I read Fantasy, Female Writers & The Politics of Influence by Tansy Rayner Roberts and found myself repeatedly thinking, “Yes!” while reading her piece.

I have always read female authors. For a long time it was in some ways an unconscious choice. I wasn’t seeking out books because they were written by women; I picked out stories that looked interesting, and I’m interested in stories about women, and stories about women are written predominantly by women.

So I have been somewhat confused by complaints about the lack of female authors. After all, I’ve been reading and recommending books by women for years!

The first mystery author I fell in love with was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I still have those books, well-worn and beloved, and on the first pages you can find the words “Happy Birthday, Love Mom & Dad.” The second mystery author I fell in love with was Agatha Christie, and I found her all on my own and devoured every single Miss Marple story I could get my hands on (The Poirot mysteries? Not so much. He never really appealed to me.)

The first fantasy book I read was JRR Tolkein‘s The Hobbit, and I literally read the book to pieces.

This book was also a gift from my parents. (My father also tried to get me to read SF, which he loves, but I could never get into it. (In my life I’ve probably read a double handful of SF books I liked, and more than half of those are by an author I can no longer read, because I can’t tolerate his hateful politics.¹))

Although I loved The Hobbit, I didn’t really read fantasy again until I was in college when I received used copies of Davis Eddings‘ ² Belgariad in a Christmas gift exchange. I devoured it, and then a friend recommend Guy Gabriel Kay‘s Fionovar Tapestry. After that I started searching out fantasy books.

What I found first was Mercedes Lackey‘s By the Sword and MZB’s Sword & Sorceress (Volume who knows at this point). From there I found The Mists of Avalon³ and anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Thieves World. When I’d read an anthology, I’d find new authors to seek out: Mickey Zucker Reichert, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Tanith Lee, Diana Paxson, Jennifer Roberson. And I’d browse the shelves of my favorite used bookstore for more books: Holly Lisle, Robin Hobb, JV Jones, Jane Lindskold, Katherine Kerr, Jane Yolen, Sara Douglass, Morgan Llewelyn.

As I said, I wasn’t seeking out female authors specifically. And I read plenty of books by male authors, some of whom became favorites: Charles de Lint, Steven Brust, Terry Pratchett, Dennis McKiernan.

But there’s a funny thing about those men–they all write female characters with agency. Women who don’t need to be saved.

Because that’s what I was truly looking for in my stories. People who saved the world. People who saved their country or their family. I didn’t want books about people who needed saved, I wanted books about people who saved themselves.

And that’s what I found in those authors.

As is obvious to anyone who has known me for more than about 15 minutes, I’m a tremendous geek, so I have a book blog for keeping track of what I read, and that has allowed me to go back and compare the number of male vs female authors I’ve read.

Also because I’m a tremendous geek, I just went and looked at the authors who appear in my review site. (I just pulled the author lists from the menus and counted the number of men and women, discarding joint efforts.)

To be honest, even knowing my reading preferences, I was surprised at the numbers.

 
 
(I chose Fantasy and mystery because those are my favorite genres, and then checked non-fiction because it should theoretically be relatively gender neutral. ⁴)

Then I looked back at what I’ve read over the past several years, which includes books outside of these three genres. However, let me clarify something about this table first. When I started tracking author gender, I was curious as to the number of women who were writing under male pseudonyms or initials, and how many women were writing under female names, (I don’t have a breakdown of this by genre, but I generally only see it in fantasy and mysteries) which is why I have two different totals for female authors.
 
 

 
 
NOTE: These totals are not going to equal 100%, because I have removed data for anthologies and jointly written books ⁶ to reduce the number overload looking at the table.

So why all the complaints about the dearth of female authors, when there are lots of female authors out there?

Because, IMO, female authors are marginalized.

When you have male members of SFWA constantly belittling women and a campaign to make sure that award balloting goes to white males–who wants to be associated with that kind of nastiness? When you have female attendees of SFF cons suffering harassment and sometimes even abuse–why spend your money and attention with people who have made it clear they don’t want you?

And then there’s the question of why is it that female readers will read male authors, but the reverse quite frequently is not true?

Part of the problem, perhaps, goes back to something I noted earlier: I wanted to read books about people who saved themselves, not people who had to be saved by others. This is why for decades I avoided reading romance novels. I’d been loaned a couple in high school and (aside from all the boinking) I really wasn’t interested in women who needed to find a husband (which is the sub-genre of romance I was loaned). So I avoided romance, because that’s what I assumed it was full of. (Well, plus the boinking. “Can we skip the kissing parts?”)

