Flogging the Fray

First there was the big deal about Fantasy covers and naked women and an off the cuff remark about when do we get to see a guy's naked butt on a cover. Then there was the Banville/Black "slumming comment". Then the Hugo Awards spawned a traditional vs literary sci-fi brawl. And now, it's "The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Sci-Fi" and the fact that there are no women or people of color represented in the book. And all of this mad gnashing of teeth has just been in the last month.

Aaargh. Get a grip, people. A book or a story is just that. A book. A story. You sit down and read and either enjoy the ride or toss the damn thing against the wall. Who cares who the author is or why they wrote that particular tale?

Well, scratch that. Of course you like to follow certain writers on their writing journey but did you pick them because of their sex or color or their literary bend? No, you picked them because they wrote a story that appealed to you as a reader. When a writer writes, that's all that should matter, because for the reader, all that other crap is just that, CRAP.

Does all that controversy and writer in-fighting sell books? Does it bring in more readers? I don't know and personally, don't care. When I sit down to read I want a story that engages me, that takes me out of my hum-drum little world and launches my imagination into orbit. I want to be entertained. All the fighting and spouting of learned opinions doesn't interest me, the reader, at all. As a writer, I find it all very amusing.

And as a writer, I wish they'd do away with all those stupid genre/literary tags. But that's wishing for the moon because words will always spawn discussions and arguments and maybe that's the way it should be. I imagine those first storytellers sitting around a campfire spinning their yarns were stoned (with rocks, you druggie fool) if they didn't spin their tales to the listener's satisfaction.