“I Write Genre Fiction” — Damn You, Dirty Phrase!
Sam Sykes has a great post about how fantasy fans internalize the belief that the genre defaults to crap. I implore you to read it. It’s good. Really. And it’s because of Sam that I’m writing about the phrase in the title above. Only, I’m coming at it from a different angle. I’m not talking about the belief that good fantasy novels are exceptions, not the general rule (in part because I have no idea what “good” means in this context). What I’m talking about is the feeling I get when people ask me what I write. By “people” I typically mean “MFAs at my university.” Somehow the fact that I am a writer on the path towards publication has spread through rumor in my university. I’ve probably mentioned my writer status somewhere before, and so people I’m friends with on Facebook simply know. Regardless of why these folks know I am a genre writer, in conversation with them, the question that often springs up is “what do you write?”. From there, I tend to get sheepish about the whole genre thing. If I bring it up — “I write genre fiction” — it is either said with a hint that I’m not terribly proud of it, or some vain attempt to qualify my statement with nonsense like “I write literary and adventure SF.” None of these presentations makes me particularly proud. And now that I’ve read Sam Sykes’ take on how readers adopt this attitude about their favorite genre, I think there needs to be a break in my own little world. I’m done with being ashamed and afraid to say what I do. No more. Saying “I write genre fiction” isn’t a bad thing. And to anyone who thinks it is, well, fuck you. I write genre fiction. I’m proud of that fact. I love genre fiction. Most people love genre fiction, even if they won’t admit it to themselves. Those people should be ashamed of saying things like “I like Star Wars, but that’s because I grew up on it; I’m not into that stuff anymore” or “well, that book isn’t really genre; it’s literary.” Fuck that. It is genre fiction. It’s also literary. So what? It can be both. It’s also perfectly fine to like Star Wars AND the recently-released John Carter, or Star Trek (new and old) and Game of Thrones (the books and the show). Celebrate it. Love it. And if you write the stuff, don’t do what I’ve done for far too long: cower at the prospect of having to justify yourself to someone who “doesn’t write that genre trash.” You should throw off the shackles of shame and flip your figurative middle finger off at anyone who scoffs at what you love to do. Fuck’em. This is genre. Hear us roar. Or something like that…
So They Started Young — So What? (A Rant About Authors)
L. B. Gale has an interesting blog post entitled “Fantasy Writers: What We’re Up Against,” in which s/he profiles George R. R. Martin to give fantasy writers an impression of the writing life of one of the greats. We learn, for example, that he won his first award when he was 17 and was nominated for a Hugo at 25, with his first novel published when he was 29, and so on. Martin isn’t the only SF/F writer who started getting recognized when he was young, I’m sure, but there is something about looking at age as some kind of impressive element that bothers me. What exactly is impressive about getting published at a young age, let alone winning awards at said age? Writing isn’t like business, where making millions at a young age might be quite impressive indeed. I’m sure a lot of people are envious of Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire before 30. Why? Because most people don’t make it in the business world when they are young. To be fair, most people don’t become billionaires either, but the point still stands. But writing can’t be held to the same standard. Authors make it big when they are young, middle-aged, or damned old. Kenneth Grahame didn’t publish The Wind in the Willows until his 50s. Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) at 66. Anthony Burgess’s first novel at 39. Mary Midgley at 56. Joseph Conrad at 37. Raymond Chandler at 43. Richard Adams at about 52. And on and on and on. (There are bound to be plenty of SF/F examples too, but I didn’t want to spend an hour searching to find out.) But their ages don’t matter. We’re not talking about an 8-year-old writing a great science fiction novel, or a 115-year-old doing the same. We’re talking about writers who came into prominence at various points in the typical span of a human life. What matters isn’t that they wrote a great book at 17 or 52. It’s that they wrote a great book. What matters isn’t that they won an award at 17 or 52. It’s that they won an award. The age is irrelevant (or it should be). We needn’t revere authors for being brilliant at a young age; let’s revere them for being brilliant. What say you all?
