Special Guest Post: Kat Howard on Putting Women in the Story
“Why aren’t there any men in your story?” It’s the question I
get most about “Sweet Sixteen” (Lightspeed, July 2011). Whether
I say this in my answer or not depends on the context of the
question, but my immediate response is always to wonder whether
the person asking the question would have noticed if I had
written a story in which there were no women.   I write
speculative fiction because for me, that is the literature of
possibility. Oh, sure, to do it well, you need to be concerned
about making the strangeness of your story believable to the
reader. The science shouldn’t contain any howlers. The magic
should have an internal logic. But if you want to make a tiny
blonde cheerleader the biggest demon-slaying badass around, good
on you.  Although, I’ve noticed that for some people, it’s not
the demons that are the unbelievable part of that hypothetical
story.For them, the thing that is beyond strange is the idea
that a woman can do this--be the he