Well.

I spent the last few days stressing out about having to include a “short bio” with a submission for an anthology that will in all likelihood reject my story anyway. It's funny how these things can seem so huge. I ended up in Forward Motion, because they are wonderful, helpful people. The advice and help that I got there was excellent and got the job done.

So, that done, I submitted the story — with one change. I have rewritten the first page of this story so many times I've lost count — often due to my interpretation of an editor's comments. As a result it just wasn't the first paragraph that I had loved anymore, so many drafts ago. So I decided to trust myself, and change it back.

I don't know if that's the right thing to do. I don't know if it's stronger or weaker for it. And this may sound like some kind of emotional masturbation, but I think I'm going to try to trust myself in my writing for a little while. That does not mean I won't accept critique — just that I'm going to stop second-guessing every goddamn word I write.

I had hoped to get a new story out the door by the end of May — that's not going to happen. But at least I got this one turned around and back out without the usual wondering whether I should retire it.

Now it's time to watch a movie and relax. Thanks, FM folks. I appreciate your help. I wouldn't have got even this far without you.

(And I still have so far to go.)

And now, a few words from Mr. Neil Gaiman (not the first time on this blog):

And as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help but tell, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world. It’s the point I think of writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you’re doing. – Neil Gaiman

“Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.” – Ray Bradbury

Not a lot of new words, but several new ideas. 

Via Stonetable I found this post on the use of log lines in fiction.  Seemed like a great idea, so I thought I'd give it a shot on the current work in progress.  I came up with a couple of really dreadful log lines, but one of them sent me off in a new direction, and just in time.  I am at 1439 words on this one.  As usual there is far more dialogue than narrative.  It's yet another short story that seems to want to be a comic book script.

Which brings me to an idea I had last week as I was trying to plan out the next few months of writing projects. 

I am going to continue doing the incessant rounds of submission and rejection with the print and online markets.  That's probably not sounding like a revelation to anyone but me — see, I was really thinking of dropping that whole cycle and just going straight to Creative Commons and publishing on a web site.  The paradigm is shifting, and I really do want to be a part of that. 

But.

There's a part of me that says that I'd be 'giving up' the original dream of being published by someone else, of getting that validation, and if I'm extremely lucky, a paycheck. 

So I think I've come up with a compromise: adaptation.

I can't put unpublished work on the web, because that's 'publication' and publishers will not accept it unless they accept reprints.  Okay.  But there is no reason I couldn't post adaptations or derivative work from those unpublished manuscripts.  What I'm getting at is that if my schedule allows it, what I'd like to do is adapt the short stories as comics scripts, and post those on the web under Creative Commons.

What excites me most about the idea is that if I do that, artists can then feel free to draw to those scripts.  I'd be giving something to the community.  Paying into the dream, playing a real part in building that share-alike world that Patrick and I talk about and that others (including him) are working so hard to create. 

So.  That's what I'm thinking about.

The narrative fiction remains the priority though.  I have developed yet another mind-game sort of schedule for myself, and the scripting only happens if I meet my narrative goals. 

I'm back to working on the ramp-up to productivity.  Yesterday's goal was 250 words, today's was 300.  I met them both.  Tomorrow will be 350, etc.  until I reach the 1k mark, because that's where I should be.  When I'm on my game, when my brain is flexible enough, when I do the problem-solving during the day away from the keys so that when I sit down I'm just on the task of writing, it's only an hour or two of work. 

I'm using the techniques that have worked for me in the past: the sound track, the word count goal, intermittent free-writing (which is really just a way to talk to myself without annoying the family.)

I think I can get this one done in fewer than 3k words, which will be a record for me.  It's just topped 1k today, and I don't think I have very far to go.  This is good.  Even if I kept at 250 words a day, I should still have finished the first draft in a week. 

These are the games that I play with myself.  The carrot is being able to call something 'done.' 

We're going to go see Iron Man today, and I can now do so with a clear conscience.  I think I'm going to go clean up my half of the office a bit right now — I've been working in the t.v. room, and that's not always going to work.  (For instance, even with headphones on the theme to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cut right through, and that is not particularly conducive to writing dark fantasy.)  Besides, we have an office now.  I think in the little house I got so accustomed to not having my own space that now that I finally do, it's uncomfortable to use it. 

Stupid brain.  But it made words today, so it gets a cookie. 

269 words of new fiction, and I have to learn how to build a bridge.  I'm a page closer to the end of this story.  It's something.

So Elizabeth Bear linked to this article  on Thursday.  I opened it in a tab in my browser and promptly forgot about it for two or three hours (and a glass or two of wine.)  When I returned to it, my first reaction was “what the hell am I reading?” followed swiftly by “oh my god… EXACTLY.”  Go read it, and then come on back.

Here's the thing.

