Sim Kern Profile picture
Jan 22 5 tweets 1 min read
For those arguing that this isn’t a thing, consider that even though Don’t Look Up was supposedly a blistering satire about COVID and/or climate change, it mentioned neither COVID nor climate change.
Naming a few best-selling authors as exceptions is not the dunk you think it is. I know there are exceptions and clifi gets published sometimes—my whole career is an exception. And I’ve also run into many publishing professionals who will point blank tell you “don’t write this.”
This article came out a month ago: google.com/amp/s/www.lati…
And I’m just going to head off whoever is going to accuse me of not understanding allegory and ask sure, but why was that needed? If these weren’t effectively unmentionable, then where are the non-allegorical representations of the two greatest global crises of our lives?
No one wants me to be wrong about this more than me

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More from @sim_kern

Jan 22
I first learned of Thich Nhat Hanh in 2016, during a weeks-long insomnia brought on by the election. My go-to anxiety-coping-mechanism, drinking, was not available because I was pregnant. I was watching ASMR to try to fall asleep, when I came across one of his guided meditations/
That video had a profound, calming effect on me. At that point, I don't think I had ever, in my adult life, fully inhabited the present moment. Not sober. I could get there stoned, but not on my own. In fact, I'd never really understood what people meant by "being present" /
Pregnant, terrified about *handwave* all I foresaw when Trump won the election and what my kid's future would be like, and unable to use chemical coping mechanisms to deal with anxiety, I started watching every Thich Nhat Hanh video I could find, reading a dozen of his books/
Read 7 tweets
Jan 21
Traditional publishing says don’t put COVID in your stories. No climate change either.

But that means our “contemporary” stories are set in a fantasy alternate reality that gets farther and farther away from the real world every day.
This is the idea thats haunting me most after talking “Art at the End of the World” with @MaryHeglar @amywestervelt and @lyta_gold last night. Podcast will be up next week!
Art is there to make sense of our world and help process collective trauma. Let us process!
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9, 2021
One of the most ethically and politically loaded aspects of writing speculative fiction is just describing how a character perceives another human being they’ve never met. So much world building is packed into every choice you make there.
Do people assume others’ genders on sight? Binary genders? Do they ascribe pronouns to this person immediately? When rendering physical descriptions will your character assume and name race or ethnicity or avoid stating them outright? What do your choices reveal about this world?
And it gets even more complex if your character finds this other character “attractive” on first sight. What beauty standards are involved there, and what does that reveal about the culture of your world, and your character’s role in it?
Read 6 tweets
Nov 4, 2021
It scares me when I see liberals assume that the CRT fight is bound to backfire. McCarthyism successfully suppressed-the-hell out of glaring, powerful truths, leading to a 70-yr of attrition of worker's rights & labor power, turning basic socialist concepts into boogeymen.
"How can you ban teaching truth? How can you ban conversations about the fundamental power dynamics that make sense of our history and present?" Uhhhhh....yeah, remember how our media tells us that providing medical care or family leave are "radical leftist positions"? Like that.
There are liberals in this U.S. who genuinely consider themselves progressive, who lick Elon Musk's boots and spit at Bernie Sanders. The amount of coordinated suppression of socialist thought that it's taken to achieve a populace like that for these oligarchs...I mean, hats off
Read 5 tweets
Oct 1, 2021
Hey #IamNonbinary and I write this book about gender & climate change & ghosts, and if you're scrolling the hashtag looking for something good to read--why not this? Also it's a short lil novella, everyone reads it in one sitting. You'll love it. Yay for nonbinary people.
Gah and I forgot the alt text, sorry. It's a graphic of the cover of my book DEPART, DEPART! and also my headshot and the publisher, Stelliform Press's logo, and then some quotes about how great the book is that I'll link to: stelliform.press/index.php/prai…
And here's some links where you can buy it!
From the publisher: stelliform.press/index.php/sim-…

From Bookshop: bookshop.org/books/depart-d…

From Amazon: amazon.com/Depart-Sim-Ker…
Read 4 tweets
Sep 24, 2021
A major media outlet only just paid me for an article I wrote over 2 months ago, and only after exchanging over 30 emails with their editors and accounts payable department. I spent 2x as long trying to get paid as I did writing the article. Not the first time this has happened.
My first job in journalism was writing a series of music and culture articles for the Houston Chronicle’s youth culture blog—called 29-95–which folded, and I never got paid for those. I only followed up about 5 times before giving up because I was 22 and didn’t know better.
Earlier this year it took me about 6 months to get paid for another article. It seems like outlets either PayPal you right away, or you have to take a part-time job hounding them for your couple-hundred dollars they owe. Is this just a me problem or systemic?
Read 4 tweets

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