Okay, so I’ve realized I have to bite the bullet and learn to do some graphics stuff or else be dependent on other people, which is irritating. So here’s an attempt at a postcard advertising my classes, which I thought I’d use at cons to promote them. I know this is lame, but suggestions are very welcome. First up is a different font, I think.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
So let me start out by saying I screwed up, and in a way that I should have known better than to do. The problem is that the Wayward Wormhole intensive writing workshop that I’m hosting is in one way absolutely not up to standard, and that is its lack of accessibility. This is particularly unacceptable given that I have called out inaccessible venues in the past.
I’ve also called out economically inaccessible stuff, and yet this workshop, unlike the other school efforts, does not have guaranteed scholarships in place to help make the workshop cost easier on anyone, although we’ve structured fees to try to fund at least two scholarships this year.
I made this poor choice in part because ““ while this is not an excuse ““ 2022 was the year of the biggest changes of my life (the end of a 20+ year partnership and a cross-country move) and I just let the wheeeeee castle vibe carry me along past any thoughts other than how do I make spending my birthday in a Spanish castle a reality? And when the voices in my head stopped saying that and one in the back nervously raised its hand and said hey what about accessibility, I told myself we’d addressed that by making sure there was a virtual version.
Except now that I’ve thought about it, that’s not enough, because the virtual version lacks some features that the on-location includes. So I apologize to the community for setting a bad example. I apologize to my teachers for having involved them in this ethical lapse. And I apologize, abjectly, to my students for having let them down in this regard.
Given that I have already made a substantial down payment that is nonrefundable and which I can’t afford to lose, what are the material steps I can do to show I understand I fucked up and mean to make it right?
So. There you have it.
Best,
Cat
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One of my projects this year has been fleshing out the on-demand version of the live class I teach, “Hex Engines & Spell-Slingers: Writing Steampunk and Weird Western.” I recently finished up the project and wanted to share some of the results.
Here’s the sections and the suggested reading lists.
Problematic aspects can — and often do — appear when working with the steampunk genre, primarily because of the typical setting of the Victorian era. One thing you want to remember about the Victorian era is that during this time the British Empire is exactly that – it’s an empire. At this time the British Empire is working to control the territory it already has and expand into the territory it does not yet control. It has a lot of colonies, and many explorers who want to find new lands to add to those colonies. England’s not alone in this. Many of the explorers being sent out are bent on conquering in some way. Coupled with that is the fact that the lands they are entering are in fact not uninhabited, but are often occupied by civilizations older than England’s.
Looking at the history of this time period, brutal stories are told over and over again – there’s a lot of economic oppression and sometimes the removal of legitimate governments. So when you write in this era, you will want to consider issues of colonialism (control of dependent countries) and imperialism (the policy of expanding an empire through the establishment of colonies and conquering other countries). It is important to remember that for many people, especially those who are “othered” in some way, the Victorian era is not a pleasant one. It is an era of tremendous racial discrimination and attempts to legitimize that discrimination in any way possible. One in which white women are struggling to get the right to vote, homosexuality is illegal, and society in general is incredibly repressive to the point where furniture legs are covered to avoid their suggestive nature. You will also want to think about how industrialization affects the poor. London fog for example doesn’t have to with the weather, but rather all the factories that are churning out coal smoke.
Representation and diversity has not been steampunk’s strengths in the past. Today more and more writers are trying to change this and writing steampunk stories featuring characters who are people of color and using them very effectively to confront a lot of these issues.
Supplemental Resources
Essays:
Websites:
Fiction:
When it comes to problematic history, steampunk isn’t alone. Weird Western also has its own issues. Just as Victorian England had an imperialistic approach to the world, the western expansion of the United States into the already inhabited territory of the “Wild West” was accompanied by its fair share of atrocities. Native Americans were displaced and often killed, and their land given to white settlers.
The latter half of the 19th century is marked by the American Indian wars – constant battles, massacres, and overall brutal savagery on the part of the settlers expanding into the frontier. Reading the history of this time period is both intensely saddening and informative as well as something you will want to have a working knowledge of if you are writing Weird Western.
One thing I suggest doing when you are writing Weird Western is to figure out the actual date of the story. Since you are writing alternative history, it may be slightly different, but chances are these wars will be going on unless you have compensated for them in some way. And in turn, those events will be having an influence in the world you are creating.
One of the big issues we have when writing Weird Western and dealing with the Wild West in general is we have an impression that has been supplied by the mainstream media, particularly Hollywood. This version has been incredibly whitewashed compared to historical reality. Despite what we see in movies and television, the first cowboys weren’t early John Wayne prototypes, but actually Hispanic vaqueros, who spread northward from Mexico into the United States (as well as south into Argentina).
Many Hispanic cowboys in the Wild West were ones who chose to remain in the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, when the land they were living in, which had previously belonged to Mexico, became the American territory of California. They soon discovered that the citizenship they had been granted didn’t protect their land from white settlers. At the same time laws were passed that were intended to discourage them, such as laws preventing traditional celebrations on Sundays for being “too loud” and other laws known as “greaser laws” which permitted the police to arrest and imprison Mexican Americans on vagrancy charges if they were unemployed.