I LOVE the term “speculative fiction.”  It's the term I use when people ask me what I write.  I more often than not have to define it for them as best I can, (“You know.. sci-fi, fantasy, horror kind of stuff…”) and know that invariably they still don't really know what it is that I write.  That's because everything I write is different.  I write fairy tales, psychological horror (badly, I might add,) bio-based sci-fi, stuff that would have fit well on The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, if I were writing scripts, and contemporary fantasy and magical realism.  If I knew dick about the Victorian era and its technology I'd also be writing steampunk, but that's another post entirely.

The thing is, all of that fits under one umbrella… somehow.  It's What I Write.  They all seem related to me.  They always have.  The stuff that I read seems related — Douglas Adams sits next to Neil Gaiman on my shelf, and apart from being British they don't really have a damn thing in common.  T.H. White's The Once and Future King goes nicely with Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Stephen King's The Stand.  They go together.  They just do.

I occasionally notice this thing that Mr. Morgan talks about here, what he calls the “more relevant than thou” attitude.  And I, like him, just don't give a fuck.  It's a big tent, and we can all fit in here.

I'm not in a position where these things can really bother me.  Nobody knows me or my writing, and maybe they never will.  Nobody is going to be disparaging my stuff as irrelevant because frankly nobody's ever seen it.  But what I know is that I, Reader, do not sort my loves into 'relevant' and 'passe'.  I read what I love. 

I do not love crime fiction.  I do not love mystery.  I do not — Cthulhu help me — I do NOT love memoir.  I do not love romance, erotica, or thrillers. I rarely can get behind anything that does not contain the elements of fantasy, horror (which typically is fantasy, but scary,) or sci-fi.  (Notable exception: T.C. Boyle.)  But my heart absolutely swells for anything in the SpecFic tent.  Even if I don't love the story (you've seen me gripe and nit-pick a bit here before) I love the writer for going there.  I love the stuff that says “what if the world/universe was not as it actually is, what if it were like this instead.” 

We're artists.  Don't we all get that?  And art is subjective.  The idea of sci-fi writers bitching about who is more relevant than whom conjures caricature images of art gallery snobs, claiming that a stark red canvas is more relevant than, say, Chagall.  It is subjective — you like it or you don't.  There is no good or bad, better or best.  You like it, or you don't.

You know what I don't really dig, even in our tent?  Space operas. Also, vampire stories. But they're still written, and they still sell, and I absolutely love that people are writing and reading them, and who the FUCK gets to say that they shouldn't?!!

It's a big goddamn tent, and it's got a number of banners flying over it: skulls, dragons, spaceships, dripping butcher knives, gene sequences, robots, broomsticks.  I LOVE this tent.

And anyone who thinks we should take down any one of those flags can get the fuck out.  I'll be over here in the corner, reading a book. 

Maybe even theirs.

Oh, the things that trouble my angsty, amateur little head. 

Today I paid someone a sincere compliment: I said that something of his was well written.  What I meant by that is that I was engaged the whole time, there was no meandering in the thought process, one thing led to another easily and I was left with what I think was a clear understanding of the author's point.  It is what I would call 'strong writing.'  It is not the most moved I've ever been by his work; there are other pieces that were more exciting to me but frequently wandered from the central theme, or were more mesmerizing but obfuscated by passive voice and what Strunk & White would call 'unnecessary words,'  but that carried me away nonetheless.

This played into what is becoming a minor obsession for me: differentiating between “good writing” and “writing that I personally enjoy.”

I keep coming back to this theme lately:  we all like different things, and I think we often mistake our personal bias for expertise.  Two different people will read a book and one claim that it's brilliant while the other says it's crap.  Is one right and one wrong, or is it just the kind of thing that one of them likes and the other one doesn't? 

Some people — a lot of people! — enjoy fast-paced, plot-driven thrillers that barely go deep enough to leave a ripple on the surface of a character.  That reader may consider something in the chick-lit genre a 'bad book.'  Other readers like high fantasy, murder mysteries, or memoir and will look down upon the perceived hackery of genres that don't suit their tastes.

I read something the other night, just to give myself a little mind candy:  Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Signal to Noise.  It did not grab me the way that Violent Cases did, (few things do,) but it was a very moving story about a film maker who has learned that he is going to die, and soon.  I loved seeing (it's a graphic novel) and reading a protagonist who is just a guy with a very serious problem and decisions to make.  The exploration of those decisions and why he makes them was the story.  That's the kind of story that keeps playing behind my eyes when I'm done reading.  It's the kind of story that sets my brain on fire and makes me want to create something of my own. 

Beyond the differences in what different types of literature are 'about,' different genres are actually executed completely differently.  I've seen this come up in workshops — someone will bring a memoir into a spec-fic workshop, and we all trip over the adverbs, gasp and say “But where is the theme?  What's the conflict in this scene?” because we don't understand the conventions of the genre.  Likewise we'll take one of our crazy stories into a literary workshop and we hear “I don't understand where the demons came from.  Was she hallucinating, or was that a dream?” because they don't understand the conventions of our genre and know to suspend disbelief a little further than they normally have to.

