Good morning, Readers!

Today is a fantastic day.  It's still as hot and humid as Satan's balls outside, and I still hate it, but I'm in a fantastic mood at present.

Why?

Well, every Monday since training at Carleton went on hiatus, I have been participating in a table top RPG game test.  The gaming system was designed by my good friend and one half of the awesome team behind JenEric Designs (Check them out.  Do iiiiiiit!), Eric Desmarais.

It's called FADDS, and is a really fantastic gaming system.  I hope that it gets published for wider use because this game is fun as f... Hell.  Ahem.

Eric, incidentally, is the wonderful human being who did the layout for Human and will also be donating his time and expertise on doing the layout for Sky Road Walker.

I am having the time of my life!  This game has been so much fun, and the people I play with are so much fun!  Really, like most things in life, it's the people who make it so awesome.

By the by, the character I'm playing is based heavily on a character I wrote in my science fiction novel Skylark.  She's a tough merc. with foul mouth and a massive crush on an opera singer named Veronika... (Veronika is played by another member of the group).  I have been having so much fun.

And so much epic and ridiculous shit has happened this game...  I will be writing it all out after I've moved house and everything is settled.  It'll be going up on wattpad.com.  And, to tell the truth, if I had the funds, I would turn the events of this game into a YouTube miniseries.  It is so funny, with great action, and fantastic characters.  All the people playing the game would be offered roles as their characters.... It would be a glorious thing....

Oh the things I would do if I had the funds!  Anyone feel like dropping twenty million dollars in my lap?  No?  Oh well.  Le sigh.  You know, just as an exercise, I think I'll write up the scripts for a miniseries anyway.  It would be a good writing experience in a format I'm a currently unfamiliar with.

In other happy news, the other half of the awesome duo behind JenEric Designs (seriously, would you check them out already?) has some awesome news I must share.

Yesterday, Jen Desmarais signed a contract.  That's not her actual hand, her pen or the actual contract in the picture above.  That is clip art, you fool.  She posted a photo of the real thing to Facebook.  Yesterday, Jen became a published game designer.

I am so proud of her, by the gods!

It's a game about sex.  I will deliberately leave you hanging on this one.

There isn't much to tell about the game yet, but there will be!  I promise I will keep you posted on it, mostly because I'm so excited for Jen and I want the world to know about this game.

Jen will be published by Renaissance Press, who do games as well as books.

Speaking of Renaissance Press, they currently have a fantastic game that you can pre-order.  Are you or do you know a fan of Jane Austen?  They have this amazing game you must get for yourself or the Austen fans in your life.  They're up for pre-order, so head here and buy a game... or three.

And back to JenEric Designs, they are currently running a competition, and you should enter.  Go here for details.

Alright, I'm done gushing like an idiot.  I'm off to do this Welsh lesson for the umpteenth time.  I'm struggling with this one guys!

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

So, I painted another thing.  Here it is:

You may have seen me grumbling about it on Facebook or Twitter.  True story: I'm not fond of this one.

Granted, the concept was very ambitious.  I don't think I have the skill to pull it off, I'm afraid.  I'm quite disappointed with this effort.  Fifteen hours of work, and it ended in sadness.  On the bright side, at least I finished it, instead of just deleting it like I have done to so many things that did not live up to my expectations.

My perfectionist tendencies are something I'm trying to work on combating (some of you may remember that I wasn't especially happy with 'Ware the Wood Wight either, though overall I was proud of the effort).  It's really fucking hard, guys.  Really hard.  Perfectionism is paralysing.

I look at other art on Deviant Art and I'm simultaneously blown away, and so envious I could cry.  I know I shouldn't be comparing, but honestly, I feel like my stuff looks so... stupid...?  childish...?  utter crap...? compared to the incredibly beautiful pieces on there.

This piece very nearly didn't make it.  I almost hit the delete button on it.  However, I have been reading a lot on what makes people successful, and one of the big things was being okay with imperfection.

I'm not okay with how imperfect this art is.  But someone else might be.

I can pick a million things I hate about the above work that I've spent so damned long on trying to make beautiful.  Someone else might fall in love with it.

The point is, no successful artist became successful by hiding their art from the world.... No living successful artist, at any rate.  Lots become successful after they've passed.  I wonder if they ever struggled with the quality of their work?  I wonder if they ever saw a piece they did and feel nothing but sadness and frustration?  Probably.  Who knows?

So, despite really not liking it, I've decided to make prints available for people who do.  They're right here.  Now I'm off to go be sad for the rest of the day.

And to learn Welsh.  That, at least, is something I can do.

