It's only just now March. Total short stories completed this year: 3. Total novel chapters completed this year: 1. That's, erm, twice what my New Year's resolution said, though by my unofficial revision thereof I'm behind on novel chapters. This is okay, though. I'm all out of contests and anthologies to sub to, so I have more time to work on said novel.

Total submissions in the mail at the moment: 5.

Total wordcount this year: 19250. Holy fuck I feel productive!

Oh, and you can now read "Render Unto Caesar" at the Fortean Bureau. Once again, art has been made to go with one of my stories! It's really cute art, too. PH34R /<1773NZ \/\/17H H4L0Z.

This weekend I'm going to clean the house and work on papers. Buffy party tomorrow, too!

Please stop masturbating in public about what SF is, isn't, was, or wasn't. Your lamentations about the State of the Industry--as if the Industry were some synchronic, undifferentiated Thing--are embarrassing, because the State of the Industry changes dramatically from publisher to publisher and month to month, if not minute to minute.

You seek to "describe" us, thinking that it is preferable to pigeonholing. News flash: You can't. We can't even describe ourselves. We like it that way.

Please, describe me. Tonight I finished a tech-heavy story about extraplanetary colonization, loyalty, corporate ethics, and data mining. Two weeks ago I finished a story containing fantastic elements, and a number of readers could not decide whether those elements were metaphorical or literal. This was on purpose. I wrote a story about linguistics and post-human creatures who inhabit a dreamworld and a horror anthology bought it. What genre do I write in?

If you said anything, you are wrong. And I will happily point you to dozens of others like me. Our style whispers while you are asleep or rocks out with its cock out. Our stories have bizarre external structure, or no structure at all, but the structure is as much a character as the protagonist and antagonist. (If we even fill those roles conclusively.) We challenge ourselves, challenge each other, and we sell.

"Hard" vs "soft" is irrelevant because it doesn't exist any more. Slipstream, cyberpunk, urban fantasy, magical realism, genre, literary, fuck it, fuck all of it. If you hate literary, I will show you Martin Amis and Angela Carter. You say European Quest Fantasy has nothing new to say and I show you Guy Gavriel Kay and George R. R. Martin. We can play this game all night if you like.

There is stuff that is good and there is stuff that sucks. This is the only distinction that I and those like me give a shit about. There is no science fiction. There is only fiction, good or bad.

We do not care about "siphoning energy away from the genre" because we do not care if there is a genre. We do not care about the "genre community". (Most of them are fat and smelly; we would not allow them to date our children.) We care about being read, and we do not care who does it. We do not care about "new audiences"; they have been our target audiences all along.

Now do you understand?

Sincerely,
Meredith L. Patterson