Why Electronic Submissions Are Necessary
I asked on Google+ whether folks would be interested in this post. A few people said they were, and so here I am telling you about why people like me (i.e., the poor) need electronic submissions. For a different take on this issue, see Mari Ness’ troubles with accessing a post office due to physical constraints. My constraints are primarily financial. I’m not going to pretend that I am the poorest person in the world. Nor am I going to suggest that I cannot truly afford the occasional hard copy submission. Anyone with the extra time can probably poke holes into my finances and find the money to pay for postage, whether by cutting out my social life (which isn’t all that glorious to begin with) or making other kinds of sacrifices. But it seems to me that poking holes doesn’t really change the point, and it certainly doesn’t change the fact that fewer and fewer markets refuse to accept electronic submissions. In any case, here goes: Not All Writers Have Mountains of Disposable Income I’ll use myself as an example. I have a guaranteed income of around $12,600 annually for the next two years. That is not an exact figure, and my income does increase if I get summer teaching and it will increase because I am taking up an adjunct position at a local community college (for which I am not paid terribly well). But for now, let’s only talk about the income I know I will have this academic year: $12,600. With that amount of money, I have to be able to afford the following: rent, utilities, college fees, school books, food/various necessities (toilet paper, over-the-counter meds like vitamins, cold medicine, etc.), health costs (medication, doctor appts., etc. — I’m an asthmatic and a cancer survivor), and career “maintenance” (making sure I have a working computer, conferences, etc). You could also include the things I buy as a consumer and the little I get to spend towards maintaining a basic (and I do mean basic) social life. I think a healthy social life is crucial to mental health (for me, that means occasionally having lunch with friends, not running off to binge drink in Vegas). But I won’t include that below. If you’ve ever lived on $12,600 a year, then you know that buying all of those things is not easy. Even taking a rough estimate from my own life (minus a few of the above categories) isn’t exactly inspiring: Rent: $575 x 12 = $6,900 Utilities: $156 x 12 = $1,872 (it should be noted that I have been reducing my consumption and hope to bring my utilities bill down considerably once the “year” switches out) College Fees: $630 x 2 = $1,260 School Books (rough estimate): $200 x 3 (Fall, Spring, Summer) = $600 Food (Gainesville ain’t cheap, and I don’t consume endless amounts of garbage): $150 x 12 = $1,800 Prescription Medicine: $25 x 12 + $25 x 2 = $350 That by itself (dropping “various necessities,” “career ‘maintenance,’” and so on) adds up to $12,782, though it does not include other expenses which I can’t yet anticipate (health complications, etc.). That means I have less guaranteed income than what I have to spend on necessities, which also means I have to find ways to make up the difference in other ways (selling things, advertising revenue, praying I get summer teaching, etc.). That also means that whatever extra I can get isn’t going to be spent on shipping charges to F&SF (who seems to be the only relevant holdout) or Interzone, who I am desperate to submit to. I’m going to save that extra dough for emergencies, such as if I get extremely ill, or for other necessities, or even for giving myself a day off somewhere other than in my apartment (i.e., doing something for my mental health). Where in that lot am I supposed to “easily find” the $2-$3 per package shipping cost I have to pay in order to send my work to all those pro markets that don’t take electronic submissions? And if it’s so hard for me to cook up the money, or justify spending it based on always being unsure what my actual income will be, just imagine how difficult it is for people living in other countries, where shipping to the U.S. can cost ten times as much (adjusted for local currency value)… This is the problem. It’s not about being too lazy to take my work seriously enough to print it out and send it to publishers. It has always been about the cost to me as a writer to send my work to a publisher. That is not an investment I am willing to make, because it’s not actually an investment. Investments have reasonable guarantees, and that’s not how writing works. There is never a guarantee that you’ll