(no subject)
i meant to post this a few days ago, but didn't get around to it.
Again, i'm going out on a limb and making wide sweeping assertions that i will prob have to scale back on to make acceptable. but you're getting a first draft, here. :)
PS: there are lots of footnotes on this one
In “Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous talks about how women need to write themselves. They need to put themselves into their writing: not write like men, or write as women are “believed” to write, but actually write themselves: that combination of the “masculine” and the “feminine” that is true femininity. Jane Tompkins says something similar in “Me and My Shadow”; she discusses how academic writing is “masculine” and non-academic writing is “feminine”. Tompkins says that when we analyze literature in a feminine way, we have to get at the individual. Academic writing avoids this like the plague: there’s the “intentional fallacy” that says that we can never know what the author really intended (though without saying the word “intended”, academics posit what the author meant all the time), and in academic writing we want to say that there is a universal meaning to a text, even if that meaning is undetermined and up for individual exploration: we never talk about the individual reader; we reduce such discussion to the level of “this poem made me think of my puppy that died”; we call it unacademic; we laugh at it. Derisively.
But Tompkins says that every piece of writing affects every individual a little differently, and we have to acknowledge that. We have to get away from this lack of individuality that’s allowed in academia right now. And feminist critics are always breaking the rules, talking about the lives of women writers along with their writing, apologizing for this to the great god of academia, but doing it nonetheless, because it’s important with women’s writing.
So I’m going to indulge in a little personal explication of the author’s intend. (There I go-“indulge”! Talking about it like it’s a guilty pleasure, like eating chocolate when you know you should be having a salad. It’s bad for you, but it tastes so good. No, I’m not going to “indulge”; I’m going to DO it.)
I realized when I was typing up that last chapter the other night, that it was strange my heroine in the story about the blob was blonde. Those who know me in Real Life may not find this unusual, as I am myself in fact blonde. But it IS strange, and I can explain why.
As early as third grade, there was a big dichotomy in my life. There was the me I was inside, and the me I was outside. The inside me, the me of my imagination, was NOT blonde. She had black, curly hair (my hair at the time was straight as a pin), and I usually gave her green eyes, just to make her unusual. This idealized me shows up as the heroine of my stories in the Halloween tale I wrote for a storytelling assignment in D.S. in third grade, and she shows up again as the heroine of my Island stories in seventh grade. I only branched out into other hair colors with my Island stories because I realized that if I ever tried to publish them, the readers would think it was bad art that so many of my characters looked exactly the same. So I tried to do a lot of mixtures of coloration in my characters. But even there, almost none of my characters were brunettes. The occasional redhead peeked in, but not brunette. Mostly, my characters had black or blonde hair.
So there was this dichotomy between my internal self and my external self, and they even LOOKED different*. It’s misleading for me to call the external self the “real” self, because lots of the time, I felt like she was less real than the internal self**: the potential queen of her magical world, the one who was transported into fantastic alternate universes. I lived so much in my imagination that it was more real to me than my “real” life. I still recognize this dichotomy. In the coat of arms I designed for myself, I have two supporters: a white unicorn with a blue horn, and a red stag with white antlers. The unicorn is my internal self. By giving it a blue horn, I locate it as a C. S. Lewis unicorn (the unicorns he mentions in both the Narnia books, with which I have had an intense connection since childhood, and The Great Divorce, which I now usually peg as my favorite book, all have indigo or blue horns). Unicorns were my symbol of my imagination, of my internal self, of the magic I lived with in my mind, ever since second grade. The stag on the other side represents my external self. This is the self that grew up in Pennsylvania, that got A’s in school, that had blonde hair and glasses (then contacts), that went to Wilson College, that’s attending the University of Delaware $. I think it’s a measure of my maturity that I have the stag on my coat of arms; when I was in seventh grade it would have been two unicorns for sure. It was only when I began to actually like my external self, my body (actually, my face: I had major self-image problems as an adolescent, and it was all based on what I perceived as my ugliness. My actual body body’s never been an issue for me), that I began to write about blonde characters not because I needed a variety of complexions in my fiction but because they felt right ^.
