Tag: anti-woke

Why my pronouns are His Majesty / His Majesty’s

I am 90% certain that the views I am about to share are the reason that I was disinvited as a panelist from LTUE, Utah Valley’s local science fiction convention/symposium. LTUE used to be a fantastic convention, and I still have a lot of friends who are regulars there. But sadly, the convention has become increasingly woke in the past few years, and now appears to be entering the “go broke” phase of that process. It didn’t help that just a few weeks before the 2022 convention, they decided to require proof of vaccination from all attendees, and refused to offer refunds on memberships that had already been purchased.

I recognize that I probably wouldn’t have been disinvited from the convention if I’d just passively gone along with the preferred pronouns thing, staying in my lane and not making waves. But here’s the thing: because of my personal views on the issue, that would have been moral cowardice. And moral cowardice is, I believe, the root cause of much of the insanity happening in the world today. It’s the reason why those 19 kids in Uvalde, Texas are dead: because of the moral cowardice of the police who refused to do their damned jobs and stop the mass shooter. It’s the same moral cowardice that allows evil people in high places to silence their underlings, for fear of losing their pensions, or positions, or jobs, or whatever. It’s the same moral cowardice that allows groomers and radical ideologues to use social media to dominate the culture war, because good and reasonable people are afraid that if they say what they honestly believe, they will incur the wrath of an online mob and be canceled. I don’t agree 100% with Tim Pool on how to put this principle into practice, but I do agree that arguing “I have kids, I can’t afford to be canceled and lose my job” isn’t enough to absolve you of your moral cowardice. The only way to reverse the madness that our world is currently passing through is for a critical mass of us to stand up, be brave, and reject the moral cowardice that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. After all, it’s not like the nature of evil has changed in the last few years.

So I hope you’ll excuse the rant, but the things I’m about to say are things that would qualify me as a moral coward if I refused to say them. I believe them that firmly. And before anyone accuses me of “violence” (as we see so often from those who wrongly conflate speech for violence and violence for speech), I want you to know that there is no hatred or malice in my heart that is driving me to say these things: only a firm and unyielding conviction of the truth, as I understand it.

In the last few years, it has become fashionable for people to post their “preferred pronouns” on their online profiles, or to give their “preferred pronouns” when introducing themselves. The underlying idea is that it is wrong to assume a person’s gender, and that if someone considers themselves to be queer or transgender, we should all affirm their delusions. Indeed, calling transgenderism a delusion is enough to incur the wrath of the online hate mobs and get you canceled for being a “transphobe.” But here’s the thing:

I will not respect your pronouns.

I will never respect your pronouns.

“Preferred pronouns” are a form of controlled speech, and controlling people’s speech is how you control their minds. But I don’t want my mind to be controlled, especially not by people who I believe to be deluded at best, and malicious at worst. People who would like to see my views silenced and my person canceled.

You see, I reject the idea that gender and biological sex are separable. I believe that gender is innate, immutable, and biologically essential. Yes, I recognize that there are nuances to the biology of sex, like people who are born with XXY chromosomes or other intersex conditions. It doesn’t change my personal view that gender and biological sex are inseparably connected.

My views are rooted in my personal faith. In fact, my church’s teachings are very clear about the role of gender in our lives:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

So for me, the question of gender is not a small issue. It is central to my faith, which makes it a hill that I am absolutely willing to die on.

But here’s the thing: if you don’t share my religious views, I totally understand. I’m not trying to preach to you, or convert you, or force you to accept my views on this issue. We can agree to disagree and still get along just fine with each other, even if you believe in transgenderism and preferred pronouns.

I just want you to return the favor.

When you try to control my speech by insisting that I use your “preferred pronouns”–especially when you get all worked up about it–what I hear is “fuck your religion, fuck your faith, fuck your God, and fuck you. Bend the knee, you transphobic white supremacist, or I will put a target on your back and destroy you.”

No, thank you.

I’m not going to deny a central tenet of my faith. I’m not going to be cowed into affirming something that I believe to be wrong. I hold no malice toward those who disagree with me, but I refuse to live by lies or to bend the knee to the false gods of the woke regime.

And because of how important this issue is to me, I’m not going to be passive about it, either. That is why my “preferred pronouns” are His Majesty / His Majesty’s. I am 100% serious about that. And don’t forget the capitalization, you bigot.

“But Joe! How can you insist that people use your preferred pronouns when you refuse to use theirs? Doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”

You need to familiarize yourself with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, my friend. Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Also, rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

When I started doing this, it was just a harmless joke. Intuitively, though, it just didn’t seem right to answer “what are your preferred pronouns?” with the blandly normal (and thus obviously discouraged) “he/him.” I didn’t go out of my way to make that joke, but in instances where I couldn’t avoid it, such as when the submission guidelines (or convention questionaires) required that I give my preferred pronouns, that was the answer I always gave.

And I sincerely believe that it is the right answer. I didn’t choose this ridiculous regime, but if you’re going to force me to live under it, then I’m going to make you live by your own rules, dammit. That’s what you get for trying to control my mind by controlling my speech. And if you’re going to blacklist me, or disinvite me, or call me a “transphobe,” or otherwise excommunicate me from your society, so be it. I will not bend the knee.

A man is an adult male human. Pronouns: he/him.

A woman is an adult female human. Pronouns: she/her.

They/them is typically used to indicate plural, but can be used in some circumstances to refer to an individual when it is not possible to determine their gender. However, no one’s gender is inherently such that “they/them” pronouns are requisite in all cases.

If that offends you, get over yourself. I say that with all of the love in my icy cold heart. Seriously, you will be happier, healthier, and more fulfilled if you change your life to conform to reality, rather than trying to change reality to conform with yourself.

But I’m not going to force your speech. If you want to post your “preferred pronouns” on your profile, or introduce yourself with them, I’m not going to be offended or try to stop you. I just won’t use them.

As for my “preferred pronouns,” how you respond to those tells me everything I need to know about you.

