(no subject)

I read Daily Science Fiction, which means every day for a while now I've woken up to a story in my inbox.

I've noticed something really strange about the fiction I receive: the stories I enjoy are written by women, and the stories I hate are written by men. Both men and women fall in between those two points ranged out along the "indifference" spectrum, but thus far, DSF has yet to publish a story by a man that I enjoy. I don't usually read the author byline at top, so it isn't until I hit the author bio that I go "yep, a man." Sometimes it's obvious-- the rapetastic or the thoughtless, 12-year-old boy power fantasy (granted I've only seen one of those so far, which is a superb ratio for SFF publishing)-- but other times it could go either way, and only my gut feeling of "no sir, I don't like it" suggests the author is a man, and then I hit the author bio and yep, it is. As far as I can tell there's no hidden cues in the stories that allow me to make such a distinction-- the stories are all very different from one another-- so really all I have is love it/hate it to go on, but thus far, the record has been spotless.

Today I see a story from an author named Damien. And it was really good! "Oh wow, there's at least one man submitting to DSF who can write, and write a female protagonist that doesn't get raped!"*

Then I hit the author bio: Damien Walters Grintalis lives in Maryland with her husband, two cats, and two rescued pit bulls. She is a member of the HWA, an Assistant Editor of the Hugo Award-winning magazine, Electric Velocipede, http://www.electricvelocipede.com, and is represented by Mark McVeigh of The McVeigh Agency. You can visit her blog, dwgrintalis.blogspot.com, or follow her on Twitter @dwgrintalis.

"...Oh."

That'll teach me to assume, I guess.

This isn't to say that one gender writes better than another, so much as a trend I've observed from this specific publication in a couple months of reading it. Though it is a pretty amusing refutation of the idea that you can tell men and women's writing apart, and women just can't write as well as men.

Oh, and check out her blog, she has some short story recommendations that are absolutely fantastic, like this one: Lessons from a Clockwork Queen from Fantasy Magazine.

*I will try to avoid stories written by men about female protagonists if it's outside the YA genre, because rape is inevitable. The last story I read was on DSF a week or two ago and it involved the main character unwillingly selling sex for food-- and guess what, folks, coerced sex is still rape. Women do have other services they can sell. You know, like anything else useful in a post-apocalyptic society. Yet authors will always have them raped or somehow coerced into sex because the sum of their characterization is what lies between their legs. It's not only male authors who rape their female characters, of course, but I haven't read a story in years (YEARS!) written by a man with a female main character who is not raped or assaulted, and most of my reading is male-authored so it isn't like I have a bad sample size.