I don’t normally do this, but I decided to crunch numbers for submissions received in November for the Historical Lovecraft anthology and had some interesting results. Please note I did not crunch numbers for previous months, so the pies show a slightly askwed view of the slush.
First of all, England and the United States continue to be extremely popular settings for stories. As you can see in this pie chart, they account for almost half of all settings. I realize “outside England/USA” is a big category, but it seemed the easiest way of crunching the data.
The most popular time period continues to be the Victorian/Edwardian era. Again, my slicing of time periods is pretty arbitrary, but I was going for ease of use. However, November did see a spike in stories submitted in ancient settings, which explains the large chunk of green in this chart. Ancient Rome and Mesopotamia were the popular locations (aside from England and the USA, which, continue to show up in numerous stories, as detailed above).
Now here’s an interesting one: there are almost no stories about women in the slush. Almost all submissions had male protagonists. The “both” category would have been in use if we had a story with two main protagonists, one female and one male. Since this was not the case, there was no green on the chart. My definition of protagonist was simple: who is this story about? Not the most brilliant solution, but there you go.
Did the lack of female writers in the slush reflect the lack of female protagonists? As you can see by the following chart, that might have been the case. Few women in the slush seemed to equal few stories about women.
This is not meant as a scientific exercise, but I hope it highlights some of the issues we are seeing with the slushpile: stories which are mostly about men, with similar locations and time periods, making for a very uniform reading. I didn’t crunch numbers for this, but most of the protagonists were also middle or upper class, with an abundance of aristocrats even though there are plenty of chances to tell stories about beggars, thieves, cooks, servants and anything in between.
Although we are seeing submissions from international writers, more stories from people outside the United States and Canada are very welcome (we did have one story in French from a writer sent to us in November, along with other international authors).
Africa is probably the most neglected setting and, shockingly, we have very little Egypt in the slush. Historical Lovecraft is open to submissions for one more month. Use this information wisely if you are going to start a story soon.
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This was an interesting breakdown to see. I’m a little surprised (maybe I shouldn’t be by the lack of submissions from female writers. For what it’s worth, I just finished a first draft of my submission; it has a female protag and is set in the African Congo.
Very cool, thanks for sharing! Though in re: to the gender of protagonists, doesn’t Molly Tanzer’s contribution feature dual protags, one male and one female? That’s how I took it anyway, when I beta read it. Shame on Africa being thus far neglected, seems like something really awesome could be done by fusing mythoslore with any of the sundry folklores of the continent…
Hi Jesse,
Data was only for November, so Molly was not in the stats because of that. But it would still read pretty much the same as Molly is so far the only female writer who has sold us a story AND the only one with a female & male protags (though there are now several stories about and from women in the the hold pile).
Hi Lynne,
I’ve been getting more stories from women in the past few days, as though they were mobilizing as the deadline draws near.
Ack, that’s me not reading close enough–sorry!
I think that everyone might be avoiding Eygpt because ‘It’s too damn obvious, everyone’s going to be doing it’, and then, even if you did Eygpt, you’d avoid the Amara period for the same reason. This is what I thought, anyhow, and maybe everyone else is thinkin
g the same way.
But then, that wouldn’t explain all the stories set in the US and UK.
Similarly, I can report that I’ve found it quite difficult to do female protags in a hi
storical timeframe, because of the constraints on movement and action imposed on women
throughout history. I’m used to doing futuristic or present day settings, when this isn
‘t a problem (unless you want it to be), but on attempting to write something for this
anthology set in Renaissance Florence, I was shocked to find just how constrained women
were in this time, or in fact just about any time I cared to pick. From what I could
tell from the information I could find, anyone would find modern day Saudi Arabia prefe
rable to 15thC Italy (and not just the women)!
Byzantium, much the same.
Rome?
Athens?
Bejing?
All much the same.
I’m not doing Sparta, not after that movie.
But the one place this leaves is Eygpt, where women had considerable social and politic
al freedom, and possibly Asia under the ‘Pax Mongolica’. Oh, and I think maybe ancient
Korea, but where are you going to find the references for that?
