Summer Projects

Tomorrow I take my last two final exams of my college career. Friday, I move. A week after that is Commencement.

Over the next year, there will be more changes, including applying to and then sorting out the logistics of various graduate programs as well as one of the more important Presidential elections I've seen. But the summer stretches out before that, before any decisions need to be made, with only work as a necessary draw on my time.

So I'm going to write. And knit, of course, but that list of projects isn't relevant here. What I hope to write:

• at least one essay as Emah
• finish Silver In The Sun
• finish rewriting the werewolf thing
• finish the Regency polyamory

It's a short list, but they're mostly long projects, and it'll be satisfying to have them done.

What are your writing goals for the summer?

Genre Fiction and Sexual Violence

One of the interesting contrasts between literary and genre fiction is what we expect from them: literary fiction we expect to give us good writing and interesting narrative devices, genre fiction we expect to give us a particular emotional experience.

With the recent kerfuffle about Game of Thrones and having gone to see Mad Max yesterday, I was thinking more today about the things I want from an experience.

This tweet summarizes a lot of it. I mean, at this point, we all kind of expect a pervasive threat of sexual violence from every shadow in Westeros. And, because I've seen other action movies, I was kind of expecting some threat of sexual violence in Mad Max. I was braced for the hit. And then it never came, and it was a gift, and I really love that fucking movie.

I read non-fiction and literary fiction both for school and for my own edification, and I brace in the same way when reading a lot of those. Sexual violence is pervasive in the real world, and so it pervades fiction set in the real world.

Which takes me to the genre fiction I read. I have a friend who, because she's perfect, heads an email filled with book recommendations as 'Trash Books!'

They are supernatural romance novels. They're amazing. It's great. In every single one, people fall in love in a long-term-monogamy sort of way, kick butt, have magic powers, and maintain healthy friendships. It is the best kind of wish fulfillment.

Also of note is the way it treats sexual violence. Rape still exists, in these worlds, because I tend to read the kind of paranormal romance with high body counts and so other kinds of violence come with that. Of note, though, is that rape attempts are far less frequent than in the real world. In the series I'm reading now, I'm on book 19 and there have been two characters who were raped, of which only one was a perspective character (the other character started a centuries-long war and she was considered justified except when she nearly murdered her kids). There were also three threats that ended in violence. This is significantly lower than anywhere in the real world. Also, anyone who tries to rape a woman ends up dead or severely beaten. It's very emotionally satisfying.

And it also makes these books kind of reassuring to read: one doesn't have to be quite so braced against the possibility of an onslaught.

That's what genre fiction offers. There are other genres, like cozies, where the only thing one has to be braced against are dessert cravings, but these tight genres offer a kind of consistent experience that's as relaxing as a glass of wine.

Body horror and blenders

Becoming a monster plays into an aspect of horror that I'm very fond of: body horror. Becoming a monster sometimes involves physical changes - shifting, or things under the skin. One of my favorite incarnations is in Homestuck and Homestuck fandom, where there exist Helmsmen: high-powered psychics capable of directing a spaceship with their minds. Mostly they are chained to the ships, stripped of free will, and wired directly into biotechnological interfaces. Fanworks are frequently somewhat horrifying.

Body horror taken to this kind of extreme is its own kind of externalization - of different things for different people. Puberty is generally horrifying, with all of the growing and hormones. For trans* people, who sometimes experience their changing bodies as deeply and irreconcilably wrong, it can be deeply horrifying and an utmost betrayal. Disability, severe injury, and assault can all be traumatic. They can all be body horror, and expressing body horror as a plot device, as a way a character becomes stronger can be ways to explore the more mundane sort of body horror at enough remove that it's just fascinating. Body horror can also be a way to explore the ways we take - and deal with - damage.

I haven't generally been fond of the product of writing as therapy, but that has somewhat changed - body horror in particular has let me read stuff that I can relate to - and I've also come to a slightly different appreciation of the ways we use our experiences to create art, which is well-articulated in Amanda Palmer's review of The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. I've found that I really like when things are fine-ground and spit out as art that's appreciable in its own right and not just as a reflection of the creator.

Schools of thought

I see two major schools of thought about writing when not on deadline, and I mostly see them dichotomized.

The first is that one must write every day, just plant butt in chair and get words done, get them out. Polish later, but write every day, no matter what. The discipline will mean you produce more and more easily and improve.