All of this to say, the fact that the girl in that story about the blob is a blonde is actually significant for me. That girl was not my imaginary self, my idealized self, the self that had adventures. She was my external me. She was the self that took ballet and did well in school and perhaps even sucked at gym. I’m not saying she wasn’t idealized-the getting up and giving a speech and rallying the girls to attack the green blob isn’t very characteristic of my external self. But she’s more of the person others see than the person I see in my head. She connected with my external experiences of being teased about ballet and my poor sports ability (I was going to type “athletic” ability, but then remembered that ballet IS athletic, and their misrecognition of the fact is one of the things I’m still battling in myself). She is an idealized external self, who shows those frustrating boys once and for all***.
If you don’t understand the blonde/black dichotomy in my own, very personal conceptualization of myself, you will miss a great big piece of possible analysis of that green blob story. And that’s why we need to resurrect the author that Barthes killed off. We need to stop calling the intentional fallacy a fallacy. We need to examine the author along with the work. Because writing is a personal thing. Even when I’ve gotten to the place I am now in my fiction writing, where everything does not curve back on my own imagination, where things are written for outside consumption, there are little things included that are just mine. My personal inside (really inside) jokes/signifiers. I don’t know how many of these things a literary scholar could ever use to analyze my writing, because I don’t write all of them down. But if, like Cixous and Tompkins say, women need to write themselves, then that’s what it’s going to come down to.
That, to delve back into my own academic concerns, is why feminists need to look at fan fiction, valorize it. This is women writing what’s in their hearts and their heads. They’re not worried about sales; they worry about their audience mostly because they enjoy the shared enthusiasm: they expect that the things in the story that excite themselves will be the things that excite their audience, and they’re right. Fan fiction has idealized women, Mary-Sues, both incredibly beautiful and incredibly strong-warrior princesses-the mix of the masculine and the feminine in each woman. We need to stop seeing this as a childish myth, as a self-referential shared egotism among squealing, rabid adolescent fangirls-this is women writing themselves, writing what they really are in their own heads. Without ever hearing of Cixous and Tompkins, without getting into academia and knowing that those academic pieces of writing exist, they are acting out that imperative. And they are being criticized for it, by both the mainstream and academia. Academia cannot (presently) understand it.
Even now, writing like this about myself seems bad. And there is some truth to this which I cannot deny. In Fahrenheit 451 Montag catches a book and sees the single line: “My favorite subject: myself.” It is selfish and proud to discuss only yourself all the time. (I’m sure we’ve all had conversations with people who do this, and it’s incredibly irritating. And SO HARD not to be that person.) But I’ve got this feeling that what I experience, deep down inside, is actually a shared experience. That if I get this out there, that more and more women (and perhaps even men) will say, “omg, I DO THAT TOO.” I hate to reduce it down to the “authentic realism” generalizations of Sarah Mills and say that all women have these similar experiences that they can recognize in each other’s writing. But deep down, I suppose I actually believe that’s true. Part of the reason I love reading others’ fan fiction is because I see in it the fantasies and imagination I indulge in (there I go again!) myself. It sounds like something I would have written. It’s when my fictional style begins “maturing”, when it becomes more and more academic, more and more (to my mind) masculine, critical, emotionally distanced, that you don’t make so much of that authentic realism connection with other women. You’ve taken yourself out of the writing/reading sisterhood. You’re not in the shared imagination (I wanted to write “shared fantasy”, but that makes it sound self-indulgent and almost sexual) anymore; you’re not in the world of beautiful colors and beautiful warriors. You’re in the “real”, external world, the one everyone is always trying to make you live in. But if we, in our low-context society, can no longer make those close connections in the real world (it’s like trying to make close connections over the internet, mediated by text and physical distance: the more you connect with people through the monitor, the more alone you feel), then maybe we can make better connections in the imagined world. If I write myself, and I point out that women writing fan fiction are writing themselves, maybe people outside fan fiction will notice that these women are all writing a self, writing a femininity, composing woman, sharing woman, sharing enthusiasm. Maybe we can break through the masculine academia that separates our internal selves by its addressing only the external.
Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’” By writing themselves, their internal selves, not listening to the arguments of society telling them that they’re writing unrealistic, self-aggrandizing, low art, women may be able to make that connection. And then literary analyzers will have to take us-the real us, the resurrected authors, the internal women-into account.
