Gender bending along with a contest

The contest portion of this experiment is over. Please feel free to go through the stories and test your ability to guess the author's gender. There are a total of ten excerpts and stories. If you just want to skip to the big reveal, click here.

The original post:

I want to do an experiment, and I need you, the readers, to be my lab rats.

Now before you protest, you must know that I'll be gentle and there will be cheese.

Last week, a group of us were talking about whether readers make automatic assumptions about the contents of a novel when they see a woman's name on the cover. Part of this has to do with the Guardian article that talked about women taking male pseudonyms in order to trick male readers into reading their novels. The other part has to do with my own experience using my real (read: female) name when publishing Miserere and some of the assumptions that were made about Miserere's themes.

I question whether readers can really tell if a book is written by a man or a woman based on the prose alone.

So I and one other author, who shall remained unnamed until the end of this contest, summoned some of the finest writers in the SFF community, and they have kindly pledged a sample of their work for us. Each author has written a short scene (approximately 500-1000 words) or a short-story and has chosen a pseudonym. There is a mix of men and women. I will post one scene or story a day (omitting weekends and holidays).

THE TASK: Tell us, based on the prose, whether the scene was written by a man or a woman. At the end, I want to tabulate the results and see if readers can really tell the difference. If you want to, you may say why you feel a particular scene was written by a man or woman, but you don't have to.

Yes, as a scientific study, it is full of holes and sucks, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. This little test is an itch that I've been wanting to scratch for a long time, especially when I read the Fantasy Reddit and I don't see a single woman listed for best novel in 2012. I know women released books in 2012. Perhaps I'm hanging out in all the wrong places.

Or maybe the "female-authors-equal-romance-y/YA-ish-themes" connotation is true in readers' minds, so maybe some of you are skipping novels by women entirely. I wonder. And when I think too much, I tend to get into trouble ... or hold a contest.

THE CHEESE: You have a chance to win free books.

After the last scene or story is posted, I'll draw one grand prize winner. Each author who has participated in this exercise will send the grand prize winner one copy of a novel of their choice (some of the authors have multiple books published, so I've left it to the author to choose). You will have a chance to win a novel from one of these authors: Mary Robinette Kowal, Myke Cole, Mazarkis Williams, Mark Lawrence, Alex Bledsoe, Shiloh Walker, Damien Walters Grintalis, and Diana Rowland. When I announce the grand prize winner, I will hook the pseudonyms up with the real authors' names.

I will throw in a copy of Miserere, so the grand prize winner will be eligible to win at least nine books at this time. 

THE RULES: The contest is open internationally. You may comment once on each sample. All you have to put in your comment is whether you believe the sample was written by a man or a woman.

I will drop the name of each commenter who guesses correctly into an Excel sheet. That means that if you correctly guess that scenes #1, #3, and #6 were written by a man, you've got three entries in the contest.

You've got a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

The cheese will be awesome.

And I will be gentle.

The contest will begin tomorrow (December 20, 2012) with the very first sample. Help me spead the word ... and let's see if we really can tell whether the prose is written by a man or a woman ... or is it all in a name?

Questions? Put them in the comments of this post.

random notes--the macrocosm

It is important to keep in mind a central idea of the Indian tradition, namely that of levels. There is a hierarchy of levels within a person, in the society, and in the cosmos. The lower levels in all these are lower precisely because their insight and understanding is not as subtle nor as comprehensive as it is at the higher levels.

For example, those parts which are at a lower level in a person or in humanity wish to live by their own likes and dislikes and not by what is good or right for the whole person or the whole society. Those parts of us, or those among us, which understand the needs and requirements of the whole, need to control, persuade, or coerce the lower parts to obey the higher vision. Otherwise, there will be chaos internally, in the society, and in the cosmos, leading to a violation of right order (dharma) and of wholeness. --Ravi Ravindra

The Inner Journey: Views from the Hindu Tratition, edited by Margaret H. Case

Parabola Anthology Series, Series Editor Ravi Ravindra

Miserere giveaway--the winners!

