A guy I've admired from afar for a long time, Buck Angel, speaks about trans* issues, outing and other obstacles at Amara's today.
I can't possibly stress how important Buck is for the whole trans* issue. In my head, I've always referred to him as a gendernaut - somebody who goes places most of us never do, and vastly expands our understanding of gender and sexuality. Do go and check the interview out.
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
I blogged elsewhere & update on Dark Soul
Welcome, new subscribers! Please feel right at home. :)
First of all, I'm really enjoying to see Dark Soul going viral. I don't think there were many stories I've written that have turned out to be so popular, but it's great to see all the reviews and tweets pop up. I consider those motivation to sit down and finish Dark Soul 5.
As an update - Dark Soul 4 is completed.
Dark Soul 5 looks like it'll have five stories, as I have a lot of plot to wrap up and am currently pondering to add a sex scene somewhere. Interestingly, every single story of Dark Soul explores power, and most attempt a mind fuck of some description. (Yeah, I know, I'm slow, bear with me for a moment.) Some of those are tied up into sex, others into loyalty and obligation. The most powerful stories - IMHO Dark Secret, Dark Night and Dark Lady I - combine those themes.
How do I know these are the best ones? They are the stories that I balked the longest over starting. ("The m/m readers will rip me apart if I put a sexy guy into a female dress" was one of the considerations, admittedly.) And they were the hardest to write overall, and at the end of every single one I sat back, thinking, or saying "holy hell, I need a drink/coffee." (But I do keep a bottle of vodka in the freezer for this type of "woah, hell.")
So it's a ride; for me too.
So, back to Dark Soul 5. Two of the stories are written and they clock in at around 13k. It feels like I have most of the plot still to get through, but least, the research part is done, so now I can concentrate on finishing what I've started in terms of the plot arches. As a side note, I did not expect Stefano to have quite that much internal strength, courage and humanity (well, he has to, considering the beating he takes throughout the series).
Overall, I'd reckon DS5 will clock in at 20-25k words, which means the whole series will be around 90k words, which should make an attractive paperback later in the year.
Right now, I don't want to be thinking about "what book next", but I do want to get the second part of William's story finished before I vanish in WWII for a year or two. (Possibly two.)
We'll see what the next year brings in terms of queer writing and in the mainstream.
First of all, I'm really enjoying to see Dark Soul going viral. I don't think there were many stories I've written that have turned out to be so popular, but it's great to see all the reviews and tweets pop up. I consider those motivation to sit down and finish Dark Soul 5.
As an update - Dark Soul 4 is completed.
Dark Soul 5 looks like it'll have five stories, as I have a lot of plot to wrap up and am currently pondering to add a sex scene somewhere. Interestingly, every single story of Dark Soul explores power, and most attempt a mind fuck of some description. (Yeah, I know, I'm slow, bear with me for a moment.) Some of those are tied up into sex, others into loyalty and obligation. The most powerful stories - IMHO Dark Secret, Dark Night and Dark Lady I - combine those themes.
How do I know these are the best ones? They are the stories that I balked the longest over starting. ("The m/m readers will rip me apart if I put a sexy guy into a female dress" was one of the considerations, admittedly.) And they were the hardest to write overall, and at the end of every single one I sat back, thinking, or saying "holy hell, I need a drink/coffee." (But I do keep a bottle of vodka in the freezer for this type of "woah, hell.")
So it's a ride; for me too.
So, back to Dark Soul 5. Two of the stories are written and they clock in at around 13k. It feels like I have most of the plot still to get through, but least, the research part is done, so now I can concentrate on finishing what I've started in terms of the plot arches. As a side note, I did not expect Stefano to have quite that much internal strength, courage and humanity (well, he has to, considering the beating he takes throughout the series).
Overall, I'd reckon DS5 will clock in at 20-25k words, which means the whole series will be around 90k words, which should make an attractive paperback later in the year.
Right now, I don't want to be thinking about "what book next", but I do want to get the second part of William's story finished before I vanish in WWII for a year or two. (Possibly two.)
We'll see what the next year brings in terms of queer writing and in the mainstream.
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
The "citizen-journalist" and the e-book piracy fallacy (then turns into: patronage)
Today Publishers Weekly tweeted an article from that rather amusing, very mixed bag of a "news source", HuffPo.
It's an opinion piece by Harry Freedman, entitled "Why I'm Not Worried by E-Book Piracy".
I'd say it's worth checking out, only is isn't. The author conflates, in a tangle of derailed logical thinking, several debates: the indie vs trad. publishing debate; the pricing debate; the quality debate; and then tops it all off with the rather lurid hope that continued piracy will make authors "angry" enough so they will turn away from pricing their books at $0.99 - and because it'll make authors angry, e-book piracy isn't really harmful, so Freedman's "not worried". (How much of that is whistling in the woods is open for debate.)
Wow, talk about an intellectual fallacy, naivety and a lack of research (possibly due to a lack of data and experience. According to his blog, Freedman is a relative newcomer to e-publishing, so he might be forgiven).
This is especially lurid in the face of this news item: Piracy Drives One Noted Author to Early Retirement.
So, it's clearly working, Harry, isn't it?
I can state, knowing my own sales, that my sales have stayed essentially flat in the last 18 months. Or, to run some other numbers, I've sold something like 300-350 copies of one story, which is extremely widely pirated. I'd estimate that around 20,000 illegal downloads were made (this number doesn't include torrents, which are very hard to track, and it doesn't include what I call casual sharing, the "here, I bought this, you gotta read it, so I'm sending you the PDF" sharing between friends).
Now, not every pirated copy is a lost sale, I get that. Let's assume that 5% of those downloaders might have bought the book. That's 1,000 people - three times what I actually DID sell. And, no, the $300 total royalties I got from that story doesn't really pay for the (many) hundreds of hours of work that went into making it. And those are peak sales - after the first quarter, sales always drop dramatically - always. Chances are, those $300 are most of the money I'll ever make from the book.
That for a book that has very high ratings on Amazon and Goodreads and ranks amongst the best I've done. Am I worried?
Am I worried that in a growing genre, my sales are completely flat? Am I worried that if you type my name into a search engine, the first links are links to pirated copies of my books? Am I worried that I now have to spend prime writing time on sending takedown notes to websites?
It means less time for writing, no hope ever to be anything but full-time employed, and it also means not only fighting the Muse all the time and my own fears, but the sense of entitlement.
There's a strongly Darwinian streak in this debate, which runs like this: "If you can't make a living off writing even while being pirated, then you're clearly not good enough. If you drop out of writing, you just lost Darwin's race. It's not like there's a shortage of writers - ten more will take your place."
Yeah, at which point, art will return to the palaces of the rich. Every author will have to find himself/herself a patron. Thing is, much of that art was locked away - patrons very often didn't share it with the wider population until way after their deaths. Imagine how many paintings and sculptures we'll never get to see in our lifetimes because they are in "private collections".
Thing is, my genre isn't something that a patron would be interested in. So I'm considering every paying customer my patron, who can all pop a couple bucks into the kitty and in return, I'll do my best to be fun and entertaining (and hot. I'm not forgetting hot).
It's an opinion piece by Harry Freedman, entitled "Why I'm Not Worried by E-Book Piracy".
I'd say it's worth checking out, only is isn't. The author conflates, in a tangle of derailed logical thinking, several debates: the indie vs trad. publishing debate; the pricing debate; the quality debate; and then tops it all off with the rather lurid hope that continued piracy will make authors "angry" enough so they will turn away from pricing their books at $0.99 - and because it'll make authors angry, e-book piracy isn't really harmful, so Freedman's "not worried". (How much of that is whistling in the woods is open for debate.)
Wow, talk about an intellectual fallacy, naivety and a lack of research (possibly due to a lack of data and experience. According to his blog, Freedman is a relative newcomer to e-publishing, so he might be forgiven).
This is especially lurid in the face of this news item: Piracy Drives One Noted Author to Early Retirement.
So, it's clearly working, Harry, isn't it?
I can state, knowing my own sales, that my sales have stayed essentially flat in the last 18 months. Or, to run some other numbers, I've sold something like 300-350 copies of one story, which is extremely widely pirated. I'd estimate that around 20,000 illegal downloads were made (this number doesn't include torrents, which are very hard to track, and it doesn't include what I call casual sharing, the "here, I bought this, you gotta read it, so I'm sending you the PDF" sharing between friends).
Now, not every pirated copy is a lost sale, I get that. Let's assume that 5% of those downloaders might have bought the book. That's 1,000 people - three times what I actually DID sell. And, no, the $300 total royalties I got from that story doesn't really pay for the (many) hundreds of hours of work that went into making it. And those are peak sales - after the first quarter, sales always drop dramatically - always. Chances are, those $300 are most of the money I'll ever make from the book.
That for a book that has very high ratings on Amazon and Goodreads and ranks amongst the best I've done. Am I worried?
Am I worried that in a growing genre, my sales are completely flat? Am I worried that if you type my name into a search engine, the first links are links to pirated copies of my books? Am I worried that I now have to spend prime writing time on sending takedown notes to websites?
It means less time for writing, no hope ever to be anything but full-time employed, and it also means not only fighting the Muse all the time and my own fears, but the sense of entitlement.
There's a strongly Darwinian streak in this debate, which runs like this: "If you can't make a living off writing even while being pirated, then you're clearly not good enough. If you drop out of writing, you just lost Darwin's race. It's not like there's a shortage of writers - ten more will take your place."
Yeah, at which point, art will return to the palaces of the rich. Every author will have to find himself/herself a patron. Thing is, much of that art was locked away - patrons very often didn't share it with the wider population until way after their deaths. Imagine how many paintings and sculptures we'll never get to see in our lifetimes because they are in "private collections".
Thing is, my genre isn't something that a patron would be interested in. So I'm considering every paying customer my patron, who can all pop a couple bucks into the kitty and in return, I'll do my best to be fun and entertaining (and hot. I'm not forgetting hot).
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
A Writer at University
I've recently talked to one of my co-writers, and realized that writing is really largely overcoming obstacles. They can take a number of shapes, really, most are probably mental in my case. (They can be physical - I knew a writer once whose arthritis was so bad she could only type for 30 minutes per day, talk about serious limitations!)
Thankfully, my ego is pretty resilient overall. It's probably a layer thing. The outer layer is me going "Yes, I'm FUCKING AWESOME". The next layer down holds my insecurities. It's a big layer, and the inner critic lives there, too. That's the place where reviews hurt, especially when the reviewer says out loud what I was feeling down in my guts but didn't know how to fix. This is the place where I keep half an eye on my Amazon rankings and Goodreads reviews.
But at the core of it, deep, deep, down, there's a place that nothing can touch, and that's what powers the Muse. I'd reasonably confident that I'll always write, because I've always made up stories. It's integral to me like the spine or the skull bone. Nobody can remove it. I don't think it could even be damaged by outside forces. If we use the metaphor of a nuclear reactor (I've recently used that in my writing, so it's a close one), the radiation is always there. Whether I turn it into anything sellable is a different matter - and the plutonium core absolutely does not care. It's happily emitting radiation, whether anybody does anything with it or not, it'll just go on doing that because that's its nature. The best answer to "why do you write?" for me is "because I cannot not." It's my birth defect, or my calling, it is really what it is.
Now, a situation I recall from university becomes truly bizarre. I started university studying German Literature (made kinda sense at the time) in addition to American Studies and my major in History. Still getting my head around how this whole writing and novel thing works, so I figured some help from academia might be nice.
So we're doing the "get to know you" bit at the start of a German Lit course. 99% of the people there said they were studying German literature because they always liked to read (or were good in German at school). I, the dissident, admitted to being a writer and trying to learn some tricks from the pros.
Response from the lecturer running the course: "OH MY GOD! You should immediately drop out, because if you stay, you will realize that every story has already been written, and so much better by the Grand Masters of Literature than you could EVER HOPE TO BEEEEE!"
Let's not even begin to talk about how a man (who's made his life and career in academia by talking about the work of writers to the uninitiated) tells a creator to a) either not get involved in literary criticism as it would surely break the writer's heart; or b) give up writing and despair over his own inadequacy at the very start of his career in the face of the masters.
In other words, why play chess; you'll never beat Deep Blue. Why run; you'll never beat Usain Bolt. Why cook, if that Michelin star is WAY out of your league.
And surely, if all stories in all possible permutations have already been told, surely we've run out of stories way before Shakespeare. Sorry, Faulkner, what you did was a complete waste of your time ever since Ovid.
Also, I hadn't been aware that gay military sci-fi romance was so big in the Middle Ages.
Okay, I mocked the asshole lecturer enough now. I just dread to think how many young writers might have believed him, if only for five minutes, thanks to his Position of Authority. But then, writers do it because they must, so the real writers will have been okay, anyway. I'm just sorry for the moments of doubt this guy has left in his cynical wake.
And every story has a moral. I did exactly what the dude wanted: I dropped out of German Literature (now, having dropped out of the German language too, this has an ironic double edge) and turned towards American Studies, where one of my favourite lecturers ran this course: Creative Writing (my first CW course).
Thankfully, my ego is pretty resilient overall. It's probably a layer thing. The outer layer is me going "Yes, I'm FUCKING AWESOME". The next layer down holds my insecurities. It's a big layer, and the inner critic lives there, too. That's the place where reviews hurt, especially when the reviewer says out loud what I was feeling down in my guts but didn't know how to fix. This is the place where I keep half an eye on my Amazon rankings and Goodreads reviews.
But at the core of it, deep, deep, down, there's a place that nothing can touch, and that's what powers the Muse. I'd reasonably confident that I'll always write, because I've always made up stories. It's integral to me like the spine or the skull bone. Nobody can remove it. I don't think it could even be damaged by outside forces. If we use the metaphor of a nuclear reactor (I've recently used that in my writing, so it's a close one), the radiation is always there. Whether I turn it into anything sellable is a different matter - and the plutonium core absolutely does not care. It's happily emitting radiation, whether anybody does anything with it or not, it'll just go on doing that because that's its nature. The best answer to "why do you write?" for me is "because I cannot not." It's my birth defect, or my calling, it is really what it is.
Now, a situation I recall from university becomes truly bizarre. I started university studying German Literature (made kinda sense at the time) in addition to American Studies and my major in History. Still getting my head around how this whole writing and novel thing works, so I figured some help from academia might be nice.
So we're doing the "get to know you" bit at the start of a German Lit course. 99% of the people there said they were studying German literature because they always liked to read (or were good in German at school). I, the dissident, admitted to being a writer and trying to learn some tricks from the pros.
Response from the lecturer running the course: "OH MY GOD! You should immediately drop out, because if you stay, you will realize that every story has already been written, and so much better by the Grand Masters of Literature than you could EVER HOPE TO BEEEEE!"
Let's not even begin to talk about how a man (who's made his life and career in academia by talking about the work of writers to the uninitiated) tells a creator to a) either not get involved in literary criticism as it would surely break the writer's heart; or b) give up writing and despair over his own inadequacy at the very start of his career in the face of the masters.
In other words, why play chess; you'll never beat Deep Blue. Why run; you'll never beat Usain Bolt. Why cook, if that Michelin star is WAY out of your league.
And surely, if all stories in all possible permutations have already been told, surely we've run out of stories way before Shakespeare. Sorry, Faulkner, what you did was a complete waste of your time ever since Ovid.
Also, I hadn't been aware that gay military sci-fi romance was so big in the Middle Ages.
Okay, I mocked the asshole lecturer enough now. I just dread to think how many young writers might have believed him, if only for five minutes, thanks to his Position of Authority. But then, writers do it because they must, so the real writers will have been okay, anyway. I'm just sorry for the moments of doubt this guy has left in his cynical wake.
And every story has a moral. I did exactly what the dude wanted: I dropped out of German Literature (now, having dropped out of the German language too, this has an ironic double edge) and turned towards American Studies, where one of my favourite lecturers ran this course: Creative Writing (my first CW course).
Saturday, 31 December 2011
I hear wings beating
The next time I'm writing a series, I'll write the whole thing before I publish a single book.
Granted, it's quite possibly terribly inefficient in terms of work. What if reception is so bad that you've just spent three years of your life writing a series that people are hating? And yep, overall reception has a huge impact on whether I'm writing the sequel, or feel like doing a prequel. Characters that are loved are more likely to come back on the stage for an encore. People hating the overall concept of a series can strangle the second part in its infancy. On the part of the author - total deniability: "It was meant as a standalone anyway."
Writing a series while parts are being published seems like a clever thing to do, then, until you do it in practice. (Hey, I'm still learning how to treat the Muse right - a writer's career seems largely a series of experiments on him/herself, trying to trial and error a way to stay alive and productive and more-or-less - but not too, that's dangerous, too - happy.)
When I started the Dark Soul series, I wrote "Dark Soul" for a gun kink anthology. Much like a lucky oil explorer getting the drill in just right, I then saw the earth split wide open. Geyser. Unstoppable. I'd hit 20-year old oil in my own soul. Holy shit, I hit THAT geological layer again, get the rig over here, NOW!
I wrote Dark Soul 1-3 in a happy daze, sucking on that general area and swallowing as fast as I could. Then, November happened, certain moderators of a certain Goodreads group stepped up their harrassment of trans* writers, "sniffing out" "fake men" and demanding that publisher police the contents of their writers' underwear or be threatened with boycotts, some bloggers ran around outing trans* people as having ovaries (gosh, the possession of ovaries now a crime or what? Personally, most trans* men would like to keep theirs in jars or wash them down the toilet, but they ARE kind of important for the body's hormone equilibrium).
Things thankfully died down (mostly, anyway, not that those mods ever learnt a thing or even apologized), but the important thing was, the geyser had died off. My "sure I can write this whole Dark Soul series, want the whole thing next month?" became pure boisterous posturing.
For weeks, I didn't even feel like a writer. Words were just scrawls on paper. I had moments (days) of intense loathing for pretty much the whole genre and everybody involved in it, including myself, then I slowly dragged myself out of that, realizing, deep down, that I'm not going to allow a few entitled assholes to ruin me as the writer, ruin my fun, or take my books out of the hands - and minds - of my readers.
In short, just because there are assholes and trolls on the internet, I don't have to suffer for them, or hurt those people who really want my stories. Of course, when I write, I'm emphatically NOT writing for the assholes and trolls out there, but I've also discarded the very petty idea of anti-dedicating my books ("This book is for readers, but not J., L. and JM, or A.S., who I hope burst spontaneously into flames when they read any sentence I've written" - ah, if words had such power!).
Although it admittedly would have been fun to watch how quickly and indignantly they'll deny having done "anything" to "deserve such vile treatment", while at the same time working very hard behind the scenes to damage me and my business, and that of my friends.
Honestly, regarding November I'm very nearly past caring, because my real battle - the one that almost nobody has any influence on whatsoever - is to finish a five-part series when trolls have stomped all over the well you'd been tapping. Why do I even bother?
I've spent what feels like two months staring at the screen, digging in my brain, using the sharpest tools I had to try and draw blood. Some writing is nothing less than digging through the
scar tissue of your soul and trying to get at a fresh artery. Some of us look inside like junkies trying to find one good vein. And if you can't find any on your arms, you can always go for the one in your balls or between your toes. We're talking THAT kind of writing.
I felt so bruised and so numb inside that I couldn't see the faint blue shimmer of a vein through my skin. And when the blade went in, I couldn't get deep enough to get even a spurt of blood. Anywhere. Obsessive writer that I am, I kept cutting away, kept digging, and probably made all my friends utterly miserable with my thinly-veiled self-loathing. A blocked writer is a pitiful creature, and he/she knows it.
I knew it would be two more parts, but I couldn't get them written. I analysed my own writing process from inception to final proofing stage to debug it, and I have some vague ideas what I can optimize now and in the future. All this under the pressure to have to deliver two novella-sized books of several stories that were nothing but a twinkle in the Muse's eye. My Muse, however, usually a hard-working and pretty reliable bastard, had fled the scene.