(appendix: an example of a piece of writing from my Chloë and Mary story. I wrote this at least 9 years ago and never gave it to a single person to read. But it shows that what I’m writing about here, this stuff that may actually be accepted as academic by academe one day, is the stuff the internal me was thinking about as an adolescent. The stuff the uneducated, immature woman was thinking about. And it discusses signification and discourse and the formation of identity before I had ever learned about those terms.
Perhaps the problem is in my head. I visualize things so strongly and so much that perhaps I can’t entirely enter the real world. Don’t get me wrong, I know what’s real and what’s not. But when I’m sitting by myself out in the field, and I’m trying to be real, to be sitting in the dimension of reality and not of my mind, I can’t do it. I’m talking to people, and singing songs and visualizing my stories and my wishes and the things I hope will happen. I’m reading signs into everything and I’m not simply being. I can’t simply be. It’s not possible. When I talk to others, I’m rather real, during a conversation I’m rather real, but I can’t appreciate it while I’m concentrating on talking. And talking is a mind to mind thing, so it’s not real either. Nothing is real and I’m surrounded by a silver veil, and I’m in my mind all the time and I can’t get out of it. Sometimes I want to, and sometimes I never want to leave.)
Footnotes:
* In my adolescence, at the time when the dichotomy between my imagined and my real self was most painful, I made plans for a story (which I never wrote) about a brunette named Chloë and her internal self, the sarcastic and absorbed, the creative, black-haired Mary. I still see Chloë dressed in green, Mary in bright blue. Mary expressed anger, frustration, wonder, impatience with everyone who couldn’t externally share with what she was experiencing. Chloë was… well, pretty normal. The green/blue dichotomy represents the earth/water dichotomy that’s still rolling around in my head (also visible in their names: Chloe means “green shoot” and to my synaesthesia looks green; Mary means “bitter waters” and to my synaesthesia looks blue) and shows up in my writing about the four elements. They’re the two elements I consider feminine. Water is colorful and creative; green is… sort of normal.
**In The Silver Chair, Puddleglum (in one of my favorite scenes) says, “all I can say is that ... that the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours IS the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just four babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia … that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.” I was going to say, “Lewis used this as an argument that there are eternal realities better than the sublunary world, but I always sort of thought of it as valorizing made-up worlds like Narnia.” But come to think of it, Lewis believed there were things in our imagination and in our emotional experiences that pointed to the greater reality, so perhaps using my imagined worlds as a road to get to what’s really real isn’t so far-fetched a use of Puddleglum’s speech after all!
$ I often forget the academic successes I have had or the awards I have won, and I think part of the reason is because of this dichotomy. Those awards were awarded to my blonde, external self, not my dark-haired internal self. I see the internal me as more real; I live in it; I concentrate on it. The external stuff tends to disappear. When people identify me by some external feature of my life, I am often startled for a moment: they identify me in a newsletter by my academic accomplishments or the fact that I take ballet. “I am not that blonde!” I think for a moment: until I realize that I am. To them, at least.
^ At the same time, my writing became more-well, what a lot of people would call “good”. It became more geared toward a mature audience. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad-even I (even my internal self) appreciates my later work more than my adolescent work. But by embracing the external self, I also seemed to be distancing myself from my characters. My black-haired Island heroines were ME, in a very intense way. My more recent blonde characters, though acting more like the external me (and thus, to the minds of external, academic, masculine, critical readers) more realistic, are less authentically real to my internal self. They look more like the external me, but they feel less like me, because they feel less like my internal self.
*** In my imagined worlds, my black-haired self is always the leader. She is queen (or princess) or captain or both, and she never encounters sexism except at the moment she conquers it: revealing herself (myself) to her (my) antagonists as a woman and shocking them, but always silencing them in the process. Even in the imagined world of my Island stories, there is no sexism, no institutionalized patriarchy. I worry sometimes that my audience will find this too idealized, too unrealistic, not artistic enough, not connected enough with the real world. But I think this, like my worry about people finding my preponderance of dark-haired beauties evidence of poor writing, may be one of the masculine guidelines I have to try to combat. Or maybe not.
