1. Tim is having a print sale of sunrises. Amazing photos, amazing prices. The Belle Fourche Reservoir one particularly knocks me over–if you think it looks intense on the screen, wait ’til you see what he does with it as a print.
2. Today’s Google Doodle fills me with joy (thanks, Catherine, for pointing it out). Maria Mitchell! Hurrah!
Last week, when I was preparing for a birthday and a house guest, my friend Kethry asked for advice on how to get in the habit of writing stories, and I promised her I’d try to give some. And now the birthday has passed and the house guest has gone home and I am completely full of head cold, and I am trying to wade through my to-do list, and here we are. So.
1. Figure out what you want to do. I suppose it’s possible some people manage to write consistently and successfully–where by “successfully” I mostly mean “to their own satisfaction”–without having any idea what they want to write. But one of the most common problems I see among new writers who aren’t writing is that they don’t really know where they’re going. Occasionally you can wander into something interesting without knowing what it is, but on a day-to-day basis it helps if you have some idea what you want.
So: Do you want to finish something you’ve already started, or start something new? Do you want to write a novel? A short story? A new short story every week? Do you want to write for submission to professional editors? Fanfic forums? Your own website? Your own desk drawer? What elements would you like to have featured in your writing?
That last question, what elements, can be a very useful one to attack from whatever angle appeals to you. You can freewrite about it, or talk it through with a trusted friend, or just think about it while you’re brushing your teeth, but be as concrete as you can. If you’re a setting person, think hard about what kind of setting appeals to you; ditto for character or plot. If you start thinking, “I want to write about a 15-year-old girl…no, wait, a bunch of 15-year-old girls…who are in their high school’s marching band…”, that’s a very different direction to start that story than if you ended that with “who are drawn together by their experiences with a ghost” or “who live in the Black Hills”–and very different altogether if you put in all three. And “I want to write a scene in which A can say X to B and have it be devastating” gives you all sorts of variables to work into the rest of the scenes.
2. Figure out where you’re stopping. Not writing as much as one wants is a pretty common problem through all walks of writing life. Are you just not writing anything at all? Are you starting ten million stories and not finishing any? Are you drafting stories but not revising and polishing them? The change in habits needed for someone who never picks up the pen or touches the keyboard is very different than for someone who writes their head off and never revises. I’ve seen lots of journeyman writers having to readjust their habits and their ideas of success because they had fixated on raw word count as the signifier of success, and now they need to revise and polish, and that doesn’t have the same milestones. And the remedy for “I tend to wander off and read the internet instead of putting words down” is far different than the remedy for “I write 500 words and can’t go further.”
3. Try to make it not hurt. Of course there is the literal version of this–ruining your wrists with a non-ergonomic setup is not conducive to anyone’s goals. But also it’s easier to keep a good habit if the only “painful” parts are the parts inherent to the thing. If you want to try scheduling the same time every day to write, don’t make it 5 a.m. if you’re a night owl or midnight if you’re a lark. If you love the feel of a fountain pen on paper or the convenience of typing title ideas and story notes into your phone, do that. Writing good fiction is hard enough without making it externally harder.
4. Know your own tendencies. I’m a list maker. Earlier this week I had an item on my (general to-do) list that involved making another list. The list I made had another set of three sub-lists. I love me some lists, and they are incredibly useful for me in getting myself together. But at least two people dear to me find lists counterproductive. The way their brains work means that making a list will interfere with them getting stuff done. It’s best to roll with this kind of thing, not fight it.
Similarly, I know that I work best in the morning and right after meals. But not everyone works that way. A lot of people apparently do well with promising themselves food “rewards” for getting writing done, and good for them! It gets them a banana and something written! Me, I work on fuel, not rewards. I say to myself, “We’d better have this banana so that we’ll have good energy to write well.” And for me that works.
A lot of people also seem to find “accountability” useful: they make writing dates, either in person or online, with writer-friends. Do not ask me to do this with you, because it will make me resent every hair and eyelash on your head. If you want to get together and drink tea and talk about our projects, grand, but the only way I could get through a writing date of that kind is by telling myself that my real work-time is some other time that day. (I’m like this with workouts also. Workout buddy my sweet patoot. Leave me alone and let me do what I’ve got to do.)
