On Twitter, your follower count is never stable. Often people (and spam accounts) will follow you just so you will follow them back. If and when you don't, they remove you from their list, and your 'followers' number goes down by one. And of course you lose followers because you annoy or offend them or they check out your tweetstream when you're having a bad stretch and your tweets come off more moronic than usual. You can't please all the people all of the time.
I don't worry about it.
Except it seemed clear to me: the people who follow me don't care what songs I'm listening to and tend to find 'blips' annoying as hell. The 'blips' take up space in your tweetstream, there's no substance to them, they're not amusing you or engaging with you or linking you to something interesting. Hearing someone's music choices is a bit like listening to someone describe the dream they had last night: there is such a personal and subjective element to it that it doesn't mean much to you. And bores you.
I had the feeling I had kind of violated some unspoken but important tweeter-reader contract. And it drove home a point that Seth Godin and Chris Brogan and other social media rock gods are always making: you have to give people something that they actually want. You have to provide value for their time and attention. When you don't, they drop you, and why shouldn't they? It's a point that seems so obvious, and yet so easy to forget; we get too involved in our egos, wanting to sell our stuff or promote ourselves or construct some clever online persona or show off the music we're listening to because we think it's cool and by extension makes us cool.
So this little experience deepened my sense of respect for life in the attention economy. There's only so much attention to go around, and I have to earn it -- and continue to earn it. Other people can pull off the blip.fm thing, but me? Not so much.
I am thankful for the amazing people in my life and the ability to do work that I love.
I am thankful that in the last year and a half I could feed my soul with the conversation and connection I was craving.
(And I am thankful that my turkey came out well. Moist, tender, and well-seasoned!)
2
I am in Pacific Grove, near Cannery Row: John Steinbeck country. I came up with Dude to visit Dude's parents, sister, and niece. One of the best parts is collecting stories about Dude when he was younger: "He always had a girlfriend," his sister told me. "So many girls were in love with him."
"When he got divorced," his father told me, "younger women and older women would come up to me in town and say, 'How is Dude?...Tell him to give me a call."
Dude managed to look appropriately bashful.
I went on a long walk to work off the previous day's turkey and apple pie, blissing out to ocean air and exercise and Nine Inch Nails on my borrowed iPod. We had dinner at a place that served deep-fried olive-and-blue-cheese concoctions (they were good), and crayons to draw on the paper tablecloths. Afterwards Dude, his sister, niece and I went to a bar and danced to live music. Dude and I rounded off the night with the movie Pirate Radio, which I recommend, partly for its awesome soundtrack.
3
At Tribal Writer I posted the writer's show and tell: show us what's important, and tell the freaking story and why you need to write like a bad girl, part one. The latter is first in a series (and my experiment in turning essays into more blog-friendly posts).
4
Amazing to think of where I was -- emotionally and mentally and physically -- this time last year, and how far I've traveled since.
I'm thankful for that, as well.
Dude called and emailed me throughout his week in Thailand, where he was building houses for Habitat for Humanity "with Jimmy Carter and 3000 of his closest friends." I talked to him on my cell while driving night streets near downtown Los Angeles, until a cop pulled up beside me and I said, "gottagobye!" and ditched the phone. I never talk on the phone when I drive, but the time difference and our schedules made us elusive to each other.
He told me about his trip to a "fish spa": you dip various body parts into a tank filled with fish. They nibble away the dead skin and leave you clean and smooth. "I was laughing and screaming at the same time," said Dude.
He showed up on my doorstep yesterday, wearing a t-shirt and torn jeans and a shell bracelet wrapped round one wrist. He was tanned and unshaven and his hair was the longest I've seen it. Talk about a sight for sore eyes.
2
Went to a Writers on Fire workshop yesterday and enjoyed it, sitting in a circle of talented writers on a deck in Topanga Canyon, taking off my leather jacket when it got too warm and putting it back on when it got too cold. The critiques and conversation -- led by the awesome Rachel Resnick-- inspired ideas for posts for my writing blog Tribal Writer, including (perhaps) a series on how an aspiring writer can start to put together her "author platform" even if she's not published yet. (The most recent entry is the happy death of "genre vs literary" in the days of the technorenaissance.)
So I will take the pathetic and easy way out and cross-post my last post from Tribal Writer*. I promise to do this rarely, since Tribal Writer is supposed to be my helpful, writing-related blog, and this Livejournal my indulgent lifeblog (that covers anything else I decide I want to write about). Or my 'catblog', as I believe some people call it, even though I myself have no cats to blog about and, due to allergies, appear to be fated for a lifetime of catlessness.
