Yes, I am the New Vice President of SFWA

I am running for SFWA President again. Here is my platform statement.

Dear SFWA members:

I think a proven track record’s a pretty good credential for the Presidential position, and so I propose you let me steer for another couple years, and after that, I’m going to take a year off volunteer work. Maybe do one of the cargoship cruises.

Here’s the stuff I’ve managed to do for SFWA over the past two and a half years. You could probably go back through the various Presidential letters in The Bulletin and get better detail but here are highlights.

• Worked with Operations Director Kate Baker to help her establish policies and procedures that advance the organization’s mission. Members will have noticed, for example, the implementation of the Singularity, the electronic newsletter that lets you know the latest and most important/interesting information from the organization. I feel strongly that establishing an operations director who really drives the organization overall, rather than relying on the random and sometimes wildly varying commitment levels of the President and Vice President is a good move, and I look forward to seeing the amazing stuff that Kate will do in coming years, based on the way she’s kicked ass so far.
• Due to the hard work of our fabulous financial team of Bud Sparhawk and Oz Drummond, I saw us through a financial crisis that could have taken down the organization and didn’t. The board and I worked to enable Oz and Bud to create a financial plan that will keep us going another 50 years. There’s been trimming, brainstorming, and general flensing of the budget, while additional sources of revenue have been developed and are starting to produce results. So far the biggest casualty of that crisis has been the NY reception. Another reason I’m running is that I promised the reception wouldn’t go away permanently and I’m still working on getting that back for us.
• Got Derek Kunskën running smoothly as our Volunteer Wrangler. We’ve gone from a situation where volunteer emails weren’t consistently getting acknowleged to one where they’re getting answers and finding spots in the organization where their volunteer efforts can make a real difference. In talking to Griefcom the other day, its head said that the Committee was fully staffed for the first time in his memory, and actually also had two people shadowing members in order to learn how to do it. Volunteers are also being recognized for their efforts; I hope to see some of you at the Volunteer recognition breakfast at the Nebulas .
• Recruited Maggie Hogarth as VP, so I will take indirect credit for the ton of great work she’s done but say that it is really all her effort that makes her such an outstanding team member. Indie writers, Maggie has been consistently looking out for your interests and making sure you are always represented in discussions. She’s driven community efforts, formed the Outreach Committee, worked with the Nebula Programming team to get representatives of companies like Amazon, Kobo, Patreon, etc there, set up the NetGalley program, and been an amazing ally.
• The Speakers Bureau is up and running, SFWA has been publicizing it via flyers at ALA and other academic conferences and it’s got almost 200 members listed there.
• The EMF process has been thoroughly looked at in order to make it easier for the members to use and is being revamped, including figuring out how to make a portion open to professional speculative fiction writers who are not members, which I expect to see happen within the next month. This hasn’t been entirely smooth, but the end result has been greater clarity and unity of purpose among our EMF stewards.
• Putting stuff in to provide for the future. This has been one of my biggest foci: looking at existing processes and groups and trying to make sure they’ll last. Most of the important volunteer roles now have understudies or shadows making sure that if the volunteer has to step down, someone is ready and prepared. We are writing things down. Conversations that used to be held in email are instead happening on the boards or in Evernote, where they are preserved. If I had to point to one issue that I thought was hampering SFWA when I came on board, it would be the lack of institutional memory and the way I kept hitting the sad carcasses of abandoned or lost projects that had gotten lost in the mists somewhere along the way. This is, in my opinion, no longer a problem. Huzzah!
• SFWA membership cards. I actually can take no credit for that, it was all Michael Capobianco and Kate, but I mailed out a bajillion, thanks to the friends who came and helped assemble them and Caren Gussoff, who did the actual mailing.

In looking back at the Presidential platform I ran on two years ago and seeing whether or not I lived up to it:

• SFWA’s “brand,” to employ vile marketing jargon, has grown, and what’s nice about that is that we’re continuing to acquire new members, many of whom immediately put energy in the discussion forums and volunteering.
• Institutional memory is being better preserved. The Operations Procedures and Practices Manual still needs to be delivered, so there’s still a ways to go, but our new Director-at-Large Erin Hartshorn recently took this on.
• Volunteer system as noted above.
• Indie writers are joining and contributing. For example, Jonathan Brazee is helping make sure that this year’s Nebula programming has plenty of panels of use to independently publishing peeps.
• Communication remains an ongoing goal, but is substantially better.

What to Expect From Two More Rambo Years

What am I hoping to get done that I haven’t already? This is a tough list because I regard the fact that a number of things aren’t farther along as a failure on my part, but here we go.