Another trick that is good for non-me people is the writing every day strategy. I write six days a week. I don’t write seven. Writing may or may not be your main job, but it is in fact work. You will need to not do work on some days of your life. Some people work best in spurts, so they’ll write every day for a month or two before crashing out; some people work best steadily. But having a regular writing time, whether it’s daily or not, is really helpful for a lot of writers.
The nice thing about asking yourself what you want here is that not only do you have a means of going forward by thinking about it in more detail, you also have a means of evaluation as to whether the different ideas are working for you. Because that’s the thing about writing: there’s no one thing that works, there’s just what works for you–and it helps to be able to evaluate concretely and say, “Okay, I got a novel and two short stories written since I started trying this, I’m going to call that a win,” or “Hmm, I got half a story written, but I also had mono, so let’s keep taking data,” or, “Ugh, this was miserable and did not work, let’s try something else.”
A lot of writing habit advice online seems to be geared for the idea that you want to do this full-time as a professional. Many of us do. Some of you don’t. It’s okay not to. It’s okay to write part-time. It’s okay if the habits you form are the habits for you to write one or two short stories a year, if that’s what you want and can fit in with the rest of what you want. It’s also okay if the habits you form are letting you write multiple novels per year. You get to be the judge here.
Tomorrow (Friday, July 26) is my birthday. I’m telling you this now because one of the main ways to celebrate my birthday worldwide–by which I mean it happens in both Eagan and Apple Valley–is to have something unusually awesome for breakfast.
I am a big fan of breakfast. No matter what a crappy day I have had, I can go to bed and think, “Well, in the morning I get breakfast.” Even when I have a stomach bug or food poisoning, I go to bed thinking, “Maybe in the morning I’ll feel good enough for breakfast.” Sometimes it’s really very simple.
So! I always felt weird about having no better answer than “Thanks” when people said happy birthday to me, so now I answer, “Happy my birthday!” Because really! There’s no reason you shouldn’t have a happy my birthday as well as a happy your birthday. And one of the best ways to do that is with a croissant or apricot breakfast crisp or weird fruit fridge porridge or french toast or…breakfast stuff. It’ll be good.
I am like a twelve-year-old when it comes to my birthday. I have been poking at the packages on the hearth for days now. Poke…poke…pooooooke…. It also turns out that Amazon will display your wishlist with the items obscured, so you just see how many there are, which is like the digital version of poke…poke…poooooke…so, being mentally 12, I do that too.
I love birthdays. I really think this is going to be a good one. For all of us, I hope.
I have had my share of horrific cover art/illustrations for a short story writer, or possibly more than my share. So when I get really good art not once but twice from the same artist (and the same art director: thanks, Irene and Tor.com staff!), I sit up and take notice. That artist is Julie Dillon. I’m so glad other people are noticing her work enough to nominate her for awards like the Hugo, because she is doing just lovely stuff.
You can look at Julie’s website here, and it’s full of links. She did a zodiac calendar with images like this one–no, I’m not a Pisces. My birthday is Friday. But I really really like this Pisces. There’s also a place to order prints, like this one I dearly love.
Or, of course, you can get a closer and more detailed look at the two illustrations she did for my Tor.com post-nuclear fantasies. Mmmm, art.
Last week I was doing a polishing draft of a book of mine, working with my agent* to make sure it’s the best it can be when she shows it to editors. And one of the questions we’d talked about was a name change.
In the first version of this book, there was a major character whose name began with the Kj- dipthong. But when I was first writing this book, I had a different idea about its audience than I do now–specifically, I was imagining the average target a few years older. I don’t want to make young readers bounce very early in the story with something that can be fairly easily changed, and it turns out that this character’s name actually could be. This took me a bit by surprise, because the last time I did a name change on even a minor character, I had to change parts of her dialog and even some of her actions. She was going from Laura to Lucy, and Lucy simply would not do the things Laura would, or at least not in quite the same way. (This got even more difficult because my brain decided that Laura was Lucy’s younger sister, rather than being nonexistent, and now there is a Laura story rattling around somewhere in here waiting to be written. SIGH. BRAINS.)
