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writing

Merrie had recommended some podcasts about writing (and no, I’m not Elizabeth, but I can steal recommendations with the best of them), and because I already subscribe to more podcasts than I can reasonably listen to, I added some of the ones she pointed to. On Thursday, I listened to the first episode of Holly Lisle’s “On Writing” podcast. Her advice on this one is don’t start your book with weather. Amusingly, and this is probably an indicator of how limited my repertoire of beginnings is, it had never even occurred to me that one could do such. I thought over my openings. I couldn’t come up with a single one that has weather in it. I read a few, to make sure. Nope. No weather. Total absence of rain, snow, wind, clouds, sunshine. Well, I’ll be. I was doing something right and didn’t even know it. But here’s where we come to the peril of writing advice, especially when it comes to me. My Connerly woman genes dictate that if someone tells me I should not do something, I must then immediately find a way to do that forbidden thing. Start a story with weather…so tempting. Not only does Holly warn me away from such a course of action but (extra bonus plus) I’ve never done it before! Hmmm. This writing advice podcast business may not be for me.

I am doing a second (in some places third) draft of Cualcotel, have I mentioned that? I haven’t done a writing post in so long I forget what I’ve told you about. I’m still in the first quarter of the book, and I’ve discovered that I hate revision. This is part of why stuff languishes in my “to be fixed up before sending out” pile. There’s also the queasy feeling I don’t much like any of it and maybe it’s all terrible and I’m doing myself a kindness by not sending it out. If I don’t much care for it, how can I expect anyone else to? Though Gaiman said (on this very website, how cool is that?) that he doesn’t expect anyone to like everything he writes, including himself, so maybe it’s all pointless grumping on my part. Then again, he demonstrably doesn’t suck, while I…well, let’s just say I haven’t proved my not suckitude yet.

I sent “Hindsight” out again, which means I officially have something out there again. It had languished for about six months. So, that’s on its way to its sixth rejection. My goal is to get a second thing out before “Hindsight” comes back. I also already have the next market picked for “Hindsight”, which should help turnaround matters. Really, how am I ever going to get that 100 rejection party if I don’t snap to it?

The last thing I completed was a retelling of the Garden of Eden story. Snake’s point of view, of course. Yeah, I know, so done. Like the world needs another one of those. Stack of useless words. On the other hand, it’s what I had available to be written, so I wrote it, and it’s preferable to the alternative: no story and no words. I did another one of those idea generating exercises, which is kind of fun. I did actually write up some stories from the first iteration of that exercise (including the mournfully, grievously broken “Far From the Tree”) and I hadn’t done it this year, so I guess that’s useful. Spent about twenty minutes on it. About ten ideas, maybe about three or four of those usable. One that I thought was really cool.

I’ve had, lately, a lot of existential angst about my writing. Almost two years and I’m not anywhere, to speak of. I have a pile of words that I don’t know what to do with, I seem incapable of sending anything out, and my writing lacks any sort of luster, though I do try. This has led to me weighing down my friends and relatives with numerous “woe is me” discussions of my writing (sorry, guys). Thankfully, you can be spared the brunt of all that, and I can get straight to the funny parts. With one of my friends, I had this exchange :
11:41 AM me: This was better when I thought I was GREAT!
my friend: hahahaha
and hugs
11:42 AM i find your fiction to be markedly different from your conversations.
where you, in the words of admiral nelson, forget maneuvers and go right at ’em.
11:43 AM me: hmmm i’m digesting that. so my fiction is indirect?
11:45 AM my friend: i would say oblique without the payoff.
11:46 AM that the very best oblique writing can deliver.
me: i’m working on payoff! really, I am.
Then, with another friend, discussing a specific broken story:
“So of course I’m headed for the showdown so I have to put the caretaker in sooner.”
She, “Well, actually, I’m never sure which way you’re going with something. I find you often go in directions I didn’t expect.”
“Oh,” worried pause, “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
“No, no, no,” she assures me,”This can be a good thing.”

Right, so on my first book, the one where they excerpt reviews down to a single word because anything else would be damning, I’m having them put “oblique…” and “unexpected”. I’m sure my friends won’t mind blurbing me. Also, it appears I won’t have to turn in my internet bloggers member card, because I have managed to post a chat transcript. First memes, now chat transcripts, will my conformity never end?