“It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So I DNFed Timescape by Gregory Benford today. I didn’t like any of the characters, and the retro-future view of the 90s as a dystopian post-climate catastrophe wasteland was predictably bad. But this quote from the afterword got me to thinking:

Habitual readers of science fiction will feel right at home with some features of Timescape: the ecological crisis, the contact between past and future and resultant time paradox, the scientists working to solve a scientific puzzle and save the earth [sic], and even a certain amount of scientific theorizing.

For 70s science fiction, the idea of an imminent, inevitable, and nigh-apocalyptic environmental collapse was thought to be so ingrained in the genre that it was accepted as a foundational trope of the genre. As a consequence, 70s science fiction tends to age very poorly. Almost all of the “important” works of the era, like Timescape, are infused with this Malthusian nonsense, and accept as axiomatic that all of the big crises of the 70s would only get worse and worse.

In contrast, the science fiction of the 40s and 50s was all about how science could help us to overcome the crises of their time, not how those crises were fundamentally insurmountable. Small wonder, then, that authors like Heinlein and Clarke inspired us to put men on the moon and satellites into orbit. And what did the authors of the 70s inspire us to do? Certainly not to tear down the Iron Curtain, pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war, or reduce global poverty at the most extraordinary rate in history. And yet, all of those things actually happened.

It makes me think of this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

So what are some of the current assumptions of the science fiction field that will make future generations of readers scratch their heads? What are the things that will make the “important” works of 2020s science fiction age rather poorly?

Racial essentialism is probably a big one. I sense a growing cultural backlash against the racism of the intersectional left, especially in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020. That’s why the term “white supremacy” is in vogue right now, because the word “racist” has lost all of its power through overuse. If Worldcon doesn’t survive the pandemic, then I suspect that at least a few future SF historians will draw a connection between the Hugo’s demise and N.K. Jemisin’s three consecutive Hugo wins in the 2010s.

Transgenderism is probably another. Laying childish things aside, a society that rejects the biological essentialism of gender is not even metastable, as we’re seeing right now with all of the rapes in transgender bathrooms and prison facilities, with the obvious social contagion driving LGBTQ trends in the rising generation, and with all of the ways that political correctness demands that we reject basic science, typified so perfectly by the pregnant man emoji. That doesn’t necessarily mean that gender norms will revert to what they were in the 50s—in fact, I tend to think that the norms of that era were only metastable at best—but I do think that there’s a major cultural backlash on the horizon.

There’s a lot of other low-hanging fruit: the cli-fi of our era will probably age just as poorly as the apocalyptic visions of climate catstrophe written in the 1970s, and books that are based on 20s feminism will probably age just as poorly as 20s feminism itself. But what about some of the more difficult things to predict?

One of the more subtle ways that our current science fiction may age poorly is the complete ignorance of worldviews that clash with the established narrative. I would say that there’s a refusal to engage with contrary narratives, but it actually goes much deeper, as many writers are so deep in their own echo chambers that they don’t even know that contrary viewpoints exist. This has less to do with partisan politics and more to do with all of the ways that social media has re-engineered our society. Future generations will probably see the effects of this re-engineering much more clearly, and will wonder that the science fiction writers of our age were so unaware of how it affected them—both on the political right and on the political left.

Another less obvious thing is our generation’s lackadaisical and often schizophrenic attitudes on the importance of the family. When the chaos of the 20s is finally in the rear-view mirror, I suspect that there’s going to be a major groundswell of public interest in forming, cultivating, and maintaining strong families—largely because I suspect that’s how we’re ultimately going to find our way out of all this chaos. There’s a reason why Augustus Caesar, founder of one of the greatest empires in world history, placed such an emphasis on the importance of the family. Much of today’s science fiction takes it for granted that “love makes a family,” which was never true in any age—not even our own. It also takes for granted that found family is an adequate substitute for the real thing. With mutual commitment and great personal sacrifice, it can be, but that isn’t usually expressed on the page.

Does this feel a bit too much like wishcasting? How am I wrong, or what are some of the other things that I’ve missed? It’s probably just as difficult for us to answer this question as it is for a goldfish to comprehend what water is, but it is an interesting exercise, and hopefully a useful (or at least entertaining) one.

Navigating Woke SF, Part 4: Götterdämmerung

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation today, after his sexual harrassment scandal that has seen an overwhelming number of women come forward. As tempted as I am to dive into the politics of this story, I bring it up only to provide context for this:

Yeah, I’m cringing too.

For the last several years—arguably, since the Ferguson riots and President Obama’s pivot toward intersectionality, this country has been progressing steadily toward the woke moral panic that we now find ourselves living through. Unlike the Red Scare, to which it is comparable in both scope and severity, the threat posed by “white supremacists” and other villains of the intersectional left is as laughable and contrived as the term “Cuomo-sexual,” and will age just as badly.

To anyone who studies history, it is obvious that there’s going to be backlash against all the gaslighting and hypocrisy of the woke moral panic that is currently gripping our nation. All around us are signs that the tide is beginning to turn.

The first indication that caught my attention was the “woka-cola” scandal over critical race theory (CRT) in Coca Cola’s employee training. Instead of giving a token response, Coca Cola reversed the policy and fired the executive responsible for implementing the policy. The only reason a major coproration would do something like that is because the scandal was hitting their bottom line in a way that they could not ignore—and yet, there were no organized boycotts on the part of the conservative right. Just a lot of disenchanted consumers quietly saying to themselves: “I think I’ll get a Pepsi instead.”

There are other indications of a growing cultural backlash all throughout our society, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to viral videos of parents standing up to CRT in their kids’ schools. All of the organizations pushing the woke moral panic are little more than establishment astro-turf backed by corporate money, while the organizations pushing back are genuine grassroots movements—and they’re winning. All of the ground gained by the left during their “long march through the institutions” is about to be lost in a single generation, perhaps even a single decade. Public trust of established institutions is plummeting, and with every glaring instance of “sophisticated” woke hypocrisy, people are rejecting the establishment narrative, just like in V for Vendetta. Bollocks!

So what does this have to do with science fiction? In the second part of this blog series, I pointed out the following:

Traditional sci-fi publishing has trended to the political left (sometimes to the extreme political left) of mainstream American culture since the New Wave era back in the 60s and 70s. It seems that the campus radicals took over much of the field, not to mention the fact that American traditional publishing has always been centered in New York. But until just the last few years, it was still possible for left and right to coexist in our pluralistic society. People of different political persuasions could agree to disagree amicably, and while there may have still been whisper campaigns and secret author blacklists, you could still expect to see a healthy mix of opinions and perspectives in most places that published short stories.