But this time around, it only took a few hours of letting the idea percolate before I decided that Kjartan could become Tryg. Readily, happily, no emotional balking whatsoever. Hurray! Surprise! But. This meant switching from someone who mostly went by his full name (Kjartan) with occasional uses of a nickname (Kjar) to someone who mostly goes by a nickname (Tryg) with occasional uses of his full name (Trygve). So while it was a lot emotionally smoother than I expected, there was no way I could do a simple search-and-replace, even with a name that was not going to have any false positives. I had to read each line that referred to him and make sure that it was not one of the rare cases where his first name would appear.
This was not hard, but it was a bit tedious, and with obsessive brain tendencies, I ended up doing it and the rest of that polishing draft work…all in one day. So that was Friday. Go team Mris. But uff da.
I appear to be growing brain back now. I seem to be able to do useful things in a fictionward direction. But even when name changes appear easy, they’re not. Really, really not. Because names are complicated.
*Yep, as those of you who read the briefer social media (G+ and FB) know, I have an agent now. Tamar Rydzinski of the Laura Dail Agency will be representing my long-form works. Many thanks to my good friend Jaime Lee Moyer for introducing us.
You all remember when I linked to the Spellbound Kickstarter, right? And lo, it came to pass, that there was once again a children’s fantasy magazine in the land? Well, shocking all of us who know here, Raechel Henderson’s goals have not stopped there. She’s doing another Kickstarter, this one for companion volumes of Spellbound and an adult anthology, retelling fairy tales from the full spectrum of humanity. All races, sexes, sexualities, and abilities are welcome in these fairy tales.
I’m particularly interested in the response Raechel got from making explicit in her guidelines what has always been implicit in her attitude to the world: that she welcomed diverse tales. Apparently the act of stating that has made a huge difference in the stories she’s receiving for the regular issues of Spellbound, and I’m really excited to see where she can take it with a special Kickstarter project–especially because of the adult/kid anthology pairing. I’ve never seen a pairing like that before, and I think it’s awesome. So go forth and support the awesome.
Saladin Ahmed, Engraved on the Eye. Kindle. Short story collection, some in the same world as Throne of the Crescent Moon and others not. The former are the collection’s better stories, I feel; too many of the latter are an idea without an arc.
Joan Aiken, Go Saddle the Sea. Kids’/YA Napoleonic adventure tale ranging from Spain to England. A quite competently executed example of its type, and sometimes swashing and buckling are exactly what’s called for.
Scott Carney, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers. This book was extremely short for something that was attempting to deal with all forms of commerce in human tissues (except, apparently, prostitution). It was, as expected, quite unsettling, but in some ways having the topics jumbled up together made some seem less horrific just by contrast. I expect that each of the chapters would probably have been more effective as an essay, given its own mental space.
Tina Connolly, Copperhead. Discussed elsewhere.
Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her. More Junot stories. I think the general improvement here over Drown is even clearer because they’re similar kinds of story, but Diaz is a more mature writer now.
Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. I am pretty uncomfortable with this book. There’s the whole “strangest man” conceit, which looked more and more dubious the further I read. Either Graham Farmelo is not a very good writer, or P.A.M. Dirac was…not that strange really. If I got together the strangest twenty people I know personally, from this account it looks like Dirac would be less strange than all of them. As I read on, it was looking more and more like Dirac was someone who had some high functioning atypicality in his neurological makeup and possibly some mental illness issues from his family. (Nature, nurture, the Diracs had it all.) I am really uncomfortable with armchair diagnoses in retrospect, but I’m even more uncomfortable with a default What A Weirdo narrative when, really, not so much. And then I got to the end of the book, and one of the last chapters was a badly researched chapter on autism that perpetuated several stereotypes about autism and autistic people. SIGH. Add to that the general dryness of the style and approach, and I’m afraid I can’t recommend this one.
