Wednesdaily

[ellenmillion]

Public Service Announcement

I got hit by this livejournal exploit. I edited it out of my last entry (not counting the twitter post) as soon as I got up this morning - you might want to do the same, if you got hit. It also explains some major changes in media embedding.

Business as Usual

I thought of some progress I was going to announce today in my blog. It was grand. I can't remember it now.

Art and Authoring





So, this is a concept sketch for a calendar plate for River Twine. It's due at the end of the month (eek) and I randomly received the month of March and have to include three particular characters. Things I'm working on here: strong sense of depth, lighting and color (known weak areas in my art). You can't see those last two elements yet, of course. The concept I'm going for is an unexpected early spring thaw - Blacksnake (the foreground character) will have to go around the long way to safely cross this river.

I also worked on the slums picture from two days ago, but the progress is fiddly and minuscule enough not to be worth scanning.



Home and Health

House still not sided. Jake and I are taking bets that they don't finish it until spring. He's half convinced we're going to get 98% of a siding job for 1/2 price because they forget about us. (We paid half up front, with half due on completion.)

It snowed yesterday! Big, fat, wet flakes that mostly melted on the ground. Then it rained. Then it sleeted, then it snowed some more. There was an icy white glaze on things when we got up this morning. Winter... is trying to be here.

Planning

I have to deal with warranties this afternoon - I get of of work at noon today. Our subwoofer, DVD player and my Roomba have all pooped out, so I will probably be spending most of the afternoon on the phone. Whee.

Linking

Are women role models missing in speculative fiction? http://mizkit.livejournal.com/503409.html (Catie links to several other bits of the discussion in her post.)

My take on the topic is that I never noticed they were missing, either. In fact, I remember being surprised to find that one of the books I picked up recently was from the POV of a male. (It was one of those first person books and I jumped in with the wrong assumption, so it was a shock a few pages in.) I'm actually hard-pressed to think of any that don't have strong female characters.

This sort of carries over into many discussions I've had with people about gender discrimination. As a woman who excelled in engineering and worked in a machine shop, you'd think I'd be in the thick of it, but I've never really experienced gender discrimination*. I'm not sure if it's a factor of where I live (Alaska, where men are men and women win the Iditarod), a peculiar personal blindness to the topic, or just a bizarre set of circumstances that has always shown me strong, capable women doing well at whatever they set their minds to.



*Okay, there were a few times that people would come into the machine shop where I worked and ask for someone in charge. When I was it, they would look a little surprised, maybe even a little abashed, then I'd do their job for them, and they'd leave happily. But that wasn't ever so much 'you're a girl, you can't do this,' just 'you're a girl! Good for you!'

Comments

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Your artwork isn't visible. Doubtless another thing to grumble at the hackers for.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

As much as I'd love to heap more blame on them, this was my own dumb 'whoops, I forgot to upload it...' It should show now! :)

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

You could do cool things with the water around those ice-chunks. If you want to make it really clear that Blacksnake can't cross here, I'd make sure the near "shore" is depicted as ice with some cracks too. Otherwise, an athletic person might well be able to jump it, especially with friends there to help if zie falls short.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

Oo, you're right. It does look like a manageable jump right now. I'll add some cracks!

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Just thinking back to high school track...

[pixiewildflower.livejournal.com]

Great sketch work!

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the gender thing -- that's generally been my experience as well. I read the post you linked to with a strong sense of deja vu. Although I did, and still do, read quite a lot of books with male protagonists (I read a ton of SF and what's generally termed boys' adventure books when I was a kid, like the Black Stallion books and such) I also read a bunch of books with female protagonists and in general, the idea that I was only supposed to identify with female characters never, ever occurred to me until encountering critical gender theory as an adult. Actually, I laughed off the whole idea at first, because it was so alien to me -- I'd never experienced a lack of female characters in my life (or female writers, for that matter) and the idea that I should even *care* was a novel thing for me. Ditto for general lack of gender discrimination or weirdness -- now that I've lived Outside for a little while, I think Alaska is actually much better about that sort of thing (frontier mentality and all that, plus we're a fairly young state, demographically speaking). For every guy I've met who discounted me because I'm a girl, there have been dozens and dozens who took for granted that I was competent and intelligent, and in fact looked up to me as one of the few people who could fix the office computers. *g*

All of this meant that it took me a really long time to stop discounting other women's experiences (in my head, if not to their faces) and to recognize that there are actually still significant issues out there -- I think it's mostly a combination of luck (such as the way that I fell, quite by accident, in the middle of a group of mixed-gender and mutually supportive friends in the notoriously misogynistic comics industry, insulating me from the kind of horror stories I've heard from other women) and geographic accident, growing up in a state and a generation that generally seems to recognize and appreciate female competence. That, and not particularly having trouble laughing off the incidents of genuine misogyny that I *do* run across; it's more of an aberration than an everyday occurrence.

Having said that, it's been interesting to notice that the more consciously aware I've tried to become of gender theory, the more I've been noticing the subtle way that my own writing reinforced some of those ideas without me even being aware of it. Like the fact that both of my graphic novels use the Women in Refrigerators trope pretty heavily (i.e. a wife/girlfriend/female friend dying as a plot device to motivate or cause angst for a male character). In fact, while I do have both male and female characters, prior to actually making an effort in this area I tended to write a highly disproportionate number of women as victims and men as the characters in the story with power and agency. It's certainly not that I'm going to toss all my male characters and write nothing but women -- but I'm making an actual effort to put a little more thought into stereotyping my characters into certain roles based on their gender (and their ethnicity and sexual orientation as well). It's kind of disturbing how easy it is to do it without thinking about it.