That is not true today. Certain subjects and opinions have been deemed verboten, while others have been exalted to the status of eternal truth, and any story that questions or challenges the politically correct narrative doesn’t have a chance in most of these markets. In other words, science fiction has gone woke.

If I’m right and a major backlash against the woke intersectional left is brewing, then many of today’s most recognized and award-winning publications and editors are going to fall, or at least become relegated to a position of cultural insignificance. Indeed, we had an indication back in 2017 that this was already starting to happen, when it came out that China Mike Glyer buys traffic from Chinese bots to artificially boost the stats for his Hugo award winning site, File 770.

I suspect that these woke institutions within the SF field will try to maintain the illusion of cultural relevance for as long as they possibly can, much as ex-Governor Cuomo did everything he could to maintain the illusion of his fitness to hold office (even publishing a book about his leadership during the pandemic—talk about gaslighting!) until his inner circle had abandoned him, the Biden administration had called on him to resign, calls had come for his arrest, and the New York state congress had a deadline in place to begin the impeachment proceedings.

When the illusions fade and the gaslighting can no longer be maintained, there is going to be a cultural götterdämmerung—a “turbulent ending of a regime or institution.” Or perhaps the götterdämmerung has already arrived, and it ends when the illusions can no longer be maintained. Either way, it seems that the smart move is to reject these woke SF markets—or, as they so arrogantly put it, to “self-reject”—in favor of going indie, going with the semi-pro markets, and otherwise building an audience that isn’t caught up in all this woke madness.

Camp NaNoWriMo: Day Nineteen

  • Words written: 957
  • Total stories written: 2
  • Total words written: 13,223
  • Total words remaining: 16,777
  • Total words behind: 5,169

Finished that story, finally! It’s actually not that bad. Working title is “In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight.” It’s 8.5k words, which is about 3k-4k more words than it should be, but with a bit of work I think I can cut it down. Will probably do that as a side project sometime in the next few months.

Not a super huge writing day today because I helped my sister pick up some stuff from her storage unit down in Manti, and also had to make a Costco run. That took up the whole afternoon, but I did get a good start on the next story, with the working title “Tolerant and Fair.” It is just about the most politically incorrect story I could possibly write, and may actually get banned (or get me banned) from Amazon if I publish it. No joke.

The main character is a twenty-something girl who grew up with three lesbian / gender-nonbinary parents, and she rebelled by dating a straight-edge Christian boy and becoming a Christian herself. They are now about to elope together after joining a colony mission to Mars, but he wants her to introduce him to her parents over a family dinner, so that she won’t regret it later after they’ve eloped.

Basically, it’s the whole “Mom, Dad, meet my rebel boyfriend” sort of meeting with the disapproving parents, except that the religious conservative is the rebel boyfriend and the ultra-liberal types are the disapproving American Gothic parents. It is going to be so much fun to write, and even more fun to submit. I really might submit it to Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and Escape Pod, just to get a rejection that says “please do not submit anything to us ever again.”

But in all seriousness, I know that this story will be on thin ice with Amazon, especially with how they’ve banned When Harry Became Sally (which I own now, by the way. It’s on the TBR). And in all seriousness, I intend to approach the transgender issue with some sensitivity to those who take the other side—but I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I really do think a lot of these girls are being deliberately misdiagnosed and permanently mutilated by a healthcare system that has been totally taken over by radical activists promoting an ideological agenda at their expense. Glenn Beck recently did an interview with Abigail Shrier where they discussed that very topic. Excellent podcast.

So yeah, I’m super excited about that story. With luck, it should be finished in the next couple of days. I know that I’m running behind on my word count for camp nanowrimo, but I really do think I can get it back up before the end, especially with a couple of these projects that I’m really driven to write. Just need a couple of days to really ramp it up.

Camp NaNoWriMo: Day Three

  • Words written: 1,778
  • Total stories written: 1
  • Total words written: 2,775
  • Total words remaining: 27,225
  • Total words behind: 129

Made good progress today. I’m still a bit behind where I should be, but not by very much. It’s a lot easier to write 30k words in a month than 50k words. Maybe I’ll make the full 50k nano word count my stretch goal.

Anyways, one short story down, and it’s a dark one. For that reason, I’m not too keen on it, but it was a story that needed to be written, to get it off of my chest if nothing else. The rough draft comes to about 4.1k words, but I think I can cut a solid 600 words out of it, or more, and it would probably be an improvement. But that’s going to wait until next month, at the earliest.

Also, I’m reasonably confident that this story will get me blacklisted at most of the pro-paying science fiction markets, or at least the ones that keep a blacklist. But I care less about that than the fact that most of them will flat-out reject it, on political grounds if not for the quality of the writing or the story, and I’m certain that most of them will. But whatever. I think my readers will like enough to make a splash when I self-publish it, and I care more about that at this point than about making a professional sale.

Navigating Woke SF, Part 3: Toward a New Short Story Strategy

So I really love how China Mike Glyer cherry-picked the excerpts that he quoted from my last blog post, leaving out how I said that it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt, or how you can’t take diversity statements at face value because of all the elitist signalling language. But the thing that I especially love is the way he characterized all of what I said as an “opportunity to learn from a professional why he’s self-rejecting from these short fiction markets.”

No, That’s Not Self-Rejection

There are so many things wrong with the phrase “self-rejection.” On its face, it sounds empowering, but the underlying assumption is that submitting your short stories to the traditional markets is your best/only option, and therefore you’d be a fool not to follow that path. Is that really an empowering message? Or is it actually more empowering—not to mention, straightforward—to say that it’s not you rejecting yourself, but you rejecting them?

For a long time, though, I really did believe that choosing not to submit a story to a high-paying market was tantamount to rejecting my own story. Even as an indie author, I still believed that for a short story to be successful, it had to be traditionally published first.

