World-Building in Collaborators – Thinking About Gender

As the concept for Collaborators took shape, I realized that one of the key issues was power: power that comes from advanced technology, power that comes from military superiority, power that comes from idealism, power that comes from love, and power that comes from political advantage. But also and especially, power that relates to gender. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to address the issues of power without talking about gender.

People – that is, we Terran-humans -- often confuse gender, sex, and sexual orientation. Sex identification arises from biology, and most of us are either male or female genetically and phenotypically. That is, we possess either XX or XY chromosomes, and our genitals conform to the norm. These are not the only possibilities (you can have XXX or XXY, for example) and problems arise from the societal demand that every person fit into one or the other category. This has nothing to do with “masculine” and “feminine,” which are cultural interpretations, or with who a given individual is sexually attracted to. The binary division of male and female, while appropriate for many people, does not work for everyone.

Gender, on the other hand, has to do with how you experience yourself, a personal sense of being a man or a woman (or both, or neither). Each of these is distinct from sexual orientation, which has to do with an enduring physical, romantic, and emotional attraction to another person. Gender has been described as "who you want to go to bed as, not who you want to go to bed with."

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Sherwood Smith on Writing for the Long Haul

Over on Janni Lee Simner's blog, Sherwood Smith talks about "keeping the flame burning" as we struggle through what's called midcareer:

"I think killers of inspiration are unexamined literary habits and complacency, but also, there is an insidious one: the conviction that one must speak an important Message. In my years of reading all the works of authors who had long careers, one pattern I’ve noticed is that for many, the earliest, written-purely-for-fun works are those that last, and forgotten are the later ones, wherein the writer—perhaps with sharpened skills, certainly with hard-won wisdom—gave in to the temptation to summarize all that hard-won wisdom in One Great Novel."

Gosh, been there, done that. Or rather, wrote for fun and then tried to pontificate on my own work as if it had cosmic importance. I do write about things that matter to me because I enjoy reading stories that have layers of depth, but I want -- and do my best to offer -- a whopping good tale first.

Read the whole thing here: Sherwood Smith on Writing for the Long Haul - Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches