Tag Archives: why we read fiction

The Girlie Playhouse to be published by Heresy Press

My mother, Tricia, circa 1977.

In the mid 1990s, I could not find a publisher for my second novel, The Girlie Playhouse, because it “promoted the politically incorrect idea that woman are mere sex objects.”  Why is it dehumanizing to women to portray them as sexually attractive? That’s an honest question.

I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas where all the women and older girls donned dresses and high heels for church on Sunday. As a teen, I was greeted by the preacher’s wife on the church steps, “Now, don’t you look pretty, young lady!”

My mother was a devout Christian. According to her own lore, she was even destined to become a nun at one point, but she was also a sexpot: her dancer’s poise, her deep voice, and her cat-eye make-up. In my earliest memories, my mother and I leapt around the living room in our underwear while Tchaichovsky’s Swan Lake blared on the stereo. It seemed it never occurred to her that being sexy could be sinful.

“God created us naked,” she once said.

Imagine my confusion when I arrived in New York City at seventeen, in my high-heels and short skirts, to attend college where I was told that I thought of myself as object not a subject, as a thing not an agent.

Like most Texan females, I actually thought of myself as strong, independent, and whip smart. As far as I was concerned, my beauty broadcast the message that I was in control of the mate selection process. It seemed to me that studying on the East Coast meant that I was going to have to learn what kind of victim I was.

Instead, to understand sexuality better, I took courses in Anthropology, Biology, and evolution. I learned about reproductive fitness and hormones.  But that didn’t quite explain taboos. I studied Religion. I read the Scarlet Letter. I learned about the Puritan revolution. I read a lot of Victorian novels about women whose lives were destroyed by pheromones.

These questions helped inspire my novel about feminine sexuality, set before the fall, as it were, in a strip club called The Girlie Playhouse, where nothing bad can ever happen, until it does. The heroine, Trixie, is inspired by my mother and the novel is dedicated to her.

Academic fashions change and in the last several years, the same professors who had shamed me for dressing “like a prostitute” began to praise transwomen traipsing around in stilettos and pole-dancing for pre-schoolers. Apparently, feminine sexuality is okay when people assigned male at birth express it.

Have we finally gotten over our biases against feminine sexuality? Or did this sudden reversal reveal the covert misogyny that energized the many waves of feminism in the 1990s?

The Girlie Playhouse has finally found a home at Heresy Press, which is dedicated to “unbounded creativity and fearless expression.” Publication date is April 2026. That’s a long time away so, while you wait, sign up for the HP newsletter and book club.

Mediocrity is the natural tendency of all things. This isn’t a judgment. This is a statistical fact.

Fiction publishing goes by the numbers.  Big publishers want books that will appeal to the largest number of people. When considering what to publish, they have a big pool to choose from. So, it’s usually arbitrary which few of those millions who submitted their work get selected to be marketed toward the millions at the reading end.

There are so many mediocre readers out there that a lot of mediocre books could get published and do well enough to break even. But that wouldn’t be economically efficient for publishers.  They want a bottle neck: they want very few books to be successful. They want everybody reading the same thing. This saves on marketing costs.

If you think the capitalist model of publishing mirrors the Darwin’s model of natural selection, you would be right.  But there is a great deal of misconception about selection for reproductive fitness.

In economics, as well as in nature, the most common forms tend to survive the selection processes to have greater reproductive fitness.  Nature and capitalism are not, contrary to popular misconceptions, geared toward fitness optimization. They are geared toward getting by. Publishers want to survive in the economic realm. They also want to put their competitors out of business, further reducing the options available to the public.

In addition to being a literary fiction novelist, I am also an evolutionary theorist.

The notion that the best survive is something of a fallacy. Natural selection can only work well in very small, isolated populations. The truth is that, in a big pool, the most common and the ones that got there first tend to survive to reproduce more. This is called the Matthew Effect, for Matthew 25:29 “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

The traditional publishing industry is a coarse-grained filter that eliminates most of the garbage, selects mostly good-ish writing, and eliminates most of the radically new works of genius.  This image of a Gaussian distribution shows the middle hump of okayness making up around ninety-five percent of books and the outlying tails of extraordinarily bad and extraordinarily good together making up less than five percent of books published.

The review industry is a second filter that again eliminates most of the worst and best works, and selects the middling ones.

The majority of readers come next selecting again for mediocrity.

In general, mediocrity is the natural tendency of all things. This isn’t a judgment. This is a statistical fact. There are always more middle readers than tail readers.

To make the situation even worse, people tend to be interested in what is similar to what they already know. This puts even more squeeze on the unique.

The literary award system used to be a good way to find those good books.  But big publishers can’t afford to let little literary publishers occupy that valuable marketing real estate.  Literary agents and publishers used to joke: Want to make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a big one. Now, no joke, Want to make a fortune in publishing? Publish only mediocre books. It’s business after all, not charity.

We need filters, but we need to seek ways to improve them. Tail readers need to find tail writers and vice versa. We need better defined fine-grained filters.

I have been associated with two sources for finding good books, Dactyl Review and The Strange Recital.

If you know of more ways to find good books, leave a comment below.

Meno’s Stories on the Strange Recital Podcast


The Strange Recital, Episode 20021
A podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality.

VNA reads two short stories from her collection, Chance that Mimics Choice. Stay tuned for the interview that follows the stories.

Meno’s Stories is a series of four about a paradoxical scientist who stumbles his way to discovery. This program features “Winter Flies”* and “The Walk.”

*Reproduced by permission from the Antioch Review, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Spring, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by V. N. Alexander.