That was the thinking that informed my old short story strategy. Submit to the traditional markets first, and don’t self-publish until all of the high-paying professional markets have been exhausted, or (hopefully) until the exclusivity period of your contract wears off. You might spend years sending your story out to the markets, only to find that self-publishing is the only way to get it out into the world, but at least you have the moral victory of knowing you didn’t “self-reject.” Except, in a world where it’s possible to be your own publisher, you did reject your own story all those years, simply by choosing to keep it on submission instead of publishing it yourself!

To be fair, when it comes to short stories, self-publishing and traditional publishing are not mutually exclusive. And years of experience with self-publishing short stories has taught me that it’s very difficult to earn significant money with them. As I put it a couple of months ago:

…short stories can be useful to do just about every other thing except make money selling them directly. If you price the singles at $2.99, you might sell as many as one or two per year, making less than $5. If you price them at 99¢, you may sell as many as a dozen per year, if you’re lucky—again, making less than $5. I didn’t have much luck getting bundles of 3-5 to sell, but larger collections of 10 to 12 stories do occasionally sell, and at a decent enough rate that I’m earning more on those stories than I would if I’d sold them individually as singles. But short story collections don’t sell anywhere near as well as novels.

So if you can expect to sell a short story to a high-paying market in a reasonable period of time, it certainly makes sense to put it out on submission instead of self-publishing it first. But as I’ve established in the last two posts, when most of the high-paying markets have gone totally woke, that changes the equation—especially if you are a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee.

To review, here are the potential benefits of submitting to the traditional short story markets first:

  • The pay.
  • Marketing.
  • Prestige and reputation.
  • Networking.
  • Awards and SFWA membership, if you care about that. I don’t.

And here are the potential drawbacks:

  • Lost time.
  • Lost time in exclusivity.
  • Lost time in submission.
  • Lost time not submitting simultaneously.
  • Lost time running out of open markets.

In short, the biggest potential drawback is all of that lost time where you could have self-published that story, but didn’t. Tell me again how that isn’t self-rejection?

Costs and Benefits of Self-Publishing (and How Wokeness Changes the Equation)

So if you can’t really expect to make any money self-publishing short stories, what good are they anyway?

In my previous post, I compared short stories to pawns in the game of chess. The pawn is the weakest piece in the game, but many chess masters still consider it the “soul of the game,” not because of what each piece individually can do, but what they can accomplish when taken together. A strong pawn structure is key to both openings and midgame strategy, and in the endgame, pawns become critically important as they threaten to advance to the final rank, where they can be queened.

Short stories are similar to pawns in this way. Taken individually, they’re not particularly significant, and if you’ve only written or published one or two of them, they’re probably not going to have a huge impact on your career. But when you have a bunch of them and get them to work together, they can build your career (not to mention, help you develop your craft) quite effectively. And there’s always the chance that you can get one optioned for film, just like advancing a pawn to the back rank.

About a year ago, I did something very unconventional and made all of my short story singles free. Here was my thinking behind that decision:

As a short story reader, I’m already used to paying for anthologies—and I’m more likely than other readers to buy them, since I’m the kind of reader who seeks out short stories. So if I pick up a handful of free short stories from an author and come to really enjoy her work, I’m already primed to buy her collections when I finish each story—and that makes the backmatter of each free single the best place for her to advertise her collections.

It’s a bit like first-in-series free, except instead of the one free book pointing to the rest of the series, there’s a bunch of free short stories all pointing to the same one (or two or three) collections. The typical reader is probably going to need to read a few of an author’s short stories anyways to really become a fan, so making all of the stories free could really be the way to go.

Of course, the big downside to this as an author is that you probably can’t sell reprint rights to the stories that are available as free singles. Why would an editor buy your story for their publication if it’s already available for free? So you would have to make the singles free for a limited time, if selling the stories to the reprint markets is part of your strategy.

But if you’re going to eventually bundle those stories into a collection, that’s not really a problem. Publish them as free singles as soon as the rights revert back to you, and then take down the singles when you have enough of them to put into a collection.

In the past several months since embarking on this experiment, I’m happy to report that it’s been a success! Not only have these free short story singles brought in new readers by giving them a wider sample of my work, but they’ve also been quite effective at building engagement among my newsletter subscribers and driving sales of my other works.

So here are the benefits I’ve seen by publishing free short story singles:

  • Marketing. The free short story singles are great marketing tools because the cost to try them out is minimal, not only in terms of price but in terms of time.
  • Discoverability. Nothing is quite as good at getting your name out there as a free story.
  • Name recognition. They say the average person has to see your brand at least seven times before it starts to stick. By putting a bunch of short stories out there that readers can pick up for free, it helps my name to stick with them.
  • Engagement. My short story singles are some of my most—and best—reviewed ebooks. This is something I genuinely didn’t expect, but it’s helped to boost the effectiveness of everything else.
  • Converting casual readers into fans. This has also been a pleasant surprise. Every time I send out a newsletter plugging one of my free short story singles—even one that’s been out for a while—I see an uptick in sales of my other books, as well as an uptick in fanmail from readers who credit the short stories for really turning them onto my work.
  • Regularly putting out new work. This is potentially huge. At the end of the day, nothing else is as good at selling your books as publishing the next book. Ideally, all those books would be novels, but since I’m not the kind of writer who can put out a new novel every month, short stories can pick up the slack—especially if they’re free.

There are still a lot of things that I still want to tweak, both to drive organic newsletter subscribers and to drive sales of my short story collections, but in terms of overall strategy I think I’ve got the self-publishing end down pretty good. So what are the drawbacks?

Because most of the high-paying short story markets only purchase first publication rights, the cost is that you give up what you could have gotten by going with the traditional markets first. But if all of those markets have gone too far woke, that changes the equation considerably:

  • The Pay. If all but a handful of the higher paying markets have gone woke and are therefore off the table, it doesn’t make sense to hold out for the money—nor does it make sense to make pay rates the deciding factor in whether or not to submit. If you have the time on your publishing schedule to send it out, great! Go for it! But don’t let the hope of a couple hundred bucks keep you from putting it out yourself.
  • Marketing. If a market has gone woke, then it’s reasonable to assume that its readers and supporters have also gone woke. Since that’s not my target audience, it doesn’t make sense to hold out for getting published, no matter how large their readership or subscriber base. In fact, publication with a woke market may actually hurt me by turning off the very non-woke readers that I’m hoping to reach.
  • Prestige and reputation. Same as above. If a market has gone woke, their reputation precedes them for both good and ill. Better to know my target audience and stay true to them than to seek honors from those who insist I bend the knee.
  • Networking. If my predictions are correct and the culture is starting to shift decisively against everything woke, then the writers and editors I ought to be networking with are largely working on passion projects and semi-pro startups, not the established markets.

