This year, Toronto’s fashion bloggers are taking a starring role at L’Oreal Fashion Week.  Well, I suppose that explains the recent ethics hubbub.  It also explains why people kept asking me if I’m going to L’Oreal Fashion Week.  I didn’t really know that it was going on.  I should have but it just didn’t register with me.  Other things on my mind.

Fashion week: Who cares?

Well, I guess fashion bloggers do.  And I can’t begrudge them that.  I don’t expect them to care about Ad Astra, though they will when I’m done blogging it.     They should care. Science fiction conventions are kinda awesome.

I know a lot of the names mentioned in the article.  Some of them are known readers who leave the occasional comment.  Toronto fashion and Toronto fashion blogging is a small place.  If I didn’t have a venomous, battle-hardened hatred of brunch, I’d probably know all of these people.  And I’d probably be a member of the press by now.

Yet I’m still pissing up the science fiction rope.  I’m starting to wonder why.

It’s a strange time.   Fashion has, to my view, become more forward looking than science fiction.  It’s no great accomplishment.  SF is horribly conservative.  Not just in content but in style.  For all of its big talk, it just recently stopped being the almost exclusive province of straight white men.  It is now the almost exclusive province of old straight white men.

The major houses are just coming around to online publishing.  Almost every science fiction based blog I’ve ever read is dull as paint.  And, when SF writers, these forward thinkers, attempt to write a book meant for cyberspace, they basically try to retrofit the internet to meet the demands of their obsolete story structures.  Then they wonder why no one reads the shit except for other writers.

They just don’t get it.

But fashion gets it.

Just look at the recent project from Danielle Meder and Carolyn Rohaly.  Called “Rags and Mags” it’s an online fiction about Toronto fashion told in the form of a blog.  It’s perfectly executed, genuinely entertaining and full of links that are actually helpful for the interested reader.   This is innovative.  It’s smart, funny and cute.  It understands its subject, its audience and its style.  It condescends to no one.

It’s just plain good.
Science fiction on the other hand has gotten just plain bad.  When a deeply conventional book like “Perido Street Station” by China Meiville warrants a whole new genre –”The New Weird”– then there is something wrong.  It’s not weird.  You want weird?  Read Geoff Ryman, Matt Ruff or Minister Faust.  They’re weird.  And none of them quite fit into science fiction.  Like Vonnegut, Kafka or Burroughs, they’re just too good for it.

And fuck it.  So am I.

You know, I’m getting old.  I’ll be thirty in May.  I’ve been patiently waiting to hear back about a novel I submitted years ago.  Although I have the interest of a publisher, time does not stand still.  I’ve written other books since then.  I can’t sit on my hands forever, waiting for some sort of fucking validation from a business.

A  business of all things . . .  Me.  Waiting for that?

It’s not the money.  There’s no money in writing and I never even expected any.   It’s the legitimacy.  This is what publishers sell to writers: Legitimacy.  If you self-publish, you’re vain.  In every other artform — music, movies, comic books and design– being indie grants cred.  In literature, it destroys it.  Why is that?  Could it be a vested interest at work here?  And how the fuck did I end up falling for this bullshit?

only get about 350 to 450 unique visitors a day.  So I’m not the fellow who writes what the public reads.  But the people who do write what the public reads?  They read me.  I prefer that.

Shape