Anyway:
the most important trait you need to become a published writer
I'm taking part in a memoir/novel workshop that starts this Saturday, and I'm psyched.
Although in general, I have mixed feelings about workshops.
The right workshop can be a thing of wonders, but I never found the ‘right’ one: I found, instead, nooks of ‘right’ scattered both online and off.
I would start a class with enthusiasm and then, at some point, drop out, not because I thought it was a waste of time (it wasn’t) or because the other writers were stupid and untalented (they weren’t), but because critiquing others’ work ate up so much time and energy that the benefits didn't seem to justify the compulsive-obsessive effort I put in.
I’ve always found it a bit odd that aspiring writers would seek advice and guidance from other aspiring writers. If you’re an aspiring brain surgeon, do you go to another aspiring brain surgeon and ask, “Hey, can you show me how to saw open this guy’s head?” Or do you go to the best brain surgeon you have access to, who has accomplished what you want to accomplish? ( Read more... )
1
In my last blog entry I talked about finding your novel 'hook' -- the one or two sentence description that strikes at the heart of your story and sells it to the right reader.
It's useful to work this out early because it forces you to hone your sense of the story that you want to tell, in a way that helps you tell it.
It's hard to find the center of a completed manuscript if there's no center there to begin with.
You want to make sure you put the 'there' there.
2
Dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, in her excellent book The Creative Habit, talks about 'scratching' and 'spine'.
Scratching is what you do to find ideas.
You scratch at the world around you, searching for whatever will spark your imagination.
'Scratching' generates your raw materials. These are the ideas that you want to explore, but in and of themselves lack forward movement. You could say you want to write about love, or the hidden lives of families, or the return of the repressed. These ideas are important to your storytelling, but useless on their own. They sit there. They look at you. Okay, genius. Now what?
My scratching produced these materials: love, forbidden desire, friendship, reincarnation (the return of the past), the secret emotional legacies handed down within families that play out in other relationships.
Then -- to find the 'spine' (and the beginning of my 'hook') -- I ask: who are my characters and what do they want?
One of my favorite sayings is "desire rules the world". People who go after the things that they want -- and how they succeed or fail -- create the society that we live in.
Desire creates politics; creates history; creates stories.
Your narrative begins with desire, and ends with how it does -- or does not -- get fulfilled.
3
After my last entry, readers suggested to me the following:
The book is about a reincarnated Hollywood 'It' girl who gets involved in a love triangle with two older men that ignites traumatic memories and starts repeating an erotic obsession that, twenty years ago, ended in tragedy. (Steve Prosapio)
Sounds to me like it's about the reincarnation of a murdered actress who finds three of the men involved in her disappearance, and how they fall into the original behavior patterns that led to her murder, even though she's not fully aware of her past life. (Stacia Kane)
This, I think, might be my spine...but not my hook.
The spine is when different ideas hook together and the basic narrative reveals itself.
But the hook is the center. The center is where all the different elements meet, and crystallize, so that one or two sentences suggest the entire novel.
Which means my 'hook' needs to include the group of wealthy hedonistic thirtysomething friends that the dancer gets involved with, because the group dynamic is a major part of the narrative.
When I put this to a reader -- the writer Stacia Kane -- she came back with this:
Perhaps something about how the relationships of a group of wealthy, hedonistic friends are forever altered when a new woman enters their circle and it turns out she is the reincarnation of a murder victim, and her former self seeks to use her as a tool for revenge?
I played with this and came up with:
A group of wealthy friends in Los Angeles is forever altered when a young dancer with memories of a past life gets involved with two of the men, igniting a drama of erotic obsession that echoes events from twenty years ago, when one of their own disappeared.
I think I'm getting closer, because what these last two examples suggest that the previous ones did not is this: transformation.
Because stories are not just about desire and conflict, but change.
Somebody wants something and has to overcome obstacles to get it, but in order to overcome those obstacles he or she has to transform.
So I have some more thinking to do, about my 'hook' but also the novel itself.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Twyla Tharp: On Failing Well
Twyla Tharp's Spine
Since my ex-husband and I separated, my house has come in handy: it's been used for a wedding (complete with tea ceremony in the living room) and a music video.
The shoot involved a silver disco ball. This pleased me.
Unexpected bonus: the stylist, Simeon, also happens to have his own line of lingerie and brought a box of his wares for me to sift through at my leisure. I loved the stuff: black French lacy things with "a touch of Thai trimming".
