Thread by @bogiperson

Whenever there is someone saying "I'm not interested in diversity, only in literary quality," I tell my story about reviewing short fiction, and I haven't had a handy thread of it before.

So, thread! (Later I can just bump it when the topic comes up again. It does a lot)

I started reading short stories online -- mostly SFF stories, but not exclusively - in the early 2010s.

At first I'd read everything. (There were also fewer stories back then, and I read fast, so it was feasible to read most of the recent SFF stories.)

I thought that I would also review everything!

Shweta Narayan organized a thing where marginalized readers would get Hugo memberships donated by people.

I applied and got one, so I wanted to make sure I'd both make an informed choice and contribute to the community.

At first I tried to review everything......

.....Lol

This was extremely time-consuming, so I gave up after a few months.

(Now @ClowderofTwo does a lot of excellent broad-coverage short story reviewing, I encourage you to check his reviews out)

@ClowderofTwo So i tried to figure it out how to narrow down what I reviewed.

Obviously I wanted to actually enjoy reading. :) At least for the most part!

(I confess I do sometimes finish entire novels just so that I can write That Very Critical Review, but I don't want this to be ALL I do.)

A lot of my favorites came from smaller mags, so I didn't want to do something like... focus on the major mags.

(Which is a legitimate choice, Charles does that to an extent now, but other choices are also legitimate :) )

How else to narrow down what I *reviewed*? (At this point I was still reading almost ALL of it.)

Because I got my Hugo membership as part of a diversity initiative (a very small one, I think three people got memberships), I thought I would focus on marginalization in some way.

I started to group stories by theme where the theme focused on some marginalization.

E.g., here are stories with women protagonists. Here are stories set in non-Western countries. Etc.

(You might see what is coming... I didn't, but back then there was much less discussion.)

This did increase my average enjoyment of the stuff I was reviewing. (Which is always a bigger investment of effort than reading.)

But it also resulted in what I found a very annoying problem.

Previously, I felt that my story enjoyment was distributed vaguely along a bell curve: most stories I felt meh about, some stories I strongly disliked, some stories I absolutely loved.

After this change, the distribution was also changing shape! (Just my vague impressions...)

With the focus on marginalization as a theme, the distribution was turning bimodal! That is a technical term for a curve that has two peaks.

Now there were many stories I loved. And many stories I fervently disliked.

(Much fewer stories I felt meh about.)

Which led to me writing some very frustrated reviews. (And also getting flak for them.)

So how do I get the highest percentage of stories I'd love, while avoiding the stories that drove me up the wall?

Also, there was more and more short fiction. Not just more venues, but also venues were expanding (e.g., Clarkesworld went from 2 stories a month to a full-length print issue in the past few years)

It was more difficult to keep up.

The question presented itself: how could I maximize my own personal enjoyment of stories, by making determinations what to read and what not to read, in advance.

(Not just what to review after having read a big unsorted pile.)

Now, this is only my personal enjoyment and other people's personal enjoyment might differ :)

I reread a bunch of my reviews and determined that the stories I often felt strongly negatively about were majority people writing minority characters (not always! Big generalities!)

There was a lot of "Strong white woman running around in the Exotic Landscape" and such.

(I think these stories also sell less well now, but this was the early 2010s.)

So I figured that I would try to read stories with minority protags by minority authors.

(Side note: back then it was either "diversity" or "minorities", and "marginalized" was much less frequently used as a term. "Inclusion" even less so)

This is what is now called #ownvoices (after Corinne Duyvis came up with the term) but back then it didn't exist.

(I am glad that this term exists now, though I see a lot of misuses of it)

This resulted in an immediate increase of my reading enjoyment.

By a lot.

And I felt it was not just my enjoyment, but also overall higher level of..... technical proficiency in what I was reading, all of a sudden.

I can enjoy work that is not very strong on the sentence level, structural level, etc. if I appreciate the themes.

So I expected I would be reading more stuff like that.

But this was NOT what happened.

If anything, overall technical proficiency of the stories increased.

Wow I had to examine my own biases!!! RAPIDLY!!!

As a minority person, I had thought that the stories by minority authors would be weaker on craft...

well, this was due to internalized oppression, to use the technical term....

(I was also conviced my own English was bad!)

So my thoughts were initially along the lines of, "phew, it is good to know that minority authors write just as well on a technical level"

But that wasn't quite it.

It wasn't "just as well", it was genuinely *more*.

And I discussed this with other minority people because I was confused. What was going on!?!!

Before I explain, thank you to the people who discussed this with me back then - I remember @polenth @aliettedb @silviamg Shweta @RB_Lemberg & probably even more people!

