Rewriting.

I'm revisiting Blood and Fire, and contemplating making a real novel out of the mish-mash of stories at last. JJ has given me some interesting ideas, and I think I have an outline roughed out that will let me use pretty much all the good text from the current series of short stories, while tossing out the awful bits, and adding only a couple of chapters worth of text to get a single mostly coherent narrative. But before I dive into it, I need to do one thing, and that is rename the planet.

Mysteria is a ridiculous name for a planet. Particularly when said planet is a living, sentient being. Would you like being saddled with a moniker like Mysteria? It's also a rip-off from the Mystara D&D setting that was almost certainly the original inspiration for the role playing sessions that were the original inspiration behind my writing. I'd really rather not keep any second hand D&D references in this thing, it's going to be stereotypical role play fantasy enough as it is, really.

But I'm totally drawing a blank here on the name. Any suggestions? Serious preferred over silly, I have to use this in religious writings, epic bits of story, and everyday bits as well. Though silly suggestions will be obligingly laughed at. Just not actually used.

Interesting

Apparently Dark Horse has very quietly canceled the Gor books.

I'm curious as to the reason behind it, but I am also quite pleased!

And just so nobody gets the wrong impression, I shall explain why I am pleased. I do not support censorship, but I do support honesty. If somebody wishes to publish the Gor series as fetish material, or even as some sort of semi-pornographic social commentary, that's great. Awesome. More power to them. But the fact that Dark Horse was pushing these as mainstream fantasy, and their promotional materials never once mentioned anything about female slavery, domination, submission, kidnapping, branding, rape, or any of the other icky and/or kinky stuff that's in them really bothered me. I was massively influenced by books that I read as a young person. To the point that I pin my liberal/libertarian political and social stance on the books I read. I was raised in a very conservative household, the only liberal influence in my life was books. And I have a submissive nature and an attraction to some freakish kinks. If I had read those books as a young teen, I am certain they would have influenced my attitudes toward sex and towards D/s relationships. I've got enough screwy stuff in my head without adding in all the "what women really want" crap that's in those books. As a youngster I never would have picked up a book with a back cover blurb saying something like "Tarl Cabot is trasported to the counter-earth world of Gor, where he learns what it means to be a real man by capturing female slaves and having his way with them. Enter a fantasy world where all that women really want is to be enslaved by a real man." But I would have picked up a book with the back cover blurb that Dark Horse gave it. "Part science fiction, part adventure novel, the stories in the world of Gor would unfold to show Tarl Cabot’s growth from a novice to a man whose fate might determine the course of every man, woman, and child on Gor. John Norman’s Gor Omnibus 1 collects the first three novels in the series. Prepare to take a journey to a land of passion and sorcery." That's a dishonest representation of what you're going to get, and I have seen a lot of accounts, in various discussions of this thing, of people who picked up one of the Gor books, having no idea what it was about, and were horrified and shocked when they actually read it. You should not be horrified and shocked to discover what you're reading. A cover blurb should say what's in the book so that you can try it or reject it knowingly. Of course cover blurbs don't say how good a book is, and I don't expect the Gor novels to say that they're one of the worst-written things to ever be published on the front. All blurbs claim that the book is a great book. But most blurbs tell you something about the central theme of the book. It's about adventure, it's about romance, it's about mystery. The Gor novels are about female sexual slavery. The cover should say so.

So! With all that said, I am very, very, very happy to see that the dishonest and misleading version of these books that Dark Horse was preparing to publish has been scrapped. Bravo.

Ha! I am not alone!

I was just linked to what somebody called The Eric Burns School of Blogging. The article there is about wecomic critics, and is pretty spot on, but scroll down to "Don't try to rewrite history" and you'll find a very excellent explanation of why, with a very few exceptions, I refuse to take down posts, delete comments, or make major edits save as footnotes. And why people who do those things, especially the ones who delete comments, get a black mark in my book. I'm not going to regard you as a total idiot just because of doing it, I understand the reasons behind doing it, and I've done it myself a time or two, but it's something I consider a pretty big indicator of potential idiocy, especially if you do it a lot.

Men and women

I've been reading some feminist stuff lately, sparked by the recent renewal of discussion about the Gor books. And some random comment, I can't even recall where now, made me think of a way to explain something about gender differences.

Men and women are different. That's fairly evident to anybody with eyes. They're different. The problem is when we take the real differences further than they go. Particularly when we forget that the differences between men and women are smaller than the differences between individuals within one gender. I shall illustrate this point with a simple, easily verified fact comparison. Men are taller than women. This is a fact. Men are taller than women. Nobody disputes this. But let us look at some numbers. The average American male is 5' 9.2" tall. (175.8cm for you metric types.) The average American female is 5' 3.77" (162.5cm) tall. (This is, in fact, almost exactly how tall I am.) So men are, on average, 5.43 inches (13.3cm) taller than women, at least here in the USA. But that's not telling the whole story. The shortest woman who ever lived was Pauline Musters, who stood exactly 2 feet (61cm) tall. The tallest woman was Zeng Jinlian, who was 8' 1.5" (248cm) tall. Thus the variation among women's heights is six feet, 1.5 inches (187cm) or more than fourteen times greater than the height difference between men and women in general.

Now, apply that to all the other statements about the differences between men and women that you hear. Men are better than math. Women are more emotional. Men are stronger. Women are better with children. In all of those cases, the variation between individuals of the same sex dwarfs the variation between sexes.

This is why gender roles tend to be silly. They can make sense if you're only looking at averages, but once you start considering cases, you find they very often just don't apply at all.