Guys... I'm getting royalties!
Wha...?
I've been writing seriously for seven years, publishing for six. This is the first royalty I've ever received. Granted, it's not much, but it's there. It's a royalty cheque (deposit). Guys... I think... I think I'm a writer now...
So, uh, thanks for buying my books, Australia! I know what I'm going to spend that eleven dollars on!
Food. I'm going to buy myself some food.
That wasn't what I was planning on blogging about this morning, I was just so blown away when I read that email first thing today that I had to say something!
What I was intending to blog about it this:
Fellow Canadian author and wonderful person Renee Miller is doing a little experiment. She put out a call last week for her writer friends to submit a piece. She wanted to test the assertion that one can tell the gender of the author by the style of writing.
She, like myself, believes that this assertion is absolute horse shit. And she wanted to expose it for the horse shit it is by conducting a reader experiment. Essentially, she asked her writer friends to submit a short piece, and then posted them up for her readers to judge whether or not the story was written by a male or female writer.
Please, please, do participate. You can find the premise, the rules and the stories all here. Read them, and guess which stories were written by writers of which gender. There will be a second batch to guess, so be sure to participate then as well.
I think this is a very interesting experiment she's doing, and I do hope that many people participate.
As you know, I'm not in agreement with gender roles at all. I think they're stupid, baseless presumptions of ability based on nothing but stupid presumptions of imagined differences. Anyway, I don't want to get started on it, because I could rant for days how utterly full of shit gender roles are, and I want to spare you that.
I would like to remind you, however, of that time I plugged my writing into a computer programme designed to guess the gender of the writer, and my results were thus:
59% Male
41% Female (or European male)
Anyway, those who know, know that I'm about 100% female, so the whole "writing is gendered" thing is utter horse shit.
Anywho, do check out Renee's experiment, and buy one of her awesome books while you're at it, m'kay? I have things to paint, so, uh...
Ciao!