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

This morning, I spent breakfast reading this article from Buzzfeed.  The headline caught my attention because I am a self-described cynical agnostic, which is to say, I really don't believe that there is some higher power constantly worried about the state of each individual's soul.... but I'm open to the idea.

I'm also quite superstitious and do believe in the distinct possibility of certain supernatural phenomena...

Ghosts.  I'm saying I believe in ghosts.

Anyway, personal beliefs aside, there was one sentence in the quotes provided in the article that struck me mute a moment.

I could have stopped reading there.  That explained the purpose of my pointless existence.  Maybe not the create life part in the literal sense...  Kids are expensive, yo.  But giving wonder?  I can do that.  I want to do that.  Can I do that forever, please?

That's what writing is to me.  It's creating a sense of wonder.

Remember when you were a kid, and the world was full of wonder?  When I was a child, I was encouraged to use my imagination.  To that end, there were faeries living in our garden.  I was a moon child, sent to hide one earth because there was an epic battle raging back home, trees had thoughts, and magic was real.  Sadly, as I grew I lost this sense of wonder in the world around me.  Pressure to "grow up" meant abandoning all ideas of magic and possibility, and that left the world looking a little more dull, and little less wonderful, and so much more difficult to bear.

I rediscovered that sense of wonder in books.  My heart thrilled as I turned the pages and fell exciting tales of good versus evil.  The dreary, hard, upsetting real world faded away.  That thrill, that sense of wonderment, is part of what I love about reading so very much.

I've mentioned it before, but reading saved my life.  It taught me a whole lot about the goodness in humanity when all I could see was the worst.

It has taken a long, long time to come around after shutting myself away from all the hurts I experienced as a young girl.  There's been a lot of unravelling of biases and undoing of automatic defence mechanisms.  Slowly, oh so slowly, I have been regaining my childlike sense of wonder.  I'm starting to feel like anything truly is possible.

Books, both reading and writing them, have helped with this.  My writer's mind hears words whispered in the leaves; trees speaking to one another with the aid of the wind.  It sees dancers in the clouds as they scuttle past the sun on a cool autumn day.  My writer's mind knows that there are spirits walking beside me.

None of that is, objectively, real, but it doesn't have to be.  The beauty of imagination is that the mere possibility that it could be real is enough to spark that thrill, that sense of wonder.

It is my life goal to impart the same thing to anyone who may pick up one of my books.  Writing does this.  Writing fills the world with wonder again.

This is my purpose, in an objectively pointless existence.  It's what makes my living at this point in time worthwhile.

That, and the knowledge that I will haunt you all when I die.  MWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

Ladies and gentlemen, registration for Can-Con 2015 is now open.  What is Can-Con, you ask?  Well, from their website:

I have been attending since 2013... 2012? 2011?  Crap, I've forgotten.  I've been with them for a while, is what I'm saying.  I first went to Can-Con with nothing but one book and some artwork to sell.  They were all very warm, and so inviting, and just generous and giving and GAH!  I was overwhelmed with how incredibly positive my experience was.  It has been the same every year.

Their acceptance of me, little old me, who felt like a massive fraud walking amongst all these actual writers, that gave me the confidence to call myself a writer.  They have been and continue to be the best of people.

In short, I love Can-Con, and I have since I first attended.  It really is all about fantastic Canadian speculative fiction, and it's an absolute blast.

If you are interested in speculative fiction, and you want to meet some great Canadians who are great at it (and have the chance to sit in on a slew of fascinating, funny and brilliant panels), you must register.  If you are not, 1. what the hell are you doing reading this blog? and 2. you still must register.  Yup.

You can do that HERE.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD, DON'T MISS OUT.  You will regret it.

Why are you still here?  What the hell?  Go register!

And then come back, because I have to show you the best ad. for a political campaign I have ever seen in my life.

Back?  Sweet.  Here it is:

Okay, I have work to do.

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

Guy! Guys!  Guys!  GUYS!

Ottawa is getting it's own archery tag arena!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

In case you missed it entirely, I'm so incredibly excited for this.  You see, since learning about Archery Tag some three years ago, I've been wanting to do it.  Then, last year, I found out there was an arena in Toronto.  Sweet!  That's my birthday sorted.... we'll go to Toronto and play some Archery Tag.

But, "No!" said the universe.  "I've got one better."

And then, this year, an arena in Ottawa announced its arrival.

So... That's my birthday sorted.  They announced their grand opening this morning.  I've got plenty of time to plan this birthday bash.

