Links:
- A brief essay by Margaret Atwood on science fiction.
- 1978 Dating Game winner turns out to be serial killer/rapist. Because 1970s Game Shows weren’t creepy enough.
- Lupa writes about racism in non-indigenous shamanism.
- Death Bear may be the most beautiful idea I’ve encountered in a while.
- A long, but really interesting article about making teachers more effective.
So tonight, I got a ton of good writing in. The bulk of it was novel related, and really satisfying except in one regard: I scared myself near-shitless doing it.
The problem is that I’m really quite good at locking onto my own phobias and visualizing the thing itself. Case in point: last night we had to move a truck out of our yard. The truck was on a slight incline, and I spent part of the day trying to imagine how we’d manage it. At one point, I imagined that I might have to help by pushing it. This in turn led to me imagining the most disastrous scenario possible, which involved my own hideous crushing death and the truck crashing, uncontrolled in through the fence into our back yard.
Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve quite clearly imagined what it’s like to have your skull crack open. It’s an experience.
So tonight, I was writing out a story from the point of view of my protagonist about how one of his phobias (which has something in common with one of my own fears, though it isn’t identical) is really quite rational from his point of view. Fertile, wonderful ground, and I’ll almost certainly have to keep at least part of that scene when I begin working on my proper draft. But damn if by the end of my two hours I wasn’t sitting there with my heart trying to crawl up out of my throat so that it could run screaming because I was too frozen to do it myself.
That’s a good feeling at the end of the day, but in the moment? I was considering finding a night light.
And they say to write what you know…
Two links that have me thinking, both in general and in terms of story fodder:
- How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Sort of chilling in a fear v. history sort of way, and a good example of how ideas and actions shape the way we perceive history.
- Why ‘Everything Has a Cause’ Is a Terrible Justification for God’s Existence
Being a polytheist who did some time in a non-theist framework, the manner in which I have a horse in the whole atheism race is sort of bizarre at best. But I’m in love with the sort of philosophical work that goes into these questions, and the ramifications of what societies can look like depending on how they answer them. So.
Otherwise, I’ve got a couple of posts brewing. Obviously, I want to say something about Gallifrey One and the panel and such in an official capacity because it was fantastic, but also about my thoughts on writing in somebody else’s universe, and about different kinds of stories on the spectrum between needing to tell them versus telling them for the art and joy of it. It’s just that none of them are quite fully formed yet, and so they’re works in progress.
Today’s big adventure is that it officially marks the moment when The Book can be worked on. It makes me a little nervous because there are three last things that need writing, and a possible fourth in the wings, but none of them are large things, particularly. Important, yes, but not large. In the meantime, I’ve got to hit an office supply store to grab a few things before the magic starts happening…
You know, it occurs to me that this week is sort of a crazy, ‘real writer’ moment.
I’m shagged out from going to a convention, waiting on page proofs for Well Versed to arrive, my author copies of February’s Crossed Genres arrived, and I sent out a contract for something else.
Freaking. Awesome.
Next stop, actual word count…
…until I get into a perfectly good airplane and fly to Los Angeles to attend Gallifrey One. I am told that I will not be expected to jump out of said airplane at any point during my journey, nor will I need any sort of formal training, or specialized equipment.
We shall see.
If you’re attending, I plan to arrive late Thursday afternoon and drift bar-ward until my roommates arrive, at which time it is anybody’s guess where I will end up (but if Racheline is to be believed, probably the bar again).
Overall, my plan for the weekend is to try and catch some of the commentary sessions (particularly Day Four), a solid chunk of the Torchwood-specific stuff, and at least one of the Big Finish panels. And, obviously, I’ll be in attendance at the panel I’m on, which is:
Where The Hell Can Torchwood Go From Here?
11 AM Saturday, February 27 – “Second Stage” Imperial
(with John Fay, Kate Orman, Salina Conlan, Catie Kagawa, Gemma Kendrick, and me)
That season finale at the end of “Children of Earth” left things in a bit of a state, didn’t it? With only two major players left from the original gang, and a handful of recurring/supporting characters to potentially choose from, where can Torchwood go from here?
Which is sort of fantastic because I haven’t had a lot of time to really explore this much as a fanwriter yet (writing for publication makes a huge dent in the hobby, oddly enough), and I have a lot of ideas about themes and character, and what I’d do if I were Prince of Everything and got to decide.
(Or if the BBC were interested in hiring me to write for them, which would be very nice indeed. Dear BBC…)
Other goodness:
- Since the announcement has gone live, I can now tell the world that I’ll have two poems — “Pipe” and “The Irony Is That We Are All Hungry” — Well Versed 2010. This won’t be coming out for a little while, but rest assured I’ll make note of it in public when you can order it.
