Posts

Showing posts from July, 2015

Hello, my name is...

Image
Hiya, folks. Today I've turned over my blog to an absolutely wonderful author whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person at the 2014 World Horror Con in Portland. I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did. *** Hello, my name is… Loren Rhoads My mother was a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by books.  Once she showed me where the science fiction shelf was, I’d sit down and work my way through it. It didn’t take long for me to notice all the writers (in those misty, far off days) were men.  Even the few women wrote under male names: Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh, James Tiptree Jr., and the ambiguously gendered (to me) Leigh Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley. The message I took from it was that women were welcome in small numbers, as long as they passed socially as men.  It was a message I had already internalized. I never felt like my given name fit me.  From an early age, I called myself George – long before I knew that was the nickname of Nancy Drew’s female f