In Which Gail Carriger Gets Snippy Over Proper Attire

Today Gail climbs onto the proverbial soap box and blogs about something evil, something so base and vile, that you may, just possibly, wish to stop reading right this very moment.

She may offend you.

She is not holding back.

Still reading? Right, here goes.

This is something I believe in, possibly more than anything else, Gentle Reader. So I am going to take the plunge. This is a highly embarrassing topic that everyone seems afraid to broach. Well, I have the courage. Someone must be strong, and I am that person. Yes, we are going to talk about . . . Appropriate Dress.

Let me start this off by listing some inappropriate dress for a convention, mixer, signing, event, party, rout, etc.

* Sweat pants

* Shorts

* Track pants/gym clothing

* T-shirts with offensive slogans (in fact t-shirts with slogans period I would strike down if you are over the age of 30, but I don’t think the SF/F community could cope with the great black void this would leave behind)

* PJs or anything that looks like PJs (for The Love, people!)

* Any article of clothing that has a hole that is not an arm hole, a leg hole, or a head hole

* Similarly, anything that is fraying, pilling, warn through, or sporting any kind of remnant of any kind of food

* Dirty shoes

* An untended beard

* Unwashed hair

I don’t care how alternative you think you are. How much a slacker. What counter-culture you believe you represent. You are none of these things.

You are a slob.

You are disrespecting the authors and presenters (if you’re a fan) and the fans (if you’re an author), not to mention all the other important individuals who have arranged for and attended the event (con organizers, editors, agents, producers, actors). Most importantly, you are shaming yourself and the SF/F industry as a whole. Yes you are. Suck. It. Up.

If you aren’t suitable to be seen in public, than you shouldn’t be in public. Go back, take a shower, take a nap, put on clean respectable clothing.

What sparked this rant, Ms. Carriger?

You might well ask. I was watching a (unnamed, to protect the guilty) video blog of some SF/F convention footage, featuring, I am sad to say, mainly authors. And I was ashamed. Ashamed, I tell you.

Please, let me explain something. Style is not hard. No matter what your shape or income level. All it takes is a tiny bit of time and effort. You can make it hard. I, for example, like a challenge. So do the Goths and the steampunkers out there. But it really doesn’t have to be difficult. And, as the person who spots the problem (namely, me) is responsible for its solution, here are some tips:

* Look around and find someone who’s about your shape and whose style you like. At a convention, in particular, this can work well because people are disposed to be friendly. Go up to them and ask politely where they shop, and how they put together their look. People, in general, love to talk about themselves and will be delighted to tell you.

* Invest in a few good pieces that you can pull out for public appearances in particular: a really nice pair of jeans, some basic black t-shirts, perhaps a sports jacket or a little fitted blazer. Ladies, never discount the inherent joy in one really nice day dress. It is far more important to spend money on basics than on the tux or the uber-fancy gown that you maybe wear once a year.

* You can do quirky, but try to confine it to accessories: hats, watches, jewelry, belts, belt buckles, and the like. Trust me, the people who do head-to-toe quirky put a lot of effort into it, you might want to ease in slowly.

* You have two choices: you can fit in, or you can stand out. You don’t want to fall to the wayside. If you are wearing inappropriate dress you will be dismissed. We are a superficial culture. Most cultures are. Appearance is important. No, don’t argue, it just is. There is no point in fighting this one; 34,000 years of clothing evolution is not something you can muscle down with one pair of ratty sweatpants. Besides, you and I both know the truth of it. You’re just being lazy.

* At a SF/F convention, to fit in, you wear jeans or BTUs, boots or sneakers, and a t-shirt with a nice graphic logo. This is very boring, but so long as it’s clean, at least you don’t look like a homeless person. Cheap corsets and old leather jackets are also known to make all-to-frequent appearances.

* At a convention, to stand out, you can do any or all of the following: go Goth, go vintage, wear a suit, were a nice jacket over your jeans and t-shirt, actually investigate the current trends an go fashionable (this one is hard), go hippy-dippy, go frat/sorority, and/or wear color (there’s an awful lot of black).

Right. So. There it is. Read it and shop!