Revised Short Story Strategy

With all of that in mind, here is my new short story strategy:

Stage Zero: Put the Story on the Self-Publishing Schedule

The goal here is to publish something new consistently every month. Every time I write a short story, I immediately put it on the publishing schedule for a month where I don’t have a novel or a bundle already scheduled.

At a minimum, I should have enough stories to fill out the publishing schedule for at least the next six months. That way, if one of them sells to a traditional market, I can bump all the other ones forward, or have time to write something new. And ideally, I should fill out the schedule for the next 12 to 18 months, in order to have more time to put new stories on submission.

But unlike before, I’m not going to wait until a story exhausts all the potential markets before I self-publish it. If the story hasn’t sold yet to a traditional market and it’s slotted to be self-published next month, self-publishing takes precedence.

Stage One: Submit to the Traditional Markets

Before, my plan was to submit to all of the available markets that paid at least 5¢ per word, starting at the highest paying ones and working my way down until all of them were exhausted. But since most of those markets have gone incurably woke and it no longer makes sense to hold out for the pay, I’m now willing to submit to any market that pays at least 1¢ per word.

Since time is the key factor here—and the most relevant cost—instead of starting with the highest paying markets and working my way down, I’ll prioritize markets that allow simultaneous submissions and hit them all up at about the same time. Of course, if the story sells, I’ll promptly inform all of the other markets and withdraw my story. The same holds true if the story is still out for submission when I self-publish it.

For markets that allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll submit to any market that has an average wait time of 90 days or less, but for markets that do not allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll only send my story to them if their average wait time is 45 days or less. Again, time is the key factor here, and the most relevant cost. If a market can’t turn around my submission in less than six weeks, and still demands that I give them the exclusive right to consider my story, free of charge, I’m probably better off submitting elsewhere.

Stage Two: Self-Publish as a Free Short Story Single

This part of the plan remains exactly the same as before. But since ideally I’m turning around stories faster, that means I can put out short story collections faster as well. I’m not sure when I should decide to keep the short story single up while it’s also bundled in a collection, but that’s a publishing decision that has little to do with navigating the woke SF markets, so I’ll mull it over for now.

Stage Three: Bundle in Collections and Submit to the Reprint Markets

Again, this part of the plan is largely unchanged, with the caveat that I won’t be submitting my stories to any market that’s gone totally woke. Because of this, there may be times when my previously published stories aren’t on submission at all, but since that’s already the case, I’m not too worried about it. Besides, submitting to the reprint markets isn’t a high priority.

Conclusions

Thank goodness we live in a time when independent publishing is a viable option! If not, there’s a very good chance that none of my stories would have an avenue for getting out into the world, simply because I’m a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee to the woke establishment’s lies. In spite of all the insanity—and in spite of the fact that most of the major SF&F short story markets have gone completely woke—this is still the best time in history to be a writer and a reader.

Navigating Woke SF, Part 2: When Is It Not Worth Submitting?

So a couple of hours after I published my last blog post, China Mike Glyer of File 770 infamy picked it up for his daily pixel scroll. Hi, China Mike! I thought you might be looking for some red meat to feed your readers—aside from the Chinese clickfarms, of course—but I was especially pleased that you included my affiliate links with the excerpt you copy-pasted! Not only does this bring in some extra cash (thanks, China Mike!), but it also gives me some metrics to compare File 770 with, say, some of the other indie authors that I do newsletter swaps with. And wow… let’s just say there’s a reason why they call you China Mike Glyer and leave it at that.

So in today’s episode of red meat for China Mike, I’d like to pick up where I left off with the last post and pose the question: when is a science fiction market too woke to be worth submitting to? But to answer that question, we first need to answer: why bother submitting short stories to traditional markets at all, when self-publishing is an option?

It’s a good question, because there are a lot of good reasons to self-publish short stories. In my experience, they don’t earn particularly well on their own, but they are quite useful as newsletter magnets to gain new email subscribers, free ebook giveaways to let readers sample your work, and giveaways for newsletter subscribers to remind them that you exist and keep your books in the forefront of your mind. I make all my short story singles free on all the ebookstores, and keep them up until I have enough to bundle them into a collection, at which point I take them down and submit to the reprint markets. It’s a system that’s worked pretty well for me so far.

Potential Benefits of Submitting to Traditional Markets

So why submit to traditional markets first? Why hold off self-publishing in the hopes that you can sell first publication rights? Here are a few of the reasons:

  • The pay. A professional short story sale will bring in several hundred dollars, and even a semi-professional sale (1¢ per word or more) will typically earn more than pizza money. Over the lifetime of a typical story, that’s a good chunk of the income you can expect to earn from it (unless it’s optioned for a movie, of course).
  • Advertising. A short story sale, especially to a higher-paying market, will get your work—and your name—out to many readers who may have never heard of you before. Making your self-published short stories free accomplishes a similar thing, but with a different audience. Lots of readers who follow the magazines don’t typically look up free short stories on Amazon, though I’m sure that some of them do.
  • Prestige and reputation. Whenever you make a professional or semi-pro sale, that’s another human being proclaiming that your story is good enough to pay you for the privilege of publishing it. The SF&F short story markets are incredibly competitive, especially the higher-paying ones. Not all readers care about this, but being able to say that your stories have been published in Analog, or Asimov’s, or F&SF helps to set you apart from other authors—and many readers do sit up and notice. I certainly do.
  • Networking. Breaking into a short story market can be a great way to make connections with other writers and editors in the field, which can open up some really great opportunities later. I’ve had some really great experiences with this, and I look forward to having more in the future. You never know how things will turn out when you put yourself out there!

