Female fans rule the world!

Or at least fandom. According to a recent sociology study by a guy named John Tenuto, female science fiction and fantasy fans tend to be much more active in their fandoms than men are. Which, to anyone who has participated in any fannish activity online in the last ten years (at least), should be kind of obvious. My default assumption when dealing with a fellow fan online whose gender I don't know is female, not male, and I'm ... rarely wrong. Particularly if there is a creative endeavor such as fanfic or fanart involved. It's been like that since I've been participating in fandom, however vicariously. And given the prevalence of female author names in copies of old fanzines that I've seen online, and the presence of people like Bjo Trimble, I'd say that's been the case at least since the late '60s, at least in media SFF. It might be different in print SFF, but I doubt it.

Which just confirms that the standard media SFF practice of marketing almost exclusively to teenage guys is stupid. I sure hope the people at the Sci-Fi Channel notice this.

More Writing Meta

If you're a writer and you haven't checked out synecdochic's writing meta posts, go and do so. They are very useful, particularly to writers of middling-fair writing skills. If you're just starting out they may be over your head, but I'd check them out just to get a look inside the details of the writing process. Today's entires are on why, when, and how to break the show-don't-tell rule* and (once you've gotten past the stage where you need a line-edit of grammar, spelling, and style) what a beta does.


*(Yes, like all rules there is a time and a place to break it, but you've got to understand it in order to do so.)