You're not for me

I've had a wry smile this week about a combination of tweets I saw from SF magazines bemoaning the lack of female submissions to them.  I'd suggest they take a look at their submission guidelines and see if they support stories from the groups they want to see more of.

Here's the thing.  I'm a woman, and I necessarily see the universe from a woman's point of view.  And that often means I don't much like parts of our current culture and society.  And naturally I want to write about and challenge those things I don't like.

The fallout from rape is one thing that concerns me greatly.  This gross violation of a woman's body and privacy destroys women's lives.  And I feel that often the emotional fallout isn't acknowledged sufficiently in stories.  

So I wrote a story about a man being forced to understand the consequences of his rape.  He undergoes a treatment ( I'm being vague here not to give spoilers), and a therapist forces him to take responsibility for what he's done.  At the end of his treatment period he stands on a bridge at the exact spot where the woman he raped jumped to her death.  He's had his own life radically altered by his sentence, and has to decide whether he can go on now.

I absolutely love this story.  I feel it has something important to say, and I believe it says it well.  It doesn't demonise the rapist, it seeks to understand him through his understanding of toxic culture.  But I can't sell the story.  I'm still looking for the magazine willing to publish it.

Other mags rule themselves out because they won't take stories that challenge the 'family'.  I personally don't think nuclear families are good for women, and I won't write them into my stories.  So those magazines aren't for me.  Yet another magazine has a prejudice against talking cat stories.  I have a story with talking (telepathic) big cats.  They're lion-sized, and are used as that world's huskies to pull sleds.  Not your average talking cat, but still that magazine wouldn't take that story.

So submission becomes a process of ruling out markets rather than ruling them in.  I won't write what I don't believe in, and the result is that sometimes that I look at a magazine's submission guidelines and utter those immortal words.  'You're not for me.'