- Jim Hines’ glossary of writing terms over at SF Novelists made my morning.
- Jaclyn Dolamore’s book, Magic Under Glass, has finally got its new cover. And it is lovely.
Two things of note if you’re looking to spend some of your money on readable things:
- My friend J.C. Hay’s novella, Hearts And Minds, is out in e-book format. I was an early set of eyes on this thing, and if you like steamy, ass-kicking space romance, buy this. Right now.
- The Polyphony anthology series is in trouble. Wheatland Press needs 225 pre-orders by March 1st to make it a reality. You can read their post about it here. The direct link to the book on their site (including a purchase link) is here.
It’s a bit of a melancholy night (morning, technically) here. I’ve had to deliver my “you are not your day job” lecture to a friend who’s feeling frustrated at the deferment of her dreams, and frustration at doing work that’s got nothing to do with her passion.
So here’s my stance on this. It isn’t really a manifesto or a confession or even anything important so much as an artist’s open letter to the world around him.
Every so often, I go read the qualifications a person has to have to be an astronaut. I’m a child of the 1980’s, and I had one of those ridiculous spring-loaded plastic rockets with the badly-molded space men in them, and I have been known to glue stars to my bedroom ceiling in spite of being thirty.
I read them, and I think, “Okay. If I hired a personal trainer, and went straight back to school,” and so on, I could meet those qualifications. I would have to want it very, very goddamn badly because I am out of shape, asthmatic, and not particularly inclined to be a scientist, but I could do it. I could bust ass and reach that bottom rung and hope that somebody would want to shoot me into space.
Or I could do what I’m doing right now, which is being a writer with a day job.
In the last year, I’ve spent much more in terms of resources on being a writer than I have earned. In purely fiscal terms, I might just barely break even on things like business cards and web hosting. Maybe. But there’s no way in hell I’m making a dent in this week’s trip to LA, or the cost of bringing my writing office up to spec (or having it at all). The netbook I’m using right now to type this was a gift. Electricity, last I checked, does not grow on trees.
Moreover, nobody is recouping me for the 20 hours/week I spend trying to put words in order. If I had spent that time flipping burgers at minimum wage, I’d be at least $7500 richer right now.
I am not $7500 richer. Or even $750 richer. Come to think of it, in 2009, I probably spent at least $750, what with Dragon*Con and all.
This is why I have a day job. Those 40 hours (well, technically closer to 55 if you count transit and other time away/preparation that I would not have to account for if I worked at home) are what make the 20 hours a week I spend in the chair possible. They feed me, clothe me, house me, and meet my basic needs. That day job will be paying me vacation time most of the time I’m in LA.
My day job sustains me.
Some weeks it doesn’t feel like it. Some weeks I do the math in my head and count up how much I’d have to make writing to quit and do some part time gig, or quit altogether, or quit with extreme prejudice, establish a trust for my family, and then run away and live in a hut in British Columbia.
I am pretty sure everybody has moments like this. Otherwise nobody would play the lottery. This is because most of us have the misfortune of buying, selling, or processing things as a career (or joining the Army) when we’d rather be kickboxing.
As a human being, I have to believe (either because it’s true, or out of self-defense) that those of us who have our hearts set on the sky but are not yet astronauts have a choice. We can be miserable because the world didn’t give us a space ship, we can find meaning and joy in the non-spaceship things in life and celebrate the ones who get to fly, or we can build that motherfucker in the back yard and hope it flies.
Being an artist is hard. Like being an astronaut, it takes a hell of a lot of work, and there are no guarantees that even if you put the work in, you will get anything out of it. For me, though, it’s worth the effort and the sacrifice.
And now, I’m going to bed. I’ve got work in the morning.
Spent an extraordinarily productive evening with my dread mistress Chloie last night. She had project work that needed doing and I had a story that needed plotting, and so we kept one another more or less in line until things were sorted. That turned out to be much closer to 3 AM than could possibly have been predicted, but it was good, and nobody got thrown through any windows.
Not that we didn’t try.
Nominations are open for the WSFA Small Press Awards. If you’re a small press author or publisher dealing in “imaginative literature” and know of something fantastic — either a book or short story in a small press anthology or periodical — go get your nomination on!
Of interest to anybody who writes, Joshua Palmatier posted about the nitpickier side of long fiction, writer’s tics, and the travails of publishing a novel that will either be quite informative or make you groan with familiarity.
Otherwise, things are relatively quiet here at the house. Well, aside from the reasonable last-minute sort of panics one has before going to a convention. Gallifrey is starting to feel like a real thing that I’m doing, not just some words scrawled on my calendar in Sharpie. Airplanes! California! Panels! Me hyperventilating a little bit because I have to confirm my shuttle reservation!