Rudyard Kipling, Maugham’s Choice of Kipling’s Best. Grandpa’s. An odd assortment for an odd reason: Somerset Maugham wrote the introduction to talk about what he picked and why and what he felt Kipling’s flaws were. And, the times and Maugham being what they were, it did not occur to him that Kipling literally calling the entire continent of Asia a whore for no particularly well-laid-out reason but pithiness might be considered a flaw. No, literally. He called…yeah. It was…a thing. Kipling has that authoritative voice that’s so easy to read, and some of these stories were great fun, but some of them also highlighted why the authoritative voice is not an unmixed blessing.
Louis L’Amour, Hondo. Grandpa’s. I run into a lot of discussion of romance novels and what non-romance-labeled things are “actually” romances or “near” romances or inspired by or deal with similar issues. And for some reason–possibly the decline of the Western as a genre?–hardly anybody is talking about Westerns as essentially romances that were acceptable for men of their time. It’s striking, though, how much the basic plot of a Western is similar–and the sensory focus, albeit through a different stylistic lens. Not my thing, not going to be my thing, but interesting to look at.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Saltation. The thing that really makes me role my eyes about the Liaden books is how much they tend towards a model of the One True Excellent Person and everyone else being either bland background or not structurally on the same level (teachers/mentors/etc.). The OTEP story can be fun to read about, but in this case it felt very much like filler, because the OTEP didn’t run into things that were genuinely challenging and definitely didn’t grow in her interpersonal behavior. I like a popcorn space opera from time to time, but this is not my favorite example of the sub-genre.
Val McDermid, Trick of the Dark. This was in some ways a lovely and twisty mystery novel. I enjoyed it greatly. It bafflingly lacked one word, however, and that word was “bisexual.” When you’re dealing with women who have been romantically involved with men…and now are involved with other women and are dealing with coming-out issues with friends/family…wouldn’t you think this would at least be an option to be discussed? Maybe? Even if it was only to say, “No, it turns out I’m not bisexual, but I see why you might have thought so under the circumstances”? But no one in this book appears to have heard of bisexuality. Very strange. (And before anyone asks, it was published in 2010, which is well after a random reader would have heard of the concept, much less an out lesbian like McDermid.)
E. C. Myers, Fair Coin. I found this compulsively readable. It was not always enjoyable, but it dragged me headlong through when I intended to only read a chapter or two, and I really respect the things it was doing with “wishes” and personal autonomy–that we make the decisions we make in part because of who we are, and some of those decisions cannot be fundamentally altered without fundamentally altering the person not only after but before the decision is made. That was very, very well done. I’m eager to see what Myers does next.
Roger Parker, The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera. By which we mean Western opera, apparently; from reading this you’d never know that the Chinese had opera. It managed to educate me more generally about the evolution of opera in Europe (and a bit in North America, but mostly Europe) without telling me even a single one of the things I wanted to know going in. There were some interesting tidbits that made up at least some of the lack, but in general–meh. Meh, I say!
Tim Parks, Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence. This is a light, fluffy, fast read. If you’re looking for something deep and chewy about the evolution of Italian banking, this was not it. On the other hand, it’s got fairly good personality sketches of several key early-mid Medicis.
Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria. What a lovely book. You know that depth of texture and style that often goes with a wandering plotlessness? Samatar has managed to wed it to a spirally unfolding plot in ways that don’t cut down on the texture. There is foreign travel and being the titular stranger, but the travel does not become random travelogue structure. And the ways of the gods and the dead in this set of foreign-to-the-protagonist places are very interesting indeed. I can see why this made Jo’s list of exciting fantasy novels from the last decade; I will definitely want more of Samatar’s work when more is available.
Janni Lee Simner, Faerie After. A fitting conclusion to the series. I think it would stand all right alone, but a lot of the emotional weight of the series comes from already knowing the people and what they’re up to; I’d recommend starting at the beginning. I particularly liked the handling of the stone hand, in case that’s as intriguing to anyone else as it would be to me.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Laughing Policeman. The title should not lure you into thinking that this is an upbeat and cheerful Swedish mystery novel, for lo, it is not. There’s a reason we have a serving size on these things.
