seperis | in relation to tor

There's been some discussion of a boycott of Tor--I mean, I am not seeing an anti-Tor community popping up or anything, but before that happens, I'm going to quote

chopchica on the subject:

The thing is, phn and tnh, while both *huge assholes* =/= Tor, just as some really asshatted authors =/= Tor. There are a lot of authors - and future authors - who will be the ones penalized if there's a boycott or backlass. It's a real conundrum for me. I personally don't ever want them to see a dime of my money. However, I don't want to punish others for their bad behavior.

I'm a bit worried that this post is going to rally up some kind of larger boycott, or be seen as a call for one, so I'm going to run around and paste this response here and there, just to make it clear I am *not* suggesting everybody boycott Tor. I think a much better response would be to send letters of crit to the top of the houses, to try to make it clear that the actions of pnh and especially tnh are very seriously hurting their future business - as well as possibly frightening a lot of future authors into never subbing to them. - link

This isn't to suggest anyone--anyone, most especially those most hurt by

tnh's actions during this--shouldn't follow their conscience and if they are uncomfortable buying from Tor, I respect and support their decision completely and without reserve.

Having said that, I think

chopchica hit the nail on the head in what this means. I'm not sure a boycott will have any effect on

tnh or her husband, but it could badly damage other writers. As someone with several published writers on their flist (I have no idea what company they use, come to think, but they could be affected, so take this with the knowledge I have a Schrodinger's dog who may or may not be fighting), I'm aware, as far as their entries on the subject have indicated, how difficult it is to make a comfortable living doing it. For that matter, I think most of us can name one or two published or pre-published writers we know and talk to.

I cannot and will not presume to tell anyone, for any reason, what they should do or how they should feel (and if I do, hi, if my pants are down? I will fix that shit first, ask questions later), but I do want to emphasize that the authors affected will be invisible collateral damage. We won't know who they are, or how they will be affected, or if a new writer, maybe one of our friends, a member of our community, our fandom, our flist, was rejected in relation to a formal boycott.

So--yes. I only rewrote that four times in an hour.

I think Chopchica and your point is well-made.

That said, I'll be staying far away from ML from now on, and there are certain particular writers who will not be getting any of my royalties from now on.

But I really do need to buy Toby Buckell's stuff.

I think I'm going author-specific on this one, too. And yeah, ML is off my reading list. I don't think I can read it again and not remember what was said in

tnh's LJ.

*facepalm*

I went there out of curiosity to see if any of this was mentioned there. It wasn't.

What *was* mentioned was a review of a book called "Principles of the American Cargo Cult".

Quoting PNH: The outlined principles divide up alarmingly well into “stuff I recognize as generally true about the way Americans think” and “stuff I just now realized I think.” Damn.

One of them:

Good intentions suffice

You can always apologize.

Um, or apparently not apologize. Instead you can just run away.

Edited to fix html.

edited at: Date: 2009-02-01 10:01 pm (UTC)

...I guess that wasn't supposed to be deliberate irony. *blank* I--can we pretend it was?

er. May I ask who ML is? ^^V I'm following the links out of morbidity but... I must have missed that?

Thanks...

ML is Making Light tnh's blog/discussion board she moderates. Sorry about the confusion! I forgot to clarify my acronyms.

ah! Thank you. I thought it might be an author. ^^

*perk* Is Toby involved in NON-asshaberdashery, or was that a general sentiment?

I haven't seen him comment on the race!fail, although I don't know that he hasn't. He is also a writer of color, though, and he's gotten good reviews. Seems like a sensible guy.

(At this point, my divisions are breaking down into sensible and batshit. Possibly I need a finer-grain seive.)

*nod* I hadn't seen him around and was wondering.

I'm actually at a point where there are a few people I'm eyeing sideways, expecting outbreaks of batshit at any moment.

Oh good, I'm not the only one blinking slowly around with a faint feeling of paranoia.

I'm totally gonna be watching you tonight!

Toby has commented sensibly on other racefail. He doesn't hang out on LJ, so he may not have been aware of this one until much later.

He's commented sensibly in the past. I would generally consider him to be an anti-asshaberdasher.

That's relieving. Lord knows the DEFEND MY SOCIAL CIRCLE AGAINST ALL COMERS trap has snared several people I thought had better heads on their shoulders than this.