• Better integration of the game writers, because I think we’ve really fallen short so far and need to do better.
• Getting the finances to a point where the annual Reception can be brought back, although I’d like to see it alternating between East and West Coast.
• Movement on health care. We’ve got a task force exploring it. Our best bet may be teaming up with another organization, but this remains to be seen.
• Seeing The SFWA Bulletin on a regular schedule.
• Get the Preserve Your Legacy campaign, aimed at celebrating Bud Webster’s memory while giving writers the resources they need to set up their literary estate, launched.
• Continuing to put in processes. One of the things I’ve worked hard at is passing on what I know of corporate management, and trying to make sure we are consistently working at a professional level.
• Continuing to build relationships with other organizations, including other writers organizations as well as publishing and marketing partners.
• More and better outreach to potential new members.
• Continued advocacy for writers, like the recent statement about magazines trying to monetize writers.
• Ponies for everyone. A pony in every pot. Pot for your pony. Scalzi will smoke pot with your pony. Membership cards, integrity, and whimsy.

This is an update of my statement of two years ago as to why I’m qualified.

I’ve got decent people skills and a solid work ethic. When it comes to the various factions that clash occasionally, I’ve got friends on most sides and pride myself on trying to listen and understand where people are coming from. I try to unite rather than divide, and to lead by example. I frequently touch base with other members of the SFWA team and work well with them, including weekly Google Hangout sessions, texts, and phone calls. I don’t take myself particularly seriously (most of the time), have no problem admitting when I’m wrong, and try to learn from both my mistakes and what other people pass along.

I’ve worked as both a writer and an editor. I have over 200 fiction publications, including in such places as Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Tor.com, and five collections (four solo, one with Jeff VanderMeer). I just turned in my second novel to the publisher (Wordfire Press) and am working on the third in the series. I’m a hybrid author, working in both traditional and independent publishing.

My short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” was a 2012 Nebula nominee, while other works have been nominated for the Locus Award and the Million Writers Award. I was the editor for several years of award-winning Fantasy Magazine, receiving a 2012 World Fantasy nomination for my efforts there, and I guest-edited Lightspeed Magazine’s Women Destroy Fantasy issue. I have worked as a volunteer with multiple speculative fiction organizations, including Broad Universe and the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

I teach a popular series of online classes on writing and editing and do some podcast narration, and have written a book on how writers can best use their online presence to sell books.

I am a frequent convention-goer and make a point of organizing or participating in SFWA activities when they’re available at such gatherings. This year, I will be attending ICFA, Emerald City ComicCon, Norwescon, the Nebula Award ceremony, the Locus Awards, Worldcon, DragonCon, and FenCon.

I’m running because it seems to me in these tumultuous times people need to be stepping up and leading. If I want other people to be volunteering time, I have to show it’s a task I’m willing to take on too. If I were grading my performance over the last year and a half, it’s a solid B. I’ve done some solid stuff, but I’ve also dropped a few balls. I’d like to get some more stuff finished up before the grade is in. And, selfishly, I love the team and would miss the hell out of that weekly videocall where we touch base.

Peace out,
Cat

#sfwapro

As part of a Twitter conversation, one of my favorite gamewriters, Ken St. Andre, suggested I write up something about SFWA and independent writers that goes into enough detail that people can understand why — or why not — they might want to join. This is part one of a multi-part series that will talk about some of the history behind the decision, and in this first part I want to talk about the organization prior to admitting independent writers. Part two will discuss how SFWA came to change membership criteria in order to make it possible for people to qualify for membership with indie sales in 2016, and some of the changes made as part of planning for that expansion. Part three will focus on how SFWA has changed in the intervening time, while part four will look at what I see as the changes that will continue as we move forward over the next decade. In all of this, I’m trying to provide something of an insider’s look that may or may not be useful, but certainly will be full of many words.

So what is/was SFWA, before the change? I’m going to paint in broad strokes here based on my understanding and research. (I’d love to see a book devoted to the history of SFWA at some point and one of our current projects is trying to collect that, under Vice President Erin M. Hartshorn’s direction.) The organization started in 1965 with Damon Knight organizing a number of professional genre writers in order to force publishers to treat writers better, namely pay them decent rates in a timely fashion while not taking excessive rights.

One of the first writers they helped was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose work has been pirated in the United States, Bob Silverberg said to me in email that there’s very few of those founding members left, but they included himself, Brian Aldiss, Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Kate Wilhelm and a host of distinguished others. Silverberg says Ellison as well, though the document he sent me seems to contradict that. At that time it was the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Initially SFWA was exactly what you would expect of a volunteer organization run by the most chaotic, capricious, and disorganized creatures possible: science fiction writers. Stories abound, including records getting lost because someone’s cat peed on them, Jerry Pournelle inviting Newt Gingrich to be the Nebulas toastmaster and a subsequent heated brouhaha that included some people walking out of the ceremony and Philip K. Dick agitating to get Stanislaw Lem expelled. My favorite remains Joe Haldeman’s account of the SFWA finances being somewhere in the realm of $2.67 when he became SFWA treasurer; he bought the notebook to keep track of them out of his own pocket.