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Can you name some author whose novels you prefer to their short stories? I’ve been trying to do this for days. I’m having trouble coming up with a list. Some people I can’t vouch for, because I’ve never read their short (or long) work, but in nearly every case where I’ve read both, I prefer the short stories. Stephen King is my token exception, but maybe that’s just residual effects of that meh short story of his I read out of McSweeney’s. Weird, innit?

I finally finished the Ellison tome and I can safely say I’ve read all the Ellison required for one lifetime. There was some seriously amazing stuff in there, don’t get me wrong, but one thousand pages can hardly be claimed to be a distillation of the choicest morsels. Sadly, I was underwhelmed by “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman”. The included screenplay occasionally had me reaching for a knife to gouge out my eyes, but I’m sure that’s just my movie aversion kicking up. Likewise, reading about Hollywood bores me, so the whole “Nights & Days in Good Old Hollyweird” section tested my resolve to read the whole book. On the other hand, “Jeffty is Five” continues to be the most amazing story ever, Ellison’s reporting from the Selma march wooed me completely, and if once in my entire life I write a story as good as “A Boy and His Dog” then it’s pretty much die happy time. Oh, and “At the Mouse Circus” hit me in all the right spots, even though I know I didn’t scrape up anywhere near all the meaning that’s in there, and I can’t wait to read it again sometime.

The slushbomb story fizzled. I had two scenes that didn’t go together, and in fact may have belonged in different stories (though I know they were in the same world with the same protag which is really frustrating). I just wanted a nice, three-scene story on a traditional arc to test the waters at F&SF with. Oh well. To the vault with you until you grow a plot, you wannabe cyberpunk piece.

So in discussion of why the slushbomb is or isn’t a good idea (discussion in which I did not participate, mind you) on an email list I belong to, someone linked this blog posting by Jed Hartman. Besides being incisive (if a little too liberal with the disclaimers), it made my brain tingle in three ways :

  1. The suggestion of degendering by submitting with only your initials and how that might make editors auto-assume you are female made me realize that my initials (A.S.) would be really amusing to use in submissions. If I ever write something Tiptree nomination worthy, I’m so doing that.
  2. Jed says:

    “So instead, the idea, from my point of view anyway, is to have more editors who are naturally inclined (without conscious bias or intent) to buy stories by women. Regardless of your own gender, do you generally like the stories you read that are by women as much as or more than the ones that you read that are by men? (I’m not talking about conscious choice here; I’m saying, do you find yourself reading a story and liking it and then noticing it was by a woman, over and over again?) If so, have you ever considered editing a magazine? Or a Year’s Best? Or even publishing a virtual Year’s Best?an online list of what you would put into a Year’s Best if you were editing one?”

    Something chimes in my head. I can do that? A virtual Year’s Best? Huh. How come I never thought of that on my own? So there you go, something you may see from me at some point, because that’s how things start in my head, with that little ding and followed by the “huh” that means I’m mulling it over.

  3. Jed also ponders whether SH’s focus not just on character driven stories but on stories about relationships is the reason for SH’s slant toward women authors, when most of the rest of the industry appears to slant against. He seems to have a handle on a lot of things, and obviously he knows more about the industry than I do, but this seems off mark to me in at least one sense : I don’t recall ever reading a story (SFF or otherwise) that wasn’t about relationships. Maybe it’s projection on my part, and the other stuff falls by the wayside when I’m reading. Maybe it’s the slippery nature of a word like relationships. Still, all those award-winning Ellison stories? About relationships. Just last night I read “Alien Stones” by Gene Wolfe (that man’s a genius, can I get an amen?) and it’s about relationships more intensely and directly than ninety percent of the things I’ve read written by women. Obviously there’s a difference in what SH buys and what F&SF buys, and the difference is more than I generally like what’s in SH better, but I don’t think relationships is the key factor, by any means.

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I’ve noticed from reading a handful of genre blogs that periodically people will bring a topic to attention and delve into it with great vigor and vim (as Dr. Seuss would say). Since WisCon, the topic receiving the analysis from all angles is cultural appropriation. To be honest, I haven’t followed everyone’s argument (a massive lj-oriented list’o’links is here), but I did read what my list of regulars had to say on it, and what they linked. I have no light to add to the debate, and not very much heat, either. I have no sweeping statements to make, no edicts on who should (or shouldn’t) write what, no real dog in that hunt. Even so, it’s a topic that makes me uncomfortable. I believe in cultural honesty and cultural integrity. I believe in letting people have their own voices about their own history. I’ve criticized white, male writers far more talented than I for writing outside their cultural norms here on this very blog, but only when their efforts failed to convince me they knew what they were talking about. Only when their lies were shoddy. Had they been convincing, all would have been forgiven. But what sort of random, subjective standard is that?

