I've decided to make a change in how I choose anthologies to list in my postings.
As you might know, these lists started out as a list on my hard drive, for my own reference. It included anthologies I thought might be interesting to write for; I noted down the vital info, so I could find it easily. I eventually started sharing the lists each month.
The list has grown from its origin in some ways -- I post anthos with all genres of fiction, rather than just genres I write in myself -- but not in others. I don't post poetry anthologies because I haven't written poetry in decades and know nothing about current markets. I don't post flash fiction anthologies because I don't write flash, and besides there are a bajillion flash anthos and they'd be better off collected in a place of their own, by someone who's into flash.
But I've also posted only books that I qualified to write for, unless specifically asked. I've had a few editors write to ask if I'd post some limited-demographic books, and if they otherwise qualified, I've been happy to do so, but I haven't gone looking for those books on my own.
I do come across them, though. And so I've decided that as I find anthologies open only to a limited demographic, if they otherwise qualify, I'll go ahead and post them. The complete post that $5 patrons get has one of these this month, with a December deadline, and I'm sure there'll be more in the future.
To clarify, I'll post info for books that are limited by the age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or ability status of the writer.
I still won't post books limited to writers who are members of a particular organization, or students of a particular school. I figure if you're a member of an organization or a student at a school that's putting an anthology together, you'll hear about it through your org/school's web site or newsletter or whatever.
I'm considering geographical limitations. On the one hand, I can see the utility in posting anthologies only open to Canadians, for example. There are a lot of Canadian writers who wander around the English-speaking writerverse online where my Patreon and my blogs are found. And there are a number of Canadian publishers who receive subsidies from their government, and who are partially or completely limited to publishing Canadian writers because of that, so the question does come up at least once or twice a year. I'm pretty sure there are at least a few Canadians reading this, so those posts would be useful to at least some people.
Would it be useful, though, to post anthologies only open to, say, current citizens or current/past residents of a non-English-speaking country? I see those very occasionally, so they're out there, and they advertise in English. I'm thinking they must have their own places they hang out online, though, where they'd get that kind of news, so there wouldn't be much point in my posting them. On the other hand, there are minority populations who could probably use the signal boost. What do you all think?
And just looking at numbers, I'm wondering whether it'd be worthwhile to post calls for anthologies open only to residents of a particular state of the US. I've seen a few of those around over the years, they do exist, but would it be useful to post those? Would you all like to see them?
I'd love to hear what you think about the geographically limited books in particular, and anything else you'd like to comment on.
Thanks,
Angie
Showing posts with label question. Show all posts
Showing posts with label question. Show all posts
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Novellas and Candy and Context
I have two workshops coming up, and I'm reading like crazy for both of them. For the Anthology Workshop, the one at the end of this month that I go to every year, I'm currently reading all the other attendees' stories, 230+, and have to hit a 10-per-day schedule to get them done before I leave for Lincoln City. For the SF Workshop, in April, I have a pretty good advance reading list as well, and I've been working on it for about a month now.
The book I'm currently in the middle of for the SF Workshop is The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016, ed. by Paula Guran. I'm enjoying the stories, but I noticed something weird about what it feels like to read a whole book of novellas.
By definition, a novella is a work of fiction between 20,000 and 50,000 words long. It's a mid-range length, between the novelette (7,500 to 20,000) and the novel (50,000 and up). You don't see novellas very often because they've usually been considered too short to be a (trad-pubbed) stand-alone book, but they're too long to fit comfortably into most fiction magazines.
There seem to be more novellas around, though, since indie publishing got into full swing. When you're publishing e-books, you can let a story be any length it wants. And novellas actually work fine as paper POD books, too; more and more indie-pubbing writers are publishing them in paper, and the New York publishers are occasionally putting out paper novellas as well.
I've enjoyed a lot of novellas -- Nnedi Okorafor's Binti is one of the few works I've nominated and voted for in the Hugo Awards that actually won, yay! (Great book -- give it a shot if you're at all into SF) -- but most novellas I run across are in magazines. Asimov's usually has a novella or two, for instance. And for whatever reason, I have a hard time getting into those. I might decide that I enjoyed the story quite a lot, once I'm done, but while I'm reading, it's hard to stick with it. I find myself getting easily distracted, wondering what's coming up next. There are more stories in the magazine, and maybe the next one is better?
I've always had this antsy feeling when reading novellas, but I never thought about it much. Then I read Binti as a stand-alone book, and... it was fine. It was like reading a novel, just shorter. Huh.
Then I sat down to read Guran's anthology (which also contains Binti, by the way), and the antsiness and distraction was/is back. I'm pushing through the book, and enjoying what I'm reading, but I'm having a hard time sinking down into the stories.
This time I thought about it, and compared how I felt reading Binti as a paper book, versus reading novellas in an anthology, or reading a novella in Asimov's. And I figured something out.
It's the context that makes all the difference.