The membership requirements were proof of a professional sale. Over time the memberships would expand, allowing associate members to join with a story sale, bringing in publishing professionals as associate members, and introducing estate and family memberships. The question of requalification – making members prove at intervals that they were still producing — was raised more than once, usually with plenty of heated discussion — but never implemented.

Along the way, SFWA grew and became an organization that did what its founders had envisioned, and more. Under Jerry Pournelle’s leadership, the Emergency Medical Fund, which helps writers with medical emergencies affecting their ability to to write, was implemented. A similar fund for legal situations followed. Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss launched Writer Beware under SFWA’s auspices and began the fight to keep new writers aware of unscrupulous editors, publishers, and agents.

The fight to keep writers from being preyed upon remained a focus for SFWA. In 2004, a group of SFWAns, under the direction of James D. Macdonald, wrote Atlanta Nights in order to expose the unscrupulous practices of PublishAmerica. The book, deliberately constructed to be unpublishable, featured two identical chapters, a chapter of computer-generated gibberish, missing chapters, and a list of characters whose names spelled out the phrase “PublishAmerica is a vanity press”. It was accepted for publication by the company, which withdrew the acceptance after the hoax was revealed.

Another focus would be an effort unsurprising for a group of writers: establishing a set of awards, the Nebulas. While that may seem a bit cynical on my part, I’ll point much less cynically to the effect of the awards: the recognition of some of the best and most interesting F&SF over the years via a prestigious award group that has grown to include screenplays and Middle Grade/Young Adult Fiction as well as recognizing achievements in the field via the Kate Wilhelm Solstice award and the SFWA Grand Mastership.

Other good stuff that SFWA took on or did over the decades included a publisher audit that helped draw attention to auditing practices, started the SFWA Bulletin, a public-facing magazine aimed at educating and informing professional F&SF writers, and many efforts that started, worked for a while, and then died a graceful (sometimes less so) death when the volunteer driving them lost interest, died, or got fed up with SFWA.

Those membership requirements continued to change over the years, usually to reflect inflation. (To a degree. I’ve calculated that if we matched the buying power of the original rate, we’d be looking at closer to 20, 25 cents per word than the current 6.) The Science Fiction part was expanded to include Fantasy.

Over the decades, SFWA communications took multiple forms. The paper Forum was intended only for members and featured a letter column that was often lively in pre-Internet days. As the Internet grew in popularity, that shifted. The message boards were originally hosted on Compuserve and later moved to SFF.net, where they gained a name for being acerbic, nasty, and often contentious to the point where, when I joined, I was warned not to visit them. When I did, I found them considerably less heated than had been described, and not actually full of epic levels of bon mots, clever insults, and sundry literary feuds, somewhat to my disappointment. The SFWA Handbook appeared in multiple forms, compiling articles of interest to working F&SF writers. The SFWA Bulletin became SFWA’s outward facing publication, publishing not just what SFWA was doing, but articles of interest to all genre writers.

During Russell Davis’s term as SFWA President, Davis did something that would radically affect the direction of the organization: began the move towards reincorporation as a 501c nonprofit in California. The organization had originally been incorporated in Massachusetts, which meant there were restrictions that included having to use paper ballots for elections rather than being able to use electronic means. I will confess here that when the advantages of it all have been explained to me in the past, my eyes glaze over a bit, so I may not be the best person to speak to all of the motivations.

I joined SFWA in early 2006 but did not do much with the organization, as an associate member with a short story sale to Chizine. I found the message board system unwelcoming and generally once I’d joined, I figured I’d checked that box off my writerly bingo card and could now move onto something else.

However, I got asked to volunteer for a group assembled after an incident where a bunch of files got pulled from Scribd, including a number whose rights-holders did not want them pulled. That was an interesting group and I learned a lot about copyright as a result. I also served on a jury for the Nebula award for short story; our job was to put one thing on the ballot that we thought would otherwise get overlooked. My impression of SFWA was, I think, like most members: I didn’t think much about what the board was doing and I took advantage of some of the SFWA offerings, like the SFWA suite at conventions, the local reading series, and reading the Bulletin.

In 2012, I was asked if I’d take over as head moderator of the SFWA discussion boards, which had moved away from SFF.net onto the SFWA website. I had been the moderator of an often contentious discussion board for a game community as well as a BBS, and so I felt reasonably comfortable taking on the role. What I didn’t foresee was how that role would change my relationship to the organization, making me much more aware of its internal workings. And then, Steven Gould spoke with me in 2014 and asked if I’d consider running for Vice President. It was an interesting time in SFWA’s history, I liked the people, and so I said yes.

In Part Two, I’ll talk about the discussion and process by which SFWA came to admit independent writers. #sfwapro