He gave my favorite pieces to me for free.
I decided that he is a very very nice person.
Simeon
I'm fascinated by the idea of limerence, which wikipedia defines as an "involuntary cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another person".
Emphasis on involuntary. It's a compulsion.
When you can't stop thinking about someone, or when thoughts of that person literally alter your state of mind, you're in limerence. There have been studies that demonstrate how people in limerence and people on cocaine undergo the same brain activity. The same pleasure centers light up.
That person is your cocaine.
Limerence is, as one psychologist explained to me, a mash-up of physical and psychological influences. There's a theory that on a subconscious level we recognize something in another person that hooks into whatever need or neurosis we often don't realize we're carrying around. It's not love, although it sometimes leads to love, and when it does it creates a relationship that stays passionate for years. It can also create an unhealthy attachment impossible to break because the individuals are addicted to one another.
For some of us, attraction can be a warning. A red flag. Just because something attracts us doesn't mean it's good for us. If you grew up with a troubled relationship with one or both parents, and you seem to repeat the same bad relationship with a series of different partners, I'm probably talking about you. Sorry.
I don't think we can teach ourselves to "desire partners who are better for us" so much as recognize that love and desire are not the same thing. We can examine our history, our relationship patterns. We can heal the wounded places in ourselves if we're willing to invest the time and energy, and that act alone attracts higher-quality unions into our lives.
We can make the conscious decision to strike out for something different. We can recognize that the kind of person who has always been "our type" is the person we should reject, and that someone who might not seem to be "our type" is worth another chance.
It's not about resigning ourselves to a romantic relationship with someone we're not attracted to -- I think that's a living death, myself -- but recognizing that sometimes the most powerful attraction reveals itself over time, comes hand-in-hand with a deepening friendship. It might lack the sizzle and drama of limerence, but it also lacks the pain...and it just might go the distance.
I’m writing a novel called ‘The Decadents’ and need to figure out the answer to the question people ask when they discover you’re writing a novel (usually after, ‘Are you published?’ and ‘Have I heard of you?’ and sometimes ‘Who is your publisher?’, which is another way of asking, ‘Is it a real publisher?’)
They ask, “What is it about?”
It’s a powerful question.
And if you can’t answer it – without going into some rambling description that makes your listener’s eyes glaze over — you have a problem. You have a manuscript that might have all the elements in play (strong writing, great characters, good pacing, etc.) but which an agent or editor will reject because it’s too muddled at the center.
But often you don’t know the real, deep answer to what the book is ‘about’ until you’ve completed at least a draft of the thing. And that’s as it should be: the first draft (and the second, and the third) is all about exploration.
Exploration of the story, exploration of the characters.
Exploration of yourself.
But when people ask, “What is it about?”, they aren’t looking for the deep answer. They want the ‘hook’. They want the thirty-second elevator pitch, so they can nod and smile and sip their cocktails and change the subject.
It’s what agents want when you approach them with your manuscript.
It’s what editors want when the agent approaches them with the manuscript.
Because a manuscript doesn’t get sold once. It gets sold over and over again. The agent sells to editors; the editor sells in-house, first to other editors, then to sales and marketing; the jacket copy sells to readers; you yourself are selling the book, unwittingly or not, whenever you talk about it.
The point of the hook is to intrigue, through suggestion and implication.
You aren’t laying out a detailed synopsis of the story. There’s no time. You are, in just one or two sentences, suggesting the shape and reach and style of the story.
You are promising that the story has a center, and it is sharp and clear.
So answering the question, “What is your novel about?” is good practice. You have the chance to refine your answer according to your developing sense of the story and to how people respond. At the same time, you can fake it a bit, because all you’re doing is suggesting and implying.
My rambling answer goes something like this:
I’m interested in the idea of repetition compulsion — how we unconsciously repeat relationships from the past in order to master or resolve them — and also about how survivors of incest and emotional incest tend to find each other, and also how people with dysfunctional family backgrounds will form their own little families of friends to make up for what they never had. So ‘The Decadents’ is about this group of wealthy hedonistic thirtysomethings who live in LA and are close friends and this young dancer wanders into their midst and sets off this drama of erotic obsession that echoes events from twenty years ago when a Hollywood ‘It’ girl went missing, because the dancer might be the reincarnation of this girl, and she’s traumatized by these memories of her past life and gets involved in a love triangle that might culminate in the same tragic end if they can’t figure out what really happened to the missing girl…
How do I find the ‘hook’ in this?