And then you're stuck in the middle of a series, much like a marathon runner who gets a foot blown off at kilometer 20. In front of what feels like thousands of people, most of whom haven't even heard the shot or noticed what's wrong. All they see is that "their" runner staggers and falls. A few go after the shooter, others stare or shout in horror. And while you stagger, all you can think of is to shout "I'm OK! I'm OK! Of course I'm finishing the race, no problem, I just, errr, stepped funny on a stone or something." It's not a pretty picture, because the reality is, you know something's badly wrong, and there's this myth floating around that writing is easy once you know how to do it, and we're all writing machines and reliably produce if given half an incentive, and surely the money is enough, right? We just sit down and do this thing. We're "professionals". Usain Bolt doesn't get a cramp. Muhammad Ali doesn't chicken out.
It's all nonsense. In the end, the battle is between you and the white page on the screen. If I can't find the hole in to the story, it's not happening. That's a block, and I haven't had a real one in ages, but this one was nasty. It was made nastier because of the loathing and disgust, the trolls, and a deep-seated insecurity whether anything would have changed after November.
The answer is, yes, everything has changed, and I'm still cataloguing the fall-out, good and bad. But the first area where I had to do damage control was in my own writing, and, specifically, Dark Soul and whether it would get completed.
You're getting all these funny ideas, too. Whether the pre-November parts will have the same tone. After that huge upheaval, will I write "differently"? How will people now read part 3, which was written well before any of that shit happened?
You manage to take the first steps in part 4 and keep thinking "is this what I would have written before the trolls ate my Muse?" There's a certain taint, a certain fear and tentativeness in the writing that is maybe totally in my imagination. None of my own struggles HAVE TO have made it on the page. Writers can happily suffer in real life and nothing of it makes it on the page. I think. I hope.
And while the trolls haven't destroyed my writing, I do wonder if they twisted it. If I let them down inside me too deep and they did shit in there than I can't even fathom. Or whether I'm clenching up, in a protective reflex, in expectation of their next move. Whether I write in a certain way to justify myself, and how my Muse works, and what my themes are, and how I tackle them.
And then you write more, and the tentativeness slowly falls away. You're a swimmer who has broken out of the pollution of the coastal waters. No plants that wrap themselves around your ankles. The sea out there looks like you remember it - cold and powerful and dark and threatening, and now your muscles are warm and you can SWIM again, for all you're worth. There's no help out here, but veteran that you are, you don't NEED anybody's help. You pull, push, stroke, the machine remembers how to do it, and all the creaky, painful, self-conscious shit, the stuff about expectations, good and bad, all falls away. It's done. None of that matters.
And suddenly you have 15 thousand words, and they might be different from the 15k words you'd have written before it all happened, but, never mind, those 15k are still pretty good words, there's no taint, no rage that doesn't belong. The trolls haven't actually reached THAT deep. They are beach trolls, but once you're deep and far enough in the water, they look like spoiled, bored children hitting each other with plastic sand spades.
In the last four or five days, I've written more than 15k words. Dark Soul 4 is almost finished, and once I've finalized the last scene, I'm going to swim further and bring back Dark Soul 5. I'd say they should both be done in January.
Granted, it's quite possibly terribly inefficient in terms of work. What if reception is so bad that you've just spent three years of your life writing a series that people are hating? And yep, overall reception has a huge impact on whether I'm writing the sequel, or feel like doing a prequel. Characters that are loved are more likely to come back on the stage for an encore. People hating the overall concept of a series can strangle the second part in its infancy. On the part of the author - total deniability: "It was meant as a standalone anyway."
Writing a series while parts are being published seems like a clever thing to do, then, until you do it in practice. (Hey, I'm still learning how to treat the Muse right - a writer's career seems largely a series of experiments on him/herself, trying to trial and error a way to stay alive and productive and more-or-less - but not too, that's dangerous, too - happy.)
When I started the Dark Soul series, I wrote "Dark Soul" for a gun kink anthology. Much like a lucky oil explorer getting the drill in just right, I then saw the earth split wide open. Geyser. Unstoppable. I'd hit 20-year old oil in my own soul. Holy shit, I hit THAT geological layer again, get the rig over here, NOW!
I wrote Dark Soul 1-3 in a happy daze, sucking on that general area and swallowing as fast as I could. Then, November happened, certain moderators of a certain Goodreads group stepped up their harrassment of trans* writers, "sniffing out" "fake men" and demanding that publisher police the contents of their writers' underwear or be threatened with boycotts, some bloggers ran around outing trans* people as having ovaries (gosh, the possession of ovaries now a crime or what? Personally, most trans* men would like to keep theirs in jars or wash them down the toilet, but they ARE kind of important for the body's hormone equilibrium).
Things thankfully died down (mostly, anyway, not that those mods ever learnt a thing or even apologized), but the important thing was, the geyser had died off. My "sure I can write this whole Dark Soul series, want the whole thing next month?" became pure boisterous posturing.