First I want to thank everyone, and I do mean everyone, who tweeted, reposted on Facebook, Reddit Fantasy, and added links to this giveaway from their blogs. You guys are just so wonderful. I really mean that.

Someone mentioned PR in one of the comments, and let me tell you something, lest any of you ever forget: YOU are a debut author's PR Department. Word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit Fantasy, Fantasy Book Critic, the fans, and the book bloggers ... you have all done more to help me get the word out about Miserere than anyone else. I wish I had a copy to give to each of you just to say thanks. You guys have given me so much in terms of publicity and I just want you to know how much I appreciate your help.

Unfortunately, I have only three copies for this giveaway. A total of sixty people put their names in the comments for the drawing (59 comments and one email entry). I entered the names and email addresses into a spreadsheet and the following winners were selected by the great and mysterious Random Number Generator.

Congratulations to:

K.E. Bergdoll in New Jersey

Hansbert Emmer in Austria

Hosszu Edmond in Budapest, Hungary

I'm thrilled that I have a book going to Austria and one to Hungary--two countries that I haven't had the opportunity to send books to yet.

Thank you to EVERYONE who took a few minutes out of their busy schedule to enter.

random notes--La Santa Muerte

Okay, so I research my short-stories too.

Don't judge me.

In order to embrace my characters and their thoughts, I like to take the story, characters, and culture seriously. I also tend to believe that there is a lot more to creating a culturally diverse character than just changing skin-color. When I'm not familiar with the cultural aspects that I want to portray, I dig into research.

With this particular story, I had no idea where to begin with sources, so I DM'd Sabrina Vourvoulias and asked if I could email her. She graciously answered my questions and based on my idea, she recommended several sources but also mentioned a saint called La Santa Muerte. She suggested that was where I might find the supernatural edge that I wanted for my story.

So I sharpened my Google-fu skills and dived right into the an Internet search where I ventured across a documentary directed and produced by Eva Aridjis. The price was right, so I ordered a copy.

La Santa Muerte is a realistic, compassionate look at a saint that the Church repudiates, but who has found a home in the hearts of many people who consider themselves devout Catholics. Aridjis chronicles the story of how La Santa Muerte came to be venerated as a saint, who worships her, and why. Then she goes on to talk with woman who owns a shrine to La Santa Muerte, in addition to several people who visit the shrine on a regular basis.

To understand the Church's opposition, Aridjis interviews one priest, who explains, quite eloquently I might add, how the Church arrives at this distinction. The essence of his view is that the Christ overcame death through his resurrection and offers eternal life to his followers. Jesus vanquished death, which is seen as the enemy; therefore, to make death a Saint is to repudiate the Christ. He is quite logical about the whole thing and presents his case as a gentle lecture.

However, followers of La Santa Muerte don't consider themselves Satanists by any stretch of the imagination. They see La Santa Muerte as possessing roots in the pre-Colombian goddess of death Mictecacihuatl, and in the mother goddess Coatlicue, and consider her a part of their heritage.

A lot of people in the U.S. associate La Santa Muerte with cults and human sacrifice, because a lot of people in the U.S. believe everything they see in the newspaper, which tends to sensationalize the more lurid aspects of anything foreign or unknown. The cult of La Santa Muerte is not given entirely to drugs or drug smugglers. People who live in poor neighbors with high crime often venerate her too and her popularity seems to be spreading.

While the Church has a tendency to condemn those on the fringe of society, La Santa Muerte accepts everyone--the downtrodden, homosexuals, the addicts--she makes no distinctions, because in the end, it is she who comes for us all.

I thought it was a fascinating look, not just into how one religion is absorbed into another, but how people cope with intolerable situations and find hope for themselves and their families.

If you're interested, here is the trailer:

breaking the taboo

This is not about SFF or writing, so if you're one of those folks, you might want to skip this post.

Breaking the Taboo is a documentary I heard about through Twitter and last night, I watched it online. The captioning was splotchy in places for me, but I didn't need to see a lot of detail about how the "war on drugs" came about, because I watched a lot of this take place as it happened.