The second is to write when you feel like it, and to forgive yourself when you're not up for it for months on end. I've seen it mostly as a reaction to the first one, particularly from the chronically ill. A friend with arthritis goes through periods when writing is physically horribly painful; a friend with depression feels blank and flat and hates everything they force themselves to produce.

And the first is more popular generally, but the existence of the second is incredibly important: especially with mental illness, it's imperative to acknowledge that sometimes one's ability will not be the same as a well person, and to not beat oneself up about it.

The dichotomy of the two schools of thought kind of bothers me, in large part because the idea of not writing for months on end makes me feel kind of panicky. I write almost every day, even if it's just a little, and I write for work, and I write for school. I don't have a set word count or time. I just leave a story or two that I'm working on open in tabs (I usually only have five or six tabs open). If I have a thought, I'll go noodle in the document. Progress gets made eventually.

So writing daily - or at least having a constant reminder that I could be writing - is important to me. But not putting a minimum requirement on it is also important. I'm a full time student and paying my own living expenses. During midterms I had an hour-long breakdown over soup one day. I don't need the stress of a self-imposed writing requirement on top of that.

For me the starting point had to be that it's okay to try and fail. I can try to write every day, or try to write five thousand words a week: I can set any goal I want, but if I don't make it, it's okay. I haven't failed as a person, I'm not doomed as a writer for my lack of discipline. It's okay.

I think we have too few messages that it's okay to fail. So the second school of thought, the idea of forgiving yourself and taking care of your needs first, is desperately important. But it's not a terrible thing to also go to the first school, and set goals. We just need to be able to get off each other's - and our own - cases when we don't meet those goals. Because it's okay.

Character Creation: Cheesy Broccoli Casserole

A story is food for the mind. A drabble is an amuse-bouche, satisfying to the palate but not the stomach. A novel is a multi-course meal, with tastes that complement each other and segue into the next part.

Characters are the ingredients. You combine a little salty, a little sweet, a little bitter, a little sour, a little umami. Umami is a Japanese loanword, for pleasant savory tastes, like meat or onion sauteed in water with a little salt. It’s what makes a meal satisfying, and what makes a character feel real and stick with you.

So a novella can be taken as cheesy broccoli casserole. One dish, consumed in a single sitting. Not as many complexities as a novel, not as many twists and turns and things to synchronize. Importantly to all of this, I need to know what I’m making before I start: ingredients aren’t important until they’re used.

I start with the pasta and the chicken. The pasta is a fairly straightforward character, who’s gone through some hard times and lost some stuff. The pasta’s tragic, boiled backstory has to stop before they’ve gone completely limp. They still need to have some body in order to support the other characters and work well as a group. It’s also important that the pasta be properly drained: having pasta water floating around makes everything lose coherence and draws too much attention to a single character. Their backstory contributed to who they are, but it isn’t the totality of their character.

The chicken has a different sort of backstory, one of murder and personal tragedy and exposure to medium-high heat until thoroughly cooked. Even though the chicken and the pasta both have horrible backstories, they aren’t the [i]same[/i] horrible backstory. Identical characters unbalance the whole dish, no matter how exciting the shared story is. The chicken then gets sliced into smaller chunks. The size of the chunks depends how much I want the dish to be about identity politics, how much I’m okay with having big chunks of narrative devoted entirely to this one character.

The broccoli is a big part of the story, and is usually the main character. It knows the pasta, usually, has a bit of a shared history in that it, too, went in the boiling water. But the broccoli was only in there for a little while, and it only made the broccoli more vibrantly green. Some of the brittle rawness of the broccoli is gone, but it’s still crunchy with vigor and determination. The freshness makes for a good YA protagonist, a fighter that everyone can root for.

The shredded cheddar is not a tragic character, and is part of the glue that holds the group together. Even a glue character, though, one that facilitates group cohesion and keeps our ingredients together when they want to fall apart, can’t have that as their only identity: they need their own sharpness, and enough of them needs to show up in the story that their personality is on display.

