Day 15 – Pinterest (by sarah)

It is day 15 of Advent and so I painted an Ice Tunnel - well actually I painted it like a fortnight ago but I am putting it up now 🙂 Yes I was behind, yes I have back blogged!

I kind of got obsessed with this colour scheme.

Also I found an interesting article on what happens if you try and live by Pinterest for a week - Pinterest is an image sharing platform. I discovered it existed as people where putting my photos on there and my friend saw some cakes I'd made and nagged me (still have not blogged nor pinned the cakes).

I was a bit sad to see that there is a Pinterest stereotype - Mummy Blogger, White middle class housewife etc... and some people have found it depressing as they are not crafty enough 🙁 I'm kind of sad that I now know this. I also have a horrible feeling that this is me and yet not me. I know tattoos and nail art where on there as I like those things and occassionally look them up! I still don't know what the hell a Mason jar is and I write craft tutorials :/

I use pinterest mainly to gather inspiration for me and other writers and to discover potential artists for book covers or to post my own images or find science peeps etc.. I would not have gotten through her experiment! Well not unless someone was sponsoring me anyway!

Anyway this is my Pinterest, for those who are interested.

Advent 12 (by sarah)

This painting is of a snowman's fire place and will def. be part of a story at some point 🙂

Jean's statements about Hogwarts and LoTR

1) Hermione is only there to keep the boys safe, that is her function, to look after them and solve the problems in ALL the stories.

2) Why is everyone pale? Where are the brown people, there is snow you get brown people where there is snow but no ones even got a suntan.... later hmmmm even the people with the elephants aren't really that dark and why are they all bad?

This opened some interesting discussions about the climates and things in fantasy worlds and how we imaging things differently when we read things.

You Can’t Be A Scientist (by sarah)

Me: explains science

Kid: How do you know all this slits eyes

Me: Because I happen to be a trained scientist

Kid: No you're not

Me: Yes I am

Kid: Nooooo, he's the scientist points to Al

Al: Nope I'm an engineer, she's the scientist

Kid: What really?

Me: Yep, I've blasted moon rock with lasers

Kid: puzzled look

This was last week. I am sure I've told you all about the time the toddlers refused to believe I was a geologist and that my friend with his shorts and big beard was the geologist?

I'm sure you've all read the posts I've made about how I get parents thanking me for having Ada and a list of female scientists and engineers but this time I don't think the issue was one of gender exactly - I am a mum, I had occupied the space of "mum person" "stay at home parent" and in our society that means, person who doesn't do anything but house work, or maybe a side job in a shop or nursery.

He had no problem with there being female scientist puppets or the idea of girls in the group doing science but Mums? Mums don't do/know this kind of stuff, mums well they're kind of dumb and reserved and frightened things.

And I have gotten this so much.

I noticed that crutches aside people just assume I don't want to/can't do stuff anymore because I've had a baby or two and it is INFURIATING, more so as though Alaric suffers from this too it is a watered down version - probably as he is out at "proper work". Stay at home dad's I know tend to have issues with people thinking they are lazy and heaven forbid they try and expand their minds by reading or anything whilst at home - surely they should be fixing everything - what you mean they cook and clean? They need to go out and get a job.

And on and on and on.

But I am kind of feeling a bit stressed about bits of science that are not my bit of science because though at primary school age etc... I know all the stuff I feel like I am now The Proof and the only proof that slightly dumpy mummies can do science too.

The Dyslexic Author (by sarah)

This week is Dyslexia Awareness Week, it is also the begininng of an insane writing challenge called NaNoWriMo which stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you write a minimum of fifty thousand words in a month and I have been doing this challenge and a picture book sister challenge called PiBoIdMo (Picture Book Idea Month) since 2009, which is now scary long ago.

When I first started the challenge and using the forum I felt very edgy, being severely dyslexic made me hesitate to enter into online written discussions with grammarian monsters - the sort that correct friends' emails. How was I ever going to compare to such writing experts when sometimes I can't spell mine or my kids' names correctly?

Trying to belt out a novel is an amazing experience but it is also an emotionally fraught one, especially for those low on self confidence. Self confidence is a key to success - it is not the only key but it is one of the main three - Self Confidence, Endurance and Improvisation/Adaptability. Dyslexics, due to our education system and social attitudes, tend to be high on intelligence and low on that whole confidence thing. To keep going with the writing you kind of need to believe that your story is good enough, that your imagination is fantastic and that everyone is going to want to read it. Many authors go through a cycle of thinking their stuff is amazing and will win a nobel prize, to sinking into a pit of despair over how rubbish it is.

But dyslexics have an added edge of nerves, an extra question over their abilities. Not only is there the language structure issues but there is the widely held idea that if you cannot spell you cannot write. This is wrong.