Somewhere in my brain there's cemented the idea that a bunch of stories collected together is inherently that -- a set of stories, of shorter works. I expect them to be short, because the stories in a magazine or an anthology usually are, and while I'm reading one, I'm eager to move on to the next one. It's like eating a box of mixed candies -- the one I'm eating now is good, but I'm also looking forward to the next one, to something that'll also be yummy but will also be different. With a magazine or anthology, I'm enjoying a short story but also looking forward to the good-but-different experience of reading the next one.
Not that I actually think about that while I'm reading. I haven't been consciously aware of these expectations before; they've just always been there affecting how I read. With a short story, there isn't time to get antsy and eager to move on to the next story. (Unless the one I'm reading right now isn't doing it for me, but that's a different issue.) A novelette might hold me, or might be long enough that I start flipping forward to see how many pages before the next story starts.
Novellas, though.... Those are definitely long enough that I start feeling eager to move on before the end. Even if I'm enjoying the current story, I can't help it -- part of my brain starts straining ahead for the next one. It's noticeably harder for me to sink completely into a novella, if it's packaged with a bunch of other stories.
It took reading an anthology of novellas, for the first time ever, to get me to realize what's happening in my skull and figure out why.
A writer friend of mine who publishes a lot of short stories, and then collects them together and sells the collections, has noticed that there seem to be two very distinct audiences for individual short stories versus collections. Some people like buying them one at a time, and some people will wait for a collection, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap. It looks like, at the novella length, anyway, I'm definitely a stand-alone preference reader. Because reading Binti as an individual book, I didn't feel impatient or distracted a all. The context does seem to make all the difference.
Is this just me? Anyone else have a hard time with these mid-length stories in magazines or anthologies?
Angie
The book I'm currently in the middle of for the SF Workshop is The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016, ed. by Paula Guran. I'm enjoying the stories, but I noticed something weird about what it feels like to read a whole book of novellas.
By definition, a novella is a work of fiction between 20,000 and 50,000 words long. It's a mid-range length, between the novelette (7,500 to 20,000) and the novel (50,000 and up). You don't see novellas very often because they've usually been considered too short to be a (trad-pubbed) stand-alone book, but they're too long to fit comfortably into most fiction magazines.
There seem to be more novellas around, though, since indie publishing got into full swing. When you're publishing e-books, you can let a story be any length it wants. And novellas actually work fine as paper POD books, too; more and more indie-pubbing writers are publishing them in paper, and the New York publishers are occasionally putting out paper novellas as well.
I've enjoyed a lot of novellas -- Nnedi Okorafor's Binti is one of the few works I've nominated and voted for in the Hugo Awards that actually won, yay! (Great book -- give it a shot if you're at all into SF) -- but most novellas I run across are in magazines. Asimov's usually has a novella or two, for instance. And for whatever reason, I have a hard time getting into those. I might decide that I enjoyed the story quite a lot, once I'm done, but while I'm reading, it's hard to stick with it. I find myself getting easily distracted, wondering what's coming up next. There are more stories in the magazine, and maybe the next one is better?
I've always had this antsy feeling when reading novellas, but I never thought about it much. Then I read Binti as a stand-alone book, and... it was fine. It was like reading a novel, just shorter. Huh.
Then I sat down to read Guran's anthology (which also contains Binti, by the way), and the antsiness and distraction was/is back. I'm pushing through the book, and enjoying what I'm reading, but I'm having a hard time sinking down into the stories.
This time I thought about it, and compared how I felt reading Binti as a paper book, versus reading novellas in an anthology, or reading a novella in Asimov's. And I figured something out.
It's the context that makes all the difference.
Somewhere in my brain there's cemented the idea that a bunch of stories collected together is inherently that -- a set of stories, of shorter works. I expect them to be short, because the stories in a magazine or an anthology usually are, and while I'm reading one, I'm eager to move on to the next one. It's like eating a box of mixed candies -- the one I'm eating now is good, but I'm also looking forward to the next one, to something that'll also be yummy but will also be different. With a magazine or anthology, I'm enjoying a short story but also looking forward to the good-but-different experience of reading the next one.
Not that I actually think about that while I'm reading. I haven't been consciously aware of these expectations before; they've just always been there affecting how I read. With a short story, there isn't time to get antsy and eager to move on to the next story. (Unless the one I'm reading right now isn't doing it for me, but that's a different issue.) A novelette might hold me, or might be long enough that I start flipping forward to see how many pages before the next story starts.
Novellas, though.... Those are definitely long enough that I start feeling eager to move on before the end. Even if I'm enjoying the current story, I can't help it -- part of my brain starts straining ahead for the next one. It's noticeably harder for me to sink completely into a novella, if it's packaged with a bunch of other stories.
It took reading an anthology of novellas, for the first time ever, to get me to realize what's happening in my skull and figure out why.
A writer friend of mine who publishes a lot of short stories, and then collects them together and sells the collections, has noticed that there seem to be two very distinct audiences for individual short stories versus collections. Some people like buying them one at a time, and some people will wait for a collection, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap. It looks like, at the novella length, anyway, I'm definitely a stand-alone preference reader. Because reading Binti as an individual book, I didn't feel impatient or distracted a all. The context does seem to make all the difference.
Is this just me? Anyone else have a hard time with these mid-length stories in magazines or anthologies?