For weeks, I didn't even feel like a writer. Words were just scrawls on paper. I had moments (days) of intense loathing for pretty much the whole genre and everybody involved in it, including myself, then I slowly dragged myself out of that, realizing, deep down, that I'm not going to allow a few entitled assholes to ruin me as the writer, ruin my fun, or take my books out of the hands - and minds - of my readers.
In short, just because there are assholes and trolls on the internet, I don't have to suffer for them, or hurt those people who really want my stories. Of course, when I write, I'm emphatically NOT writing for the assholes and trolls out there, but I've also discarded the very petty idea of anti-dedicating my books ("This book is for readers, but not J., L. and JM, or A.S., who I hope burst spontaneously into flames when they read any sentence I've written" - ah, if words had such power!).
Although it admittedly would have been fun to watch how quickly and indignantly they'll deny having done "anything" to "deserve such vile treatment", while at the same time working very hard behind the scenes to damage me and my business, and that of my friends.
Honestly, regarding November I'm very nearly past caring, because my real battle - the one that almost nobody has any influence on whatsoever - is to finish a five-part series when trolls have stomped all over the well you'd been tapping. Why do I even bother?
I've spent what feels like two months staring at the screen, digging in my brain, using the sharpest tools I had to try and draw blood. Some writing is nothing less than digging through the
scar tissue of your soul and trying to get at a fresh artery. Some of us look inside like junkies trying to find one good vein. And if you can't find any on your arms, you can always go for the one in your balls or between your toes. We're talking THAT kind of writing.
I felt so bruised and so numb inside that I couldn't see the faint blue shimmer of a vein through my skin. And when the blade went in, I couldn't get deep enough to get even a spurt of blood. Anywhere. Obsessive writer that I am, I kept cutting away, kept digging, and probably made all my friends utterly miserable with my thinly-veiled self-loathing. A blocked writer is a pitiful creature, and he/she knows it.
I knew it would be two more parts, but I couldn't get them written. I analysed my own writing process from inception to final proofing stage to debug it, and I have some vague ideas what I can optimize now and in the future. All this under the pressure to have to deliver two novella-sized books of several stories that were nothing but a twinkle in the Muse's eye. My Muse, however, usually a hard-working and pretty reliable bastard, had fled the scene.
And then you're stuck in the middle of a series, much like a marathon runner who gets a foot blown off at kilometer 20. In front of what feels like thousands of people, most of whom haven't even heard the shot or noticed what's wrong. All they see is that "their" runner staggers and falls. A few go after the shooter, others stare or shout in horror. And while you stagger, all you can think of is to shout "I'm OK! I'm OK! Of course I'm finishing the race, no problem, I just, errr, stepped funny on a stone or something." It's not a pretty picture, because the reality is, you know something's badly wrong, and there's this myth floating around that writing is easy once you know how to do it, and we're all writing machines and reliably produce if given half an incentive, and surely the money is enough, right? We just sit down and do this thing. We're "professionals". Usain Bolt doesn't get a cramp. Muhammad Ali doesn't chicken out.
It's all nonsense. In the end, the battle is between you and the white page on the screen. If I can't find the hole in to the story, it's not happening. That's a block, and I haven't had a real one in ages, but this one was nasty. It was made nastier because of the loathing and disgust, the trolls, and a deep-seated insecurity whether anything would have changed after November.
The answer is, yes, everything has changed, and I'm still cataloguing the fall-out, good and bad. But the first area where I had to do damage control was in my own writing, and, specifically, Dark Soul and whether it would get completed.
You're getting all these funny ideas, too. Whether the pre-November parts will have the same tone. After that huge upheaval, will I write "differently"? How will people now read part 3, which was written well before any of that shit happened?
You manage to take the first steps in part 4 and keep thinking "is this what I would have written before the trolls ate my Muse?" There's a certain taint, a certain fear and tentativeness in the writing that is maybe totally in my imagination. None of my own struggles HAVE TO have made it on the page. Writers can happily suffer in real life and nothing of it makes it on the page. I think. I hope.
And while the trolls haven't destroyed my writing, I do wonder if they twisted it. If I let them down inside me too deep and they did shit in there than I can't even fathom. Or whether I'm clenching up, in a protective reflex, in expectation of their next move. Whether I write in a certain way to justify myself, and how my Muse works, and what my themes are, and how I tackle them.
And then you write more, and the tentativeness slowly falls away. You're a swimmer who has broken out of the pollution of the coastal waters. No plants that wrap themselves around your ankles. The sea out there looks like you remember it - cold and powerful and dark and threatening, and now your muscles are warm and you can SWIM again, for all you're worth. There's no help out here, but veteran that you are, you don't NEED anybody's help. You pull, push, stroke, the machine remembers how to do it, and all the creaky, painful, self-conscious shit, the stuff about expectations, good and bad, all falls away. It's done. None of that matters.
And suddenly you have 15 thousand words, and they might be different from the 15k words you'd have written before it all happened, but, never mind, those 15k are still pretty good words, there's no taint, no rage that doesn't belong. The trolls haven't actually reached THAT deep. They are beach trolls, but once you're deep and far enough in the water, they look like spoiled, bored children hitting each other with plastic sand spades.