Still, the whole idea of cultural appropriation makes me uneasy. If I should not write outside my culture, then I cannot write at all. I have no culture to call my own. I have a background, sure, but having existed on the planet for several decades isn’t the same as having a culture. I am jealous of and mystified by people who own cultures. I am a rootless outsider everywhere I go. The whole time I was in Europe (the first time) people believed I was European, but were never convinced I was local. In England, they assumed I was French or German. On the continent, they assumed I was British. Actually, I’m just a pretty good imposter.

So this is a problem, you see. I don’t want to appropriate, but really, none of this is mine, so I can’t help it. If I cannot borrow and/or steal, then I cannot frame my stories. This explains some of the brokenness of my shelved story “Olympus”. I am not Argentine. I have no right to this story. And yet, I was standing right there, looking at that building and wondering to myself (because I am a wonderer, you see) why someone would block up all the windows. Didn’t they want light? I walked past that building countless times, staring at it, deaf to the screams of people being tortured within. Don’t I own my experience then? I don’t know. Doesn’t feel like it, and I think my doubts are on the page.

And here’s the other part, the part that I call “I can only tell the stories I have to tell” and I’ve seen (more eloquently phrased) by other writers of genre as “you dance with them that brung you”: if that’s the story I pull from the well, then that’s the story I must tell, best as I know how. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m Argentine or not, whether I’m Hispanic or not, whether I’m Jewish or not. I’ve got Analia, and she is who she is, and I’ve got what happened to her to tell, somehow. I don’t want to shunt responsibility off onto some inscrutable muse by saying that, you understand. I don’t even believe in muses. All writers are superstitious, true, but that whole muse speaking to me paradigm has never had any significance for me. There’s not someone else responsible for my stories. On the other hand, it’s not like I can take full credit, either. Stuff happens in there, and it’s better than I can make it, though not always sufficiently better.

I only have this clay to shape – no other – and if I’m going to do this job, then I have to put my hands to the clay, come hell or high water or accusations of cultural appropriation.

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I have a hard time thinking about genre in terms of my own work. It doesn’t seem shiny enough for specfic or fabulous enough to be fabulistic or straightfoward enough to be litfic or wild enough to be magic realism. I’m kind of hoping the dissection of the work will be someone else’s job, but then there’s that whole marketing thing. The last two stories I finished have no specfic elements at all, and I have no idea where to send them.

It seems odd for me to say I don’t want to think about what exactly I write since I classify everything around me, but I seem categorically unqualified to be able to figure out what my own writing is. Not only that, classifying my own work seems like so much wankery. Plus, I have some concerns that overthinking genre could break process for me, so I avoid it. Then again, there’s that marketing thing to tend to. What is this? Where do I send it?

I can tell you where the stuff came from (en cierto, de Jorge Luis con su voz solemne y poetica, su rostro ciego, su amor perpetuo de Buenos Aires, sus senderos siempre bifurcando, y su alma bibliotecaria. And you, Edgar, with your deep preoccupation with setting, the house that is ever the soul, your sense that the mystery never solved is the human heart. Yes, you too, Fyodor, and all those sentences that are too long and all those characters who are too complicated, as well as your study of moral problems. I’ve hardly begun, this could go on for a while, so perhaps I should stop now.) Revise that to: I can tell you some of the places the writings came from, but I cannot label them any one thing, or tell where the words will end up.

I have a title for a story I don’t have a story for yet. It’s called “Ranganathan’s Gift”. I am hoping that it will be funny and synchronous.

I just finished Anansi Boys and there’s an image there that feels yanked whole cloth from Lewis. I want to compare the two, to see how much alike they really are. Anansi Boys is a great book, too, so much better than American Gods. Funny and more carefully plotted and such a delight to read. I was so happy with it.

I realized, around November or December, that my kinesthetic limitations translate to writing. I cannot, for the life of me, describe a simple sentence in which characters take a physical action. If I take the trouble to figure out what people are doing and how (in order to round out my scenes for those movie in the head people) I always take three times as long to write the applicable sentences only to subsequently have readers tell me they can’t work out what anyone is doing. Picking up a glass! Sitting in a chair! Lying upside down in bed! Tipping someone over the sill into the hole! Why is this so difficult? Learning this trick is going to cost me, I can tell already. Between the inability to describe action and figuring out how to be funny, I’m going to be pretty busy failing over here. Ah well, fail better, right?