Yours etc…

Gail

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
~ Oscar Wilde

Bio:

New York Times Bestselling author Gail Carriger began writing in order to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She escaped small town life and inadvertently acquired several degrees in Higher Learning. Ms. Carriger then traveled the historic cities of Europe, subsisting entirely on biscuits secreted in her handbag. She now resides in the Colonies, surrounded by fantastic shoes, where she insists on tea imported directly from London. She is fond of teeny tiny hats and tropical fruit. The Parasol Protectorate books are: Soulless (Oct. 2009), Changeless (March 2010), Blameless (Sept. 2010), Heartless (2011), and Timeless (2012). Soulless won the ALA’s Alex Award. She is nominated for this year’s Campbell award.

Gail will be appearing at AussieCon 4 in Melbourne in September 2010.

http://gailcarriger.com/

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I was six when I realized that I wanted to be a writer.  Prior to that, I thought of books as something that just sort of “happened,” rather like the lunchbox trees in some of Baum’s Oz books.  I figured, in my uninformed, faintly illogical way, that the authors were actually the people who’d harvested the books off whatever weird sort of book-bush they originally sprouted from.  (I never claimed to be a small child who specialized in making SENSE.)  Once I understood that no, books were made-up stories written by actual people, I knew it was the job for me.

It took a while, but I managed–through hard work, hard-headedness, and an ongoing lack of concern for doing things which make sense–to become a writer, and then, eventually, a published writer.  Which led to the next step in my inevitable abandonment of logic: becoming TWO published writers.

As Seanan McGuire, I write urban fantasy heavily informed by folklore, fairy tales, and whatever weird things have happened to catch my interest this week.  My primary series is about a half-fae knight errant in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose rallying cry is “I’m not even supposed to BE here today.”  I write stories about the Fighting Pumpkins cheer squad, whose orange and green uniforms conceal an unfortunate tendency to save the planet (and occasionally die trying).  I write the “Velveteen vs” superhero stories, where a bunny-eared heroine fights evil using psychically animated toys.  I am, in short, a gleefully silly person, even if a lot of my stuff is deadly serious.  That’s a lot of what attracts me to the things I write about; I love the contrast between “cheerleaders in garish uniforms” or “unwilling superheroine in a four-color universe” and “absolutely dire situation.”

Of course, in the middle of all this gleeful carnage, I took a year and wrote a six-hundred-page political science fiction thriller with zombies in it.  FEED has a sense of humor–I don’t think I’m capable of writing without a sense of humor–but it’s not silly.  It’s not brightly colored.

It’s not even tongue-in-cheek most of the time.  I love it, and consider it one of the best things I’ve ever written, but that doesn’t make it fit in with the majority of my work.  So what’s a cheery blonde Halloweentown girl to do?

Become somebody else, of course.

My agent and I knew from the day we started shopping the Newsflesh trilogy that they would probably need to be published under an open pseudonym.

There are a lot of reasons for that.  The easiest to spot is “avoidance of over-saturating the market”–after all, as a relatively new author, it’s probably best if I not compete with myself.  Oddly, this isn’t the biggest reason, just the first.

Genre separation is a much larger part of why I was happy to agree to writing under a pseudonym.  The Toby Daye books are fairy tale noir.

They’re dark, they’re gritty, and they’re occasionally brutal…but I would still hand them to a savvy teenager without fear that their parents would beat me to death with a baseball bat later.  You could adapt the Toby books into PG-13 movies without gutting them.  I don’t cringe when I see high school students discussing them on my forums.  FEED, on the other hand, is distopian political science fiction with zombies.  It has a high body count.  There’s gore, there’s sex, there’s bad language, and I so don’t want you to buy it for your niece who loved Toby on the basis of my name alone.  Putting a different author’s name on the cover is a screaming neon sign that maybe the contents are also going to be different.

So I went into things knowing I’d need a pseudonym, and even supporting the idea.  After the trilogy sold to Orbit, they confirmed that I was going to need to become my own evil twin, and Mira Grant was born.  “Mira”

has a sharper writing style, a more morbid turn of mind, and a much darker website.  Mine is orange and green, hers is black and red.  “Mira” talks about horror movies more, and about cats less.  Because it’s an open pseudonym, I don’t have to work to keep my identities separate, for which I am very, very grateful, as I think my head would probably explode.