I didn’t want to read about a happily ever after! I wanted sword fights! I wanted escapes on horseback! I wanted magic duels!

My discovery of the Harlequin Imprint Luna changed everything.

There you go, that’s the cover that Changed Everything for me. (That cover STILL makes me swoony, it’s so beautiful.) I HAD to read that story, and I desperately hoped that the woman in the story was exactly like the model on the cover. (She was!)

Romance novels COULD have heroines who rescued themselves!

Yes, some of the stories had boinking–but not all of them! And the boinking was (for the most part) quite secondary to the adventure. Plus, I realized that I could just skip over all the boinking! (And sometimes I didn’t even BOTHER to skip the boinking! Because sometimes there was interesting dialog and discovery there! Like in real life!) Here were all these stories I really had no clue existed! My wallet panicked! (With good reason.)

And thus we get back to the heart of the matter: why are some people so adamantly opposed to female and minority writers being classified as SFF authors? Why are so many women made to feel like they aren’t allowed to be a part of the SFF community?

Why the hell does the term “Fake Geek Girl” even EXIST?

It’s like SFF fandom is full of hipsters who refuse to like anything once it’s popular. Who refuse to believe that something can be both good and popular at the same time–that once “normal” people like something, it’s no longer awesome. That once girls and relationships are let into the clubhouse, everything is RUINED. (It’s not like there isn’t kissing in SFF, it just seems that only the captain Kirk love ’em and leave ‘en kind of kissing is tolerated.)

Why has the SFF community seemingly not progressed past “Far Beyond the Stars“?

Is there anything to be done? Many women are joining SFWA, despite being made to feel unwelcome by a minority of members, and doing their part to change things from the inside. Many men (Jim C. Hines and John Scalzi come immediately to mind) are standing up and trying to make SFF more inclusive, and pointing out when things are wrong and or ridiculous with the SFF ecosystem.

You can take the title of this post, “Where Have All the Female Authors Gone (Answer: Nowhere)” in two ways. Unfortunately, I think it probably should be taken both ways. Women are still writing, but they’re also still stymied on their way to success as SFF authors.

——-
1 Yes, of course Orson Scott Card.
2 Interestingly, later books had both David & Leigh Eddings names on the cover, once David Eddings had enough pull to put on the cover what he said reflected the authorship all along.
3 Let’s not talk about how problematic I now find MZB. Let’s just accept that Mists was a hugely influential book for me, and move on.
4 Of course it’s not gender neutral. If it weren’t for the number of cookbooks I’ve read, the male:female ratio would be skewed even further in favor of men, because I love reading about science and religion and history, and despite my love of Karen Armstrong and Mary Roach, they are less common than male authors in those areas
5 Including pseudonyms and initials
6 Because only Davis Eddings’ name was on the cover, when I re-read The Belgariad and Mallorean it counts as 10 books in the male column instead of the Joint authorship column. I’m not sure this wasn’t an error on my part.

Due to the issues we had at Cabwaylingo, we didn’t have as much time as we’d wanted for Chief Logan State Park.

Location: Chief Logan State Park
Trails: Cliffside, Waterfall (partial) Trails
Distance: 2.5 miles (including roads between trails)
Elevation: 248 feet

The park has an interesting history, as it was built upon old mine sites, and like several other parks/forests in the state, the remains of mining operations can be seen.

There is also a WV history museum that is free to visit, and which includes items from mine history and a Conestoga wagon. (Also, it is air conditioned, which was a nice break between trails.)

No pictures, sorry!

Location: Cabwaylingo State Forest (last check, link was down)
Trails: Sleepy Hollow, Martin Ridge Trail
Distance: 2.9 / 5.8 miles
Elevation: 799 feet

Saturday we were starting in Charleston, so decided to go to some south-west parks. We went first to Cabwaylingo State Forest (the cause of the drive over many one-lane bridges).

It was… disappointing.

The trails we took were not well-maintained, were poorly blazed, and signage was missing in important places.

By not-well maintained, I don’t mean rough trail. I mean sections of the trail being completely unpassable, and alternate routes were somewhat dangerous (as in a fallen tree with branches completely blocking part of the trail on a steep slope. I managed to scramble down the rocks, but might have had serious trouble if the rocks had been wet and even slipperier.)

(Those pictures are terrible, because my cell phone was not clean, and I took them on my fly without stabilizing. But you get the idea. And that isn’t the hill path that was blocked. There I was just concentrating on getting to the next section of trail.)

