Opinion: More Fuel for the Recent Baenfire

Since 2006, I’ve dyed at least part of my hair pink, usually a few locks near my face. The dye comes in a kit from L’oreal and doesn’t require bleaching beforehand ““ brush it on, wait thirty minutes, and wash it off. Voila, cartoon-bright streaks among the (once-prematurely) graying strands.

The first time I dyed it, I was about to head off to my first Wiscon ““ a large feminist science fiction convention held yearly in Madison, Wisconsin. As I’ve found the case at sf conventions since then, I wasn’t the only person there with an odd hair color; I glimpsed rainbows of pink, blue, and green. And I realized it was becoming. Complete strangers would lean over and whisper, “I like your hair,” including two flight attendants on the way home.

After the con the color faded, softer and softer, until finally, when I went to get a haircut, the hairdresser was cutting away dusty rose tips. I looked in the mirror and saw a middle-aged woman with a short, practical cut.

I bought a new kit on the way home and re-pinked my hair that afternoon.

Since then it’s become a ritual following each haircut. I go in and see it trimmed away until only the faintest hint of color remains. Sometimes I take advantage of this time to do my shopping in sedater department stores like Macy’s or Nordstroms, excursions that I think of as “passing for surburban.” Then I go home and re-dye my hair. I’m always a little self-conscious those first few days of screaming fuchsia, when I have to sleep with a towel over the pillow to keep the pink from leaving traces on the pillowcase. I try to time these days to coincide with a science fiction convention or some similar event.

I use that as an excuse when people ask me why I dye it. “I’m a sci-fi writer and it helps fans identify me at cons,” I say. That’s the partial truth. It’s part of my brand. But it’s also more than that.

Sometimes people interpret it for me. When my mother was recovering from surgery for colon cancer one year, I visited the hospital every day and used the valet parking they provided. “I know why your hair’s pink,” the elderly valet confided to me one day as he took the keys from me. “Are you a survivor or is it a relative?” I realized that he thought I was part of the flood of pink that month against cancer. I couldn’t bear to disillusion him, so I said something to him about my mother, and he went on to tell me about the women in his life who had struggled with cancer.

That’s another reason why I dye it pink. People talk to me. There’s something about the color that draws them to ask about it or say that they like it. The only person I’ve ever found who disapproved outright was a relative’s girlfriend. She didn’t last. My hair color has.

But more than that, the pink forces me to talk to people as well. I’ve habitually toed the line between introvert and extrovert, depending on which Meyer Briggs results you look at, and I like the fact that the pink pushes me outside myself, makes me be socially brave in a way I’ve sometimes retreated from.

The pink’s a favorite with people. I tried purple one year, a vibrant, almost fluorescent purple that required bleaching the hair beforehand, a painful process I will never repeat. Some nuance of the purple made it seem more confrontational, less welcoming than the pink. Fewer people came up to say something about it, although I was startled at one point when a man behind me began stroking it. “I couldn’t resist the color,” he said.

I have been advised to avoid blue. “It ages one,” a friend said, although I’ve admired the turquoise shading of Camille Alexa, a fellow speculative fiction writer, at several cons.

I worry that L’oreal will stop making this particular brand. I’ve got five boxes of it stockpiled under my sink. I figure I’ll commit to the color until the year or two that the boxes represent are past. After all, who knows what advances in hair color may have been made by then?

It took a while for my mother to get used to it. Finally one day, when we were coming out of a store, she chuckled. “Did you see that man?” she said. “He smiled at your hair. I guess anything that makes people smile is okay.”

And I agree. If I’m making people smile, I’m doing something right.

I’m lucky to live in Seattle, where hair is often not its natural shade. I’ve found when I visit the East Coast, particularly in the southern areas, people are not quite as welcoming of the color. They’re more likely to surreptitiously (or so they think) point it out to each other. I haven’t traveled abroad with it yet.

And I’m lucky to work at home as a writer, with no boss to object to the pink. More than once someone has wistfully said, “They would never let me do that at work.” That seems a shame to me, much like seeing the trainers at my gym wearing work-mandated band-aids over tattoos lest they shock the sensibilities of the patrons.