Campbell’s 98% Fat Free Broccoli Cheese Soup is our supporting cast, our environment. The minor, supporting characters should at least imply that they can and do exist separate from the story, that they don’t stop existing when the main characters stop needing them. The soup is much improved by using it as a casserole ingredient, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist on its own. The helpful innkeeper might be married to the surly coachman, or cousin to the secret informant with the critical information. It doesn’t need to be on display - we don’t need to make broccoli cheese soup from scratch just to throw it in the casserole - but it should at least be implied. The supporting cast should be dumped all over the other ingredients and mixed well, because our main cast doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Seasonings are part of atmosphere and setting, but they’re also important to character: salt is something some people avoid out of health concern or prudishness, but it highlights different aspects of character. Sexual content isn’t a bad thing on its own, and can show up different sides of an ingredient, but it’s at the discretion and to the personal taste of the cook. How much salt I use varies - by mood, by how fresh the broccoli is, by whether I want to feel like I’m eating something with pretensions at health or want intensely comforting food. Audience matters, and influences character and cookery in various ways.

Garlic is part of worldbuilding, too: it adds umami and brings the whole together, but overdoing it and giving it too much space in the casserole means that only very particular palates will like it. Foul language can also be peppered in at the discretion of the author, with the knowledge that it pairs differently with each individual ingredient.

After cooking in the story for 45 minutes at 375, the ingredients are still recognizable, can still be pinpointed, can even be enjoyed on their individual merits. But it’s the whole that’s important, and they only serve the whole. The characters can no longer be extricated from the story. Even if I were starting with the same building blocks, the same basics of tragic-but-strong or my-whole-family-is-dead, the details would change with the dish, because the story as a whole comes first, and the characters are only there to further it, and there can frequently be substitutions.

Cadence

I've been writing a lot of short fiction recently - character studies and microplots and things from a dozen different perspectives - and one of the things that's been most interesting to work on is cadence. It's part and parcel of syntax, of course, and I've always put sentences together a little weirdly. Sometimes it'll take me a couple passes before I can get something that reads fine and concise to me to parse to anything meaningful at all to other readers.

Part of this is that I learned French as a written language before English, and narrative and dialog have always been very different creatures to me. Dialog just needs to sound like people talk, and I can do that. Narrative needs its own flow, needs to be interspersed with enough dialog, needs to convey information and move plot along without getting mired in itself.

It's the cadence of narrative that I've been working on, how quickly or slowly or trippingly different stories need to go. Re-ordering sentences in ways that do nothing to improve clarity is a new thing for me, but it's been necessary in working on cadence.

Maddeningly, I've so far not found a way to work on cadence that doesn't involve revision and paying attention. It's almost like writing is something that requires effort.

Dishes

Right now, I'm stuck on a chapter.

I have the chapter outlined: hell, I have the next four chapters outlined, and the last one I have rough ideas about. It's just a matter of getting the words done.

But they won't come. I went back to the beginning of the chapter to read it through and tweak parts and see if I could get the words unstuck. I haven't been able to get all the way through it, because something's just awkward, and I can't pinpoint it, and I know I won't be able to go forward until I can.

So I go through my checklist of things that make writing difficult for me:

Am I ill? No.

Have I slept enough? Yep!

Have I eaten? I had delicious Italian with my dad a few hours ago, and I'm still comfortable from that, though no longer in danger of a food coma. I'm good on that front.

Do I have more pressing obligations that I feel guilty about not accomplishing? Nope, I've finished work for the day, I've made good progress, I'm good on that front.

Am I physically uncomfortable? Well, the temperature's fine, but my back and upper arms kind of think trying the plank exercise yesterday was a bad idea. It's not bad, though, and not distracting while I'm doing nothing more strenuous than typing.

Am I thirsty? Huh, a little bit. I should get a drink.

Is my environment distracting? Well, I'm home alone in the apartment, and it smells nice because we have candles that make it smell like a bakery with a vanilla fetish. I have music on quiet, and adequate light, and my comfy chair, but there's a cardboard box in the corner from a thing we unpacked last night, and dishes in the sink that I know I need to deal with.

So I'm going to go do dishes and drink water and recycle and hope that when I'm done this stupid fucking chapter stops being hard to write. If that fails I may knit and read for a while.

Tutorials

As part of the great diaspora of talent on the internet, a lot of things, such as writing, that can be learned about through degree programmes or books on the subject, can also now be learned about through short instructional written bits, called tutorials.

For a lot of people, me included, it's nice to be able to look up a specific piece of information and be told about the process. That's how I re-taught myself to knit, too: I went to knittinghelp.com and watched videos of how to cast on and then watched knitting videos, and then, when I was working on other projects, looked up specific increases and decreases.