In the last four or five days, I've written more than 15k words. Dark Soul 4 is almost finished, and once I've finalized the last scene, I'm going to swim further and bring back Dark Soul 5. I'd say they should both be done in January.
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
"Is he ever going to write a book for people like me?"
Recently (a few weeks back, okay, make it months), my colleague and friend Chris Hawkins told me of a conversation she's had with one of my readers (I still struggle typing the word "fan" and will likely forever be stuck in that default...).
Chris explained that my reader is a paraplegic who loves my work and she asked Chris: "Do you know whether he's ever going to write a book for people like me?" Adding that she felt I could write a main character with a disability and do him (and her, by proxy) justice.
Now I don't know who she is (Chris kept this in strict confidence, just relaying the story). I responded that I have a lot of characters dealing with a disability. Vadim Krasnorada suffers from a a bad case of PTSD. Other characters have survivor's guilt, shell shock. Sergei Stolkov, in many ways Vadim's younger mirror-image, loses an arm and a leg and has issues with his prosthetics (which are stupidly advanced and those issues seem to be largely psychological). Kendras, like Richard, has a permanent limp after a foot/knee injury.
Of course, those characters who are permanently disabled get what I'd call "magical replacements". Stupidly advanced tech that makes the physical limitation pretty much only cosmetic. In short, if it doesn't seriously impact a character, it's basically a cop-out, and in many ways, I'm pretty aware of it.
After my experiences with Race!Fail (and my immediate, passionate denial of being a racist just because I had white main characters only), I've become ultra-wary of my own instinctive "but of course I'm not X!" responses.
In this case, we're not talking racism, we're talking ableism. The assumption, in short, that main characters can only be physically perfect, with all limbs basically intact. Now, of course, in erotic fiction, the perfect six-pack, the wise-cracking charm and the physical beauty are, in some ways, givens. It's the default.
It's also a pretty rotten message, which some people can understand as "only perfect/white/healthy/X/Y people deserve love and passion" - and are understandably upset about. While we as readers (and I'm one, too), slip into the skin of these perfect people (who are prettier, wittier, sexier, more confident ... than us), that skin doesn't always fit. The "default" excludes a lot of people.
I've written Kendras a black man, and it wasn't hard at all, once I really understood what was going on inside him, his skin colour didn't matter to "me the writer". I've written Silvio as a genderfluid person (Dark Lady II definitely crosses the line from crossdressing into real gender issues - and wow, was I expecting to be hanged and quartered for that, but it didn't happen), I've tackled various mental and physical injuries and damages.
Today, I think I've seen a character happen to me who is for my reader, whoever she is, and everybody out there who wants a character like that. He's pretty kick-ass, and I can't promise more, because all I've seen so far is a tiny glimpse, but something's germinating.
------------------------------------
On a side note, I've written more than 5k in the last two days. I can hope that I've overcome the agonizing writer's block that November has given me. I'm not quite sure if anything that I've written yesterday and today is any good, but attempting to write doesn't feel anymore like tearing out my eye balls. I've even hit the occasional patch of "flow". It's no longer like pulling teeth - and how much I missed that.
Chris explained that my reader is a paraplegic who loves my work and she asked Chris: "Do you know whether he's ever going to write a book for people like me?" Adding that she felt I could write a main character with a disability and do him (and her, by proxy) justice.
Now I don't know who she is (Chris kept this in strict confidence, just relaying the story). I responded that I have a lot of characters dealing with a disability. Vadim Krasnorada suffers from a a bad case of PTSD. Other characters have survivor's guilt, shell shock. Sergei Stolkov, in many ways Vadim's younger mirror-image, loses an arm and a leg and has issues with his prosthetics (which are stupidly advanced and those issues seem to be largely psychological). Kendras, like Richard, has a permanent limp after a foot/knee injury.
Of course, those characters who are permanently disabled get what I'd call "magical replacements". Stupidly advanced tech that makes the physical limitation pretty much only cosmetic. In short, if it doesn't seriously impact a character, it's basically a cop-out, and in many ways, I'm pretty aware of it.
After my experiences with Race!Fail (and my immediate, passionate denial of being a racist just because I had white main characters only), I've become ultra-wary of my own instinctive "but of course I'm not X!" responses.
In this case, we're not talking racism, we're talking ableism. The assumption, in short, that main characters can only be physically perfect, with all limbs basically intact. Now, of course, in erotic fiction, the perfect six-pack, the wise-cracking charm and the physical beauty are, in some ways, givens. It's the default.
It's also a pretty rotten message, which some people can understand as "only perfect/white/healthy/X/Y people deserve love and passion" - and are understandably upset about. While we as readers (and I'm one, too), slip into the skin of these perfect people (who are prettier, wittier, sexier, more confident ... than us), that skin doesn't always fit. The "default" excludes a lot of people.
I've written Kendras a black man, and it wasn't hard at all, once I really understood what was going on inside him, his skin colour didn't matter to "me the writer". I've written Silvio as a genderfluid person (Dark Lady II definitely crosses the line from crossdressing into real gender issues - and wow, was I expecting to be hanged and quartered for that, but it didn't happen), I've tackled various mental and physical injuries and damages.