Also, I must confess I’m a little nervous about doing female protags in a Lovecraftian
setting. The protag normally gets eaten, lets not forget.
Anyways, you should do this graph thing more often, it’s interesting, and lets writers
see what ‘they’re up against’. Could we get a breakdown of the ‘non US/UK’ locations? Has anyone done Samarakand or Khotan?
I shall be spreading the word about Eygpt, and pointing you out to the women writers I know. I’m gonna try and do Florence with a female
protag, and Khotan too. I can’t do anything about myself not being female, there’s only
so far I’m prepared to go to get published!
Colum
Uh, I see I misspelled ‘Egypt’ every time I used it. Well, I got the right letters, what more do you want?
Anyways, any chance of a breakdown of what Cthulhu Mythos elements everyone is using, so we can tell if we’re all doing the same thing?
Colum
Hi Colum,
I try to Tweet about the slush every few weeks, so if you follow me you can get a grasp of what the slush looks like (and I blog here, of course; my Tweets can be more frequent though info is much shorter, lol).
Regarding the female characters: that tends to happen because many writers (I include myself) tend to limit themselves to a certain socio-economical strata (upper class and nobility). So you’ll find women were more restricted if they were nobility than if they were Jane the weaver. This holds true for basically any civilization I’ve studied (Precolumbian, Tudor England, etc). And then consider periods of upheaval: in the 1910s in Mexico women became soldiers due to necessity during the Revolution. Are there periods where upheavals might have modified patriarchal structures?
Think outside the box. The setting is so important for this antho.
Nobody has done Samarakand or Khotan, by the way. Protags need not be eaten, by the way.
Settings we have bought: Vikings, Wild West, Jane Auestenesque, Mesopotamia. We are heavily considering a few stories set in Egypt, Laos, Prehispanic Peru and more.
One final note: stories need to have Mythos elements. We want stories inspired by Lovecraft. I know, that’s vague, but while we’ve had stories which mention Mythos deities by name, we also bought a story about body-switching with no Mythos stuff. But body-switching, revenge from the grave, and the feeling of it, was Lovecraftian. Interpret and distill Lovecraft into your narrative.
Heretic! Protags must be eaten! Yog-Sothoth demands it! All shall be eaten!
Interesting point about ‘Jane the Weaver’, I hadn’t thought of that. I’m no student of history, so I have to skim, and it occurs to me that the stuff I’m reading might have a bias towards upper class women. I suspect that most history we have was written by the rich, and like any writers they “wrote what they knew” (how fortunate we are that so many of us know the eldritch rites of the outer gods) and thus wrote about themselves.
Indeed, poor families maybe couldn’t afford to keep their daughters locked in towers (much less pay a dragon to guard it!), they needed them to work.
But where does one go to find the details of the lives of most women in a given time period? I think this is a problem for all writers writing anything. And it’s not just women, I imagine that the same factors are probably skewing our views of men’s lives too. Do you have any pointers of good information sources that don’t require working through the entirity of Gibbon or something?
Colum
> Vikings, Wild West
Wow, although these are ‘Europe and US’, they still sound pretty ‘outside the box’. Lovecraftian Vikings?!! But yes, of course, it makes perfect sense!
Colum
Hi Colum,
I’m afraid I can’t point you to a secret treasure-trove of historical information. Reading a lot is the key (and reading non-fiction, of course). Eventually you find interesting figures and stories hidden in the margins. You discover people like Emilie du Châtelet, Hypatia or Trotula of Salerno. Fortunately a short story does not need as much details as a 10,000 word one. You can get by a 2,000 word story with some good setting and detail, and read only a few sources.
I’m co-writing a story about the Portuguese African slave trade, circa 1500s set in the Congo, which I’m submitting very soon. However it has male protagonists unfortunately.
Well, I ain’t gonna make it. Neither of my sory ideas flew. But, I’ll probably be bying he anthology to see what others made of it!
Colum