AND OMG I'M SO EXCITED!  EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, though.  I'm ridiculously excited.  Like... want to form a competitive league excited.

If they had sports like this in school, I'd have never gotten even remotely chubby!

This and running around the field with Nerf foam swords would have made school P.E. classes the best things ever.  I'd have happily been part of a competitive melee team!

Want a taste of how Archery Tag works?  Here, watch this (and try not to get excited about playing):

And now I'm off to dance in my seat while learning Welsh.

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

Many, many thanks for all your support and thoughtful comments regarding my last post.  I haven't come to a decision yet, but I am leaning heavily towards keeping things as they are.... mostly because changing branding would be quite a costly operation, and I'm poor.

There was on wee sentence of one comment that caught my attention, largely because it struck a chord with me.  That sentence was this:

I've written about this before, but I think it bears a lot of repeating.

I used to hate being a girl.  A lot.  So, so much.  I despised it with every fibre of my being.

It wasn't that I identified more with the boys or that I felt I was a boy.  That's not it at all.  I was a girl.  I knew I was a girl.  There was absolutely no confusion as to my gender.

I just really hated being a girl.

Why?  Well, girls were presented in a very negative light to me when I was growing up.  Girls were weak, they were dumb, they couldn't play sports, they couldn't do maths, or science.  They weren't capable of forming any valid opinions.  Any opinions they did manage to form were to be immediately disregarded as inferior.  Hell, they were not even valid confessors to our own experiences.

Don't believe what a girl says.  Why not?  Because she's a girl, dummy!

In fact, I quickly learnt that a girl's only worth lay in her appearance and her ability to attract attention from the opposite sex.  Those girls who happened to break the mould and actually be clever were automatically presented as repulsive at worst.  At best, they were invisible, an ostracised little duckling clutching her books to her flat chest and pining after the jock.  I mention flat chests because girls with a little more up front were immediately regarded as being brainless.

I have personal experience with this.  I was constantly treated as an idiot by strangers because I happened to have rather large breasts for my age.  For the record, I hated those too.

The fact that I was a girl meant that I couldn't enthusiastically share my love of science fiction and fantasy, because girls didn't read that stuff, and most of my female classmates - if they read at all - bought into that narrative.  The fact that I was a girl meant that I had no one the chat with about how awesome video games were, because girls weren't supposed to like that stuff, and most everyone I know bought into that narrative.  Girls weren't supposed to like swords, or play fighting, or action movies.

In fact, because I was a girl, when my mother told a director (who had come to our little amateur theatre group to help us stage a production of Oliver) that I was a writer, he turned to look at me and said, "Oh? Romance?"  I was so insulted.  I'm fairly certain my expression screamed insulted disdain (mostly because my mother quietly admonished me for it) and I flatly replied, "Fantasy."

Because I was a girl, the automatic assumption was that I wrote romance, when in fact, speculative fiction was where it was at for me (and still is).  Again, I was a girl, and therefore not really meant to be into speculative fiction.

I adored all of these things, but I felt wasn't allowed to publicly do so.  Because I was a girl.

And I hated it.

It led to a very aggressive rejection of everything feminine.  I threw everything associated with the feminine out of my life.  No dresses.  No make up.  No boys.  NO PINK!  The feminine came to mean all the things I was told it was - weak, silly, untrustworthy, vapid.  And because I wasn't these things, I decided that female though I was, I was not feminine.

It has taken a long, long time and a good deal of self-reflection and deep, personal work to bring myself around.  It has also taken a fair few really wonderful role models.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am realising that the feminine isn't the evil we've been led to believe.

Feminine isn't weak.  It is strong.  It has power.

It isn't vapid or stupid.  It is intelligent.  It is clever.

It doesn't hate swords, or play fighting.

And it is possible to be the whole package.

A few years ago, I started wearing skirts and dresses.  I experimented a bit with make up... but only a bit.  I'm still not all that fond of the stuff, and I know only the basics.  I let a large part of myself I kept hidden from the world out, a small piece at a time.  I had closed it away because I thought it was everything I hated; everything I didn't want to be.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to realise that there is absolutely no shame in being feminine, or embracing the feminine side of yourself.  Because feminine is not weak.  It is strong.  It has power.  It is not foolish, or vapid, or idiotic.  Being feminine does not mean being lesser, no matter how hard current society is trying to scream otherwise.

And don't be fooled.  Society is still screaming this bullshit:

It's a work in process for me.  There are deep-seated prejudices that I had spent so much time buying into I have to work hard to drag my thinking out of it when I'm confronted with them (the colour pink, for example).  These are prejudices that a whole whack of people buy into, whether consciously or not; which is why I feel feminism is so needed and why I identify as a feminist.