I suppose you could also include “awards” and “SFWA membership” on that list, but frankly I don’t care much about either of those. Contrary to the impression that China Mike wants to give you, I’m really not much of a drama llama, and as for awards… we’ll get there.

Potential Drawbacks of Submitting to Traditional Markets

Importantly, there are several potential drawbacks to putting your stories out on submission, especially if you have a viable self-publishing strategy. Some of those reasons include:

  • Lost time. It takes a lot of time to submit your stories to all the traditional markets, even just the professional ones. I used public data on The Submission Grinder to discover that the average wait time for professional SF&F markets is about 30 days, which means that if you want to submit to all of them, you won’t be able to self-publish that story for years.
  • Exclusivity. A lot of markets include an exclusivity period in their contracts, which can run upwards of a year or longer. Again, that’s a lot of lost time where you can’t self-publish that story, even if it does sell.
  • A very competitive market. You can keep a story out on submission for years, only to exhaust all but the token-paying markets. This isn’t necessarily a judgment of the story’s quality, either—I have stories that I’ve sent out 30+ times that have received more than 25% personalized rejections, that have never been picked up by a traditional publisher. There are just too many really good stories out there for the higher-paying markets to publish them all.
  • No simultaneous submissions. This one really bugs me. For some reason, most of the higher-paying SF&F markets don’t allow simultaneous submissions—that is, they demand the exclusive right to consider your story before they pay you a dime. What’s worse, the wait times for many of them can stretch on for months. This is how stories end up on submission for years—and all of that is time where you can’t self-publish.
  • Submissions bandwidth. At any given time, there are only between 10-20 SF&F markets open to submissions that pay more than 5¢ per word (for flash fiction, it can get up to 30). The average wait time for these markets is about 30 days, and most of them do not allow multiple submissions. Therefore, if you write more than one short story per month for an extended period of time, you will very quickly run into a bandwidth problem, where there aren’t any available markets to submit to.

So those are the potential costs and benefits that you have to contend with when writing and publishing short stories.

How Wokeness Changes the Equation

Now, let’s get to the first question: when is a short story market so woke that it isn’t worth submitting anything to them? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few days, and while I don’t think it’s possible to come up with an objective, impartial standard, I do think that it’s important to draw the distinction, because wokeness changes the cost/benefit analysis substantially.

It wasn’t always this way. Traditional sci-fi publishing has trended to the political left (sometimes to the extreme political left) of mainstream American culture since the New Wave era back in the 60s and 70s. It seems that the campus radicals took over much of the field, not to mention the fact that American traditional publishing has always been centered in New York. But until just the last few years, it was still possible for left and right to coexist in our pluralistic society. People of different political persuasions could agree to disagree amicably, and while there may have still been whisper campaigns and secret author blacklists, you could still expect to see a healthy mix of opinions and perspectives in most places that published short stories.

That is not true today. Certain subjects and opinions have been deemed verboten, while others have been exalted to the status of eternal truth, and any story that questions or challenges the politically correct narrative doesn’t have a chance in most of these markets. In other words, science fiction has gone woke.

(As a side note, this reminds me of a review that I received for my short story “Payday,” in which the universal basic income leads to runaway hyperinflation, causing society to unravel and forcing the protagonist and his family to flee. Sound familiar? In the author’s note, I mentioned how the story had been rejected by all of the pro-paying science fiction markets, and the reader found that even more disturbing than the story itself.)

“Woke” is a slang term describing a basket of socioeconomic and political ideologies that are incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties. Taken to their logical conclusion, they end in the sort of totalitarian horrors the world saw in the 20th century (and continues to see today in communist China).

I recently listened to an episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast where he interviewed Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector and human rights activist. It was an incredibly powerful interview—well worth listening to in its entirety. One of the things that really struck me was the fact that nightmare dystopian societies can only endure so long as everyone, in their own little way, tacitly supports the lie. In such a society, declaring the truth is itself a supreme act of insurrection, because (in the words of Solzhenitsyn) “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

In the science fiction markets that have been taken over by wokeness, the truth is silenced by vicious accusations of white supremacy, transphobia, post-colonialism, and a hundred other virtue-signalling examples of doublethink. If George Orwell published 1984 today, they would probably pan it as anti-Asian and push to get it cancelled or banned. There can be no compromise with these people, as there is no room for discussion or debate. These woke ideologies possess people, who cling to it like the worst possible kind of religion.

I used to think that a story from someone like me would still be able to slip through, if it was good enough. But then I spent a year subscribed to every science fiction and fantasy market that had a free podcast. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, but the authors hit all the woke intersectional checkboxes—and made sure to tell you that in their author bios. There were some exceptions, of course, but that was the general rule. Whenever there was an exceptionally good story, it was usually from an author who only checked one or two of the boxes—but their story would usually check off a couple more, such as having an LGBTQ+ romantic subplot, or having mostly POC characters. And in the wokest sci-fi podcasts, the editors always made sure to pound you over the head with an explicit political message, sometimes even before the story itself.

Of course, there are still some short fiction markets that care more about the strength of your story than upholding the woke establishment narrative, or making sure all their authors hit all the right intersectional checkboxes. But not generally among the professional-paying markets.

So how woke is too woke?

The events of the past year have convinced me that wokeness is like a cancer: no matter how small or innocuous it is when it starts, if left untreated it will metastatize and grow. The only way to treat it is to remove it from your life. No compromise. No discussion or debate. The woke care nothing for right or wrong, truth or falsehood: only narrative and power. When they look at me, they do not see a person: they see a heirarchy of identities. And if my stories are any good—that is, if they serve the truth—then they see those stories as a threat. After all, “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Therefore, it cannot be a question of degree. If a market has gone even slightly woke, then submitting your stories is an exercise in futility if you don’t hit the right checkboxes or will not bend the knee. And I will never bend the knee.

How To Tell If a Market Is Woke

So now, with a working definition of “woke” (promoting ideologies incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties) and the determination that wokeness is toxic in any degree, how can I tell if a market has gone truly woke?