@Polenth @aliettedb @silviamg @RB_Lemberg (My views and errors are my own, so please don't blame them for this thread - thank you!)

I quickly realized it had to be related to barriers to writing. If a marginalized writer CAN finally get published, the work is more likely to be excellent because it had to go through more barriers.

I think Silvia was it who had this point that we know there has been progress in inclusion when mediocre work by marginalized authors can also get published.

And maybe we are slowly getting there?? But at that point SFF publishing wasn't there. At all.

So I thought, OK, I narrowed it down to "minority themes BUT this time written by minority writers".

I did this for a few months. It was awesome!

But I quickly developed another problem. A lesser one than previously, but still.

I had gotten to know the work of many awesome writers.

But they did not ALWAYS write about their own marginalization.

They wrote about all sorts of other things too.

And I wanted to (and did!) read those other things, but they fell outside of my reviewing criteria.

So I was like.

Ok, I had gone from:
everything
to minority themes
to minority themes but by minority authors

But maybe I should just do "minority authors writing whatEVER!"

After all, I as a minority author also wanted desperately to write about whatever!!

So I did that.

This was it!! I felt very happy. I was consistently reading awesome, technically proficient work that also resonated with me more.

(Even though the specific marginalizations were almost always different from my own.)

This went on for a few years and I had no issues for a while.

I did face one more issue! (These things are complicated!)

That was when I realized that some authors might not want to SAY anything personal about their marginalization, but still write fiction about it.

So focusing on "marginalized authors only" would exclude people who are not out, and people who write entirely anonymously.

Especially queer/trans writers.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this and my decision was that demarcations are useful, but they can be fuzzier.

So my decision was (this was sometime in 2014 maybe?): I still predominantly review work by marginalized writers.

But I can review the occasional work where I don't know the author to be a marginalized person, or the author is anonymous/pseudonymous.

Of course this does mean that occasionally I review things where the author is a straight white cis etc. man.

I think there was only one novelist among people whose work I reviewed who came out about their pseudonym and did not turn out to be a marginalized person, to be honest.

And also, sometimes I review works that are about a marginalization, explicitly stated to be from an outside perspective, but where I felt I needed to say something new from an inside perspective.

(I do this especially with intersex books by non-intersex people at this point)

I stopped lengthy reviews of short stories around the time I started editing anthologies, because I felt it was somewhat of a conflict of interest / kind of felt weird. People would scrutinize my recs for what I'd buy as reprints.

Editing is slightly different

I generally want to be as open as possible, and not to ask people to disclose anything.

I read atypically fast, so it's ok for me not to narrow the slush pile down and have it reasonably big :) It is still a smaller pool than "all SFF stories"...

But I absolutely see the appeal for restricted-demographic calls. I haven't done one yet. I might!

But e.g., I think @fiyahlitmag or @clrblq etc. are doing great work with restricted-demographic calls.

I often have people assume my calls for submissions are restricted-demographic, because I buy from marginalized writers a lot, and readers look at the end product and do not see the submissions.

But they haven't been(again, I might try at some point - especially with nonfiction)

I sometimes hear editors complain that they get very few submissions from minority authors, even when what they get is excellent.

I think this is a long process of asking people, soliciting, encouraging new authors to submit, phrasing the call like that etc.

I recommend @RB_Lemberg's essay about the topic: strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/co…

@RB_Lemberg (Just to clarify because I reread my thread and maybe it's not very clear, there are many great reasons to do restricted-demographic calls and it's not about the size of submissions pools.

See eg. @fiyahlitmag mission statement - fiyahlitmag.com/the-mission/ )

@RB_Lemberg @fiyahlitmag And also the historical perspective - fiyahlitmag.com/2016/09/01/a-h…

Marginalization-focused venues often have calls that are embedded in tradition and that is awesome.

(Starting something from scratch is also awesome!)

In any case.

This is my ABBREVIATED (lol) story of how I pick/ed what to review and how "quality" comes into play with that.

Obviously "quality" is a very nebulous term.

Technical proficiency is less so, but that is still something where people have different views (especially about plot structure and what is "acceptable" for it).

These views can & should be examined for biases, everyone's, mine too

But that is a very different thread, and in fact I promised to have a thread about inclusiveness re: non-Western narrative structures and how it different from inclusion of settings / characters.

So maybe some time after ConFusion. :) It will be a long thread IY"H so I prepare!

This is it for now - I hope it was interesting to see my process and how I have tried to find which short stories to read, over the past decade or so.

Thank you for listening :)