I can ask myself: who are the characters and what do they want?
Well, the dancer wants to feel whole. She wants to overcome not just her past, but her past life. She also wants love, acceptance, and safety.
And there are two men who want her. Who happen to be best friends. And one of them is married and not quite what he seems. And both these men were deeply involved in the life of the disappeared girl, which is why the dancer compels them, and vice versa. All three are driven by an attraction that they don’t understand but sets them against each other in various ways.
So my hook is somewhere in there.
Maybe:
My book is about a young dancer who gets involved in a love triangle with two older men, an artist and a CEO, who have been best friends since high school.
This suggests some of the shape of the story, and the conflict, but it’s not enough. ‘The Decadents’ is a supernatural psychological thriller, and the ‘hook’ should convey that.
So maybe:
The book is about a young dancer who gets involved in a love triangle with two older men that ignites traumatic memories of her past life and starts repeating an erotic obsession that ended in tragedy twenty years ago.
Hmmm. Kind of long. Kind of awkward.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
And getting cold.
Dude is gearing up for his trip to Copenhagen for the conference, and I'm planning to tag along and blog about it. This Friday he leaves for Thailand to do a week with Habitat for Humanity, and although I played with the idea of joining him and traveling for a few days on my own while he works construction, the timing isn't right.
I was in Thailand a little over ten years ago, when I had a drink with a friend on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel and vowed that one day I would return to Bangkok -- which I loved -- and splurge on a room there. At the time I was sharing a $15/night room with two roommates, lizards in the shower, and a view of a slum in the courtyard in back. The Oriental Hotel seemed a fantasy world, and it's odd to remember my younger self impressed (and slightly intimidated) by that kind of luxury, even as I struggled to comprehend the poverty nearby.
Tonight Dude had a speaking gig at a college. "Am I okay wearing this?" he asked.
I glanced at his eco-friendly sneakers.
"When they're paying you what they're paying you," I said, "you should probably wear a suit."
It turned out that students had organized the entire event, arranged a dinner for him, asked him lots of questions, were engaged and passionate. Judging from what he told me afterwards, I think they impressed him. I was glad for that, because someone as deeply educated about climate change as Dude needs all the cause for optimism he can get.
Sebastian
Dude takes the stage
Me, trying to get a picture of the back of my dress to email to a girlfriend
At the other half of this blog I posted how the internet killed storytelling. except if maybe it didn't and I was reflecting again on how optimistic I am about all this stuff.
I think the Internet is awesome. I love the Internet.
And that it's forcing publishing to reinvent itself is a good thing.
Am I nuts?
2
And on a completely different note, I saw someone who looks exactly like Johnny Depp* (I am a fan, but then again, who isn't? what's not to love?) walking down Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica last night. The Promenade is an area of street closed off to cars and turned into a kind of outdoor strolling mall: at night it's also a place for street performers and musicians, and the stores stay open late. It's lively and fun.
I was there at the Apple Store buying my new iPhone (I gave up on my buggy Blackberry, plus I want the book apps) and a scarf (you can never have too many scarves) because it was freaking cold. As I walked back toward my car I passed this guy who initially caught my eye because of his brown hair and eyes (I'm a sucker for that kind of coloring) and exquisite bone structure (I'm a sucker for that too).
Then face-recognition kicked in and I literally stopped in my tracks and turned to watch the guy sauntering away in the opposite direction. The height was right, the build was right (slender but fit in the way that comes with a personal trainer -- the kind of body you only see on men over 30 who are actors or gay or personal trainers). He was wearing some kind of newsboy cap and had his hands in his pockets and was attracting no notice whatsoever despite the confident, jaunty walk. Somehow this also seemed very Depp-esque.
*I've sighted Matt Damon, whom I recognized, and Colin Farrill, whom I did not ("He's not cute enough to be Colin Farrill"), both of which were confirmed in the next few days by photographs in magazines (Damon was in the exact same outfit and red baseball cap I saw him in as he loitered by a newsstand and talked on his cell phone, and Farrill was long-haired and kind of soft and pudgy). And I also saw Fifty Cent, whom I did not recognize at the time but did note the massive quantity of women throwing themselves at him -- he was literally shoving them off his lap and looking tired and irritated -- and then recognized his picture in an issue of Rolling Stone the next day.
-- Eli Horowitz in The Believer (thank you Katherine Anne)
"Unicorns are creepy. Imagine Pamplona with unicorns instead of bulls. Not so warm and fuzzy."