And now to get some other useful things done so I can start getting a bit of word count going on this story.
Just caught via Twitter, Pyr, a SF/F imprint for Prometheus Books, has just opened up their submissions process a bit. They’re currently accepting unagented manuscripts in certain subgenres. From their announcement:
Unagented submissions: Email submissions ONLY—and ONLY in the subgenres of epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, and contemporary/urban fantasy. No horror, science fiction, or slipstream. Only full manuscripts accepted—no partials or outlines.
Get on it, people.
Tags:
Today’s interesting thing: Claire Light writes about the apparent gap between women and PoC who are interested in writing and women and PoC who submit their work to major and/or mainstream markets.
I confess to having trouble getting into the meat of her post without clenching my teeth. Light complains about how few women and PoC submit to things within spitting distance of declaring most of the submissions she sees from them rubbish. She complains about talented writers who don’t submit to high profile markets in an industry that continues to behave in ways that are hostile to them.
Even so, she makes some really excellent suggestions for editors who want to be proactive and court a more diverse contributor pool. My sense is that Light’s intentions are good, but her post runs afoul of a lot of the same things that make mainstream publishing unattractive to the people she’s trying to open it up to.
So, you know, it’s a worthwhile read.
(Side note: Nick Mamatas challenges her statement about the quality of submissions by women and PoC here.)
For the last week and change, I’ve been working almost exclusively on a single story. In its final draft I anticipate that it’s going to clock in at about 3,500 words. Being halfway through the heavy lifting of the second draft, I can say that I think it’s going to be a readable and satisfying 3,500 words. But oh, has this week highlighted some major problems in my process.
To start, I did not go into this knowing what I was doing. Now, I’ve worked hard on and been proud of things that came out of nowhere, but starting this story was the writing equivalent of storming out of the room in a fit of pique.
I didn’t know my characters, or how the story went, or anything at all. So I improvised. I grabbed some characters I already had in my head and made do. This was great fun because these are people I wanted to get to know anyway, but it had a massive side-effect of leading me in entirely the wrong direction. By day three, I was reduced to swearing and pacing because — argh! — I was either telling the wrong sort of story with the right people, or the right sort of story for the wrong people.
So I re-cast the lot of them.
This worked enormously well. I knew now the sorts of people I needed to do what, and where. I didn’t know all the whys, but I knew the trajectory I wanted more or less. I spent a lot of time re-writing what I already had to accommodate these new people before I got into the new prose.
Which was awesome. I was happy. My plan was working! Except that while I now knew who I was writing well enough, I didn’t actually know where my story was going. Which, honestly, you’d think I’d realize before day seven on a short piece, but apparently I am not the brains of the operation this month.
It is hard to look at a week of work and acknowledge that the problem with it is that I’ve spent a week doing the literary equivalent of feeling around for my keys in the dark with the light switch well within reach. A lot of the joy in writing for me is that process of discovery. I want to find out what happens next, so I make things happen.
Except in this case I was having to go through every possibility until I struck upon the right one, and many of the bits I was telling wrong in the original draft were still wrong. Not as wrong, salvageable in a couple of cases, but still wrong.
Last night, I took a string and tied it to point A of my draft, followed it through what I had, and then tied it to point B. And then, because it was the right thing to do, I took a claw hammer to everything that didn’t belong to that string and ripped it out. And that felt good, though it means I’m going through the whole story and basically re-writing it. Again.
When I look at the past nine days, what I get from the experience is a good reminder that structure isn’t the enemy. Too much structure (i.e. knowing everything and then slavishly obeying it) can be, though that’s mostly because my brain says that I’ve already written my story, and that it wants to move on to the next thing. Still, hauling off with no sense of where I’m going and why is equally dumb because it’s tiring. I have to do four times the amount of work I should be doing, and there’s no way I can write a book like this and still finish while I’m alive.
So yes, I’ll be glad to see the other side of this one, if only because it makes me want to do the next one in better, smarter ways.
I want to talk a little bit about the whole zombie antho thing again. Probably for the last time unless something else comes up.
Before I do, though, I want to make it very clear that I don’t bear Doc, or any of the folk over at the Library of the Living Dead forums any ill will, nor do I think Doc’s actions reflect a homophobic impulse on his part. Doc is by all accounts a warm, kind, thoughtful guy who has published queer horror and intends to again, and his friends are very loyal.
(He’s also apparently epically snowed in right now, and I am wishing him warmth, food, and adequate toilet roll. So, you know, good thoughts his way, yes?)
Unfortunately he’s an awesome guy in a position to learn some uncomfortable lessons. As the whole matter of the queer zombie antho’s demise develops in public, the more troublesome it is for those of us who aren’t in the LLD inner circle.