P.G. Wodehouse, Tales of St. Austin’s. Kindle. I was looking for something short and light to read when I was feeling ill, and these are so much The Sort Of Thing He Does that I did not fully remember that I’d read it before until I was halfway through. Which is in some ways fine–still served its purpose–but in some ways underscores how much this is not a life-changing classic. Well. Not everything has to be.
(Or, why I talk about the Minnesota Orchestra so much.)
I have seen several people referring to their political posts today as “obligatory,” and it makes me wince every time. Blogging, tweeting, and other social media posting is generally optional, folks. You don’t have to use social media to wish your cousin a happy birthday. You don’t have to use it to tell us what you had for lunch. And you don’t have to use it to talk about the politics of the day. All of those things are choices. Sometimes they’re really good choices, for various reasons, sometimes bad choices, but this stuff is far, far less obligatory than we’re trying to convince ourselves that it is.
My rules for how to decide when to make a political post are mine; they are not meant to be universal or to tell you when you should make political posts. But here’s what I do.
1) I ask whether I have something new to say on this topic, whether I have a pithy way to say things that are already being said on this topic, or whether I am just attempting to express some kind of solidarity. The last option gets the least weight, honestly: troops sometimes do want rallying, and choirs do sometimes enjoy really good preaching, but those things go lower on my set of priorities.
Some people do serve as sources of breaking news for their social circles, and so they relay things even when they don’t personally have anything to say at all. That’s not what I’m doing here. It’s a valid choice, it’s just not my choice. Occasionally I am emotionally overcome by something political to the point of posting, “aughhh” or “woooo!”, but usually I think it’s better energy allocation to do that aloud and keep working on other things rather than posting to social media.
2) I ask who I will likely be reaching with my actual post. Sometimes things get linked and passed around, either locally within a community or more broadly than that, but you can’t plan on that, and you particularly can’t plan on it if the people most likely to be interested and pass around your link have no mechanism for seeing it in the first place. So if my answer to the first question is that I don’t think people in Group A have heard this point I want to make, it doesn’t matter, if I have no way of getting Group A to see it in the first place.
3) I ask whether I have the time/energy to deal with the likely ensuing comments. Sometimes I’m wrong about how many comments a post is likely to get–but most of the time I post things where I don’t feel like I am going to have to watch things like a hawk lest assholery ensue. Most of the time if people post links, there would have to be someone in an epically bad mood for it to result in a jerkalanche. But some topics require a lot of moderation, and frankly there is just not that much Mris these days. A lot of moderation might well mean that moderation is the only thing I’m doing that day. Not a win condition.
4) I incline towards positive rather than negative commentary whenever I can manage it. This is not true of what I mumble to myself when I’m reading the paper (including the online version of “reading the paper”), and I don’t always succeed at it online. But I would rather be able to say, “X is good,” or even, “Y is broken, and X is one of my theories about how to fix it,” than just, “Y is sucktastic!” whenever possible. Some things just are sucktastic, and that’s worth pointing out. But for my personal skew, I would prefer positive/solvable whenever possible.
Which is why the Minnesota Orchestra stuff is a perfect storm. My likely readers are people who care about the arts, and about music in specific, and sometimes even about music in Minnesota in specific. But my likely readers do not seem to be people who are all up on the situation with the MN Orchestra, so I’m likely to be saying things that are new to them. Nobody is showing up to be jerks in the comments, and if they were I have fairly strong expectations that it would not be people with whom I have standing relationships, whose jerkitude would take more energy, more tact, more emotional engagement. And I do have a positive stance (Orchestra Good!) rather than just a negative one (Orchestra Board bad…but can freely choose goodness from here if it likes, so again: fixable).
See what’s not on the list? What’s not on the list is an assessment of how tragic or important something is. I do not make a policy of making some comment on every single thing I find important, and I have that policy in part specifically so that if I am exhausted or ill or distracted, nobody can take that as a definitive statement of priority ranking.