--Jenn Scholz Hughes
It started on Twitter. Some young goth-oriented writer posted a tweet asking people to keep on her back about meeting her word quota for the evening. I tweeted back saying that if she failed to meet her obligations to herself, I would make her write "I love unicorns and rainbows and giant mushfests" 1000 times. Or something to that effect.
How David got involved in this, I'm not exactly sure. I do remember a tweet where I threatened to lob stuffed pink unicorns at someone's head (I believe it was David's. Or possibly Colleen Lindsay's). I also remember informing David that the only unicorn that would interest me was a punk unicorn ridden by Keanu Reeves (my love for Keanu knows no bounds).
Over the next months -- we're talking MONTHS, people -- David would take random tweets of mine and find some way to refer back to unicorns. (example: me: I changed my twitter background and later in the day it mysteriously changed back. Twitter poltergeist? David: It's waiting for the rainbows and unicorns.) It got to the point where I was tweeting in exasperation: You know very well that Unicorns Kick Ass is NOT MY MOTTO.
Finally, when I threw this question to the Twitterverse: A certain individual on Twitter will not leave me alone about the freaking unicorns. Is this not harassment? David informed me that the price of freedom from his tyranny would be a story. Written by me. About unicorns.
When he sensed my reluctance on the topic, he created this:
and this
An opportunity seemed to arise when Trisha Telep, who edited the anthology which includes my story "I Need More You", emailed me and asked if I would contribute to her paranormal YA anthology which comes out next year (KISS ME DEADLY). I responded with my usual nonchalance (YES YES YES YES YES) and she asked me What paranormal creature do you want? Sadly, unicorns were taken, as were, emailed Trisha, ghost kids, lotsa zombies, fairies, banshees, vampires and demons (i think).
I tweeted this situation to David -- unicorns are taken. You weep. I know.
David responded with a challenge of his own:
You write a story. I will write a story. The contest? It must be a serious story. It must be "real" and as powerful as it's possible to make it.
I will find a publisher to publish both as a chapbook...
I felt a surge of killer instinct. I'm in.
He replied
Did I mention they have to be UNICORN stories?
But it's an intriguing challenge: to take the cuddly out of unicorns and return them to the mysterious, formidable creature they originally were.*
So. On my desk for the next two months: THE DECADENTS, my YA story of 10,000 words or so (I'm going to do something involving sorcery, inspired by a panel I attended at World Fantasy, and playing with the idea of girlpower**) and a story about freakin' unicorns.
I wish there was a point or moral to all this, but I'm not sure what it could possibly be.
* As Holly Black once pointed out, and I'm paraphrasing here, It's human nature to take what scares us and make it familiar and silly and kind of cute. It was a point I brought up months later at my zombie panel at World Fantasy, wondering how far we are from My Little Zombie toys, etc.
** I met the wondrous Francesca Lia Block at a group reading we did for Teen Week in LA recently, and we swapped books -- her PRETTY DEAD for my UNINVITED. I love, love, love the opening lines of PRETTY DEAD:
Teenage girls are powerful creatures...They are relentless and underutilized. They want what they want, and they will do what they must to get it. Love, possessions, beauty, food, sweets, friends. Unless they are crushed so hard as to give up. But then they are just as relentless, only seeking different things.
So that, crossed with the World Fantasy panel about the representation of sorcerers in fantasy literature, has resulted in a YA story of my own, even if I don't know what it is yet.
This is the revised version of an essay originally published at Storytellers Unplugged as the second half of a two part series about writing as the opposite sex. The first essay was by Richard Steinberg.
1
Storytelling is seduction, when you think about it.
Seducers get inside your view of things and reshape it to their own.
They compel you in their chosen direction, until you are exactly where they want you, be it in their story or their bed.
What writers and seducers have in common is a mind that is empathetic enough to get under the skin of another human being…and an eye cold enough to assess their progress, or if it’s time to revise the course.
They understand human nature.
And since that nature comes to us in male and female packages of experience, any real understanding needs to enfold the opposite sex as well as your own. Or else the only people you’ll know how to seduce will be people like you.
And maybe not even them.
2
My father likes to tell an anecdote about the time our car broke down along a dark highway during the kind of cold snowy night only a Canadian town – well, maybe a few others — can produce. My father told my mother and me to stay within the safe warm confines of the car while he tried to flag down help.