And it turned out that the way NaNoWriMo works is fantastic for boosting dyslexic writers. It goes something like this - everyone is rushing to get down as many words as they can, you are encouraged to leave the typos as they are and just keep going, everyone has typos, inversions of letters, missed letter where they are just typing so fast. Normal people see these and correct them, the dyslexic brain may think that that is the correct spelling and at other times it will see it as wrong - but conversely it might see the correct spelling as wrong and correct it to something incorrect - DOH!

What this means though is that when you are sitting in a cafe or pub with a group of writers your red line squiggles are no longer an issue - everyone has them. Then there is the concept that you can edit a book with mistakes in, no matter how many mistakes there are, but if there is no book to begin with you cannot edit it into something. This frees you up to write.

One of the things I also found was that increasingly I was learning language intricacies and histories and that I could grab the grammar nazis by the proverbial and correct them if and when they started. Grammar is not a fixed thing - look at the history of writing and you find that Shakespeare couldn't spell his own name, that names themselves are pretty fluid, that grammar is just basically a mark up language to tell the reader when to breathe when talking out loud.

But can a dyslexic ever be a writer, be a published author, a journalist?

Yes, they can, and when they do they tend to be multi-genre writers, not brilliant for becoming a household name but good for writing how-to and last minute books, to be able to switch the brain from science to sports to craft, to be journalists (with patient editors!), to be non-specialist all round jacks of all trades. And, increasingly, this is becoming acceptable back in the realm of fiction, thanks to authors such as Neil Gaiman.

So where does that leave me? I have said repeatedly that I must be insane trying to be a writer whilst being very very badly dyslexic but, you know what, I wasn't - I find that being dyslexic helps with research for stories and articles, as I can't rely on words or even the grammar. I often have to use both plus the context, meaning that I can often pick up on the big or small picture, the hidden concepts and deeper meanings. It also stops me making stupid assumptions as I can't take the writing literally and if it doesn't seem right I am forced to ask, to check. For science writing this is extremely important.

Now before we go any further, dyslexia is not something I can really define; it is just a part of how my brain is wired so I will not say that my writing success is because of, nor in spite of, the dyslexia. It could have stopped me; it was a hurdle, and it has stopped many but mainly because they are told they can't do things because of it. Also, yes, I am contrary and stubborn so when people told me I could not, or that I would find stuff hard, I was determined to show them I could do it - especially when my intelligence itself was under attack.

But would my life achievements have been different without the dyslexia? I kind of think not, I just had to take a different path. And that path has been strange and winding and this last week I have found myself writing craft workshops, reading my kids poetry and stories to kids whilst dressed up in ridiculous outfits at various kid clubs, being asked to perform my page poetry at several events, asked to run writing days for adults and kids, getting sci-fi stories accepted, writing blog copy and presenting my project Cuddly Science which includes script writing and picture book writing and report writing and talk writing.

And that was just this week. This last month included articles on sci-fi/fantasy and science and crafts and gardening and grant applications, and this last year saw me become a member of the Poetry Society, British Science Fiction Association and the British Science Writers Association (and yes that does confuse me especially as there is also the British Hen Well-Fare Trust that we got the chickens from too!), I have been asked to present awards to school kids and I completed a Science Communication course - something I dismissed as a "can't" during my undergraduate degree, due to the dyslexic issues.

I now firmly place myself in the role of writer, of author and so do others. I am finally what I was told I could never be - a dyslexic author. It was not trial free and it is not yet over, it kind of will never be over and I'm ok with that.

Back to NaNoWriMo, I find myself actively encouraging dyslexics to write - to take part and I love wondering around the forums and Facebook pages and twitter seeing articles like this pop up and I love to be able to say to those who are worried, those who are struggling, don't give up, you can succeed at this. And that doesn't just go for writing, it goes for every aspect of career and life 😀

Dads & Lads (by alaric)

popped up in my local news today: Lads and Dads Club to strengthen family unit.

"That sounds a bit... 'last century'", thought I. What activities might require male-only participation? Getting women pregnant probably isn't a task that fathers and sons would traditionally share, so it pretty much had to either be mustache/beard management or targetted urination, right?

But, no, it's a club for doing outdoorsy/adventurous activities. Exactly the kinds of things my wife and eldest daughter enjoy doing, as it happens (our youngest daughter, on the other hand, is scared of mud and trees). So, why the "father/son" branding?

Well, what I suspect they're trying to do is to give fathers motivation and opportunities to spend more time with their children. With the kinds of careers that make the money required to raise a family still much more accessible to men than women, a lot of kids are largely being raised by their mothers, which will indeed give kids a skewed view of the world. For a start, it'll tell them that parenting and domestic chores are for women while going afar and earning money is for men, which sucks. And it'll tell young boys that their destiny is to grow up to be a distant wage-earner, while girls are told that their destiny is to be a carer who's always hanging around the home and spending somebody else's money.