But my thoughts on knitting are not what you're here for.

Actually, I'm not sure what you're here for, as apparently most of you are Russian Linux users and therefore probably cooler than me.

Writing tutorials are interesting. I posted one a couple weeks ago - more of an insulting crash course in the addressing comma, but it does count as a tutorial. I normally don't do those. I normally don't do anything approximating tutorials, because I am not comfortable speaking from a position of authority about writing in general. I am willing to go on for several minutes [link goes to audio file] about things that don't work for me at all as a writer or reader, but I tend not to spend a lot of time on the things that work for me. This is because different things work for different people, and there is no one true way to write.

For example, Horatio Alger and Stieg Larsson were both bestselling authors. I adore Larsson's prose, but reading Alger makes me want to stab myself in the face. These preferences mean that I do not have an absolute authority on what makes popular writing, and popular writing is often what people are aiming for in their endeavors. Therefore any tutorials by me would not address a full spectrum of possible right ways. I feel, then, that any tutorials I could write would be less than ideal, and, as a perfectionist, I therefore refrain from writing them (swearing about addressing commas is different: it is possible to be objectively wrong).

Other people have different approaches, and some people write fantastic writing tutorials because they can get over being obsessively perfectionist and just write down the things they know that work. What sparked this post, though, was a tutorial on writing fanfiction that has received a great deal of positive feedback. Holy shit, people, use your critical thinking skills when assessing whether something is good advice or not. Just because someone can put together The Ultimate Handbook or whatever does not automatically mean they have any idea what they're talking about.

Project Update #2

The project I mentioned last time has been sidelined for the moment - there are still things with tone and voice and world that I have to hammer out. If I'm not deeply invested in her story, why would anyone else be?

In the meantime, I've been working on EMTstuck, another Homestuck fanfiction. I have the main story, which progresses slowly, and I've been trying to write a blurb a day. Some days I don't manage it, while some days are really productive, so I've been queuing posts so that one comes out per day. It's a great, low-stress way to get words out: the world is already pretty fleshed out, as are the characters. There's no urgent plot, and all the readers are already familiar with everything. I get to write to get words out, and practice writing tight voice.

I finished a novella, which should be out soon. I started the sequel to it, which is going to address the concept of family secrets. But as the first one took three years, I think the second one probably will, too, and I'm not going to force it. Setting it up the way I did, the first one has the best emotional impact of anything I've written. I'll talk more about that next week, though - I might even have other good news relating to it.

I've also been working on a short story, set in the fourteenth century, which is going to be about 8000 words when done.

This is one of the reasons EMTstuck is important - it gets me writing even when I'm not absorbed in something, so that my skills don't atrophy completely while I'm knitting this dress.

Commas, dialog, and swearing

I read a lot of free romance novels.

A lot.

We're not going to go into numbers here, because I have no idea: I delete most of them as soon as I finish, if not before. There's a reason for that!

There's a lot I'm willing to forgive in free books: medical implausibility, silly premise (I actually go out of my way for pretending-to-be-married and arranged marriage stories), slavish adherence to archetype. One thing that drives me absolutely batty, though, is absence of the addressing comma and other failures at punctuating dialog.

Thus, I present an educational short story:

"Motherfucker, where is my cheese?" asked John. John is calling for Steve's attention by addressing him. Because calling for his attention is not integral to the rest of the sentence, it gets a comma after it. 'Asked' is not capitalized because it is part of the dialog tag: it is adding context to the way the words are being said.

Steve shrugged. "Why should I know? Have you checked the fridge, asswipe?" Steve shrugging is a separate sentence before he speaks: shrugging is not a way of communicating words in spoken language, so it is not a dialog tag, just an action that occurs in the same paragraph. If I wanted only one sentence, it would begin 'Steve shrugged, saying, "Why. . .."' Asswipe is not capitalized, because it is an epithet and not a proper name.

It is not motherfucking hard, motherfuckers. There is a comma before motherfuckers because this whole post can be taken as an apostrophe to people who keep messing it up, and I like calling people names.

A Rant

I have no idea why anyone would feel motivated to get a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. I think the fact that many young people do so is indicative of widespread fuzzy thinking and incompetent guidance counselors.