Propaganda & Art: How we process information when we aren’t thinking

We have been hearing a lot about “fake news” and “propaganda” lately, and it is as important as ever to use our critical thinking skills. But we also need to understand how propaganda works and why it is so difficult to counteract with logic. Propaganda takes advantage of the way our brains function when we are not paying attention. When we are paying attention our analytical skills are engaged. When we are not, our brains go on processing information in a non-analytical way, using what might be called a poetic logic, based mainly upon similarities, coincidental patterns, associations, repetition, and emotion. There are sound biological reasons for this mindless type of processing, which actually helps us learn faster, retain memories longer, and make appropriate decisions without really thinking. In this presentation, we will explore how and why art and poetry may actually be more helpful in developing critical thinking skills. Art also works with the poetic logic of subconscious processing, but does so in a way that is not manipulative, deceptive or dishonest.

VN Alexander Interviewed on Yale Radio with Brainard Carey

WYBCX The Art World Demystified, Hosted by Brainard Carey
YaleRadio
In this 45 min interview, VN Alexander’s talks with Brainard about why art  is so important to learning, about the little-known “artistic” evolutionary mechanisms (other than mutation/gradual selection) that help create new species, about what the term “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence” means, about the difference between computer algorithms and poetic thinking –and lots more.

No Lies Radio: Locus Amoenus, a retelling of Hamlet, featuring a NIST bureaucrat as Claudius

freefallvna9/11 Free Fall Radio
July 16, 2015

Interview starts at 9:55. Here’s a snippet:

AS: “What do you want people to get from this book?”

VNA: “Well, in the passage I just read where Hamlet [a conspiracy theorist] makes his big revelation. He makes some very logical points and asks some very good questions. But what’s the response to that? Evasion. Nobody really takes the point [chuckle]. Nobody really gets what he’s getting at. The whole thing is kind of ineffective, really [chuckle].

“One of the things I wanted to do for people, who have tried to talk to friends about some evidence they’ve read, is to give them a story that they can relate to. We’ve all gone through this. We all know what it’s like to bring up this conversation at dinner and have very good our friends treat us very coldly.

“And I wanted to give the conspiracy theorist a place in literature. He is a very important character, as was [Shakespeare’s] Hamlet, for really defining who the modern man is. Continue reading

Millerton News: Literary Tea to host local authors July 18

millertonwnews

Millerton News
July 16, 2015
By Gregory Camillone

The NorthEast-Millerton Library will host a Literary Tea on Saturday, July 18, at 1PM with authors Victoria Alexander and Kristen Panzer there to discuss their novels.

Alexander got the voice of Hamlet from David Tennant, who played Hamlet in the Royal Shakespeare Production. “He is like Doctor Who,” Alexander said. “Clever, witty, a little bit crazy. He’s like an alien. Hamlet feels like an alien coming from the city and having different values from the people around him.”

literarytea

“The Library Tea event is an opportunity for local writers to meet, talk and share their successes,” said Director of NorthEast-Millerton Library Rhiannon Leo-Jameson. “It’s a way for them to bond.”

Everyone is welcomed to attend. The event will be located in the library and is free. Tea will be served along with other refreshments and snacks. Continue reading

Locus Amoenus Interview on NYC 99.5 FM Sat 3PM

tori3HopeheaderNYC:  Listen Saturday, June 27th 3:00-4:00 PM EST Now archived online http://www.equaltimeforfreethought.org/2015/06/27/show-535-developing-a-progressive-narrative/

WBAI 99.5 FM with host Barry Seidman

Developing a Progressive Narrative

As many may already know, science fiction and speculative fiction in general can investigate and articulate the state of our nation and/or world in very direct but also metaphorical ways. We have talked about Star Trek, for instance, on Equal Time and how Gene Roddenberry was able to discuss humanism and naturalism via the small and large screen. And there have been many novels and short stories since at least the late 19th Century which have done the same.

Victoria N Alexander and Adrienne Maree Brown are two authors who have relatively new speculative fiction books out. Victoria, who has a PhD in English and philosophy of science, is also a novelist and the founder of Dactyl, a foundation that fosters dialogue between artists and scientists. She is the author of several novels including the topic of today’s discussion, Locus Amoenus. The novel brings Shakespeare into the post-9/11 world we currently experience and sows an emotionally powerful geopolitical drama.

Adrienne Maree Brown is an author, a life/love work coach, a singer (including wedding singer), events facilitator and a scholar on the late Science Fiction novelist Octavia Butler. In Octavia’s Brood, Adrienne has co-edited a collection of both speculative and science fiction stories founded on the spirit and creativity of the late author.

Tune in, pay if forward, and question everything
http://www.equaltimeforfreethought.org/

lacoversmall

 

blank

Locus Amœnus on “No Lies Radio”

lacoversmallI just sent my manuscript off to the publisher a week ago, and, as luck would have it, I got a call from Andrew Steele, host of  No Lies Radio, asking me to do an interview on the theme of the book.

The program will air Thursday, January 23, 2014

Here’s a summary of the story: In this dark comedy, a 9/11 widow and her son, Hamlet, have retreated from Brooklyn to the idyllic rural countryside upstate, where for nearly eight years they have run a sustainable farm. Unfortunately their outrageously obese neighbors, who prefer the starchy products of industrial agriculture, shun their elitist ways (recycling, eating healthy, reading). Hamlet, who is now 18, is beginning to suspect that something is rotten in the United States of America, when health, happiness and freedom are traded for cheap Walmart goods, Zoloft, endless war, core curriculum, and environmental degradation. He becomes very depressed when, on the very day of the 8th anniversary of his father’s death, his mother marries a horrid, boring bureaucrat named Claudius. Things get even more depressing for Hamlet when his friend Horatio, a conspiracy theorist, claims Claudius is a fraud. The deceptions, spying, corruption, will ultimately lead, as in Shakespeare’s play, to tragedy.
Continue reading