A technique that moves the pace of one kind of story along would be completely inappropriate for a different kind of story.  That does not mean that one is well-written and the other is not.  Experimental literary fiction can abandon every rule of conventional fiction — up to and including spelling and punctuation –  and still find print, an audience, and the admiration of a fan-base.  I don't like it, personally.  But others do.

I think my point is that Good Writing can mean a number of different things.

We get so much advice from our crit groups, writers conferences, books, magazines, and websites.  Show don't tell, use active verbs, be consistent with your tenses, don't start two characters' names with the same letter (yes, I've read that,) kill your darlings, don't use flash-backs, let no adverb stand — we get advice on grammar, paragraph structure, dialog, pacing, plot, character development, world-building, and style.  We try to implement what we've learned.  We get better at identifying our weak spots.  We think we've almost got it, and then…

…we pick up a book, and nearly every rule we've ever been taught as aspiring writers is broken on the very first page of a relatively famous author's award-winning novel, and certain things are called into question.  The shrill admonishments to make sure our first page is perfect or an agent or editor will never get past it ring in our ears a bit.  One wonders what all of those rules were for in the first place.  Whether we really were at those conferences to learn to write at all.

I just don't know that following the rules is what makes a person a good writer, or even whether being a Good Writer is what gets a person an audience.

Gaiman had some things to say on the subject a while back:

In my experience, most interesting art gets made by people who don't know the rules, and have no idea that certain things simply aren't done: so they do them. Transgress. Break things. Have too much fun.

The question of whether or not making art is supposed to be fun is another post entirely. 

Whether writing is meant to be fun, rule-abiding, or something else, I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be philosophy.   My sweet boyfriend brought home wine and cheese and ST:TNG, so I think I'm done chewing on this for tonight.  Instead I'll do some background obsessing on the fact that I tried to handle too many things in this post and probably missed the mark on all of them.  Le sigh. 

Wine.  Cheese.  TNG.  Good night. 

I finished Darwin's Radio last week.  I got interested in the characters in the last fifty pages.  I hope that others get interested sooner. 

My lunch buddy at work had been out for some time, and I was bored on my break, so I stopped in at Rite-Aid a couple of weeks ago to see if there was anything on the racks that I might enjoy.  I picked up Jumper by Steven Gould.  There is no television being piped into my home, so I had no idea that there was a movie out when I bought it — I read the back, thought “huh, sounds like something I could get into,” and walked out without even noticing the “from the Director of the Bourne Identity” on the front. When I finally did notice it and looked more closely at the cover, all of the recent Hayden Christensen jokes popping up in blogs and conversation suddenly made sense.

It's amazing how much popular culture passes me by without t.v.

I've been reading it on my lunch breaks, half an hour at a time.  I like it, though it reads like YA novel to me.  I was torn, actually, trying to decide if it was YA or just very old, written in a more conservative era, but it was published in 1992.  Right now it's out in mass market paperback, and available at Rite-Aid — due to the movie, I'm sure.  I wonder who it was intended for originally. 

Oh, would you look at that — a quick look at Amazon uncovers a couple of editions that look like they were packaged for the YA set. 

I've seen other writers say this — it's hard to find a story that really captures me anymore, because I'm so busy noticing the way it's written.  In this one, for instance, it seems like he gave his protagonist the easy way out right away; I'm only half-way through the novel and there are no questions left to be answered or problems to be solved.  I'm following the guy around, where ever he decides to go today, but there's nothing in me wondering “what he's going to do about…?” 

Again, I am enjoying it  — I can pick it up after a few days and not struggle to remember what's happening; I can read for half an hour and not be bothered by putting it down, but also happy to pick it back up, when ever I manage to do so.  I will pass it on to my friend's son when I'm done.  I think he'd enjoy it.

The other thing I just finished is McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 20.  McSweeney's prints short fiction, usually 'literary” and experimental.  I mentioned recently the sheer booklust it induces in me; I also read it because it is so far outside my norm.  I usually come away inspired to try something a little different in my own writing.  Reading it is often a stretch for me, but there is very little that I actively dislike and there is always at least one story that stays with me.  In this particular issue the story that stood out for me was “The Man Who Married a Tree,” by Tony D'Sousa, maybe because it was the closest thing to my usual speculative fiction. 

Next on the shelf are Undertow by Elizabeth Bear, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, and a long backlog of other McSweeney's issues. 

Speaking of things to read, before I go I wanted to point out this post from the new i09 blog, The 20 Science Fiction Novels That Will Change Your Life.  I've only read three of them, which doesn't speak well of me as a trufan.  I'll start tackling the rest when I get through my current backlog. 

But for now it's time for some cold medicine and some sleep.  Have a great weekend, all.