Yes, in the wilderness everything should not be paved. Believe me, I understand that, but in other state parks trails have been marked as having trees down making them hard to pass.

The other problem was that Cabwaylingo has a lot of gas wells. I don’t care for their existence in state parks, but I recognize that the parks need money, and if the wells can be unobtrusive, fine. I can live with it. Unfortunately, gas wells mean gas company roads. So in multiple parks hiking trails have become gas roads. I don’t much like that, but again, I understand the necessity.

The problem at Cabwaylingo was that in addition to having trails that were on gas company roads, there were also new roads that were not marked on the maps, and the intersections at those roads were not blazed or signed.

Let me tell you, walking down half a mile of gas company road (gravel, no shade, rutted, muddy) and discovering you are at a dead end and must have taken a wrong turn at the unmarked intersection is VERY frustrating. Especially since according to the GPS & maps, you are relatively close to where you are supposed to be–but not close enough.

So our hike that should have been 3 miles plus a half mile (or so) walk back along the road turned into 5.8 miles total.

No, it’s not the end of the world, but it was very frustrating. Especially since the trail we were taking parallels the correct route for quite a distance (we checked multiple times after choosing our path, but it looked like our path was matching the trail we were supposed to be following, so we went on).

I’m a huge fan of the state parks, and want everyone to spend time in them, but I wouldn’t recommend Cabwaylingo to anyone for hiking, unless you were willing to accept the frustrations of missing signs and blazes and a two mile hike on gas well roads and other such issues.

As we were driving to Cabwaylingo State forest, I noticed there were a lot of one-lane bridges on the way. Apparently (as I theorized yesterday) that portion of the road was built on an old roadway bed.

What was odd was that some of the bridges had been replaced, and there didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the replacement.

So here are the bridges you’ll cross leaving Cabwaylingo and head east.

This was the best part:

There were tons of ATVs (or UTVs or whatevers) on the roads.

After several weekends of somewhat strenuous hiking, we decided we needed a nice, relaxing walk today, and so went to the WV Botanic Garden.

There are trails through the area, which are fairly flat and fairly even, including gravel paths that should be easy for strollers etc.

Although temperatures were a little warmer than I would prefer, it was a lovely stroll. We got there before the gate to the lower parking area opened, so there was hardly anyone there, and it was calm and quiet and peaceful.

A lovely walk.

As we were driving to Cabwaylingo State Forest yesterday, I was checking the GPS route to see our exits and other excitement.

“That’s irritating, why do we have to go so far out of our way? Why can’t we just exit at the road directly?”

Then we take the exit…

That explains it.

Someone was a slacker this month. Or, perhaps the opposite is true–I was outside almost every weekend, which left far less time for reading.

That’s not a bad thing.

The best book of the month was a re-read, Child of a Rainless Year by Jane Lindskold. That was closely followed by the audible version of Halfway to the Grave, Audible Version by Jeaniene Frost and narrated by Tavia Gilbert

Supernatural Fantasy
Low Midnight (2014) Carrie Vaughn (6/10)

Urban Fantasy
Child of a Rainless Year (2005) Jane Lindskold (9/10)

Historical Romance
The Black Hawk (2011) Joanna Bourne (7/10)

Mystery
Inspector Montalbano
The Shape of Water (1994/2002) Andrea Camilleri translated by Stephen Sartarelli (7/10)
The Terra-Cotta Dog (1996/2004) Andrea Camilleri translated by Stephen Sartarelli (8.5/10)
The Snack Thief (1996/2003) Andrea Camilleri translated by Stephen Sartarelli (8/10)

Audible
Halfway to the Grave, Audible Version (2007/2010) by Jeaniene Frost narrated by Tavia Gilbert (8.5/10)

And a quick look at the numbers!

I read a total of 7 book, six of which were ebooks, and five of those are books I own in multiple formats. I only read two new books last month, but that’s okay. May is a somewhat difficult month for me, so I’m allowed to wallow in comfort reading.

eBook: 6
Audio: 1
Multiple Formats: 5
Re-read: 5

I’m averaging 10 books a month so far, which is down from last year, but again, it’s not a bad thing, since I’ve been reading less because I’ve been outside doing stuff. (Once the heat kicks in, I’ll probably spend my time hiding at home with the air conditioning.)

Genre-wise, it was a smattering of different things.

Fantasy: 3
Mystery: 4
Romance: 2

As far as author gender goes, the female authors squeaked ahead by one, still holding the lead for the year.

Male: 3
Female: 4

And those are the books of May!