Again, i'm going out on a limb and making wide sweeping assertions that i will prob have to scale back on to make acceptable. but you're getting a first draft, here. :)
PS: there are lots of footnotes on this one
In “Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous talks about how women need to write themselves. They need to put themselves into their writing: not write like men, or write as women are “believed” to write, but actually write themselves: that combination of the “masculine” and the “feminine” that is true femininity. Jane Tompkins says something similar in “Me and My Shadow”; she discusses how academic writing is “masculine” and non-academic writing is “feminine”. Tompkins says that when we analyze literature in a feminine way, we have to get at the individual. Academic writing avoids this like the plague: there’s the “intentional fallacy” that says that we can never know what the author really intended (though without saying the word “intended”, academics posit what the author meant all the time), and in academic writing we want to say that there is a universal meaning to a text, even if that meaning is undetermined and up for individual exploration: we never talk about the individual reader; we reduce such discussion to the level of “this poem made me think of my puppy that died”; we call it unacademic; we laugh at it. Derisively.
But Tompkins says that every piece of writing affects every individual a little differently, and we have to acknowledge that. We have to get away from this lack of individuality that’s allowed in academia right now. And feminist critics are always breaking the rules, talking about the lives of women writers along with their writing, apologizing for this to the great god of academia, but doing it nonetheless, because it’s important with women’s writing.
So I’m going to indulge in a little personal explication of the author’s intend. (There I go-“indulge”! Talking about it like it’s a guilty pleasure, like eating chocolate when you know you should be having a salad. It’s bad for you, but it tastes so good. No, I’m not going to “indulge”; I’m going to DO it.)
I realized when I was typing up that last chapter the other night, that it was strange my heroine in the story about the blob was blonde. Those who know me in Real Life may not find this unusual, as I am myself in fact blonde. But it IS strange, and I can explain why.
As early as third grade, there was a big dichotomy in my life. There was the me I was inside, and the me I was outside. The inside me, the me of my imagination, was NOT blonde. She had black, curly hair (my hair at the time was straight as a pin), and I usually gave her green eyes, just to make her unusual. This idealized me shows up as the heroine of my stories in the Halloween tale I wrote for a storytelling assignment in D.S. in third grade, and she shows up again as the heroine of my Island stories in seventh grade. I only branched out into other hair colors with my Island stories because I realized that if I ever tried to publish them, the readers would think it was bad art that so many of my characters looked exactly the same. So I tried to do a lot of mixtures of coloration in my characters. But even there, almost none of my characters were brunettes. The occasional redhead peeked in, but not brunette. Mostly, my characters had black or blonde hair.
So there was this dichotomy between my internal self and my external self, and they even LOOKED different*. It’s misleading for me to call the external self the “real” self, because lots of the time, I felt like she was less real than the internal self**: the potential queen of her magical world, the one who was transported into fantastic alternate universes. I lived so much in my imagination that it was more real to me than my “real” life. I still recognize this dichotomy. In the coat of arms I designed for myself, I have two supporters: a white unicorn with a blue horn, and a red stag with white antlers. The unicorn is my internal self. By giving it a blue horn, I locate it as a C. S. Lewis unicorn (the unicorns he mentions in both the Narnia books, with which I have had an intense connection since childhood, and The Great Divorce, which I now usually peg as my favorite book, all have indigo or blue horns). Unicorns were my symbol of my imagination, of my internal self, of the magic I lived with in my mind, ever since second grade. The stag on the other side represents my external self. This is the self that grew up in Pennsylvania, that got A’s in school, that had blonde hair and glasses (then contacts), that went to Wilson College, that’s attending the University of Delaware $. I think it’s a measure of my maturity that I have the stag on my coat of arms; when I was in seventh grade it would have been two unicorns for sure. It was only when I began to actually like my external self, my body (actually, my face: I had major self-image problems as an adolescent, and it was all based on what I perceived as my ugliness. My actual body body’s never been an issue for me), that I began to write about blonde characters not because I needed a variety of complexions in my fiction but because they felt right ^.