Creative writing BAs do not guarantee publication. Publication does not guarantee that you can make a living writing. Creative writing BAs do not give you marketable skills that will keep you employed while you try to write.

I have met a recent graduate with an Honours BA in Creative Writing who had interned at respected, award-winning magazines and who had no idea the difference between proofreading and copyediting.

I have met a recent graduate with a BA in Creative Writing who thought that a BA qualified her to be a professor, and was bewildered when that job did not appear before her.

I do not know any additional Creative Writing majors, because I make a point of cultivating friends who are not going to be crippled by debt for years for no more valid reason than fuzzy thinking.

Creative Writing, as a major, gives you more of an appreciation for good writing. This is all very well, but it doesn't teach you marketable skills: Journalism requires people skills, the ability to work under pressure, and basic spelling and grammar. This means that you finish a journalism program with marketable, transferable skills.

I know of no graduates with Creative Writing BAs who were able to translate their degree into widely-useful skills. I know of no recent graduates with Creative Writing BAs who became employed in their field just after graduation. I do not consider it fuzzy thinking to infer a correlation.

Creative Writing seems an eminently practical degree if you:

• are only looking for self-improvement, not necessarily a job
• are already published and raking in dough at a rate that will pay your tuition and living expenses, but trying to improve your skills
• are actually pursuing an MRS, but need a BA as a cover
• are going to inherit a solid family business and already have a sibling who is an accountant

I do not see the practicality of it outside those and related circumstances.

And I do consider practicality eminently relevant to higher education. It's expensive, so if it is a bad return on investment, it doesn't make sense to do it until you are financially stable enough that tuition will not require onerous loans.

"But!" you cry, "how will I improve my writing to the point of perfection if not by majoring in Creative Writing in university?"

By not stopping writing? By diligent practice? By learning critical thinking skills that can be applied to everything? By learning about things that inspire you to write and equip you to get jobs that will inspire you to write and also support you while you do so?

Creative Writing BAs are like the little blue pills: they both seem like a good idea and a way to jump-start something good, but really you're just fooling around, because practice and critical thinking will both affect the end result far more than the artificial aid ever could.

Discuss:
- Additional reasons majoring in Creative Writing is terrible.
- What you majored in/are majoring in, and how you have applied it to your writing.

Project Update #1

I'm starting to seriously work on a project I had the initial idea for over two years ago. It started with a vivid image, of someone walking home in the dark in the rain. They were walking past trees, and they were resigned to the wet, and they were accompanied by a God.

At the time, I wrote it down, but I didn't think I had the skill to do the idea justice.

It's my active project right now. I have other images - of standing on a hill in a thunderstorm wearing a fedora, of characters throwing things at deities for being thwarted romantically - and they're starting to come together. I'm editing the first couple of thousand words fiercely, because my skill has grown in the past couple of years and I am better able to see where I'm missing my mark in tone and voice and pacing.

With all of the critiquing I've done in the past couple of years, I'm much better able to cut to the heart of the matter, which has led to a new style of outlining for me: I just write down what happens as briefly as possible. It's like the blocking run for a theatrical performance: none of it is costumed in prose, there are no microphones, the set's in place but not finished being painted. The second run is what's going to let me fill in the blanks, but right now this is looking like it'll be a much faster and more efficient way for me to write.

Burnout Mode

I firmly don't believe in writer's block. I think that it's usually a matter of needing more planning, or to work on a different project. I can't comprehend a world where someone is actually stuck and unable to write: there's always backtracking to see how you wrote yourself into a corner, or outlining, or editing something else, or doing silly flash fiction to give your brain a break from the next Great American Novel.

But sometimes I hit a wall, and will stare at a scene I have planned out and have an overwhelming sense that if I write it, it will all be crap. Sometimes I stare at a list of projects I could work on and can't even articulate cogent reasons why I should work on one over the other. Sometimes every single thing I put on screen is absolute crap and I want to delete the entire project.

I don't think this is writer's block. It's nothing to do with the writing itself, or the story fighting me, or the characters misbehaving. It's a sign that I am completely burned out, and need to have a glass of water and a nap. It's a sign that the only creative output I'm capable of at the moment is knitting to a pattern.

Writer's block is an annoying aspect of magical thinking: it gives writers problems that no one else has. Self-care is a universal issue that does not care what you do.

