the same way. (As a corollary, saying "Yeah, but what about your sex or economic status?" is like saying "Yeah, but it also has pasta and sausage and ricotta in it!". The fact that she can eat wheat/gluten and meat and dairy products does not make her any less allergic to tomatoes.)

No, white privilege is not a be-all end-all ticket which guarantees you absolute equality in all life's dealings. What it is, is a freedom from an entire suite of cultural misapprehensions, expectations, and burdens which you would otherwise have to carry. Yes, in this society, being exempted from those burdens is a privilege.

As a person – white or not – you have burdens to carry. No one is disputing this. When people point out white privilege, they're not saying you would be burdened only if you were non-white. They're saying if you were non-white, you would have these additional burdens to carry.

When there's a huge, ongoing discussion about racism and a white person chimes in with "I'm not privileged, I'm a woman!" or "I'm not privileged, I'm poor!", they are wrong. They are privileged in a way which does not reflect their sex or economic status. Believe it or not, they can be privileged in one way and disadvantaged in another.

A wealthy man of color will still not experience white privilege. He will experience economic and male privilege. He will not experience white privilege.

If you want a discussion about womens' disadvantage or economic disadvantage, you're well within your rights to start a new discussion. But please, please, please do not see it as your fundamental right to bring the discussion of racism to a screeching halt so that you can repurpose the discussion to talk about a different set of privileges altogether. In a discussion about otherness, for example, or marginality, all these privileges should be examined as part of a larger societal ailment. Discussions of otherness are good and necessary.

A discussion of racism is not a de facto discussion of all cultural otherness or marginality, just as a discussion on tomato allergies (say, in the form of a blog of tomato-free recipes for popular foods like pizza, salsa, marinara) is not a de facto forum for all food allergies (and the author is under no requirement to accommodate those with, say, dairy allergies in his/her considerations). The fact that it's an inappropriate forum does not imply that it's an inappropriate topic. People with dairy allergies are more than welcome to find or start their own forums. But expecting to walk into a different discussion and be accommodated is unreasonable.

One of the things I learned early on was that childlike behaviour was not limited to children. Really, it's been my experience that differences between children and adults are often overstated. This seems doubly true on the internet.

That makes talking about serious issues hard, because rational discussion requires that people act rationally. It's easy to be irrational online. And that's not even the biggest problem facing large discussions, especially when they're a discussions about problems, which might suggest that they require solutions. A single answer requires a single, uniform problem. A discussion as large as racism, which examines everything from the formation of the culture to individual attitudes within it, isn't going to have a neat solution or a bottom line. It can only be challenged through an awareness of the issues, and that awareness needs to be fostered through rational dialogue. Back to square 1.

I've wanted to contribute, but I've been hesitant to for a number of reasons. One of them I'll put forth here as a grain of salt, though ( be warned that it's a large one... )

TL;DR? Despite some things which might suggest otherwise, I do not speak from a position of authority. And I understand that the only way I can get a grasp on what's going on is by listening and accepting people's experiences as real and valid. And, perhaps most importantly, by recognizing that I have come from a background which has sheltered me, and that my personal experiences should not inform my opinions of others' experiences. I want others to recognize that in speaking my opinions, I can only speak for myself and my own experiences, which includes the experience of privilege. I am not and cannot be the spokesperson for any race. I'm just zis guy, you know?

A friend asked if there was any benefit to taking writing classes in college. I thought I might as well post my disorganized thoughts here as well as in the comments to the entry. What do the rest of you think?

In my experience, classes fall on a long spectrum between the pointless (or worse than pointless) and the revelatory. The absolute best classes will give you guidance not really on how to write, but how to analyze the parts of your own writing; they'll give you tools instead of rules. (Passive voice, for example? Is an excellent tool for when you *want* to pull the actor out of the action, which can be used to very haunting effect. To continue the tool analogy, you can say that a kitchen knife is better than a scalpel, but that only applies when you're trying to cut food. If you're removing a tumour, go for the scalpel every time. A tool's usefulness can only be measured against its desired effect.) They'll teach you to look not at what you're doing so much as how what you're doing affects the story you're writing.

Another thing a writing class – well, a workshop class – will give you is the chance to see how your writing affects people who aren't you, and to get feedback on what people think worked and what didn't. Feedback and the chance to engage in a dialogue are wonderful things, and also hugely useful, if the people involved take time and care in discussing it and if they're somewhere around your target audience. (In my weekly crit group, we had someone who comes from a literary background critiquing an urban-fantastical story, and some of the advice she gave was perfect for a literary story but potentially damaging for a speculative fiction story. It was apparently common-sense things like "You need to explain that this is a fantastical world right off the bat," which – no, because a reader of speculative fiction is going to assume that it is. It'd be like explaining that the main characters were people instead of bricks.)

The most important thing, in my opinion, a class or workshop can do for you is to give you a community you can later draw on. My writing group now evolved from a class I took here at university. I'm in a lot of contact with my Clarion West class, who provide not only help with stories, still, but also advice on a lot of the rest of my life (like where good job markets lie and how to construct my CV.)