Something that has been usually overlooked in media depictions of the Wild West was that one in four cowboys were black. In fact, the historical inspiration for the Lone Ranger was a fascinating man named Bass Reeves – a former slave who was a U.S. Marshall for 32 years. In 1860 1/3 of the population of Texas were slaves that had been brought by settlers to Texas to maintain their herds and ranches.
Another group that gets introduced to the American West to serve as labor are the Chinese, who are brought to America and the west not just to work on the railroads, but also in the gold mines. In fact in the latter half of the 19th century, most of the larger towns contained a “Chinatown.” There was a very pronounced gender imbalance in these communities, which contained less than 5% women. Once again, much like the Hispanic population in California, as the Chinese population grew, laws were passed to limit them, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted immigration from China for 10 years.
All sorts of diverse and interesting figures abound in the real life stories of this time period. Some of these are also women passing for men, or else carving out their own space, like Calamity Jane or Belle Starr. When you are writing your Weird Western stories, don’t write just a version of that generic Hollywood vision, but instead use the fact that the Wild West was far more diverse, complex, and interesting to give your writing those qualities as well.
Supplemental Resources
What to check out the full version of the class? You can find it here. Or if you’d prefer the live version, here’s details for that.
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(horror, flash fiction) 2. Zombies can turn up anywhere. If your mom dies in her sleep, she’ll become a zombie that doesn’t care whose brain she’s (slowly) eating.
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6 Responses
Is the whole graphic the post card, with the cat image in the background? Don’t feel you need to lose valuable space for your words by scrunching them together in the corner. Give them a little room. One tip is to keep your sentences short and sharp, something a person can digest in a glance. I’d suggest your opening line read: Take your writing to the next level! Fewer words, and a sharp declarative.
I like that Courier-type font. But I am no designer.
Fwiw, a friend has used GIMP to design his own covers for four of his books; he says that once he got used to the interface it was a pretty powerful program. (I assume from the title of your post that you’re playing around in GIMP.)
Just my few thoughts. And of course, like literary criticism, this is all IMHO, and use or don’t. I could be full of crap. It’s been known to happen before.
Nice photo selection and the weighting on the lower right feels pretty good for asymmetry. I agree, you want a nicer looking font. If you’re just doing this as an online ad, you have a lot of choices for fonts meant to be read on the screen, although with higher resolutions that starts to be mitigated and you can have a wider range.
Use higher resolution unless this is meant to be 640×480 (which will only work as an online ad).
You might want to rethink the crop of the image. Show more of the eyes at the top of the cat glass bulb, right now there’s just a sliver, not enough to give us the “it’s looking at me” feeling, and not cropped off. It feels like a mistake instead of being on purpose.
I would suggest rewrite second paragraph to continue focus of first sentence. “Be launched to new heights of productivity as Cat Rambo’s online classes teach you”¦” or some such. While the focus of the sentence is still the reader, burring them six words in defuses the hook. Also, make the ad about them. Sure, it’s for your classes, but as David Ogilvy (I think) said, “I could make an full page ad in the NYTs that was only text. The first line would read, ‘This ad is all about you”¦’ and you would read the entire ad.”
Try ghosting a white box over the background instead of a solid blue box. The white will need to desaturate, and push the tones of the photo toward the lighter end of the spectrum to make the text as readable as possible. the box also feels a little large, it’s too close to the center, but not on it. Think of proportions of 2 to 3 or 3 to 5 for a more pleasing arrangement (this small, I would go with visual proportion instead of by the numbers).
You don’t need the “http://”, at this time most kids get that part, and very few of us old timer ever type it in anyway. The “www.” is enough for people to get it’s a website (actually, the “.com” is all that’s needed, but some people’s configurations differ). That will help the text look a little cleaner.
Finally, with the line breaks it feels to me like you’re shaping the text (the ragged right makes a nice over all curve if you average out the ends). And both paragraphs end with one word on the last line. Try to avoid that.
Hope that all helps.
I like the design, but I’m iffy on courier, but anything other than Comic Sans is probably a win. I have played with GIMP a bit now and like it, though I do prefer InDesign and Photoshop which I used regularly back when the fed paid me to design
As irritating as I know it is to depend on other people, I’ve learned that sometimes it’s better to use my time on my strengths, rather than trying to learn something that other people have already mastered. I mean, if you truly want to learn graphic design, that’s one thing. But if you would rather be spending your time on writing, editing, and teaching, then it might be wiser to delegate the task out, rather than learning the idiosyncrasies of GIMP and the rules of graphic design. Perhaps you could trade postcard design for a story crit or something? I’d be happy to help you out, as would, I’m sure, many other talented graphics people in the SF-writing world. (Not to say that your postcard attempts so far are horrible–they’re fine and should suffice for your purposes. Just that, as a visual arts person, I do see a bunch of things that could be improved to help make them better. As an editor, you know how it is…) OTOH, if you want to learn because you want to learn, then I’m happy to give you tips.
I think that’s true, and for something important, I’d spring to hire someone. But I’d like to be able to throw together prototypes, at the least, I like messing around with graphics, and sometimes when one is a habitual procrastinator, it’s good to know these things. 😉