Minutes passed. I looked through the windshield and for just a split moment the man I saw wasn’t my father at all, but a hulking, shadowy, six-feet-plus stranger with a hood pulled over his head.
I got out of the car and slammed the door and stepped to the side of the road. I made sure to stand in the glare of oncoming traffic. My mother freaked out and kept yanking my sleeve, worried that I was about to get hit. Before I could even fend her off, help had arrived.
My father likes to end this anecdote with what is more or less the point of it: how I set myself out like a billboard, because I knew people would stop for me but not him.
This seemed so obvious to me that I was surprised that he was surprised by it.
It was not unlike a comment a male friend would make to me at university a year or so later, about how irritated he felt when he walked through campus at night and the girl just ahead would cross the street to get away from him.
My friend was maybe six-five, with spiked hair and black fingernails. He favored a long dark overcoat. Like my father by the side of the road that night, he seemed a bit oblivious to the impact he made on others — especially women — especially a young woman walking alone in the dark.
The comment also made me realize that I had no idea what it was like to be perceived as the potential danger, the possible threat, while doing nothing more than sauntering down the street. I never thought how that would make me feel.
I never looked at things from that perspective.
3
My father was a school principal who dealt with mostly women – teachers, secretaries, mothers. He liked to complain about what I now call “pretty girl syndrome”: women who monopolized attention and offered banal opinions with authority and confidence. They were used to people listening to them and didn’t think it was because of their looks.
Soon after I moved to LA, I witnessed a version of this firsthand. My ex-husband lives in a very guy-dominated world – he moves between business, technology, physics, engineering – and some of his friends became comfortable around me. If I wasn’t quite one of the guys, I wasn’t one of the girls, either, especially since I was neither available nor under 30 – or maybe 25 – like the women they brought to restaurants and concerts and parties.
These men were highly intelligent and successful. The girls were sweet and bright enough, but academia – or reading material in general – had never been much of a priority. Still, I was struck by how they would break into conversation with a comment so many light-years away from the sophisticated discourse going on around the table that I would think they were joking.
They weren’t joking.
When I took a longer look, I saw what my father had been talking about: these guys, raised to be nice and well-mannered (especially when they were trying to get laid), would give one of these girls a lot of attention. They seemed fascinated by what she had to say. When the girl left the room, they would make cracks about how inane or annoying or ‘dumb’ she was.
When the girl returned, they were hanging off her every word. ( Read more... )
Or maybe my world had gotten narrow and insular, and I needed to knock down a wall to let in some fresh air, new perspective.
I'm trying something new with THE DECADENTS, the paranormal psychological novel* I"m working on now -- I hired a "writing coach" and joined her workshop that starts later this month, meeting in Topanga Canyon: the drive itself, taking me out to the coast and winding up into the hills near Malibu, which I've always considered one of the most stunning vistas ever, will be good for the book. Never underestimate the power of a change of location.
She will be my sounding board, my editor, and my taskmaster, holding me accountable for a certain number of pages every week. I meet with her this weekend and I'm looking forward to the shoptalk.
* and if that's not a genre then I'll invent it, dammit
They understand human nature.
And since that nature comes to us in male and female packages of experience, any real understanding needs to enfold the opposite sex as well as your own. Or else the only people you’ll know how to seduce will be people like you.
And maybe not even them.
continued at Tribal Writer
At Tribal Writer I posted this thing about the creative advantage of giving yourself limitations, partly because I was operating under my own self-imposed restrictions: under 1000 words written in less than an hour.
Because I tend to blog LONG, especially when I'm writing about writing, and blogger code* has it that one's wisdom, such as it is, should come in packages brief and pithy.
I referenced a speech that Kevin Rose gave, and one of the other things I took away from it (he was talking about developing successful websites) was something about how you shouldn't get so arrogant that you think you know your audience. You don't know your audience. You build the thing, release it, and see what they do with it, and often it won't be what you expect. They'll take it in new directions (Twitter I think a prime example) or maybe they'll just ignore it.
But as soon as you think you can predict them, you're toast.
So of course I was relating that to writers. The reason why writers have little to no control over their covers, especially first novels, is because we're supposedly "notorious" for not knowing who our audience is going to be, let alone how to appeal to them. (Someone who worked in publishing told me that writers "always want these very literary, photograph-based covers that would turn off potential readers when it's not that kind of novel." I had also been hoping for a literary, photograph-based kind of cover, but nodded wisely and decided not to mention this.)