The thing is, all of these can be found outside of a class. You can develop those analytical skills on your own, you can find or form your own community, especially online where the cost of gathering is basically null. Classes offer it all in one convenient location and give you a structure to make things not fall apart, but they're not 100% necessary, especially as so much depends on the teachers and the classmates. I would not be where I am now without attending Clarion West, because it was a focused and intense workshop with 6 instructors and 18 students, each of which brought their own perspectives, theories, and toolsets to be picked through. But I've had workshops where the only really valuable thing I got was the encouragement (in fact, the requirement) to write.

Web designers and developers can do a lot worse than reading A List Apart regularly anyway, but there's an especially fascinating article on designing for readers up in Issue 278. It's especially interesting to me, as I'm very slowly moving toward working on my own website, which may eventually archive fiction as well.

This is about how I feel about Clarkesworld's online submission tracking. It's extraordinarily useful! It also gives me license not to forget about my submissions and let them go with grace.

I have written a short story this week! It's a 3300-word soft-SciFi piece about a boy who discovers a piece of prophetic abandonware. So far Abandonware is the working title, which I don't like, but I'm not sure what a good title would be. "I, Prophet"? "Burn This Disk"? Oh well.

I'm hoping to write or revise at least a short story a week, and submit or revise at least a short story every two weeks. Should be good exercise, at least...

Well, I finished a short, experimental-form mostly-mood-driven piece tentatively named Year of the Rabbit today. Next up: workshop it!

And revise a few things and get them looking for homes. I have two stories being shopped out right now, and I'm sure I can do better.

There's this truism which says a story is finished when the thought of revising it one more time makes you cry.

I'm about at that stage with Jessamine, which is on its fifth draft and was my Clarion West application story, but since I last looked at it, I know I've improved as a writer and my CW instructors did have a few things to say about it which could nudge me in the right direction toward revising again. So now I have to decide: is it finished, or not?

Questions, questions. I may just try to finish Year of the Rabbit and possibly rename that, and come back to Jessamine when I've developed a taste for wine.

Well, I've been neglecting this journal. I know I have a lot of unanswered comments (I'm sorry!) and a lot of unwritten posts, some of which got put off for personal reasons, a lot of which got put off for time reasons.

The short of it is, I'm back from Clarion West. (Well, "Back" as in I'm a state away from home, and home just moves, and when I get there I have to unpack everything I own and move in.) It was amazing. Superfluously so. And sometime in the next week, god willing and the geiger don't click, I'll write a lot about it and try to get to all those people I've neglected. (I'm not ignoring you! Really!)

It seems that this month is my oyster! I've just accepted an invitation to the Clarion West Writers Workshop, so six weeks of my summer are going to be spent learning craft from some truly amazing writers.

I seem to have not one but three novellas in the works, and at some point in the near future rachel_swirsky, ann_leckie, radiationdream and Mysterious Possible Others will be having a Novel Race to work out some of our problem children. (Well, I'll be working out a problem child. I probably shouldn't speak for others.)

I have one new piece of fiction up and out the door to markets: My Father's Heroes, a much softer (though in some ways harder) piece of specfic than I've written in some time. It's always fun to play in various subgenres, though I'm feeling a distinct hankering to get back to hard SF.

...about my very first sale.

Small Monuments will be published in the upcoming issue (#36) of ChiZine. And I'm in some excellent company. To say I'm excited is an understatement, at best.

While you're poking around the site, be sure to stop in at Joanne Merriam's Aviary, a beautiful and haunting prose poem about... well, you'll see :).

Up now: polish the soft-spec My Father's Heroes and look at markets for it, and finish... quite a number of other things. I have five different fics out at various markets, at the moment, and I'm feeling better and better about the momentum I building up. Hey, that's at least 5000 words written this week, and with school eating up my time... things could be a lot worse.

I should also make a good-faith effort to update this journal more often.


*Trust me; I got all of my keymashing and exclamation-point abuse out of the way on a different journal. Hey, I'm allowed one squeefest ^_^.

I've been suffering from some mild depression recently, which wasn't at all helped by the death of my father just over a week ago. He was about to retire when he was diagnosed with an inoperable glioblastoma in the brainstem. He died with a number of books to his name, and was a celebrated and respected professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He will be sincerely missed.

I've spent a while not writing anything, which is a cold, dark place for me to be. But there is some good news--I got a rewrite request on one of my stories from Strange Horizons, which I'm working on even now. And I have an idea to submit to the upcoming Warrior Wisewoman anthology. That's enough to give my weeks at least some sense of purpose; I just have to make sure I'm pursuing those goals.

Whee... long time no blog.

I have been writing, though, and while my progress on most things has been slower than I would have preferred, I am making some good progress on a variety of things in the Ulan universe. (Jessamine, The Lion And The Lizard, Incarnadine, White In The Moon, and now Nrima and the Ten Good Things.) The problem is, the more I work in this universe the more I realize that its plots tend toward the epic. Jessamine, for example, I'e been resolutely cutting down and cutting down and has finally reached the point where I've gotten it to 7,000 words... and I'm realizing that its plot and character development demand a much longer story. Something along the lines of 20,000. Which, while I'm sure isn't unpublishable, does tend to make things difficult.