I am *totally* well made! \o/

::facepalms::

I swear, English needs better 3rd-person plural structures.

What you said, and what seperis said.

Ummm...could you please explain what this all about? I tried to read up on the backstory, but so far, all I'm getting is that someone did something mean and someone else did something mean back. What's going on?

God, I'm probably the worst to do this since I wasn't even reading my flist when the cultural appropriation debates started.

chopchica's post has a pretty good summary of the latest part of it.

Can I send you to her post? Post is here. (http://chopchica.livejournal.com/163464.html) The very, very short version is, there was a discussion in

tnh's husband's post (now deleted) that called him on some of his assumptions regarding the aforementioned cultural appropriation debates and that some of it had racist connotations (I havent' seen this post; he deleted it when he deleted his lj). She defended her husband in a now-locked post that quickly went badly and accused everyone who didn't agree with her of being sockpuppets. Then there was the second post that is visible now.

That's a completely bare bones rendering of it and I think is way too simplistic to encompass this; I think

chopchica's post will at least cover the latest part. I'd also really encourage reading through

rydra_wong's links here (http://rydra-wong.livejournal.com/?style=mine). It's a *lot* of reading, but it's excellent stuff and I recommend reading through it all if you can.

http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.com/2009/01/timeline.html

Very helpful timeline.

*facepalm* And I had marked that for further reading I think last night. Gah. Thank you.

Yuck, I keep coming late the discussion, and by the time I get there - the original source of the problem is deleted. But I have to say that I'm not wild about the secondary reactions. Just.. complete inability to accept that she might have said something wrong. Complete. No, clearly this is because people don't like her or something. Like that even makes sense.

But I think you are generally correct. While Tor may eventually drop her due to bad publicity (though, in a way, I hope they don't since they'll just play into her paranoia, and I'd always rather people "See the light" rather than suffer damage), it is not like the publisher is endorsing her livejournal.

I do, however, understand that people can no longer buy her material in good conscience. I won't even read Orson Scott Card's work because of some political statements he's made, particularly regarding sexuality.

I do sometimes wonder if in the final analysis, discussions of author's political and other beliefs will just generally lead to publishers strongly suggesting that their authors not communicate with the public outside of official channels. It seems like it rarely does them good, and often does them harm. But it's not like the public can possibly ignore those statements once they're made.

Well, to make it more complicated, TNH is an editor at Tor, not a writer. So people not wanting to support her end up penalizing writers who may or may not agree with her opinions.

Ah, ok. Again with the coming in late to the game...

It's sad how much BNFs (fandom or publishing) are allowed (or think they're allowed) to get away with just because of their [perceived] status.

I'm certainly not going to read ML any longer, or buy the books of the authors who participated in this thing, but I don't want to participate in a boycott or Tor -- because, as you said, it would also target people who weren't involved in this.

Unfortunately I don't think the boycott is going to be big enough or loud enough to be heard of anywhere but a small part of the online community.

The entire thing is a damn shame. They were people whose opinions I respected and whose works, fiction and meta, I enjoyed reading. To see them behave like this is disheartening.

I was just talking to my husband about this, and how sad I am that writers I really liked have turned out to be such assholes, and that I'll never read them again. Why are the words "I'm sorry" so incredibly difficult for some people to say? And then to walk away from the keyboard.

What a sad, horrible mess.

I think writing a letter of complaint would be better than a boycott. Holtzbrinck USA owns Tor (for various reasons, I think writing directly to Tor would not be worthwhile), and letters could be directed to their HR Department.

Letters could also be directed to the sponsors of BoingBoing and Making Light.

Okay, two questions.

What/where is this "post" that started this WHOLE brouhaha?

Why do people keep talking about not having any pants on? Are they at least sitting on towels?

It's an expression meaning you are acting like an ass (and therefore showing your ass) in public and that theoretically instead of showing your ass, you might prefer to have it pointed out so you can fix the situation (ie put on some pants).

http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.com/2009/01/timeline.html

That is a good timeline to get an idea of what started this and what it's turned into.

rydra_wong has an extensive set of links as well.

How far back do you want to go? IIRC, it all started with Elisabeth Bear posting about how easy it is to write the Other. Fen of colour disagreed, citing problems with Bear's work, and she apologised & backed down BUT Bear's friends leaped in to defend her, in her LJ and on their own. Nasty language was used, and Bear didn't call her friends on it so it escalated.