To recap:
- on Jan 20, LLD put out a call for submissions for LGBTQ-positive zombie stories for an upcoming antho.
- A few days ago, the editor for the antho announced that the plug had been pulled because, “homophobia has reared its ugly head…NOT from the publisher, but with some authors that are contributers [sic] to the publisher.”
- Cue Internet freak-out at a story of publisher bullied into yanking the plug by a pack of bigots. Blogging ensues.
- LLD catches wind of Internet freak-out, Doc posts, taking responsibility for the demise of the antho and offering a kill fee. His reasoning, as stated in that post, was that he was “afraid [he] would upset people by publishing the book,” but that he considers LGBTQ people his “brothers and sisters.”
- Cue circling of the wagons over at LLD fora, including Bill Tucker’s second post, which states that the real reason for pulling the antho was a “concern that the anthology would be seen as a gimmick and would not have quality stories in it.”
- Cue Internet pointing out what a ridiculous Doc’s statement that is, pointing out that nice guys can still fail, and a total lack of people freaking out about Stoker winners Rot or Unspeakable Horror down at the Barnes & Noble.
- Doc replies to Jim Hines’ first post and says that he pulled the antho, based not on complaints from a shadowy cabal of homophobes (as in the original Bill Tucker post) but the concerns of his LGBTQ friends and writers that the antho was “gimmicky,” would “paint the gay community in a bad light,” and “no good can come from straight people writing about gays.”
- NEW: Doc’s most recent statement at Jim Hines’ blog, in which the new plan looks very much like the original plan.
Yeah, so I’ve got whiplash, how about you? Gee, if only I had a queer specfic writer around here to have an opinion about this.
Oh wait! I’m a queer specfic writer! With opinions!
Information flow (or “What is this fuckery?”)
From Bill Tucker’s first post to Doc’s reply to Jim Hines, every message about the rationale and impetus for dropping the antho has changed. This is a problem in general because cultivating good faith and trust is a necessary thing if you’re trying to do business, but it’s especially crucial if you’re interacting with a community that often gets the short end of the stick. We get lied to a lot, and even ‘nice’ people hem and haw and treat our rights like a semantic argument. It’s unreasonable to demand anybody’s trust — especially the trust of marginalized people — if you’re not going to be honest.
LLD/Doc went wrong by not being open and clear and consistent from the get-go. Whether it was deliberate obfuscation at work or just communication failure, this damaged LLD/Doc’s credibility. And, after asking all day why they didn’t just come out with their current statement from the get go, neither has offered any explanation.
Gimmicky, schmimmicky (or “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”)
Both Bill Tucker and Doc said that one of the problems with the proposed antho (which, remember, Bill was editing and Doc signed off on) was that it was “gimmicky” or that contributors would submit work that was offensive.
One, way to lack faith in your contributor base. Straight or LGBTQ, people are writing really good stuff in this vein right now. Everyone I knew who was interested was really fascinated by how to write something that would fit the theme while engaging the issues in new and novel ways. Judging by the fact that they already had subs to pay kill fees on — including one from one of the co-editors for Unspeakable Horrors — there was definitely interest.
Two, er, isn’t that what having an editor is for? Isn’t it his job (paid or not) to read over stories and determine if they fit, if they are good, and so forth? Unless LLD does things very differently from the rest of the world, I can’t understand how this is a problem. Reject the bad ones, accept the good ones, and go. It’s not hard.
Good Intentions (or “Where are we going, and why am I in this basket?”)
From the moment that there was outcry about the antho getting nixed, Doc’s friends came out in support of him. Based on his reply to Jim Hines, I can see why. His friends and his writers came to him with concerns and he acted on those. And that’s good, because listening is something good allies do. I can’t fault him for this.
What I would caution him against, though, is treating the LGBTQ community as singular and monolithic. When he says, “I’m sorry it seems I’ve caved in to peer pressure, but it was peer pressure from the LBGT Community,” that makes me uncomfortable as hell. Doc didn’t get pressure from “the LGBT community.” He got feedback from some people of his acquaintance and acted on it. Describing it as he does, though, he doesn’t make it sound particularly nice. He makes it sound just as awful as Bill Tucker’s first post, really. Darn those mean gay people! They’re so mean, crushing their own anthology!
Look, being an ally is hard. Sometimes you will get flack even when you do your best. Sometimes you will get flack for doing what you think is right. Sometimes there is no one right answer. It sucks.
Personally? I don’t think that straight people should abstain from writing queer stories. I disagree that an LGBTQ-only antho is the only right way to go. But I respect Doc for listening to his authors and friends. I hope Doc does ultimately go forward with this project when he and his authors are ready.
And now, to bed. I’ve got stories to write in the morning.
