Today’s Edition of Squee: Being Published on Jim C. Hines’s Website

A few weeks ago, fantasy author Jim C. Hines put out a call for guest bloggers to submit article ideas for a series on diversity and representation in science fiction/fantasy (SF/F), and today, my entry in the series, “I Don’t See Color,” went live on Hines’s site. Here’s a teaser of the first paragraph:

Almost all of the women in science fiction/fantasy fandoms that I have felt the strongest affinity for have been white. Partially it’s because there just aren’t many Asian (particularly Pacific Islander) women in supportive (much less leading) roles in the fandoms I grew up with. Most of the TV shows I loved watching as a child had a terminal case of Smurfette Syndrome in which the single girl on the team was white (Voltron, Battle of the Planets, Silverhawks, Starvengers, Starblazers, I’m looking right at you). And when there were characters who were Asian women, they almost universally conformed to some variation of Asian stereotype: the awkward (science/tech) nerd, the ingénue pop star, the Dragon Lady, the grades-obsessed student, and almost always without a love interest (or at least one who reciprocated their feelings).

To read the rest, please go to the entry on Hines’s blog, linked above.

Suffice to say, I’ve been a giddy, giggling fangirl all morning – it’s not every day you get a piece of writing published on the site of a writer you admire.

I’ve been a fan of Hines for awhile, primarily due to his fantastic work advocating for inclusion in geek culture, disparities in gender presentation, and promoting awareness about harassment and the need for anti-harassment policies at cons (although I recently discovered and enjoyed his Princess series as well, and my nephew read all of his Goblin series books in a week). I’m immensely proud and honored to be included with the other writers whose work has appeared in the series, and I can’t wait to see the rest of this week’s entries.

Thank you to the friends who read through my drafts and dealt with my prickly nervousness over writing this, especially my husband, Jesse Lex. This was a difficult piece to write – in fact, I think it may be the first personal essay I’ve written in a long while – but I’m glad I did, and I hope I can keep up the momentum and delve back into my personal writing with the same amount of passion I’ve been putting into my critical writing. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading and sharing the entry, and of course, thanks to Hines for giving me the chance to do this in the first place.