“Hindsight” was returned to me (by the now defunct Fortean Bureau, sadly…does it count as a rejection if the place you sent it to shuts down?) which means that I have nothing out, because “Hindsight” was all I was sending around. “How Does Your Garden Grow?” has been through a heavy round of edits and a re-read by the small critique group, so it’s a hair’s breadth from being ready to go out. There’s also a flash piece that’s essentially lacking only a title (and a market) before going out, and “Easier Next Time” which was reasonably well-received at WUTA and for which I haven’t many edits. Then there’s the big edit pieces: “Lie Down with Dogs” (which is also very long, almost 10K words, and can you believe one of the knocks people had on it was that they wanted more?), “Seamless”, “Nine-Tenths” and “How I Lost My Nissan Z-350”. Then there’s the radically (possibly irreparably) broken stuff: “Egghead Kingdom”, “Ennui”, “Found Objects”, “Olympus”, “Loyal Companion”, and the one I really love “Far From the Tree”. Unfinished pieces include the post apocalyptic star story, the Chelia backstory thing I was working on, and (winner in two categories!) “Far From the Tree”. So it looks like I have about four things that really ought to be out finding a home, four things that need revisions and six things that I just throw my hands up about for now, because I’ve no idea how to fix them.

Tally: I wrote fourteen stories in, roughly, a year and half. Six of them are (currently) unworkable. That’s a pretty scary failure percentage, there, and that’s before we get to market, even! However, in the slightly reassuring department, only one of those shelved pieces (yes, “Far From the Tree”) is from this year, so maybe the others were all overambitious practice? And “Far From the Tree” tries to do a lot and I was cocky and confident I could handle it all, at first. Still, the newer ones do seem to be getting to the page more fully realized, clearer in every respect, than the earlier ones, even when I can’t quite pull the rabbit out of the hat. The improvements are most noticeable where I’ve taken old starts and finished them (“Nine-Tenths” and “Easier Next Time”). Anyway, at least I know “Far from The Tree” is broken. In every other instance, I had to have someone else tell me the story was broken. I couldn’t see it. That counts for something, right?

You know, other than trying to get the eight that aren’t wretched in good enough shape to go out into the world and maybe working on the Chelia backstory a bit, I’m going back to Cualcotel. It’s novel time. I want to complete it. This week, my goal is to get an outline, and go over the part I think stays the same (first five thousand words or so?).

iTunes says I was listening to Distractions from the album Simple Things by Zero 7 when I posted this. I have it rated 5 stars.

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I was thinking this morning, about something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said at VP (also said in this entry by Elizabeth Bear which I’m linking again because it’s that good): what matters in your writing beyond basic competency is not so much what you do wrong when you write, but what you do right. Often when I review (or just think about) a book, even by an author I love dearly, I take the time to try and be evenhanded, and I spend a lot of time analyzing the bits that don’t work for me, since those are the bits that serve to caution me in my own work. Today, however, I was considering certain author’s gifts (or what I consider their gifts, at any rate), and I thought I would just lay them out here. So, things I admire about currently living, working authors:

  • About Caitlin R. Kiernan: how everything she writes is processed to the nth degree. Nothing is direct or straightforward. Every idea is simmered and touched by other ideas. Chronology and event description are often beneath her, incidental to the inner lives of the characters she writes about. She’s never written a line that was only about one thing, or only had one meaning.
  • About Elizabeth Bear: How she’s not afraid to maim (and sometimes kill) her characters, even the very best ones. Unflinching.
  • About Neil Gaiman: how thoroughly convincing and deft his voices are (both narrative and character voices). Even when plots are thin or reprocessed, when events seem disjointed, when references are more like wholesale reappropriations, the voices of the characters are always pitch perfect.
  • About J.K. Rowling: narrative drive and forward plot momentum. There’s never a good moment to put the book down, until its over.
  • About Gene Wolfe: how he never, ever even for a second lets you get away with being a stupid reader, and rewards you so well for paying attention.
  • About Jeff VanderMeer: the unstinting courage to take huge risks, to do unconventional and strange things with form and structure and narrative, without worrying about whether they’ll work or not. Maybe he does worry (far be it from me to claim knowledge of the author’s emotional state), but that sure doesn’t come across on the page. Also, the richness of his worlds, the depth and breadth of places like Ambergris and Veniss.
  • About Lois McMaster Bujold: Her complete mastery of third person limited POV. It looks effortless and elegant when you read her words, which is the true sign of super proficiency.
  • About Ursula K. LeGuin: How her books speak to you long after you put them down. The density of ideas in each. I read The Dispossessed over two years ago and, as recently as last week, I was still ruminating over some of the political philosophy she wrote about in it. Her ideas remain relevant.
  • About Haruki Murakami: I’ve often seen critics describe prose as luminous, which tends to make me roll my eyes, but Murakami’s actually is. I can’t even describe it, and the fact that I read a translated and therefore lesser version of his words and still feel the glow astonishes me.
  • About Ray Bradbury: His mastery of setting. I know what Mars looks like, what the 1950’s look like, what the veldt looks like, what the carnival looks like, what October looks like, and I know them all because he told me. Also, the way he can go back to the story well, again and again, and keep drawing things up. He still has things to say.
  • About Bruce Sterling: Complexity and extrapolation perfectly intertwined. It’s not layering (which I also admire in authors when I recognize it) so much as imbrication and even though he’s not an author I love, he’s certainly an author I admire.

Doubtless I could go on, and perhaps I shall revisit this at some later date, but for now, that’s a pretty good list.

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12 Nov 2005, by

Yes! Exactly!

I read this today on Poppy Z. Brite’s journal :
The only way I have of “explaining” the work is by writing the work. If it’s not in there, then I didn’t know how to say it. There’s no answer key I’m holding back.

Yes. That’s exactly it. I can’t tell people what happened or what things mean, because I’ve already done it in the best way I know how. Anything else I could say would subtract meaning, not add it. At VP, after we’d had our story critiqued in group, people were often given a chance to rebut criticisms. I completely didn’t see the point. When they asked me if I wanted to say something I just shrugged and mumbled something about the work standing on its own merit and if it’s not in there, then it’s not in there. I’m not being coy at all, it’s just that I’ve already used all the best words the best way I can when I was telling the actual story. Also, once it’s out there (which, to be fair, hasn’t happened to me yet) then it’s technically not mine anymore, and my vision of it has no more authority than that of any given person who read it with care and attached meaning to it.

Of course, it’s beyond inane for me to explain why I can’t explain my stories. Navel-gazing of the worst sort. But there you have it.

Also, I note another death in the spec. fic. short market : Sci Fiction is no more. Bummer.

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Friday’s news bulletin : “Olympus” sucks. Terribly broken. Non-functional. One new thing I tried was accomplished so poorly that it was not even registered as an attempt. All kinds of rivet counting going on, as well. And still having the problem where I think I telegraph things blatantly and people don’t pick up on the semaphores. Bear with me while I whinge a bit. This is disturbing to me on various levels above and beyond the obvious fact that, given my druthers, I’d rather write things that don’t suck. But here’s the above and beyond : 1 – this story is important to me (which may be part of the problem, I suppose.), 2 – I’d like to think I’m doing all this cool shiny stuff that I learned at VP, but apparently I’m not, 3 – I want to have faith that the curve of my writing is climbing, you know? I don’t want to think of it like this jagged stock market, prone to rise or plummet without warning. There’s a reason I don’t gamble. Two people have said this is the worst thing I’ve written. One of those two people said “trite”. Prick me, I bleed, and so on and so forth, I’ll spare you the melodrama if you promise to picture it. I don’t have any ambitions to originality, I’m right with the school of people who believe in the limited plots, but I do strive for a certain authenticity, and trite isn’t part of that equation. Bleah.

I have no idea what I’m doing! What’s worse, people have noticed this! I’d so rather have a regular job right now. I didn’t miss the mark, I just did what my boss told me. It was the committee. It was the lack of funding, and proper equipment. It was, uhm, someone other than me not doing their job. Sigh.

News of “Olympus” suckage has completely derailed me from finishing “Lie Down with Dogs”, which bothers me. The two things are not related. I should be able to continue one without worrying about the other. Should, and yet, seem unable to. Completely paralyzed. I am not the story, the story is not me. And yet.

So you know what they say: Try. Fail. Try harder. Fail better. Only today I want a break from failing. So maybe tomorrow.

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3 Nov 2005, by

Huh.

Huh. Did the new story really just tell me its title might be “Lie Down with Dogs”? Nah. That couldn’t be. Could it?

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