Spoiler: this post is super-short because I have a headache and knitting i-cord is about what I'm up to mentally.

Community

It amazes me when I encounter people who say they have no one to talk with about writing.

This is a case of privilege: I grew up with parents who write (even if they are journalists and collectively despair of my structure), I had a group of friends in high school who started a writing group, most of the friends I made online became friends in the context of writing or some form of creative output (did you know: for two years I helped run and moderate an art critique and virtual-money pricing thread). I joined the Victoria Writers' Society soon after I got here, and I I've been to Meetups about writing and PEAVI meetings and a conference about writing and book launches and poetry readings. When I wanted to find people who were also into writing, I was in a town that had lots of other people with similar interests, and I had a framework such that I had no problems seeking them out.

So when I encounter people who have no one to talk writing with, I am faintly befuddled and tend to either adopt them or refer them to the Internet, depending on my mood and their familiarity with technology.

Writing is not a solitary pursuit. I am not convinced it has ever widely been a solitary pursuit. The Bronte sisters had each other to talk to, Jane Austen had family to read her works to, Kerouac had the entire Beat movement.

Having people to talk to about writing helps refine ideas and thoughts about it. Brainstorming tends to be more productive if someone else is there to ask questions or point out when something is really obviously quite illogical. Having people to talk to about writing means having people who'll remind you that yes, this is something you like spending your free time doing, why haven't you written a word in a week? Having people to talk to about writing means that, when you've finished a piece for a contest with a deadline, you can have two people whose opinions about writing you trust read it in an afternoon.

For me, the internet is how I've found these people. Well, the internet, and people I still know from high school and university. But I'm still in touch with them over the internet, and that's where we talk about writing. I've found people on Tumblr and on an anime site I joined when I was 14, and through friends of these people. Others have found communities on Absolutewrite or Deviantart or Meetups or Critiquecircle or Fictionpress or Wattpad or any of a dozen others. If you're looking for a community, it can be worth checking out anything you can find to locate the people you'll click with.

I've found it really worthwhile.

Putting my money where my mouth is

A couple weeks ago, I posted about pseudonyms.

I've been having conversations about them since then, particularly about using them for different genres. Genre boundaries have diminshed a great deal in the last few years - particularly the 'rule' saying a writer should stick to one genre. And with online book stores, if a reader only wants books in a particular genre, that's what tags and categories are for.

Tags are of particular concern in a lot of the fanfiction I read - writers are expected to tag for major character death or spoilers for canon, and for level of explicitness, and for whether it contains romance, and the genders of the people involved if it does. Writers are also expected to tag for graphic depictions of violence, underage characters in sexual situations, and rape or non-consent: these are things built in to the platform of Archive Of Our Own, which is where I post my work. There is a little checklist when you start a new story that lets you just tick the box for anything that might apply.

The social aspect of the community also encourages tagging for drug use, mental health issues, suicide, abuse, dysfunctional families - you get the idea. Things which might be upsetting to read to the point that someone would choose to actively avoid them get tagged*. There is such strong community impetus towards tagging that an author who chose not to include a specific tag (because it would have spoiled the entire plot) has actually been vilified because of not tagging.

But this is fanfiction, so things you'd want to look for, like specific pairings or stories about specific characters, are also tagged for ease of searching. A lot of tagging is about finding the particular reading experience you are looking for.

There is some of this available in original fiction, though obviously not to the same extent. Categories, though, offer very concrete ways to separate what one writes into genres without using pseudonyms.

So that's what I'm going to do. I have no particular shame attached to writing erotica - I write smart fiction, no matter the genre, and I want people to find me and want to buy my stories based on that. That's why all of my fiction under 3000 words will end up on here at some point, and everything over 3000 words will go up on my Smashwords (with the exception of Intervention, out on Feedbooks for a couple years already, and future novels that might end up out on other channels).

*This is also known as trigger warnings. For example, someone who has been raped might not be able to read about rape without having unpleasant flashbacks or intense anxiety that would ruin their entire day. Avoiding stories with rape in them is a lot easier if they say what they are on the tin.