All of this to say, the fact that the girl in that story about the blob is a blonde is actually significant for me. That girl was not my imaginary self, my idealized self, the self that had adventures. She was my external me. She was the self that took ballet and did well in school and perhaps even sucked at gym. I’m not saying she wasn’t idealized-the getting up and giving a speech and rallying the girls to attack the green blob isn’t very characteristic of my external self. But she’s more of the person others see than the person I see in my head. She connected with my external experiences of being teased about ballet and my poor sports ability (I was going to type “athletic” ability, but then remembered that ballet IS athletic, and their misrecognition of the fact is one of the things I’m still battling in myself). She is an idealized external self, who shows those frustrating boys once and for all***.
If you don’t understand the blonde/black dichotomy in my own, very personal conceptualization of myself, you will miss a great big piece of possible analysis of that green blob story. And that’s why we need to resurrect the author that Barthes killed off. We need to stop calling the intentional fallacy a fallacy. We need to examine the author along with the work. Because writing is a personal thing. Even when I’ve gotten to the place I am now in my fiction writing, where everything does not curve back on my own imagination, where things are written for outside consumption, there are little things included that are just mine. My personal inside (really inside) jokes/signifiers. I don’t know how many of these things a literary scholar could ever use to analyze my writing, because I don’t write all of them down. But if, like Cixous and Tompkins say, women need to write themselves, then that’s what it’s going to come down to.
That, to delve back into my own academic concerns, is why feminists need to look at fan fiction, valorize it. This is women writing what’s in their hearts and their heads. They’re not worried about sales; they worry about their audience mostly because they enjoy the shared enthusiasm: they expect that the things in the story that excite themselves will be the things that excite their audience, and they’re right. Fan fiction has idealized women, Mary-Sues, both incredibly beautiful and incredibly strong-warrior princesses-the mix of the masculine and the feminine in each woman. We need to stop seeing this as a childish myth, as a self-referential shared egotism among squealing, rabid adolescent fangirls-this is women writing themselves, writing what they really are in their own heads. Without ever hearing of Cixous and Tompkins, without getting into academia and knowing that those academic pieces of writing exist, they are acting out that imperative. And they are being criticized for it, by both the mainstream and academia. Academia cannot (presently) understand it.
Even now, writing like this about myself seems bad. And there is some truth to this which I cannot deny. In Fahrenheit 451 Montag catches a book and sees the single line: “My favorite subject: myself.” It is selfish and proud to discuss only yourself all the time. (I’m sure we’ve all had conversations with people who do this, and it’s incredibly irritating. And SO HARD not to be that person.) But I’ve got this feeling that what I experience, deep down inside, is actually a shared experience. That if I get this out there, that more and more women (and perhaps even men) will say, “omg, I DO THAT TOO.” I hate to reduce it down to the “authentic realism” generalizations of Sarah Mills and say that all women have these similar experiences that they can recognize in each other’s writing. But deep down, I suppose I actually believe that’s true. Part of the reason I love reading others’ fan fiction is because I see in it the fantasies and imagination I indulge in (there I go again!) myself. It sounds like something I would have written. It’s when my fictional style begins “maturing”, when it becomes more and more academic, more and more (to my mind) masculine, critical, emotionally distanced, that you don’t make so much of that authentic realism connection with other women. You’ve taken yourself out of the writing/reading sisterhood. You’re not in the shared imagination (I wanted to write “shared fantasy”, but that makes it sound self-indulgent and almost sexual) anymore; you’re not in the world of beautiful colors and beautiful warriors. You’re in the “real”, external world, the one everyone is always trying to make you live in. But if we, in our low-context society, can no longer make those close connections in the real world (it’s like trying to make close connections over the internet, mediated by text and physical distance: the more you connect with people through the monitor, the more alone you feel), then maybe we can make better connections in the imagined world. If I write myself, and I point out that women writing fan fiction are writing themselves, maybe people outside fan fiction will notice that these women are all writing a self, writing a femininity, composing woman, sharing woman, sharing enthusiasm. Maybe we can break through the masculine academia that separates our internal selves by its addressing only the external.
Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’” By writing themselves, their internal selves, not listening to the arguments of society telling them that they’re writing unrealistic, self-aggrandizing, low art, women may be able to make that connection. And then literary analyzers will have to take us-the real us, the resurrected authors, the internal women-into account.