receive something in return, as well there shouldn’t be. I don’t expect a critique of my story, nor do I expect an editor to publish my work simply because I sent it to them. What I do expect is that the financial burden doesn’t fall upon me when the technology is clearly available to make such burdens non-existent. From that perspective, markets which do not allow electronic submissions have remained relatively invisible to me. Because they must. Their policies exclude people like me simply because I am not financially able to feed the post office in order to regularly send work to magazine publishers. And they exclude plenty of other writers simply because they don’t live in the United States. I see that as detrimental to the genre. How can you say that you represent the best of the genre when you have artificially excluded entire segments of the world’s writing population? The answer: you can’t (though some publishers make exceptions for foreign writers, which is kind of like a kick in the balls for us poor people). I am fortunate, though. My income will be
Writing: It’s Really About Winging It
I’ve been following Mark Charan Newton’s blog for some time now. He’s the author of Nights of Villjamur, City of Ruin, and Book of Transformations, an environmental activist, reviewer, and too many other things to put in a post without wandering into random topics. He recently posted an interesting response to a Guardian article about Tobias Wolff, from which I draw the following quote: While I’m in no way intending to put myself anywhere near Wolff on an achievement level, I can really agree with his statement about faking it. Every single time I sit down to write, I feel like I’m winging it. From all the research I do to watching all the reviews come in, it still doesn’t feel real. Those poor Amazon reviews seem like a plot to expose me by those who know the Truth. I should be just as humble about what I will write below, as I am even less accomplished than Newton in my writing career (a couple of short fiction sales, no novels with agents, and a long list of rejects for stories I am told are quite good — thanks Adam). The interesting thing about writing is how muddled the field has become. There are so many classes and workshops and books about the process of writing that the reality of the writing process seems to have gotten lost. Everything about writing is about “faking it” or “winging it.” Fiction is always already a symptom of overactive imaginations, its very formation founded in the campfire dramas and ancient mythologists who made up lofty explanations for the strange world in which they lived and the great heroes and monsters that inhabited it. We keep this tradition going by telling stories about people that don’t exist (or about people who do exist, but have become caricatures of their former selves). Some of us make up our own mythologies and worlds (such as Newton and myself), while others wander into the realm of the everyday or the extraordinary of the real world (the good, the bad, and the ugly). And at the end of the day, there aren’t any rules or standards for the writing process beyond the arbitrary ones we set in regards to the language itself — and many authors break that too by providing stories written in various kinds of non-standard English (Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias S. Buckell, for example, use different version of island-based dialects in their work). So when writers get down to talking about their successes, of which I have very few, I think they are exposed to the inadequacy of the method: that is that we can’t exactly say “why” we have succeeded, except to say that someone liked whatever it was we wrote. There are no hard and fast rules of writing. There is no magic advice that holds true for everyone. Some say to be a writer, you have to write all the time, but plenty of writers do the exact opposite and do just fine. Do this, or that, or do both at the same time, at different times of the day, half on a Tuesday, three times on a Friday, and never on a Sunday unless it’s the 1st of the month…when it comes down to it, we’re just making it all up — the rules, the stories, the methods, our styles, etc. I suspect that the more accomplished a writer becomes, the more able they are to put a brick wall in front of that part of themselves that reminds them of their obliviousness. You’d have to, right? Because to spend your entire life thinking that this might be the day someone figures out you’ve tricked them into thinking you’re a good writer…well, that would suck.