I'm still watching it unfold and it gets uglier every year.

It's sad when I start reading Latin American newsfeeds to work on my Spanish and my vocabulary is expanded to words like desaparecido (missing), secuestro (kidnapping), tráfico (in connection with drug trafficking); asesinato (murder); presos (prisoners)--I could go on, but you get the idea. I don't think you can turn three feet of ground down there without hitting a mass grave or a body. Executions are rife and don't kid yourself and say the ones who are shot were involved in the drug trade and deserve what they got. The number of innocent people caught in the crossfire on both sides of the border is staggering.

Something has to give somewhere. They're sick of the violence in Mexico and our prisons are full to bursting, which brings me to the one thing that I liked very much about this documentary: they talked about addiction as a health issue, not as a criminal issue.

It was worth watching just to see how they handled the drug problem in Portugal. They do the worst imaginable thing to addicts there--if someone is caught with drugs, they have to see psychiatrists who specialize in addiction. Imagine that.

I was impressed by the former presidents of both the United States and Latin America countries who were willing to offer candid views on what worked and what didn't work.

The cartels continue to operate at full capacity. Last I heard, they were building underground labs in Mexico to produce meth. They are slipping meth samples into marijuana shipments to broaden their customer base--meth is cheap to make and highly addictive--a win/win for the cartels. Americans continue to self-medicate at an alarming rate and once hooked, "Just Say No" is a joke.

Whether you agree with everything in Breaking the Taboo or not, I think it's important to watch. I also think it's very important that we start talking about alternatives. I don't think we should ever stop fighting addiction or drug abuse; however, I do believe that we have reached a point where we need to shift our tactics and open up some honest dialogue on the subject.

If you want to watch, here is Breaking the Taboo. I'm switching off comments to this post to encourage you to leave your comments at YouTube.

Peter Jackson’s version of The Hobbit, or True Confessions

Where Teresa once more says what she really thinks while risking the wrath of fandom everywhere, but for what it is worth …

I’m just not that into Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, and after some of the early reviews of Jackson’s version of The Hobbit, I’m even less into his work. It’s not that Jackson is incompetent as a director or filmmaker. Quite the opposite, his films are high on technique and innovation, which is what these early reviews extol. Kudos are given to 48 frames per second, but the story is described as bloated and “stretched thin.”

Don’t get me wrong. When Jackson brought The Lord of the Rings to film, I loved it, I really did. He shot some very poignant, lovely scenes that I still remember, and he spoon-fed the story to me so that my brain wasn’t cramping about genealogies and impossible-to-pronounce names. Even so, when I watched The Lord of the Rings, I realized that story was secondary to technique for Jackson. The emphasis was on the beauty of the settings, and not just with hobbits and elves, even the darker scenes with the orcs and Sauron were stylistically appealing.

And therein lies my particular difficulty with Jackson’s work—he is all about technique and The Hobbit, out of all of Tolkien’s works, is all about story. That was why I was so crushed to see Guillermo del Toro leave the project. Del Toro has an intimate grasp of story-structure and knows how to weave technique and story to bring a visually stunning and coherent piece of work to the screen.

Whereas Jackson brings us a lot of pretty eye candy, which can be nice, but like all sugary things, tends to rot the brain. Jackson is innovative in his art and I know he’ll bring new things to the films that he’s created; however, flash and glamor and 48 frames per second isn’t why I watch movies. I’m there for the story.

And while we’re into heresies, I’m just not that into Tolkien either.

There.

I said it.

The Fellowship of the Ring held my attention, The Two Towers sent me into a coma, and I skipped the first two-thirds of The Return of the King just so I could get to the end. Out of all of his novels, I loved The Hobbit the best, primarily because it was so unpretentious. The themes were simple, and as I became older and developed a better understanding of what led Tolkien to write The Hobbit, I loved the story even more.

Hence, I’ll be skipping The Hobbit, and The Hobbit II, and The Hobbit III ... The Hobbit XX ... The Hobbit LXXXI ...

picks and pans--Dolorosa & In Midnight's Silence

This is a works in progress sort of thing that sort of gives you an idea of how my stories emerge and broaden.