(appendix: an example of a piece of writing from my Chloë and Mary story. I wrote this at least 9 years ago and never gave it to a single person to read. But it shows that what I’m writing about here, this stuff that may actually be accepted as academic by academe one day, is the stuff the internal me was thinking about as an adolescent. The stuff the uneducated, immature woman was thinking about. And it discusses signification and discourse and the formation of identity before I had ever learned about those terms.
Perhaps the problem is in my head. I visualize things so strongly and so much that perhaps I can’t entirely enter the real world. Don’t get me wrong, I know what’s real and what’s not. But when I’m sitting by myself out in the field, and I’m trying to be real, to be sitting in the dimension of reality and not of my mind, I can’t do it. I’m talking to people, and singing songs and visualizing my stories and my wishes and the things I hope will happen. I’m reading signs into everything and I’m not simply being. I can’t simply be. It’s not possible. When I talk to others, I’m rather real, during a conversation I’m rather real, but I can’t appreciate it while I’m concentrating on talking. And talking is a mind to mind thing, so it’s not real either. Nothing is real and I’m surrounded by a silver veil, and I’m in my mind all the time and I can’t get out of it. Sometimes I want to, and sometimes I never want to leave.)
Footnotes:
* In my adolescence, at the time when the dichotomy between my imagined and my real self was most painful, I made plans for a story (which I never wrote) about a brunette named Chloë and her internal self, the sarcastic and absorbed, the creative, black-haired Mary. I still see Chloë dressed in green, Mary in bright blue. Mary expressed anger, frustration, wonder, impatience with everyone who couldn’t externally share with what she was experiencing. Chloë was… well, pretty normal. The green/blue dichotomy represents the earth/water dichotomy that’s still rolling around in my head (also visible in their names: Chloe means “green shoot” and to my synaesthesia looks green; Mary means “bitter waters” and to my synaesthesia looks blue) and shows up in my writing about the four elements. They’re the two elements I consider feminine. Water is colorful and creative; green is… sort of normal.
**In The Silver Chair, Puddleglum (in one of my favorite scenes) says, “all I can say is that ... that the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours IS the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just four babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia … that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.” I was going to say, “Lewis used this as an argument that there are eternal realities better than the sublunary world, but I always sort of thought of it as valorizing made-up worlds like Narnia.” But come to think of it, Lewis believed there were things in our imagination and in our emotional experiences that pointed to the greater reality, so perhaps using my imagined worlds as a road to get to what’s really real isn’t so far-fetched a use of Puddleglum’s speech after all!
$ I often forget the academic successes I have had or the awards I have won, and I think part of the reason is because of this dichotomy. Those awards were awarded to my blonde, external self, not my dark-haired internal self. I see the internal me as more real; I live in it; I concentrate on it. The external stuff tends to disappear. When people identify me by some external feature of my life, I am often startled for a moment: they identify me in a newsletter by my academic accomplishments or the fact that I take ballet. “I am not that blonde!” I think for a moment: until I realize that I am. To them, at least.
^ At the same time, my writing became more-well, what a lot of people would call “good”. It became more geared toward a mature audience. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad-even I (even my internal self) appreciates my later work more than my adolescent work. But by embracing the external self, I also seemed to be distancing myself from my characters. My black-haired Island heroines were ME, in a very intense way. My more recent blonde characters, though acting more like the external me (and thus, to the minds of external, academic, masculine, critical readers) more realistic, are less authentically real to my internal self. They look more like the external me, but they feel less like me, because they feel less like my internal self.
*** In my imagined worlds, my black-haired self is always the leader. She is queen (or princess) or captain or both, and she never encounters sexism except at the moment she conquers it: revealing herself (myself) to her (my) antagonists as a woman and shocking them, but always silencing them in the process. Even in the imagined world of my Island stories, there is no sexism, no institutionalized patriarchy. I worry sometimes that my audience will find this too idealized, too unrealistic, not artistic enough, not connected enough with the real world. But I think this, like my worry about people finding my preponderance of dark-haired beauties evidence of poor writing, may be one of the masculine guidelines I have to try to combat. Or maybe not.