What’s also not on the list is whether someone on the internet is posturing about how people who have not made any comment on [insert important thing here] must hold that [insert odious view here]. One of my friends posted that this morning one of her social media acquaintances noted that he was keeping track of who was not posting about the events in the last few weeks that he felt were socially important, and was drawing his (unfavorable) conclusions about their views from their silence. But I will bet you money that this man has not been following developments in law and regulation of Bangladesh garment factories after the fire and posting extensively about that, or the rise of the right-wing in Hungary. Does that make me think that he is a callous jerk who does not care how many people die for his T-shirt, or whether fascism makes a terrifying comeback? No. It makes me think that time is limited and we all have to do what we can. And it makes me think that there is always, always something awful happening in the world, and if you insist that all of them must be mentioned in a particular way, you will run out of time for the fact that there is always, always something wonderful happening in the world, too.
Tonight Mark and I and his parents went to the Gilbert and Sullivan Very Light Opera Company’s free outdoor summer performance of “The Mikado.” They’re doing it again at the Lake Harriet Bandshell (where we saw it) tomorrow night at 5:30. I recommend it to Twin Cities residents if you can make it–there aren’t many mosquitoes down by Lake Harriet yet this year, and it’s free, and you will have before you such joys as Christopher Michela playing the Mikado.
(As far as I am concerned, he can reprise that role yearly. They can put the Mikado in “Yeomen of the Guard” and have Christopher Michela play him. They can put him in “Othello” for all I care and suddenly I am trying not to let my brain work at that for fear of what would come out.)
Among the joys of this production is that the entirety of “I’ve Got a Little List” is modern reference, which is entirely appropriate for Gilbert and Sullivan. Better still, they specifically called out the Orchestra Board as people who renovate the hall and then lock out the musicians. They got cheers for that line, more prolonged than for anything else in the song. And yes, I did clap and hoot. Loudly. It was not even a slightly mixed reaction from that crowd.
This week the Orchestra management canceled the Summerfest concerts to the surprise of precisely zero people. They offered, when they were canceling the last of the season, that we could have Summerfest tickets, and we said o ho ho it is to larf. But we weren’t actually laughing then, and we’re not laughing now. Mark is reading a book about music theory–I’ll get to it when he’s done–and one of the things it talks about is how venues shape types of music. Orchestra Hall without an orchestra is frankly a pretty dumb concert venue. You can put a folk concert in there, or a jazz combo, or a rock band, and we’ve been to all of the above. But it is for orchestras. It’s for our orchestra.
At least it’s for what’s left of it.
We’re trying to figure out what to do about the SPCO season, because it’s a very different kind of orchestra than the larger, fuller Minnesota Orchestra, and frankly we like the MN Orchestra style better mostly, and also (again speaking quite candidly) the MN Orchestra at its best is a better orchestra. I don’t mean anything against SPCO–it’s amazing that we can have two professional-quality orchestras at all, if in fact we can. But SPCO is not generally asked to play Carnegie Hall. And the SPCO musicians…were not, shall we say, treated ideally in their settlement.
So what do we do? Do we act like the SPCO season is our main chance at orchestral music for the year and plan accordingly? Do we get tickets for one or two shows that are the really exciting ones and hope for a MN Orchestra settlement? The paper ran an article about how this time around the management did not get nasty and personal with the propaganda around the cancellations, and I stared at the page, thinking, “Really? That’s what we cling to as a sign of progress? That they rested on their ad hominem attack laurels rather than reiterating them?”
That’s so depressing that I’m going to go think about attack laurels instead.
Oh, people. People, people, people, I am so tired of dislike of needlework being used as a stand-in for making a young female character actually interesting. I see this mostly in middle-grade fantasies, mostly. Not so much in YA, although I don’t know if that’s because I’m not seeing as much secondary world YA as I’d like. It sometimes goes with not being boyyyyyy crazy. Because girls who are interested in boys are stupid and hate everything that is fun and good and probably will grow boobs early and never ever ever have adventures. (Also girls who are interested in girls are invisible and don’t exist. So basically if you have proto-romantic feelings before age 18 or preferably 21, you stink. Thanks, MG tropes!)