First of all, I think it’s important to give everyone—and every market—the benefit of the doubt. There are still people on the political left who can break bread with and hold reasonable conversations with those on the other side of the aisle. Likewise, there are still short story markets that tend to lean left, but will still publish good stories by authors across the political spectrum.

Second, it’s also important to point out that just because an editor hits one or two—or most—of the woke intersectional checkboxes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the market itself is woke. This isn’t a matter of balancing transgender people of color with straight white males—that’s merely wokeism in reverse! People are people are people, no matter how they identify. Anyone can become ideologically possessed, just as anyone can choose not to be.

So with that in mind, what are the red flags?

1) Has the market won any awards that have gone completely woke?

Specifically, I’m thinking here of the Hugo Awards. They were trending to the left for a very long time, but 2015 was the year that they specifically went woke by voting “no award” over several deserving authors and editors. The transformation was completed in 2017, when the new rules shut out the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and both of those movements died out.

Therefore, if a short story market has won a Hugo since 2015 or been nominated for a Hugo since 2017, I’m not going to bother submitting to them. And if a market has had stories that have won or been nominated for a Hugo in those years, I’m going to ignore the market as well, unless it appears to be a fluke or a one-off.

2) Does the market have an explicit diversity statement in their submission guidelines?

Diversity statements are not actually about reassuring minority authors that they are welcome to submit their stories. Instead, diversity statements are all about signalling. You can see this with the term “latinx.” The vast, vast majority of actual latinas and latinos have either never heard of the term or absolutely hate it, but because it’s a gender non-binary term, the woke absolutely love it—and use it primarily as a signal to other woke people just like them.

Therefore, if a market has an explicit diversity statement that contains woke signaling language, it’s going on the blacklist. Even if the market only put out a diversity statement to keep the woke mob from descending upon them, that’s still a sure sign that they’ve bent the knee.

Occasionally, a market won’t have a separate diversity statement, but will include language like “we welcome submissions from authors of all races, genders, and backgrounds.” In that case, it’s probably best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they use the word “latinx,” even once (or “folx,” or “black bodies,” or “indigenous,” or…), then that’s a clear signal that they’re woke.

3) Does the market publish content that is explicitly woke?

Editors always say that the best way to know what they’re looking for is to read a couple of issues or listen to a couple of episodes or stories. That seems like a reasonable standard, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t hold them to it.

Do the editors ever go off on explicitly woke political rants, or try to explain the message of the story in woke ideological terms? Do the author bios read like a checklist of woke intersectional identities? Are the stories themselves often thinly veiled rants about woke issues? Again, it’s important to apply the benefit of the doubt here, but you can tell a lot about a market by what they choose to publish. I won’t be wasting my time with the markets that regularly publish any of those things.

Conclusion

I believe that the culture is changing, and an anti-woke backlash is forming that will shock the people who are too deeply esconsed in their echo chambers (here’s to you, File 770) to see it coming. If I had to guess, I’d say that we hit peak woke in our culture about a year ago, and now that the pendulum is swinging the other way, nothing will stop it until it goes as far to the anti-woke side as it did to the woke side.

I’m not yet sure if this is good or bad. If we reject the lies that wokeism is built upon and embrace the individual rights and liberties that informed our founding documents, it could be very good indeed. But a lot of damage has already been done, and if we merely exchange leftist-flavored collectivism for rightist-flavored collectivism, it could be very, very bad.

That’s why writers and creators like me have a very important role to play—that is, those of us who aren’t afraid to speak one word of truth. That alone is reason enough not to waste one moment of time on these woke science fiction markets whose great day of power is swiftly coming to an end.

My short story strategy has changed a lot in the last year, much like our country. I still need to work through all of the implications of this change in order to formulate a new publishing strategy. But I’ll leave that for another post. This is sufficient for now.

Navigating Woke SF, Part 1: Short Story Markets and Author Blacklists

Last year, I had a short story published in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction. Not only was it one of my highest paying short story sales to date, but it also made it onto the Tangent Online 2020 Recommended Reading List with a *** rating, their highest tier. Only 13 out of 293 stories on the list received that honor—and making the list at all was an accomplishment!

But a funny thing happened after the anthology came out: for a stretch of several months, I stopped receiving personalized rejections for my short story submissions, and instead got only form rejections. Normally when I write a cover letter for a short story submission, I mention the last three markets that I was published in. For example: “My stories have recently appeared in Again, Hazardous Imaginings; Twilight Tales LTUE Benefit Anthology, and Bards and Sages Quarterly (forthcoming).” In a typical month, I’ll get maybe a dozen or so form rejections and a couple of personalized rejections, depending on how many stories I have out on submission.

Back in March, I started to notice that I wasn’t getting any personalized rejections. Suspecting that my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings wasn’t helping me, I decided to change things up and only list my publication credits for stories listed in Locus Magazine’s Year In Review issue. My thinking was that all of the Hugo and Nebula eligible markets give their yearly reports in that issue, and since all of the editors want to acquire stories that are likely to win awards, a publication credit in one of those markets is more likely to get them to pay attention.

Lo and behold, I started getting personalized rejections again.

Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, I exported my data from The Submission Grinder and made a quick table of my submissions returned for each month going back to July 2019. Before “The Promise of King Washington” was accepted in February 2020, I was getting roughly one personalized rejection for every 5-8 form rejections. Then, for most of 2020, I went through a dry spell where I didn’t have many stories out on submission. Towards the end of the year, I got back in the saddle, and my personalized-to-form rejections ratio returned to what it had been earlier… but then Again, Hazardous Imaginings was published in December, and for the next three months, I received no personalized rejections at all. Then, around March-April, I stopped mentioning my publication credit in Again, Hazardous Imaginings… and I started getting personalized rejections again.

So what happened? Is there some sort of unofficial blacklist for stories published in Again, Hazardous Imaginings? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if any of the other authors in the anthology have had a similar experience, nor do I know for certain that mentioning the anthology in my publication credits caused this particular issue. It could be that I was submitting to higher paying markets at the beginning of 2021, and those markets just happen to be more stingy about personalized rejections. It could be that the pandemic has just sapped everyone’s energy.

But now that I’ve made this table, the one thing I cannot say is that the whole thing is just a figment of my imagination. There was a three-month period where I saw significantly fewer personalized rejections than usual, and it just so happened to coincide with the publication of the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings and my mentioning it as a publication credit in all of my cover letters.

