"A. R. Morlan - Dear DB" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morlan A R)

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that new small press 'zine, _Prophetic!,_ and read with blurring eyes, "All
this time, my husband and I thought D.B. Winston was a man! What a surprise to
see you sign your name 'Ms.'" That cover letter, the one I signed with a 'Ms.'
(a rarity for _moi,_ it must have been Susan B. Anthony's birthday, or some
other such pro-feminist occasion) was a pure exception on my part, and I
hadn't signed one like that to a new magazine I'd submitted to in months. Even
my personal correspondence was genderless, and generated male-oriented
responses ("Dear Mr. Winston, We are sorry you were dissatisfied with new
Doggie Dinners..."), all of which seemed so _funny_ at the time. With a
growing sense of dis-ease, I scanned the contributor's copies of the zines
which had run my material, and was confronted with table of contents after of
table of contents crediting my stories to "D.B. Winston" or "Denton Blair,"
(and remembered that all the junk mail in my kitchenette garbage bag was
addressed to "_Mr._ D.B., et cetera" once I realized that the Great Computer
Network Hook-Ups had my gender wrong, I was sure that I was _doomed!_) and on
top of it, few of the magazines I had things published in bothered with
author's pages (even if they did, how many people actually _read_ those
things?)
As the editor at _Gore_ had pointed out, most of the writers in my
field are men; readers expect them to be men, for who knows what reason. It
was that automatic assignment of gender on the part of readers that led me to
use my initials instead of my name on my work, and played a part on my choice
of a male _nom de plume._ Years ago, I had read an article about breaking into
the publishing market that suggested that men have an edge when it comes to
certain genres, and since I never liked my name _anyway_ (to me, Devorah Bambi
Winston had that good old cheerleader-Pom-Pom-Girl-Prom-Queen-Sorority-Sister
ring to it, and plain old Devorah Winston had a
small-town-paper-mill-office-clerk-playing-with-her-typewriter feel to it ...
which is what I _was_ at first, when I started submitting things), so using my
initials had seemed so appealing, so natural, so crisply efficient ... and,
unbeknownst to me, so very _masculine,_ not merely androgonous, as I had
hoped.
Crazy as it all sounded, it did make sense; wasn't that editor
astonished to find out that I was really a woman? Which, in turn, meant that
the impression that she and her husband had gotten that I was a man, a strong
one? And those readers writing to the _Gore_ editor, about liking that "guy's
work." After all, didn't Peter Pan, or some other fairy-tale kidlet, say that
"wishing makes it so"? (I know he said "Clap your hands for Tinkerbelle," and
all _that!_) So, if that's the case, wouldn't "Thinking makes it so" also
apply? A wish _begins_ as a thought ... suddenly I remembered the note that
the _BQ_ editor put in with my contributor's copies, the one with the reader's
survey results. That meant that a lot of readers a lot of very _imaginative_
horror and fantasy loving (_and_ believing? I wondered) readers had asked for
my stories, many of them no doubt thinking _(believing)_ that I was a man. I
found the note, and if I had had doubts before