Whitewashing

I've long been of the school of thought that if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem. As I read more about racism in science fiction, anti-racism, and whitewashing, I've come to a dilemma:

All of the central characters in my YA novel are white. Yeah, sure, one of them isn't human, one of them is bisexual, one of the secondary characters is trans, I address mental health issues to some extent. I tried to actively include things that could be othering to young people and have those people affected by them kick ass. I was careful to have female characters retain their agency regardless of romantic attachment. I avoided the icky cultural narratives of romanticizing quasi-abusive relationships as best I could. I thought I was doing pretty well on showing a variety of people doing awesome things.

And then I realized that all of these characters were white. They're from different socio-economic backgrounds and some are immigrants and there's an age gap between people who would sociologically be considered the same generation, so I got to address a bunch of things I find interesting. I don't think about race a lot, because I don't have to: I am white. I also try to deal with people as individuals, and when they mention something race-related (delicious collard greens their grandmother makes, or parents having a hilarious Mumbai/Halifax accent), that gets tagged in my head as something related to their culture of origin, much in the same category as my parents being hippie journalists.

That's one of the reasons one of my characters is Polish: I think the idea of 'white culture' is crap, because there are so very many different cultures. But I've been reading a lot about social justice in the past year (thank you, Tumblr, I think), and have been reminded that having heroes that look like you is really, really important. Belle was my favourite Disney Princess because she looked the most like me (and also because I have an absurd weakness for that fairy tale).

So it kind of sucks that all of these characters are white. I didn't set out to write a perfectly politically correct novel. But I kind of want to rewrite it so that one of my characters (the all-American football star) is African-American. So I am dithering.

Another part of the argument is that I don't want him to be token, I don't want him to be 'just' inclusion of people of colour. Additionally, I'd kind of envisioned him as an American mish-mash: part Ojibwe, part French, lots of German, some Lakota, some English, a fair portion of we're-not-really-sure. Tanned and tall, but not particularly easily pinpointed in terms of subculture of origin. But he'd still read as white, so that would make him not particularly perfect as the All-American Hero.

There's also the really tempting part that, if I'm not changing him, the book is ready to go. I started on this four years ago, so being done is a really, really tempting thought.

Alpha Males

Romance novels and pickup artists have something in common:

They both tend to simplify complex sociological forces about attraction and mate fitness into really easy sets (I'm sorry, A Beka, for the upsetting theories). The most common sets are 'alpha males' and all other men. What are alpha males? Well, depends who you ask. Pickup artists think one thing, romance novel enthusiasts think others, but the term comes from ethology. It is not a concept that is historically or anthropologically relevant to humans, but it is easy shorthand.

What's it shorthand for, though?

Well, judging from what I know of the protagonists of this list, mostly it's shorthand for white (American, Russian, or English, for preference), tall, confident, securely employed, intelligent, physically competent, and handsome. Oh! Also able-bodied and with no crippling mental illness. Alpha male is just a much shorter term, and less problematic to say in public.

The term also connotes leadership, and speaks to people's desire for clear hierarchy as opposed to the complicated morass of actual human interaction. Werewolf romance novels are probably the most explicit in this. They break everything down so the reader gets both clear hierarchy and clear happily ever after, because simple and straightforward and forever is in dire short supply.

Hashtags

Trillian is one of the few programs I have constantly running on my computer. Partly because it allows me to keep most of my IMing in one program (I got sick of the 'what is beeping what the hell is beeping oh wow I have no idea what's beeping, guess I'm not talking to anyone' dance), but also because it is a great way to passively follow Twitter.

If any of you follow me on Twitter, you know that I do not engage a whole lot there. I post things! Every few days or so. I have occasional, usually short conversations with friends like Kim Nayyer and Suzanne. A large part of that is that most of my writing support system is to be had over more private channels, like a forum or IMs. I find it easy to forget that social media and getting a bunch of people to read your writing involves things like making sure people know you exist.

Even so, I follow a few hashtags. Hashtags, for anyone who has been assiduously avoiding Twitter for the last few years, are ways to mark that a tweet is about a certain topic. Sometimes hashtags will trend, becoming popular with a large number of people for a while. Right now, a trending hashtag is #removeoneletterfilms. The hashtags that I regularly follow are #yyj, for events and news in Victoria, #myWANA, for the author support network Kristen Lamb started, and #amwriting, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Both of the latter I follow at least in part to see emergent memes in the kind of indie writer culture that uses hashtags on Twitter, because they are sometimes also memes I will see at least partly reflected in news articles or brought up at meetings of the Victoria Writers' Society.