It’s no big secret that most of the traditional short story markets in science fiction and fantasy trend somewhere between liberal and super woke. All you have to do to get a sense for this is subscribe to their podcasts or read their stories online. For most of 2020, I was subscribed to every science fiction podcast, and I frequently ended up skipping episodes because either the story was too woke, the author bio was little more than a checklist of intersectional victimhood groups, or the editor went off on some sort of political rant (typically of the “orange man bad” variety) that had little or nothing to do with the story. You can also get a good sense of the woke-ness by looking up these magazines’ submission guidelines and reading their diversity statements.

So for the last couple of months, I haven’t been listing Again, Hazardous Imaginings as a publication credit in any of my cover letters, and the response to my stories appears to have returned to the old normal… but it doesn’t sit right with me. Why should I have to hide that I was published in that anthology? Why shouldn’t I be proud of it? It did make Tangent Online’s recommended reading list with three stars, after all. Why should I waste my time submitting my stories to science fiction and fantasy markets that would see that publication credit as a black mark?

In other words, why not blacklist the blacklisters?

When an author decides not to submit their stories to a particular market, it’s often called a “self-rejection,” since the author has already decided that the story won’t be published before the editor gets a chance to consider it. But this is a little different. It’s not my own story that I’m rejecting, but the market as a whole. It’s making the conscious decision that if a magazine is too woke, I’m not going to have anything to do with it.

Here’s another way to think about it: why should I hold out for a year or longer, hoping to earn a couple of hundred bucks for it, when most of the markets that pay that well either aren’t interested in publishing the kind of politically incorrect stories that I tend to write, or aren’t going to publish an author like me who isn’t demonstrably woke enough? Even if I only end up selling it to a semi-pro market for less than fifty bucks, if it only takes a few months to make the sale because I’m not wasting time with the woke markets, does that make it worthwhile?

Or here’s yet another way to think about it: what other benefits do I get with my short story sales, besides how well it pays? If short stories are essentially advertisements for my other work, does it actually make sense to seek publication in the super woke markets, whose readers are mostly woke? Or does it make more sense to be published in the more conservative-leaning markets, with readers who are more likely to enjoy the other stuff that I write? And what about networking with similar-minded authors and editors? I made some really great connections through the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings, and even brought Andrew Fox, the editor, onto my newsletter for an interview. It was great!

All of this is happening as we’re starting to see an anti-woke cultural backlash gain momentum. Smarter people than me with a finger on the pulse of the culture say that the Snyder Cut is where the tide began to turn. The thing that tipped me off to it was the surprising waythat Coca-Cola walked back their critical race theory training after the “woke-a-cola” scandal. To my knowledge, there was no organized boycott, yet for a large corporation to backpedal so quickly tells me that they really took a hit to their bottom line.

In the coming months, I think we’re going to see a huge cultural shift against the woke moral panic that has gripped our nation for the last couple of years. That in itself is a subject for another post, but what it means for SF&F is that a lot of these woke awards and woke short story markets are well on their way to going broke. The few that endure will become niche markets for a very small audience that has completely divorced itself from the cultural mainstream—including the vast majority of SF&F readers.

Is it really worth hitching my wagon to such a horse? Or is it better to take a gamble on the up-and-coming markets that might not pay as much, but also aren’t carrying all the woke political baggage as magazines like Uncanny or Lightspeed?

Of course, if the answer to all of these questions is “yes, Joe—go for it!” the next big question is how to determine if a market is too woke? Because some of the markets have diversity statements that are fairly conservative-friendly, like “we welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds!” and don’t use any of the woke value-signalling terms like “folx,” “latinx,” “QUILTBAG,” “indigenous,” “black bodies,” etc. In fact, I’m pretty sure that many of these markets only put out diversity statements to pacify the woke moral crusaders, in the same way that many boarded up stores and restaurants put up BLM signs hoping that the rioters sorry, the “peaceful protesters” would spare them.

One way to determine this is to look at which markets are chasing the wokest awards. The Hugos went woke in 2015, when “no award” swept the categories dominated by Sad Puppies nominees. That was really the moment when the fandom split, and the anti-woke readership abandoned the Hugos in disgust. The Rabid Puppies swept the 2016 nominations in what amounted to a hilarious sabotage operation (“Pounded in the Butt by Chuck Tingle’s Hugo,” hehe), but by 2017 that had all come to an end.

With that in mind, I went through all of the Hugo Awards to see which markets had either won an award or published a story that had won an award since 2015, and which markets had either been nominated or published stories that have been nominated since 2017. Here is what I found:

Hugo Winning Markets since 2015

  • Uncanny (5)
  • Lightspeed (1)

Markets with Hugo Winning Stories since 2015

  • Tor.com (5)
  • Apex (3)
  • Clarkesworld (2)
  • Lightspeed (1)
  • Uncanny (1)

Hugo Nominated Markets since 2017

  • Strange Horizons (5)
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies (5)
  • Escape Pod (3)
  • Fireside (3)
  • FIYAH (3)
  • The Book Smugglers (2)
  • GigaNotoSaurus (1)
  • Cirsova (1)
  • Shimmer (1)
  • Podcastle (1)
  • Uncanny (1)

Markets with Hugo Nominated Stories since 2017

  • Tor.com (37)
  • Uncanny (18)
  • Clarkesworld (5)
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies (3)
  • Fireside (2)
  • Lightspeed (2)
  • Asimov’s (1)
  • Strange Horizons (1)
  • Nightmare Magazine (1)
  • Diabolical Plots (1)

The counts for nominated markets/stories do not include the winners, but do include all of the nominations for 2021, even though the winners have not yet been decided.

I haven’t yet settled on a standard for deciding which markets are too woke for me to submit to. I suppose that’s something I’ll have to decide on a case-by-case basis, and for any who choose to follow my lead on this, it will have to be an individual decision. But I am rethinking the way I submit and publish my short stories, based on this experience. This post has already gone too long, and I still haven’t worked my new strategy out, but if you have any suggestions or ideas I’m interested to hear them.