There is no shame in skirts and dresses, or in in make up, or jewellery.  Feminine is not weak.

So be careful about making assumptions about that girl wearing that dress.  The dress isn't the whole story.  She might just be able to kick your arse; because femininity isn't weak, or vapid.  It's high time we stop treating it as such.

Now I'm off to kick arse in another language.

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

WARNING: The following post is a expletive-laced rant containing feminism. You've been warned.

So... How are you?

I'm having a small crisis.  You see, yesterday the always wonderful Marie Bilodeau wrote THIS blog post about writing as a woman.  She wrote it after having read THIS article, which I later went back and read.  Another awesome Ottawa area writer, Linda Poitvin, had tackled the issue earlier in THIS article, which I only read yesterday.

And you know, having read all this, I feel a deep sense of anger.  And shame.  I also feel shame.

I'm angry because I know it's tougher out there for women writers than it is for the men.  MRAs get lost.  There is plenty of evidence that confirms it.  In the study of human interaction, it's called unconscious bias.  The people discriminating against women are often not aware that that's what's going on.  They don't realise that they're passing on brilliance because the name at the top of the manuscript is feminine.

Some people are perfectly aware.  I've had a male friend remark to me that he deliberately avoids books written by women because (and this is a direct quote), "They only ever write about relationships."  Fuck you.  Fuck you right in your ear.  First of all, everything is relationships.  That epic battle in the gladiatorial arena I just finished writing?  That's about a relationship.  It's the relationship that gladiators have to one another, about the relationship they share with the audience, with their owners, and with the fat prick who decides their fate at the end of each fight.  Now, none of these are particularly healthy, but they are relationships.

Political drama? Relationships.

Intelligence Thriller?  Relationships.

It's all fucking relationships!

Secondly, I write genre.  In my opinion, I write good genre.  Relationships (in the strictly romantic sense) do happen in the stories, but they are not the story.  They are not what my books are about.  Fuck you for assuming that I don't know how to write genre.  Fuck you for thinking that the only genre I would write as a woman is romance.

Note: there is nothing wrong with writing romance.  Plenty of people absolutely adore reading it.  But don't tell me what I write because of your idiotic fucking notions of what it is women writers do.

I've also had an argument with a man online, who claimed that the inability of many male writers to write convincing women is perfectly acceptable.  Writing convincing women is hard.  But if a woman write does not write a convincing man?  Well, she's just not a good write.

Clue: if a writer cannot write a member of the opposite sex in a believable way, they are not a good writer, it doesn't matter their fucking gender.  Writing is hard.  You don't get a pass because you have a penis and "writing women is hard."  Writing is hard.  Period.

I also, as I mentioned, feel ashamed.  I consider myself a feminist.  And yet, knowing the bias surrounding women writers (particularly those of us writing genre), I chose not to embrace the struggle.  I opted for my first two initials and my surname.  I mostly chose it because I thought it looked really cool.

I still think it looks pretty cool.

But I also chose that because I knew how difficult it is for women writers.  I researched ridiculous amounts before deciding to try and earn a living from my writing.  I knew it would be harder to do so if the name Sonia Carrière was on the book cover, instead of S.M. Carrière.

And Marie and Linda are absolutely right.  This bias against women will not disappear unless we make it disappear.  The bias will not go away until it is normal and unremarkable to see a woman's name on the cover of books.  That can only be achieved by having women's names on the cover of books.

Yet so many of us are hiding behind gender neutral names or even masculine Nom de Plumes in order to sell our books.  Because so many agents pass on books written by women.  So many publishers refuse to publish books written by women.  So many readers refuse to purchase books written by a woman.

I hide behind my name.

And now I'm caught.  I've spent a lot of time building S.M. Carrière.  Do I switch?  Should I stay on brand? It is my name.  But it masks my gender.  I'm not contributing to the fight.  But I've spent so long building up S.M. Carrière.  It's starting to become recognisable.  This crisis is upsetting me.

I've never hid the fact that I'm a woman, or that I'm a feminist (the worst kind of woman, ammirite?) when writing this blog, or making appearances (to be fair, it would be ridiculously difficult to disguise the fact that I'm a woman when I'm out making public appearances).  I just wanted to give my writing the fairest shot at success I could.

And I feel I've let my gender down.

And for what?  I'm not even remotely successful as a writer.

Anyway, that's my mood today and why.  I'm going to forget about it for a while and just practice some Welsh and get back to my writing.

Ciao.