And it's true the audience for my books ended up surprising me a bit -- a lot more male readers than I'd expected, a lot more adult/YA crossover. So maybe yeah, what Kevin said: build the book, release it into the wild, see who gathers round it, you will learn something from them.
Then I came across Stacia Kane's post Why Can't We All Just Get Along? about a nasty experience one reader had with a few particular writers who beat her up online for sharing her Kindle's contents with her friends.
In the comments section, someone made the comment that she was tired of writers acting haughty and superior, like readers were expected to bow down to them...
And I was a bit taken aback by that. The first published writer I ever met was a bitch, sure -- she wrote children's novels, and I was 6, and she was rude and borderline mean -- but that proved the exception to the rule.
On the other hand, I've never given a lot of thought to the relationship between readers and writers -- other than a We're-all-in-this-together kind of feeling.
And the Internet seems to be changing it in any case: bringing us all in direct virtual contact with each other, with so many writers competing for the commodity of the reader's time and attention. I have no real point to make here, I was just wondering -- any thoughts on this?
* not that I think there really is one, I just liked the sound of 'blogger's code'
Back from World Fantasy. Last night I took part in a zombie panel (and how many women get to say that?) held at 9 in the evening. The moderator was John Skipp -- who did a stellar job editing ZOMBIES: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE HUNGRY DEAD -- and he had gathered several of us who'd contributed stories to the volume ("You could hurl that thing at hecklers," suggested the panel member to my right, as I flipped through the massive tome) as well as writers who "specialized in zombie lore and fiction."
Right before the panel began John took out a small squeeze tube containing an orange-red viscous liquid. "Is that blood?" I asked. I was sitting next to him.
John, who is a filmmaker as well as an editor and writer, and thus no stranger to the world of special effects, said, "It's not very good blood."
He squeezed it across his bald head, and the stuff dripped down his face and onto his shirt. At one point I couldn't help myself: I touched a finger to some of the glop on his scalp to see what it felt like.
I was the only woman on the panel. I'm also not a gamer. When we talked about the rise in popularity of zombies in pop culture, several of the guys mentioned the influence of video games: taking on the role of protagonist in some godforsaken zombie post-apocalyptic wasteland, going all Mad Max on the undead. I hadn't fully made the link between zombie lit and post-apocalyptic lit, although now it seems obvious.
It was suggested that the whole contemporary zombie ethos allows the reader (or player) to vicariously blast away people without guilt ("I never liked my neighbor anyway!"). I suggested -- as the thought came to me right that moment -- that zombie stories create a landscape in which the protagonist gets to play vigilante-hero in the kind of blunt, straightforward way, free of moral ambiguity, that our post-modern times don't allow for*. So whether you're working out issues of aggression or taking pleasure in the simplest definitions of good guys vs bad, the whole zombie thing can offer catharsis.
And oh, the vampire. The poor maligned vampire: one audience member accused him of being "too cuddly" nowadays, necessitating the shift to zombies as pop culture searches for a new Big Bad.
I've heard this point before and I don't agree with it. Vampires and zombies, in my mind, are way too different, and serve different functions in the collective imagination. The vampire (today) is the ultimate demon-lover; zombies are the swarming hordes, the nameless Others, who will take over the world, as I put it, "not because they're smart or charismatic but because there's so goddamn many of them."
Also, the vampire (mostly) stands alone.
The zombie is all about community and social networking, and not in a good way.
* since one of the notions of recent times is to question the very idea of heroes and heroism: one person's hero is another person's sociopath, etc.
I thoroughly enjoyed the “Who, What, or Why Done It” panel held in the Crystal Room at 10:00 am (I’m reading from the program as I type this): In both the ghost story and in modern urban fantasy there is the potential for a central mystery that must be solved and the denouement. Is this element critical for a successful work or is merely the icing on the cake?
The panel members were J Kathleen Cheney, Laura Anne Gilman, Thomas S Roche, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. The moderator – Daniel Paul Olson – was running slightly late: “We’re unmoderated!” one member sang out.
Olson later admitted he’d been reading Keith Donaghue's novel “The Stolen Child” which so "gripped him" that he became late for his own panel. If that isn’t the ultimate recommendation for a book, I don’t know what is.
So. The panel went like this:
SEX.
Note how I put that in caps to get your attention. The panel didn’t actually use the word “sex” so much as “desire” – “the enigma of desire” -- but I went for the cheap thrill. Couldn’t resist. Sorry.
(Also, this dialogue actually happened toward the end of the panel, prompting the moderator to wrap things up with, “And is there a better note to end on than orgasm at 11 o’clock in the morning?” Valid question.)
