Multiple identities

Oh. I missed a week without even realising it had passed! I'm just that much of an air-head.

What have I been up to lately? Well, I've started gathering proper notes for my dissertation on Angela Carter. I turned 20 without much fanfare (think a salad at Nando's, playing Mario Kart Wii, Jenga and a "compliment circle"). I went to Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention - incorrectly introduced to me by the Sensei as a writer's convention...

Which isn't to say that I didn't have a good time. The two of us had a good ol' wander around the ExCeL centre, gawking at art and shoving our business cards at people like some lame interpretation of Batman and Robin. She kept calling me "Baitman" so I guess that makes her... [insert clever comeback here].


We also sat in on a couple of panels; one was about using pseudonyms and the other was about rewriting gender defaults. I learnt that having a pseudonym can be a really critical, calculated process by marketers and authors which sort of ruined the magic for me. Some authors use pseudonyms so they can branch out into other genres without their fandoms getting mixed up and to reduce accountability if their new experimental work completely tanks.

Personally, I think that last one is a selfish reason. It seems to me that by using a pseudonym for that purpose, the same authors get to flood the market with their stuff while taking up space for actual debut authors who are looking to enter any genre for the first time. What the established authors are doing... It's sort of rude. Like they only care about getting their stuff published - and yeah, they should, but not to the extent that it damages the prospects of a writer who isn't already represented.

Sure, you may want to branch out into other genres and maybe your writing won't sell as well but that won't damage your already established genres. Nobody is going to care if you write in one genre really well and then you try something else that doesn't work out. Your first genre is still going to be respected and you'll still have the fans from that genre. I get it if your name is something like Percival Indigo and you usually write flowery, deeply emotional romance novels and want to have a stab at hard-boiled American detective fiction. In that case, maybe the pseudonym P.I. Dustbowl makes more sense for the genre, especially for readers within that genre who might look at a detective novel by a Percival Indigo and think it's a bit of a joke.

Although now that I've written that, I'm starting to wonder if Percival Indigo doesn't sound like a good name for a writer of hard-boiled detective novels. I mean, it's just a name. A name doesn't necessarily have to separate out one writer's genres, does it? I know I'm fairly new to this side of the novel game but it does seem like it's a marketing ploy and nothing else. Multiple pseudonyms in order to dominate different genres is not what I want to sign up for, but feel free to correct me if that isn't what they're about.

The gender panel was a lot less infuriating in the long run (apart from the problem with the lights - I'll tell you about it another time). The argument boiled down to the very essential: it is not necessary to split the world into two gender binaries in speculative fiction. In fact, it's ignorant and ridiculous, since two gender binaries isn't even all there is in the present, let alone an imagined future that includes possible alien species coming for tea. The lesson to learn? Gender: it doesn't just have two options. Don't try and make it seem like it does in sci-fi because the world will see you for your insufficient representations of people.