Today, I think I've seen a character happen to me who is for my reader, whoever she is, and everybody out there who wants a character like that. He's pretty kick-ass, and I can't promise more, because all I've seen so far is a tiny glimpse, but something's germinating.
------------------------------------
On a side note, I've written more than 5k in the last two days. I can hope that I've overcome the agonizing writer's block that November has given me. I'm not quite sure if anything that I've written yesterday and today is any good, but attempting to write doesn't feel anymore like tearing out my eye balls. I've even hit the occasional patch of "flow". It's no longer like pulling teeth - and how much I missed that.
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Of rabbits and wolves, and bridge trolls and knights
Today I was pointed at this most excellent post by Marie Sexton about the Muse and its natural enemies, and how sometimes, when the Muse gets wounded, it crawls away to die.
Read the full post here.
This is an incredibly powerful post about the power of the "haters". The wolves out there. They might take many shapes - for me, the wolves are people who harrass authors, who demand to know who we sleep with, and who sticks what into whom, all so that we are "legit" in the eyes of the wolves - or "trolls" as I like to call them.
The trolls are the demons lurking under the bridge. They eat the unwary. Sometimes, they injure the valiant during the combat. Sometimes, they take an arm or a leg. Passage into the next story, the next project, was rarely bought so dearly, has rarely left such gaping wounds. Some knights still soldier on and continue onwards, others don't. Others stay the fuck at home.
The problem is that the trolls don't just live under bridges. If the questing knight KNEW the trolls were under that bridge ahead, he could "weapon up", put on the helmet, change from the gentle steed to the charger, and lower the lance, armoured in his heart and body and ready to do battle with whatever comes. (Yes, knights in the Middle Ages didn't travel fully armoured and ready, they did have to change before the battle.)
The trolls I'm talking about today don't live under bridges. They live in forums, where they tell people to boycott publishers who are not policing the gender of their authors, and they live on mailinglists, and blogs (some even write blogs), and comment on blogs and hang out at any place where a juicy, unsuspecting knight might pass by. They have nothing more to offer than snark, nasty attitude, ignorance and hatred. Some of them even believe that knights quest for the "easy money".
Trolls attack the knight's horse if the knight himself cannot be brought down. They attack the knight's squire, his lady, his friends, even the peasant who told the knight which way to take.
They do it "because". I'm not sure what soul-sucking darkness lives in them so that they revel in the mayhem they can cause.
But to trot out the metaphor further: Being a troll or a knight, is, ultimately, a choice, but we can remember (and take heart in) that it's not the troll that might, eventually, reach the grail castle. Trolls are obstacles to overcome. In Campbell's The Hero's Journey, they are Threshold Guardians that try to scare us and test us and that look ghastly and mean, but ultimately, they don't matter. They have no real power.
I need to remember when I sit down to write that, in fairy tales and "romances" (and that's where the word comes from, in Western literary canon), the knight has a name, and we all remember Percival and Galahad, but I couldn't remember the name of a single troll.
Read the full post here.
This is an incredibly powerful post about the power of the "haters". The wolves out there. They might take many shapes - for me, the wolves are people who harrass authors, who demand to know who we sleep with, and who sticks what into whom, all so that we are "legit" in the eyes of the wolves - or "trolls" as I like to call them.
The trolls are the demons lurking under the bridge. They eat the unwary. Sometimes, they injure the valiant during the combat. Sometimes, they take an arm or a leg. Passage into the next story, the next project, was rarely bought so dearly, has rarely left such gaping wounds. Some knights still soldier on and continue onwards, others don't. Others stay the fuck at home.
The problem is that the trolls don't just live under bridges. If the questing knight KNEW the trolls were under that bridge ahead, he could "weapon up", put on the helmet, change from the gentle steed to the charger, and lower the lance, armoured in his heart and body and ready to do battle with whatever comes. (Yes, knights in the Middle Ages didn't travel fully armoured and ready, they did have to change before the battle.)
The trolls I'm talking about today don't live under bridges. They live in forums, where they tell people to boycott publishers who are not policing the gender of their authors, and they live on mailinglists, and blogs (some even write blogs), and comment on blogs and hang out at any place where a juicy, unsuspecting knight might pass by. They have nothing more to offer than snark, nasty attitude, ignorance and hatred. Some of them even believe that knights quest for the "easy money".
Trolls attack the knight's horse if the knight himself cannot be brought down. They attack the knight's squire, his lady, his friends, even the peasant who told the knight which way to take.
They do it "because". I'm not sure what soul-sucking darkness lives in them so that they revel in the mayhem they can cause.
But to trot out the metaphor further: Being a troll or a knight, is, ultimately, a choice, but we can remember (and take heart in) that it's not the troll that might, eventually, reach the grail castle. Trolls are obstacles to overcome. In Campbell's The Hero's Journey, they are Threshold Guardians that try to scare us and test us and that look ghastly and mean, but ultimately, they don't matter. They have no real power.
I need to remember when I sit down to write that, in fairy tales and "romances" (and that's where the word comes from, in Western literary canon), the knight has a name, and we all remember Percival and Galahad, but I couldn't remember the name of a single troll.
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