The hair color also lets people spot me in a society where being a middle-aged woman is often a cloak of invisibility. Sometimes that’s unwelcome. I’d rather fade into the crowd, which is much harder to do when pink-topped. That’s why I love sf conventions so much, why they feel like coming home to my spiritual tribe. At Penguicon I rubbed elbows with a woman whose wheelchair was tricked out like a Victorian mechanical contraption, complete with sporadic puffs of steam, a strapping young gentleman costumed as Thor, and a woman whose baby was dressed up as a miniature robot, complete with blinking lights. Indeed, at Norwescon, a local convention that’s particularly costume heavy, I look positively sedate.

It’s strange that I engage in this particular cosmetic practice. I’ve always resisted make-up. I put it on and, despite the best teachings of my mother the former Mary Kay representative, I see a clown-faced stranger in the mirror. The pink hair allows me to feel like I’ve managed some effort to dress up. Combine it with the right shirt, and people assume I’ve carefully color-coordinated outfit and hair.

But I cringe, just a faint recoil, when I look at those shirts in my closet: the crisp peppermint striped or hibiscus and butterfly printed shirts gleaned from the local Talbots outlet. Because here’s a secret: I’m not particularly fond of pink. I was never a Barbie girl. I like deep purples, turquoise, and emeralds.

In fact, I resent the way pink’s been mandated for little girls. I worry that I’m doing this to make myself less threatening to men, that I’m saying, “Look! I’m a feminist, but a fluffy pink harmless one.”

But I tell myself to stop over-thinking it. It’s a color, not a lifestyle. I embrace my pink and claim it. Which adds another dimension to it for me: it’s ironic statement as well as fashion one. It says I don’t give a damn about what other people consider age-appropriate. “This is me,” my hair says. And I look damn good in pink, or so I think.

Or maybe that’s just ego talking, an overly healthy one bolstered by all those strangers telling me they like my hair.

Among the things I’ve done in 2017:

• In writing, I did the works listed here as well as turning Hearts of Tabat (so MANY thanks to my awesome editor, Kevin J. Anderson) into the publisher (also Kevin) and starting book #3, Exiles of Tabat, which I’ve got about 40k on so far. I didn’t publish any book-length work, but I’d had two in late 2016 (to the point where I was thinking one had come out this year) and will have at least two in 2018, so I guess it all evens out.
• Lots of new classes for the Rambo Academy, including guests like Alex Acks, Jennifer Brozek, Cassandra Khaw, Rachel Swirsky, Paul Weimer, and Fran Wilde.
• In skill acquisition, I added how to cook sous vide, coffee roasting, basic lockpicking and (even more basic) scuba to my overall character sheet. I also learned how to load and shoot a pistol, along with basic gun safety.
• In fear conquering, I swam with sharks (twice) and took a self defense class.
• In travel, I visited Orlando, New York City, Indianapolis, and Pocatello (ID) in the US and Dominical and surrounding areas in Costa Rica.

Notable highlights of SFWA-related stuff:

• The Singularity, SFWA’s electronic newsletter, an entity I kicked into existence and which Kate Baker and Terra LeMay have coaxed into blossoming, has a regular, predictable monthly schedule now, and is always full of useful and timely stuff. This newsletter has garnered consistent compliments for its friendly but professional and informative feel, and it’s provided a new way to let SFWA members know about SFWA stuff they might want to take advantage of, as well as to share their own appearances and projects with each other.
• SFWA’s excellent Executive Director Kate Baker said a few years back, “I want to make the Nebula weekend -the- premiere conference for professional F&SF writers” and I said, “Tell me what you need to do it.” This year’s Nebulas were fantastic; next year’s will be even more, including having Data Guy there to present on the industry, an effort that’s taken a couple of years to get in place.
• The SFWA Storybundle had its first year and was wildly successful, as was the Nebula-focused HumbleBundle. The Storybundle program will grow 150% in size in 2017, which sounds really impressive but just means 3 bundles instead of 2. Plus – SFWA’s Self-Publishing Committee has taken that effort over, so no work for me! (Last year I read a bajillion books for it.)
• A long, slow revamp of Emergency Medical Fund stuff driven by Jennifer Brozek, Oz Drummond, and Bud Sparhawk is coming to its final stages. I just saw the EMF stewards in action: they received an appeal, evaluated it within 24 hours, and within a week, if I am correct, funds had been disbursed. The Grants Committee just wrapped up its 2017 work; next year it’ll have even more money to play with, thanks to the aforementioned Nebula HumbleBundle.
• Over 50% of the membership participated recently in the survey that went out this year, so we have some data about who the members are and what they want. I would like to think that the high participation rate was driven in part by enthusiasm for what the organization has been doing lately, but it might have something to do with the idea to offer a chance to win one of the ten $25 Amazon gift cards we gave out for participating.
• Many of the steps talked about in this discussion of the Fireside Fiction’s report on black writers in speculative fiction and what SFWA could do have been or are being put into place. One thing I’d like to find in 2018 is a volunteer who might coordinate diversity efforts, searching for opportunities where they might dovetail in order to strengthen and inform each other as well as helping make sure we’re examining and evaluating results to see how we’re doing, etc.

