At 1:45 this morning I finished the first draft of my new novella. The story came to over 22,000 words--a third longer than I'd planned. In order to reach closure, I had to fight the tempatation to add more plot twists, carry the story further. I wish I were a short story or flash fiction writer ... the satisfaction of completion is more immediate, or at least more frequent. But either I'm long-winded or else my plots are too complex for the short-story format.

I still have plenty of critique and revision ahead before this baby hits the marketplace, but there's less guilt there -- nothing to keep me from blogging. Though I just remembered I've been promised a contract for a nonfiction piece that I may need to work on soon.

One of the joys of finishing a story is that I can now look at it from the 20,000-foot level and try to pick out some meaning. What drove me to pick the situation I did? Why did the characters do and say what they did? And why did I choose to end it as I did? I haven't read the novella from start to finish yet, but one theme that I know appears often in it is sexism. The story is set in what I refer to as a "gender reversed world" where men are a minority, both numerically and politically. I've written quite a lot of fiction in this world, but this is the first time I've written in it from a man's point-of-view, and doing so revealed how hostile and oppressive my creation can be. The protagonist experiences some form of disrespect in almost every scene.

I'll be interested to get readings from my critiquers (most of whom happen to be women) to find out how closely the sexism in the story mirrors women's experience of sexism in our own culture. I fear I may have projected my own fears and hostility onto the female characters in the story and that, as a result, readers (especially women) will find the characters unsympathetic. I tried to show that the disrespect arises not out of any malice on the part of the individual, but rather from cultural assumptions that the characters don't even perceive. Unquestioned assumptions, in other words.

For instance, men in this culture are treated somewhat like children. They aren't allowed to do productive work or leave their homes or fight or give orders. When the protagonist tries to cross these boundaries, the women around him think he's crazy or stupid. They ridicule him, shame him, or slap him around. The miracle in this story is that the protagonist finds the will to take any initiative at all.

In inventing and portraying such a culture, I've tried to make the mechanisms of sexism more visible--to men at least. As for women reading the story, I hope they'll pause to ponder how *they* would treat men if they lived in a gender-reversed culture.

Is such a culture even possible? I think so, though I can't point to any existence proofs. There are (and have been) matriarchal societies, but I don't know of any that demeaned men to this degree. (Of course, there's never been a society in which women outnumbered men by a hundred to one.) One might argue that in a land of women, the one-testicled man would be a king, not a slave. Or one might argue that maternal instincts mitigate the risk of oppression and violence in a women's world. Or one might argue that my protagonist would've been caged from birth and never had the opportunity to escape and rebel.

Back in 1976, Ursula LeGuin wrote, "[I]f men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles . . . then society would be a very different thing . . . . [I]t seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation -- exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth."

A bold hypothesis. But levelling men and women, if it ever happens, might still leave huge social inequities in our society. Don't other forms of inequality (based on age, class, education, nationality, sexual preference, religious conformity, etc.) also lead to exploitation?

More on that later.