For Dolorosa, I keep getting the coolest scene in my mind:

Catarina awakens and her first sensation is the pain, stabbing her body, like needles in her blood. Then Cerberus' tongue darts out to touch her cheek.

The demon presses his lips against her ear and whispers, "Do you know, Darkling, how long it is to the end of forever?"

That one is simmering in the background and becoming more viable by the day. I also had a portion of Chapter One of In Midnight's Silence (the sequel to Garden in Umber) pass the old crit group last night. It was fun to write and I don't know if it will stay in the final cut, but sometimes I like to use little scenes like this to help establish a sense of place, character, and time:

From his window, Diago noted that the innkeeper had closed the doors in the archway so that the street was no longer visible. The little man dignified his hostel with the name Casa de Carlos; although the locals referred to it as the Casa del Cachorro, which was apparently the innkeeper’s nickname, the puppy.

With his large ears and bright eyes, it was easy to see how Carlos came by the moniker. He possessed a boyish face, but his demeanor was as stern as any priest. Carlos dictated that they must be inside the courtyard by midnight; otherwise, they would be locked out. He informed them that he ran a respectable establishment and didn’t tolerate drunkards or whores; he prided himself on the fact that people slept safely within his walls. Furthermore, if either Guillermo or Diago didn’t abide by the house rules, they’d find themselves on the street, regardless as to how far in advance they had paid for their lodgings.

The pious speech inspired Guillermo to quip that Carlos didn’t simply look the puppy, he yapped like one too.

What are you writing?

Worldwide Miserere giveaway ...

NOTE: This contest is offically over. Please see Miserere giveaway--the winners!

Okay, people, here is the deal:

I was cleaning the house--yes, yes, I know, the end is truly here--and I noticed that I still had a box that contained several copies of my debut novel Miserere.

Hmmm, said my brain.

My brain says that sometimes over mundane things.

What can I do with this box of books?

Frankly, I'm getting old, and it's becoming more difficult to keep moving that box of books around, and the holidays are here, and I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy ...

Okay, I'm NOT feeling warm and fuzzy, but all the rest is true.

So I'm giving away some books.

To be clear: these are autographed, first print runs of my debut novel Miserere: An Autumn Tale. I will sign the book to you or to the individual of your choice in case you want to give one away as a gift. If you want no name in it so you can pimp it on Ebay, that's cool too.

I'm flexible like that.

In order to enter the contest to win one of THREE SIGNED COPIES OF MISERERE -- leave a comment and tell me how you found out about this contest. One entry per person. I'm serious about that.

The contest will run from Monday, December 3, 2012 -- Monday, December 10, 2012.

If you have difficulty leaving a comment, FOR ANY REASON, just click Contact Me and shoot me an email. Same rules apply. Tell me where you found out about this contest.

I will enter everyone into my magic Excel spreadsheet and will charge the sacred Random Number Finder to pick three winners.

Worldwide.

What are you waiting for?

Comment!

random notes--crossbow specialists

Although ballesteros did occasionally utilize the bow in combat, the English longbow never quite caught on in Iberia. In the Iberian military the ballesteros were men highly specialized in the use of the crossbow.

By the fourteenth century, this weapon [the crossbow] was often built from a combination of wood, horn, and sinew. The bolts or arrows, narrower than they had been before, were designed specifically to pierce armor. Their effective range was probably about 100 meters. --Castillian Reform under Alfonso XI by Nicolas Agrait

Because they were valued for their skills with the crossbow, the ballesteros usually avoided hand-to-hand combat; however, they still wore light armor and carried swords or daggers for their defense.

I write like ...

... me.

And you should write like you.

Each of us brings a unique perspective to our stories or blogs. We shouldn't be pressured by other bloggers or other authors to write what people THINK we should write. It's important to present diverse viewpoints, otherwise we become this homogeneous non-people with our thoughts dressed in gray.

Write the stories you want to read. Write them with your unique voice.

Write on ...