Yep... That sucks. Fathers spending more time with their kids is a good thing, and help in doing that - in telling them that they should, and that it's an OK thing for a man to do, and in giving them ready-made group activities to turn up so they don't need to organise stuff themselves, and to get them in with other similarly-minded people to exchange tips and make friends - sounds awesome to me.

However, I think it's been unfortunately tainted with gender stereotyping. That it's sons that need more time with their fathers, but daughters don't. There's an assumption that the boys need to learn MAN THINGS from their MAN DADS, while the girls are fine learning woman things from their woman mums.

But kids don't have these gender stereotypes as to what activities they should do, unless we force them onto them. And forcing gender roles onto people causes misery.

The Lads and Dads club have a rather defensive-sounding statement on their site saying that mothers and daughters are welcome too, but the rest of the site is full of statements like:

Lads and Dads Club is about creating fun and inspiring male environments. We’ve got great events for grown-up sons and their fathers, from hill walking to sky diving and weekends away. And because not all sons have a dad around, and not all dads have sons, mums and daughters are welcome too.

Boys need to be boys ... At the core of the Lads and Dads Club we are all about supporting fathers in their efforts help their children to grow and develop and have lots of fun along the way. This necessarily means that we are creating a very male oriented environment and we think that this is a good and necessary thing for Fathers, their Sons and often their Daughters too. (and, at least when I fetched it, the bottom of that page had a big ad for "ItsNotForGirls.com: Men's fashion at its finest")

So they've clearly given some thought to gender issues, but seem a bit confused, as no attempt is made to reconcile "Mums and daughters are welcome" with all the hyping of "male environments".

What's going on here? Did somebody complain about the sexism, maybe citing "discrimination", and they felt compelled to quickly wedge in the statements about accepting girls to avoid "trouble"?

You see, I think that organising outdoorsy/adventure activities for kids is great. And encouraging fathers to take a more active role in raising their children is great and particularly needed, because sexist stereotyping tells men they're supposed to be distant and leave the parenting to the mothers. But restricting this parenting to sons, and using it to reinforce the very gender role assumptions that are the root cause of the problem, isn't exactly the best way of dealing with it.

I'm worried that this thing will succeed, and in doing so reinforce the "men work all day, then go to the pub with their mates to avoid going home to their families, and then hide in their sheds all weekend" stereotypes.

And I'm worried that it'll become the target of feminist anger and be destroyed, leaving all the people behind it feeling angry that women came and destroyed their attempts to build a male-only space, leading them to become men's rights activists and try to fight the feminazi conspiracy, rather than trying to help fathers to do cool stuff with their kids (of all genders).

What would be AWESOME is if they realised that the problem they're seeing (fathers aren't getting to do much parenting, at the cost of both themselves and their kids) is a symptom of false traditional ideas of what gender means, and work to solve the problem in ways that break down those gender models, rather than reinforcing them. Now, to market it to fathers who, themselves, will have been brought up with those kinds of gender stereotypes, they'll need to be careful to make it look acceptably "manly" so that the fathers aren't turned away from it; there's a very fine line between "not offending gender stereotypes" and "promoting gender stereotypes", but it can be walked. The organisation's current description of themselves (starting with the unfortunate name...), however, is nowhere near that line. There's no reason to actually use the word "father", rather than "parent"; if the content is all written without touching on gender stereotypes of any kind, it can be "not unfatherly" without being "exclusively fatherly" (and, therefore, "not unmotherly" without being "exclusively motherly" either!).

The United Kingdom is full of "mother and toddler" groups. Even if they're called "parent and toddler" instead, they're invariably female-dominated, which reinforces itself as fathers are left feeling quite out of place at them. It would be great to fix that, and a logical place to start is by making "father and child" groups for various age groups of child, so fathers at least have a comfortable place to share fatherhood with each other. Given a chance to build their confidence in that role, we would be able to break down the barriers and migrate towards everything truly being "parent and toddler"; but as with whenever we apply "positive discrimination" to try and encourage people to do something society historically tells them they shouldn't, this needs to be handled with utmost care and sensitivity, lest it becoming divisive and discriminatory in its own right.

This can happen alongside "adventure activities for kids" groups that encourage mothers and fathers to go and do fun stuff with their sons and daughters - which would start off being dominated by fathers and sons, because of our social expectations; but there's no reason to give into that and assume it's the natural state of affairs.

We're all suffering because of gender stereotyping. There's no reason to force that onto another generation.