The forecast was walling for possible thunderstorms, and we were rained upon during the drive down, but in Fayetteville the weather was beautiful, and we had two lovely hikes (although the second was cut short, and a few drops of rain did fall on us as we were hiking back from the Diamond Point Overlook).

Location: New River Gorge
Trails: Long Point, Butcher Branch, Fayette Trail (loop); Endless Wall (half)
Distance: 4.2 mile; 2.3 mile
Elevation: 832 feet; 281 feet

Our first hike was out to Long Point, and this is the view when you get there.

This is, for obvious reasons, a popular trail, and it’s also relatively easy to hike. Mostly flat and wide, with only a few rocky sections.

After discussion and referring the maps, we took the Butcher Branch trail out to the Fayette Trail, making a small loop off the Long Point trail, giving us a slightly longer hike, and letting us see a little more of the area.

Then we drove to the other side of the river, and did half the Endless Wall trail. We decided upon half because the only way to make a loop is to walk back to the starting point along the road, and I didn’t particularly want to do that, so we turned around at Diamond Point and came back. I definitely want to make the full hike on another visit.

All in all a gorgeous day.

Since we’d already visited three parks, we decided to stop at Carnifex Ferry on the way, to make it four for the day, six for the weekend (a record for us).

Carnifex Ferry overlooks the Gauley River Canyon, near Summersville (Land of Speedtraps). We had no idea what to expect, since it’s a Civil War Battlefield, but it had an utterly gorgeous view of the Gauley River Canyon. If you’re in the area, you should definitely divert her for the view.

Location: Carnifex Ferry Battlefield State Park
Trail: Patterson Trail
Distance: 1.2 miles
Elevation: 157 feet (there is a very steep drop down to the Copperhead Overlook)

View from Copperhead Overlook

Pillow Rapids Overlook

Picnic Overlook

Stop four on Sunday was Little Beaver State Park. If we were local, we’d probably go there frequently; I don’t think we’ll make another trip just to go there, but if we’re in the area, we’ll stop again.

Location: Little Beaver State Park
Trails: Lake Front Trail, Beaver Creek Trail
Distance: 1.8 miles
Elevation: negligible

Had I mentioned what a gorgeous day it was? It was a gorgeous day.

Standing on the bridge over the Little Beaver Creek.

The Beaver Creek trail was supposed to have a bridge crossing the creek. We got there, and… no bridge.

So we cross the creek on the rocks. Oh. That’s where the bridge is.

Michael and I were debating when the damage had been done. I said it was probably Sandy damage, he disagreed.

The website, of course, give us no enlightenment.

This was our second park of the day, and we ran into the problem that the trail blazing seemed to stop about halfway up the trail we wanted to take, and after the previous day’s eight mile and the fact we had to drive home, we decided to err on the side of caution, and took a shorter hike.

Which was perfectly fine.

Location: Bluestone State Park
Trails: Big Pine Trail, Overlook Trail
Distance: 2.5 miles
Elevation: 760 feet

They’re replacing the bridge, which is good for safety, I’m sure, but I love how iron bridges look, and the replacement just isn’t picturesque.

Our first stop Sunday morning was Pinnacle Rock State Park, which is near Bramwell. Due to some confusion on the part of the GPS about what part of the park we wanted to see, we ended up driving through Bramwell, and seeing a bit of the area, and narrowly avoided going into Virginia.

Location: Pinnacle Rock State Park

Up up up to the rock!

Looking down at the trail from the lower part of the park.

Unfortunately, stupid children have spray painted the rock extensively, so it was hard to get a picture without graffiti.

The view from the top.

Order Muppet

We again made the trip to Seneca Rocks to hike to the top in memory of my cousin Ben on his birthday.

Once again, we did the hike straight up to the top with no breaks. That’s 1.8 miles, 900 feet, in just under 40 minutes.

We were very lucky that it didn’t rain on us–the forecast was calling for thunderstorms, but other than a few sprinkles (and a lot of sweat) we made it back to the car, dry.

Location: Seneca Rocks (part of the Monongahela National Forest)
Distance: 3.5 miles
Elevation: 991 feet

This is taken from up on the rocks, above the observation deck. The Order muppet did not join me.

The view along the ridge of the rock.

Just above the observation deck, and as high as the Order Muppet wanted to climb.

An utterly gorgeous stream along the trail.

You can see from this picture, that it was a cloudy, overcast day. But that did make it cooler, and nicer to hike.

For those unfamiliar with Seneca Rocks, the hike takes you up to the left side of the rocks. The observation desk is approximately where the tree-line ends.