Things that are frustrating about being two people: Needing to convince people that I am, in fact, both Mira and Seanan.  Needing to remember to answer to both names in public.  Needing to remember what I’m signing while also trying to remember how to spell the name of the person I’m signing to, because otherwise, you get some real weird signatures.  (I use my doodles to differentiate, a lot of the time; Seanan draws pumpkins, Mira draws chainsaws.)  Needing to maintain and update two websites.

Needing to pack two wardrobes for conventions.

Things that are fantastic about being two people: I have this amazing degree of genre freedom, because I don’t have to be locked into “the kind of books that so-and-so writes.”  Seanan writes urban fantasy and Mira writes science fiction and nobody gets pissed off when there are no zombies in a Toby book or pixies in the Newsflesh book.  I have an outlet for those statements that don’t fit my usual cheerfully macabre approach, since when I’m being Mira, I’m allowed to be a lot grimmer (and vice-versa–I’d go nuts if I had to be Mira all the time, and never got to talk about my collection of My Little Ponies).

It’s weird when people assume my real name is the pseudonym, or somehow miss the memo that I’m actually two people, but it’s also a fantastic, freeing experience, and I’m so glad I’ve had the opportunity to do it.  I am the monster under my own bed.  I think that’s pretty cool.

Bio:

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, where she has made a lifelong study of fairy tales, reptiles, and horror movies.  This combination explains a lot.  Her first book, ROSEMARY AND RUE, was published in 2009, beginning the October Daye series of urban fantasies.

In 2010, she became her own evil twin, Mira Grant, whose first book, FEED, made the US National Public Radio’s list of the Top 100 Killer Thrillers of all time.  Seanan currently lives in a rickety old farm house with two blue cats, too many books, and a reasonably large number of spiders.

She’s been nominated for the 2010 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and is still a little gobsmacked by the last two years.

Seanan/Mira will be appearing at AussieCon 4 in Melbourne in September 2010.

www.miragrant.com

www.seananmcguire.com

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You know, eventually you run out of ways to kill characters. You’ve had it up to here with bad guys and their unhappy childhoods. You’re not sure you can stand another hero/heroine examining critically his/her reflection in a shop window/computer screen/mirror. The sex scenes all start to sound the same.

The pressures of writing a novel are not necessarily what non-writers think. It’s not the alcohol, the hours, the loneliness, the recreational drugs that get you. It’s that sudden worry….

Didn’t I write this before?

Learning to write novels should, in theory, be like learning to write a bike. Master the basics, take off the stabilisers and free wheel down the nearest hill, until the time comes to slog up the other side.

And yet the opposite seems true.

Every writer I know is worried he or she won’t be able to do it again next time out. The more books you write the harder it gets. It’s second album syndrome. (Multiplied by the lesser known third, fourth and fifth album syndrome.)

First books get written on blind faith and adrenaline.

And if you’re staggeringly lucky – and I was – it hits the right desk, at the right time, when the right editor had a slot for that kind of book. All of those are key. Your book being good isn’t enough. The editor has to like that type of book and not already have one like that on her lists.

By the time we hit our second novels most of us know how lucky we got first time round. And we know just how damn hard it is to write a book, rewrite that raw copy, edit the result and send it off.

And by our third books?

We’re worried we’re repeating ourselves. Not realising that’s precisely what most publishers want us to do. This adds complications as we start to think this character reminds me of that one. Didn’t I use that plot device before?

And that takes me back to where I came in.

As a writer you worry you’ll run out of original ways to kill characters. Ideas for novels are ten a penny. Enough plotting software, character schemes, writing aids and how-to books exist to make us all bankrupt if we bought them all. The arrogance of assuming someone will want to read this I take for granted.

The really hard bit about writing is discarding, Didn’t I do this before? And replacing it with, I can do this again.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. Apart from novels he writes for magazines and newspapers. He travels extensively and undertakes a certain amount of consulting. Until recently he wrote a monthly review column for the Guardian.

Felaheen, the third of his novels featuring Asraf Bey, a half-Berber detective, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. So did his last book, End of the World Blues, about a British sniper on the run from Iraq and running an Irish bar in Tokyo. He has just delivered the Fallen Blade, the first of three novels set in an alternate 15th-century Venice

His work is published in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish and American, among others.

He is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, currently editor-in-chief of Red magazine. They divide their time between London and Winchester…

JCG Website

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