A Short Story Wants to Get Away From Me
Earlier this week, I started writing a short story entitled “The Girl Who Flew on a Whale” as part of my WISB Podcast project. The story, as my friend Adam Callaway remarked, is a whimsical fantasy for young readers (chapbook level). I’ve always wanted to write a story like this. They’re fun to read and the current venture has been fun to write. But one of the issues I’ve had is the tug in my mind to turn this short story into a much larger project. “The Girl Who Flew on a Whale” is about a young girl who lives in a semi-Victorian-era town on the continent of Traea (many centuries after the events of The World in the Satin Bag). Her mother wants to prune her for the aristocracy, while the little girl, affectionately called the Dreamer, wants nothing to do with that world — rather, as her name implies, she dreams of the legends and myths of her world, wondering and wishing some of them are true. The conflict is one that I’m sure has been seen many times before, but it is also a conflict that is close to my heart. I don’t have children, but know that when I have them, I’ll do everything I can to foster their creativity. Because children who have their dreams crushed are children who lose the very thing that makes the world grow: creativity and innovation. We need dreamers today more than we ever did before. “The Girl Who Flew on a Whale” is partly about that conflict, but I’ve set it in a fantasy world (with plenty of whimsy) to get the message across via an adventure. And that’s where the issues arise. The story is begging me to expand the narrative I have already started. It’s begging me to bring in swashbuckling pirates and strange creatures and wonderful magic and all sorts of silly and beautiful things. Many of these I’ll put into the story anyway, but the grand adventure my mind is trying to imagine won’t fit into a short story or novelette. I’m having to keep those things at bay while I write a more manageable tale (and one that I can actually read in a single sitting for the podcasted version I promised everyone). Something I’ve been thinking of doing is providing the short version and then expanding it into a proper chapbook. I know many writers have done things like this (writing novel versions of shorts they wrote a long time ago). But is it as common today as it was in the old days of SF/F? I can’t think of many contemporary examples. I bring all of this up because I’m curious about some things: How do you go about keeping a story under control? Or do you throw your hands up and give it what it wants? Do novel versions of short stories work for readers? Do you enjoy reading those kinds of stories? What do you think? ———————————————————– P.S.: I actually already have cover art for this story, which is amazing. My lady has been working on artwork for me (not because I asked, but because she’s freaking amazing). I’ll share such things later. Maybe I’ll even do a special illustrated edition of the short story. That would be cool, no? P.S.S.: The inspiration for “The Girl Who Flew on a Whale” came from the following image:
Penelope Lively Says We’re “Bloodless Nerds” (or An Old Hypocrite Speaks)
If you haven’t heard, Booker Prize winner Penelop Lively, age 78, believes people who read books in electronic form are “bloodless nerds.” The article continues with the following: She said that Kindles and other devices to which you can download novels are no substitute for real books and no self-respecting bibliophile should want one. “I have an iPad but I wouldn’t dream of reading a book on it,” she told the Telegraph Ways With Words Festival. She makes a number of other typical arguments (how kids don’t read like they used to and so on), but I think the above is really the crux of the matter. Here is a person who has an iPad, which we can assume she uses to read things like online newspapers and magazines, blogs, and other forms of content, which at one point were provided to the public in print format. This same person thinks reading ebooks is bad news… So excuse me, Ms. Lively, if I treat your holier-than-thou assault on those of us who use eReaders with contempt. The fact that you benefit from the very shifts in reading formats you deride for the book form is laughably ironic and hypocritical. You can’t say “I use an iPad” in the same breath as “reading electronic books is for bloodless nerds.” Reading is not exclusive to the book, and the shift in reading habits has been going on for decades. For whatever reason, we’re more concerned about the death of the “book” than we are about the death of the print newspaper or the print magazine or whatever other prints have been subverted by online “printing” practices. Hell, you might as well bitch about all those stupid blogs out there and how in the old days you only got heard by your friends or if your local newspaper printed your letter to the editor. Those were such good days when you didn’t have much of a say in the way things ran beyond your vote. Screw Tunisia and Egypt and all that social networking and online newspaper-ing and what not… For the record, I quite like the “book” as we understand it in print form. I still buy lots of books. But I don’t disparage people who have become readers via eReaders or converted to electronic reading. It serves a social function as much as an economic and literary one. In a strange way, that timeless phrase (“don’t just a book by its cover”) has a double meaning now. Nothing wrong with that in my book…