So, assuming that you have a variety of stories, none of which are quite children's or young-adults' stories (but of which none are necessarily adult-only), most of which seem to be heading toward that awkward ten-to-twenty-k-words mark, all of which are set in or around the same city... what do you do? Publish a collection of related stories or a chronicle of the city as a novel? Sand them down as much as is possible and try to submit to magazines? Try to find a story that would work as a novel, work on that, and then work on the horter ones as adjuncts to that?

Questions, questions.

The SciFi I grew up on was overwhelmingly Star Trek with a light edge of Star Wars. I watched through every episode of The Next Generation, and for a long time could identify most of them by name based on a vague summary of the plot. In fact, Star Trek was probably one of the most important of my media influences--inside or outside the genre.

So it's kinda weird that I've wound up thinking of SciFi as rigorous (or at least somewhat diligent) science-based fiction; I try to research whatever I write, even if it is only Wikipedia research. I try to stay within the bounds of reality except for what I need to stretch to make the story work--FTL travel and the like, for example. (I don't know nearly enough about physics to make up plausible explanations for FTL; I mostly just handwave that.)

Is there still a place for the magic-science fiction of Star Trek and Doctor Who? (In an episode of TNG, they mention that the Enterprise's sensors can't cut through "the thermal radiation." In an episode of DW, the Doctor remarks that a space station blocks "SONAR, RADAR and scanners." These despite the fact that the Enterprise routinely scans suns, and SONAR uses sound to scan.) Is there still a market for soft, technobabble-filled works, where you can make up things as you go and as long as you allude to a logical explanation you don't have to make it terribly logical at all? I'm sure there must be, but I don't know what it is.

I may or may not ever write something like that. I tend toward harder sci-fi, because I like the texture of it better. It's become something of a prestige genre in my mind. But who knows; someday, for nostalgia's sake, I may want to try something so soft as to fall apart under inspection--and it'd be nice to know where that goes.

Machina went out to Analog today, and I have another story up on OWW. It's called The Last Flag, was written in two and a half days, and shows it. White In The Moon was by comparison a lot more refined, fresh out of the fingertips. We'll see how many drafts this one goes through before submission.

Well, Machina got rejected from F&SF, so I'm going to shoot it off to Analog tomorrow. Fortunately, I think my skin is getting thicker. I got the note, marked it down on the calendar and in my database, looked to see what markets I didn't have things at yet, checked Analog's guidelines, printed off a copy, a cover letter, and a SASE, and got the whole thing packaged and ready in under a half-hour.

Oddly, the only things I've ever sent to F&SF have been science-fiction regardless of the fact that I may actually write slightly more fantasy. I think that somewhere along the lines the bit of their guidelines that reads "We receive a lot of fantasy fiction, but never enough science fiction or humor" got interpreted as "Hey, SF GO HERE" and has never been overwritten. Of course, now I have to find something else to send them that 1) isn't out at another market, and 2) I haven't sent them before.

Subbed a story to Fantasy Magazine. I now have five stories out in various places, which is more than I've ever had out at a time.

The draegonhawke journal is running "submit a story a month (at least)" and "write a story a week" challenges. The prizes should be self-evident.

I sent out Misere to ChiZine, and I'm wondering if I can cut 2200 words from Jessamine. It's sitting at 8170 or so now, down from 10,000 on the last revision (many months ago), and I think it could stand to be tighter. I'm thinking it can go to Fantasy Magazine first, unless another place clears up.

I think this kind of mass-submitting-of-different-things-to-different-markets should have a name. I'm thinking "strafing." I'm thinking that I need to get into the habit of strafing.

And, you know, writing much more than I am now.

...

Speaking of writing, I'm working on the forth installment of the Ulan stories (Jessamine, The Lion And The Lizard, Incarnadine, and now Atmosphere--which really needs to be renamed. As does Incarnadine, but I'm getting offtrack). I'm also working on a story about winter, and how much I the narrator hates winter, and how twisted forcing myself herself to enjoy winter makes me the narrator feel. Except in the story Winter eventually comes and drags the narrator off, and oh god I want to move to New Mexico.

Today I submitted The Lion And The Lizard to Abyss & Apex, and I'm going to mail off Machina to Analog. (I also sent Small Monuments to InterZone, but that's not the point.) So today I have the dubious honor of sending off a mythic fantasy piece and what's likely the hardest sci-fi work I've written to date.

If this sums up my writing career, I'm not going to complain.

I really need to get the ball rolling on my submissions. A lot of the stuff I need to revise, but I'm moving so slowly on those that I wonder if it'd be a better idea to keep submitting as I'm editing. I'll try it for a few stories--I'm young, it's at the very beginning of my career, I'm allowed to fumble about and make mistakes a bit--and hopefully I'll get quick enough with revising that I won't have to do it forever.

Submitted a flashfic (Winter Hymn for Tomorrow) and a poem (Epithalamium) to Raven Electrick, and another flashfic (Bullshit) to Vestal Review. Hey, the worst that can happen is they won't get in.