Posts tagged ‘Jae Steinbacher’
Women dripping from his wrists
We’re featuring three stories today for our Kickstarter, which in different ways show the dangers of objectifying women.
In Aimee Ogden’s “Matched Set,†(from which today’s title comes) that danger is to the protagonist, who finds herself trapped—literally—by her expectations that she’s the special one who will be treated differently from the women her lover objectifies.
In Chikodili Emelumadu’s “Candy Girl,†becoming an object takes the protagonist and, eventually, her ex-boyfriend, to a dark place. (The story first appeared in Apex Magazine and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson prize.)
In Jae Steinbacher’s “Blood Sausage,†the protagonist teeters between treating robot sex workers as objects and as people. Jae Steinbacher writes:
“Blood Sausage” came from processing feelings about relationships and ownership, as well as my interest in the nitty-gritty aspects of maintaining human-like non-organic bodies. It’s set in La Alberca, a real town I visited when I studied abroad in Spain during college. Despite not thinking of myself as a setting-focused writer, many of my stories are infused with setting; it becomes just as integral as character in some cases. Placing an android brothel in such a traditional town offered me space to engage with absolutes and suggest what might lie between them, how they might be tied together. As for the protagonist, there are shades of myself in Val, and she embodies certain darker impulses that I’ve both felt and witnessed in others. It’s freeing to give one of your weaker qualities to a character and see how it plays out on the page.
Find out more about our Kickstarter here.
About the Authors
Chikodili Emelumadu is a Nigerian writer currently residing in Cambridge, MA. Her work has been published in Eclectica, One Throne, Omenana and various other magazines and anthologies.
Aimee Ogden has been a science teacher and a software tester. Now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, The Sockdolager, and Shimmer.
Jae Steinbacher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where they are a freelance writer and editor. They are a graduate of North Carolina State University’s MFA in Fiction program, and of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Their stories have been published in Terraform, Escape Pod, and PodCastle. You can find them on Twitter at @JaeSteinbacher or visit their website, julie-steinbacher.com.
2 June 2018
Kickstarting Women Up To No Good!
Projects like the VIDA Count have demonstrated that women account for startlingly less than half of those published, and writers of marginalized sex and gender identities account for much less than their presence in the general population.
To help counteract that—and also because we thought it would be fun—we started the Women Up To No Good series, which focuses on “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet.
There are other imbalances too, most notably race, and while we have no formal requirement for inclusion of writers of color, we strive for diversity in all of our anthologies.
Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good and Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good are anthologies of writing by women and authors of marginalized sex and gender identities, about female protagonists whose knowledge or appetites are critical to their stories.
We’re raising money to be able to pay our authors professional rates, and to properly promote the anthologies so they get the attention they deserve. Our hope is to get the Women Up To No Good series on a solid enough footing that sales of the books will support all future anthologies.
Broad Knowledge authors
Sharp & Sugar Tooth authors
Check out our Kickstarter here.
1 April 2018