With Trillian, any tweets that include those hashtags pop up in the bottom right part of my screen. I can glance over and read and glance back and then it fades away. If I feel it necessary, I can reply to or retweet the tweet in question without ever switching tabs.

The curious thing about hashtags like myWANA and amwriting is that I see some people using them to market their books.

This is interesting to me, because yes, of course, writers read, but these hashtags seem to be only peopled by writers. I'd think that marketing could be more effectively directed at readers who are not already writers themselves: your writing support network probably already knows all about your book.

Editing published works

This was going to be a completely different post. One of the pitfalls of being friends with a number of writers and reading all of their stuff behind the scenes (primarily in Google Docs) is that I lose track of what they've actually published. A friend was talking about how she's heavily editing one of her novels, and I was annoyed  with her because I thought it was the one she'd already put out. Whoops, no, it's the one slated for later this year.

But back to my annoyance.

Editing works that are already out is something that happens. We see it most commonly with comics, where collected volumes will have extras: these are mostly to get you to buy the same material again, plus bonus sketch or story or worldbuilding. This is established practice, which is evident particularly in popular series such as The Sandman, which has the individual issues, the collected editions, the absolute editions, and the annotated editions. One gets something new and slightly different out of each edition. One needs to buy the whole series four times to get that full experience.

It is also fairly established practice in textbooks, where new information requires rewrites.

But in novels, there have traditionally been few differences between editions: some will have particular illustrations, some will not, and the page count may vary between the hardcover and the pocketbook, but it is essentially the same content. In the case of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, there are two cover variants, but the contents remain the same. The cover variants are entertaining when next to each other (all of my copies have been of the black cover: my best friend has one with the white cover), but the contents are the same.

Take, for example, American Gods (yes, it is apparently Neil Gaiman day on Author's Refuge). It recently had a tenth anniversary edition! The tenth anniversary edition has an additional twenty thousand words on the original. Twenty thousand. It is also the author's preferred text.

I find this maddening, as it's a larger echo of something I see a lot in indie publishing. I need to buy it again to get the whole experience - to get the experience the author wants me to have, even. This is okay for me with American Gods, as my paperback has gone missing somewhere in the last two countries, and I adore the story.

In indie publishing, I've seen a few authors scrambling to fix typos or plot holes pointed out by first readers - meaning that people who buy the book on the first, second, and third days are generally all buying slightly different books. This is amateurish, and frankly quite terrible: your book should be the best it can be before you publish it. Often, the best it can be requires an editor.

I am firmly of the opinion that, when you learn something new about writing, something that changes the way you write, it is the better part of valor to take that and apply it to something new instead of re-writing something old. Produce new and better things and send them forth into the world, and then produce more that are even better.

But I'm caught - it's been ten years, and it's twenty thousand words. It's a celebration, not a cover-up. I may end up buying the hardcover.

Songfic, and other creatures from the zoo

Sometimes a song is particularly inspiring.

Like this one: I really like it. I have written portions of stories that were inspired by it, as I find lots of bass and a steady beat good for reminding me of an atmosphere of adventure, and 'I just want to turn the lights on in these volatile times' seems like really good motivation to go and do something really stupid.

Songs can be useful reminders of an atmosphere one is trying to evoke, particularly for those of us who have a tabbed browsing problem (currently open: Tumblr, blogger, two Youtube tabs, a wikipedia article, a knowyourmeme.com article, three writing projects, two stories I am supposed to be critiquing, a forum thread, and two stories I'd like to read). If I get drawn in to other things and disrupted from the mood I was writing, a song can remind me of what it was I was trying to do with the scene. Video game and movie soundtracks are integral to the mood of a piece, and the music Stephanie Meyer listened to while writing Twilight became a sort of soundtrack as well, so popular music relating to other media is not a new concept. Society is a story machine, and they leak out all over, and each tastes of the others.

But songs can take on other roles in stories, like the fanfiction My Immortal drawing its title, chapter titles, and tone primarily from Evanescence and My Chemical Romance songs. There also exists songfic, which involves weaving lyrics into plot.

One of the neatest approaches to songfic I've ever read was Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. It follows the plot of the Scottish ballad of the same name, and the full text of the ballad was included in the back of the book I read. The text itself is full of broad and witty references to literature, and a portion of its charm stems from the fact that it is in many ways a book about stories.