Several things about the needlework thing annoy me, though. One of them is that it’s the cheap shot among “women’s work” stuff. It’s the one that middle-grade readers of the present are by and large not being asked to do, or at least not insistently/universally. Some girls are crafters as a hobby, but very few of them would self-define as doing “needlework.” So it’s a lot safer for an author aiming at a tomboy everygirl, because, hello, third wave! Tomboy everygirls can love making cookies or soup or whatever. And nobody* really says, “I adore cleaning. I live for cleaning. Cleaning is so awesome.” You can have your character announce that she hates scrubbing the floor, but nobody thinks that makes her amazing, they just think it makes her normal.
The other thing that ties in with this is: needlework used to be a lot like cleaning, in that it used to be necessary for continued health. Sure, you can choose whether you want your home spotless or a little messy, but you do in fact need to wash your dishes, one way or the other. That’s a health issue. And before industrial textiles, you had to do a million textile-related chores in order to keep your family healthily clothed. Mending. Taking things in and letting them out and altering them for younger/smaller family members. Even tapestry, while it is an art form and was used for self-expression, was also used to keep the walls of those stone castles and houses from turning the wenches into wenchcicles. Even in post-industrial textile societies, you will see a very realistic concern for what torn clothing and clever needlework can mean if you read the books of Noel Streatfeild, where the cost of a dress to put a family member in a good position to gain economic advantage is really non-trivial. I would love to see a parent or sibling in a fantasy novel react to a character’s stated hatred of needlework in one of these contexts–basically someone treating it as the protag saying, “I want you to buy me a better cell phone and data plan and all the other bells and whistles I want,” or else, “I hate cleaning the toilet,” rather than, “I am so interesting and independent!” I don’t expect that soon, though. It’s pretty embedded.
So where does all this come from? Two places: resentment of early twentieth century middle-class Anglo/American enforced femininity, and the Victorians. A lot, a lot of the women who pioneered the fantasy genres–especially children’s fantasy–chafed at the roles they were slotted into in the rest of their lives. And the “needlework as a useless pastime for enforcing female idleness” is straight out of Victorian life, where manufacturing endless unwanted decorations for the parlor and the jumble sale was, in fact, some women’s lot. But the Victorians were substantially along the line of progress of industrial textiles; a vicar’s daughter who spun flax would be distinctly odd, because that sort of thing was done in factories by then. Taking those frustrations and plunking them down wholesale in medieval-inspired cultures is understandable for those who lived them and witnessed them firsthand–Edith Nesbit, if ever you do that, I forgive you. (But notice that Nesbit has an unusual regard for the consequences of the children’s rash behavior on servants and the family budget. This was not much replicated by her imitators.) For those of us for whom they are historical study, it’s just plain laziness.
More than that, it’s attempting to make traits and interests exclusive that frankly aren’t. My friend V., for example, crocheted me a hyperbolic plane. She is interested in fiber arts and in math. She didn’t have to choose Boy Stuff or Girl Stuff–she can like some gendered activities and a great many activities like fiber arts and math that are not essentially gendered. And we lose a great deal when we accept shorthands for characterization too easily, too readily. “She’s a tomboy, not a girly girl.” “He’s a brain, not a jock.” We make our own cultural pitfalls in creating supposed opposites that aren’t really opposed more universal than we mean to when we import them whole cloth into secondary worlds.
Honestly, though, it’s just boring. It’s a trigger for me to say, “Another one of those, author getting lazy,” and put the book down. Find something else to express your character’s adventurous soul. Or don’t make them have a standard-issue Adventurous Soul TM in the first place. Whichever.
*Almost certainly somebody says this, because, well, people. They vary. And almost certainly there are loads of women who hate “needlework.” I am not a seamstress or a crafter myself. My complaint here is not that girls who fit these traits are unrealistic or do not exist, it’s that the traits are being overused and used cheaply.