Desire is the ultimate mystery: why are we attracted to this person and not that person?
(Chelsea piped, “And why isn’t that person attracted to us?”).
I’ll admit I perked up at this, because questions of attraction and seduction form the core of the novel I’m working on right now (along with a recent comment I heard a therapist make about “the different things we tend to think are love”).
Desire itself was recognized as a powerful and troubling force – “the panther that we want to make our pet” as Laura put it. “We are attracted to the panther because the panther can destroy us.”
continued
"Everybody whose last names start with A through L, stay here. Everybody whose last names start with M through Z, come over here."
Exactly one dude and I stepped "over here", which neatly took me from the end of a long line to the beginning of a non-existent one.
The guy behind the table looked at the first line and said, "All you guys have last names that start with A through L? Really?"
Nods of assent, some of them gloomy.
"Wow," the guy said. "I love statistical distribution in action."
I laughed.
And reflected: You know you're at World Fantasy when a guy says I love statistical distribution and it's funny.
It's also a place where, if someone asks someone else for a lighter, the person is likely to say, "Do I have a lighter? No, I lit this --" waving her cigarette -- "with fire that sprouted magically from my hand."
Cool.
I ran into John Skipp in the Art/Dealer's Room and he showed me a copy of ZOMBIE: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE HUNGRY DEAD which I had not seen yet ("You haven't?" John was aghast). The book looks awesome, and John mentioned an Amazon review of it that wondered "about these writers [this person had] never heard of, like Justine Musk and Adam Golanski, their stories were amazing!" Thank you, Amazon reviewer.
John and I caught up a bit with each other's lives: in roughly a ten-minute stretch the conversation involved zombies, evil clowns, apocalypse, Cory Goodfellow, marriage, porn stars, and puppet shows.
And that's just the stuff I remember.
My LJ and Wordpress blogs (the latter is now called Tribal Writer, after digital tribes, get it?) were intended to be mirrors of each other, but already they've split into two different entities, which is probably what my undermind was meaning to do in the first place. This also affects my thoughts on the blog I'm still mentally evolving, which I want to be about creativity and community with a greater emphasis on forum. We shall see. I'm not sure I know what I'm doing, but that's ok: you throw stuff out there, and if it works, it works, and if not, nobody died, and you can change it up anyway.
I was up late last night on the age of the author platform. I don't pretend to be an authority on this stuff -- yet! -- but I like what Tim Ferriss once said when he gave a little seminar about growing your readership (I saw it on Youtube). He blogs, he said, because he likes to learn cool stuff, and blogging gives him the venue and opportunity to do that. So how awesome is that?
My goal is the same, and this is the stuff that I want to learn about.
Well, my goal is that, and to develop my own author platform*, but since your platform is you -- and not just whatever product you're trying to sell -- such goals are indistinguishable from each other.
I've pubbed three novels but they feel like they belong to an earlier era, and the one thing I like about a blog is that it evolves as you evolve, whereas a novel is (among other things) a frozen profile of who you were at that time. So I feel like I'm at the start of something new, which means I have to break into publishing all over again (this lovely post about me nonwithstanding). Rather than my blog supporting my novels, I feel like my novels give me credibility as a blogger: they support my blog(s), which will support future novels, which will support future blogging, and thus the circle of life goes round.**
Let's reinvent blogging a little bit.
Let's take it back from the marketers trying to disguise corporate sells as something 'authentic', let's mark it apart from something that could be so easily replaced by microblogging and the fragmented forms of social media.
We're writers, after all: so let's write.
We could crush it if we wanted.
It would be fun.
* which means I'm now writing about writing about platforms, how meta
** although pleased to say that editor Trisha Telep invited me to write a story for the YA paranormal anthology ETERNAL KISS 2. I'm psyched because I've been itching to write some YA, and also because I have some length (13,000 words) to play with. I like things that get to go long.
I have an idea for a story involving a sinister black unicorn and a hate crime, but Trisha informed me that unicorns "are taken". So I'm going with fallen angels again -- I'm thinking about bringing back my bad guy Archie from UNINVITED -- and setting it against the rebuilding of New Orleans (Dude is involved with the eco-friendly reconstruction of the lower Ninth Ward and I go on trips with him). This makes me a bit nervous, since New Orleans belongs to Poppy Z Brite (docbrite) and if I get it wrong I will feel (or imagine I feel) her displeasure rain down upon me. And deservedly so.
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