*points up* a lot of people have done good links round-ups.

Thanks. I'm trying to catch up now. Just finished reading the original Bear post.

Remember, a lot of the uglier stuff that happened and that was said was deleted and hidden. medievalist also went back into most of the posts out there and deleted all of her comments.

coffeeandink has caps of some of the missing posts.

Yeah, that's what's making it hard to catch up. I was wanting to read the original TNH post because I thought that is what started the whole thing. Now I see it was the Bear post and TNH came later on but is now deleted.

I don't even know these authors or their books.

http://spiralsheep.livejournal.com/276263.html

http://spiralsheep.livejournal.com/276691.html

http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/888012.html

tnh came weeks later. bear lead to sarah monette/truepenny which led to medievalist and mac_stone. they led to pnh (husband of tnh) who deleted not only his post but his entire lj. By the time tnh showed up, this had been going on for *weeks* - at which point she decided to ignore all previous evidence and history and go after people for being mean to her husband.

Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear are SF/F authors. Patrick Neilsen Hayden runs the SF/F department at Tor books and is an editor. Theresa Neilsen Hayden used to edit for Tor and now consults and moderates Making Light and Boing Boing. mac_stone runs a very popular forum for beginning writers. medievalist is just an asshole - albeit a very educated one!

The thing is, it's been going on for so long now. It's very hard to catch up (and the whole hiding the evidence game makes it worse). What this started with was a discussion about cultural appropriation. What it turned into was a forum for defensive white people to say racist things while hiding behind a shield of academia and POC being uneducated raving hoardes. Then it turned into a whole lot of the pain white people were dealing with from all of this happening. And *now* it appears to be about tnh - a one-woman force for justice - threatening everybody who hurt her husband's feelings and refusing to accept that discussions of racism happen outside of her journal.

I understand. But what does Tor mean? I bought ebooks, but I can't think of any online stores that have this initial.

Tor is a publishing house.

As a latecomer (found out about this yesterday), that's the best description of this imbroglio I've come across yet. ::thumbs up::

I didn't realize about

mac_stone. I thought he was just a jerk -- I hadn't realized he was part of the SFF granfalloon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon).

mac_stone is a woman, actually! She also runs the absolute write forum - a place for beginning writers to begin to feel at home in the writing world so they can try to go pro. How's THAT for irony!

mac_stone is also the person who set off the worst of it - by making a post where she outlined all of the qualities of an abuser, and then stated that every single POC who had challenged her about her views fit those criteria. This led to lots of outrage, medievalist topping her recent level of fail with even *more* fail, and pnh wading into the fray to defend his good friend mac_stone (which he did by saying that some people were just smarter than others).

mac_stone was the first person to make a brand new, deliberately inflammatory post just to stir things up. She was also the first to delete and is still around yapping about how people are saying things she didn't say. She's ignoring the part where they have *screencaps*.

She also dumped the whole <lj user=diversity2009 mess on an unqualified TEENAGER (who entirely admits she's unqualified) on the grounds that the teen in question was one of the few PoC on the internet still speaking to her. Said teen also has issues with her race that can be seen from SPACE (to the point where she started denying she was a PoC at all), so I'm guessing mac_stone saw her as an excellent patsy. Yes, the girl in question has been acting like an idiot, but she's a KID, for fuck's sake. Everybody's an idiot then. And medievalist and mac_stone are a couple of grown-ass women using a PoC girl as a metaphorical human shield.

Yep, way to fail, mac_stone and medievalist! It was so painful to watch that happen and I feel so bad for that poor girl right now.

It was the buttercream icing on top of the fail-cake.

And hopefully that poor girl will start hanging out with a classier, less exploitative set of friends. As a PoC friend of mine remarked, "It's like reading my own internalised racism from five years ago. But I got over it, and so can she!" All hope is not lost, but I fear she'll have a painful awakening.

*points up* What

chopchica said. These are supposed to be professional authors and editors, but they can't take criticism and lash out at people.

Unfortunately, it's hard to really get full context, as a number of people in the ebear/tnh axis have deleted their posts (and the tracks of their bad behavior with it. )

That's one of the problems I had when I came out of a Merlin-fic-induced fancoma and saw my flist was talking about stuff that had already been deleted.

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