I appreciate the many of you who have joined or renewed their memberships specifically because of things I’ve done; it gladdens my heart when you tell me that, but I want to stress that it’s a team effort. That’s because this year I have increasingly experienced a wonderful thing, which is that I will say, “Hey we should do X,” and someone will reply, “Already on it, here’s what’s been done and the overall action plan/timeline.” Dan Potter, Derek Kunskën, Erin M. Hartshorn, Jeffe Kennedy, Jonathan Brazee, Kate Baker, Sarah Pinsker, Steven H Silver, and Terra LeMay, among others, have all given me the precious gift of moments like this in 2017. You folks rule.

When I first came on board a few years ago, I sometimes felt like I was wandering through a morass of undone things and incipient crises. Some plates that had been in the air had fallen and shattered, sometimes disastrously. As I got them back up, it was a panicked dash from one plate to the next at times, and I know I dropped my share. But now more and more of them have their own dedicated spinner, usually with a fallback person in the background, and that lets me stop long enough to take a breath.

I’m kinda amazed I got as much done as I did in terms of writing and teaching. Certainly some words that I otherwise would have written this year got sacrificed on the SFWA altar, but I think that will be less so in 2018. *fingers crossed* (If you enjoy my stories, please consider supporting the Patreon effort; $1 a month gets you at least one story each month; double that to get weekly writing tips and resources.)

So what’s ahead for 2018?

• I’m editing two projects. The first is Godfall and Other Stories, a solo collection by Sandra Odell. These stories are brutal and great, and I think this is an outstanding collection, particularly after coaxing a couple more stories that will be original to the collection out of Sandra. That will come out from Hydra House in April. If you’re interested in finding out what Sandra writes in a super timely way, she has The Twelve Ways of Christmas, a collection of speculative holiday stories, available for $4.99.
• The second project, which is still taking submissions, is an anthology of political SF focused on the aftereffects of 45’s era, which will come out around the same time as the elections. It’s called If this Goes On and will appear from Parvus Press.
• I’ll be writing at least one Tericatus and The Dark story for an upcoming anthology I got a solicitation for.
• I am insanely juggling three novels and need to just buckle down and knock them off one at a time. They are, in the order I plan on doing so in 2018, The Five, a YA space opera (currently at 30k, destined to be somewhere in 70k range), the sequel to Hearts, Exiles of Tabat (Hearts was 120k, suspect Exiles will be as well, currently around 30k done), and an urban fantasy, Brazen (got 20k written, will be in 70-80k range.)
• I have enough SF stories for another collection. Maybe two. Debating whether I want to approach a small press or self-pub those. I have around 50-60 flash stories, depending on how you define flash length, that I am putting together in a book for Patreon supporters and can after that can use to accompany the Flash Fiction class.
• The Idea to Draft book is so! close to being done and I just need to get butt in gear and finish it up.
• In Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers news, both old and new live classes will be offered in 2018, including ones from Ann Leckie, Rachel Swirsky, and some of the other guest teachers. Ditto with the on-demand classes – right now I’m working on turning Writing Steampunk and Weird Western into written form. Many thanks to Jim Johnson for pointing out areas I’d overlooked; the overall class will be much stronger as a result.
• Conventions I definitely plan to be at in 2018: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), Norwescon, the Nebula weekend, Worldcon, and Snake River Comic Con.
• I do have one very large and absolutely terrifying project up in the air, getting ready to launch in 2018. It is not a creative effort but a political one. Stay tuned for info on that or drop me a line if you’ve been looking for a place to put some volunteer time/effort in 2018.