Angie
Monday, September 21, 2015
Shooting Open Locks
So you're a writer and your character wants to shoot a lock off a gate or a door or something, to get to where they need to be. Does that actually work? What kind of gun/ammo would you need? How many shots? Let's find out!
Seriously, this is a fun video. :)
Also, that dude is a pretty awesome shot. O_O
Angie
Seriously, this is a fun video. :)
Also, that dude is a pretty awesome shot. O_O
Angie
Thursday, August 7, 2014
Who Owns the Selfie?
So this monkey stole a wildlife photographer's camera, dashed away with it and took a bunch of pictures, including this really great selfie.
The story went around about three years ago (and I missed it somehow) but more recently David Slater, the photographer whose camera was swiped, requested Wikipedia to take the photo down, that it was violating his copyright. Wikipedia said no, it doesn't, the photo is in the public domain because a monkey took it.
According to David Post,
It makes sense to me. If, say, a friend of mine sees something awesome happening right that minute and grabs my camera to take a picture, do I own the copyright to that picture? I wouldn't think so. If he ends up selling the photo for $10K, I might want to have a discussion about rental of the camera [cough] but I wouldn't expect to argue over actual ownership of the copyright.
What do you think?
Thanks to Passive Guy for the link.
Angie
The story went around about three years ago (and I missed it somehow) but more recently David Slater, the photographer whose camera was swiped, requested Wikipedia to take the photo down, that it was violating his copyright. Wikipedia said no, it doesn't, the photo is in the public domain because a monkey took it.
According to David Post,
If the monkey took the photo — and Slater is himself the source of the story that the monkey snapped the photo using his (Slater’s) camera — nobody owns the copyright; nonhumans cannot own copyright (or, as far as I know, personal property of any kind). Slater has no copyright claim, because the photo was not his original work – it was the monkey’s. But monkeys can’t own copyright. Furnishing the monkey with a camera no more gives him a copyright claim in the work than Microsoft’s furnishing me with a word processing program gives them copyright in what I write.
It makes sense to me. If, say, a friend of mine sees something awesome happening right that minute and grabs my camera to take a picture, do I own the copyright to that picture? I wouldn't think so. If he ends up selling the photo for $10K, I might want to have a discussion about rental of the camera [cough] but I wouldn't expect to argue over actual ownership of the copyright.
What do you think?
Thanks to Passive Guy for the link.
Angie
Friday, October 14, 2011
Guest Post at Rosalie Lario's
I have a guest post up at Rosalie Lario's blog today, talking about stories where there's paranormal activity in a contemporary setting. Do you try to set up a situation where everyone knows what's going on, like in Stacia Kane's Downside books, or do you try to keep it all a secret from the general public, like I do in my Hidden Magic series? Taking it public can give a greater sense of OMGWOW! to the events, if they were so wide-spread that everyone's aware, but keeping the secret can give you an additional source of conflict to toss at your characters. Come check it out and weigh in. :)
Angie
Angie
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Slogging Through a Great Book
Am I the only one who has trouble getting through some really good books?
I don't mean the kind of "good" book that's a classic, or something the critics have raved about -- the kind of book you feel you should like, even when you don't. I mean the kind of book you're really enjoying, where you like the characters and the plot is interesting and all that, but for some reason it's just really easy to put the book down and wander off to do something else, like, every few pages. :/
I just finished a book like that. It was m/m romance, which is a genre I enjoy. I liked the characters and their relationship arc -- I particularly liked that the writer never took the easy path to shoving them together, but made them legitimately fight for it all the way through, with good reasons on both sides for doing so. The writing itself was clear, with few or no confusing or annoying bits. I finished it pleased and satisfied, and looking forward to getting the next book in the series. Which hopefully won't take me months of on-and-off reading to get through.
About the only legitimate criticism I can think of is that the setting was kind of spotty and confusing. The book was a fantasy, set on an invented world, and the characters travelled through a number of lands, kingdoms, etc. There were different peoples, each with their own culture and language and such. All this would usually be good, but I had a hard time keeping track of who was which and where they were, so a reference to a Blah from Wherever would have me pausing to wrack my brain for a memory of when the Blahs had been mentioned before, and where Wherever was in relation to the lands 80% of the story took place in. I could tell that the writer put a lot of work into her worldbuilding, and did a good job of it; she just had a hard time communicating it to me as the reader in a coherent manner which would let me grasp her world as a whole, and see how all the pieces fit together.
If this had been a hardcopy release from a New York publisher, it probably would've had a map in it, and I would've referred to it fairly often. Having that graphic showing exactly where different places were in relation to one another, which land this town is in and where exactly the river by the protag's village runs, would've helped a lot. I felt like I was expected to know exactly where the protag was going when he travelled north along the winding coast road, but the lands or towns up there had been mentioned some number of pages back, and I didn't remember them; a map would've let me check quickly and easily, and then get right back to the story. I've never seen that kind of map in a fantasy e-book, although they're common in hardcopy books; this is probably something e-pubs should consider.
But most of the time when I wandered away from reading, it wasn't at a point where the writer had tossed out the name of a people or a place I should remember but didn't, so I can't really swear that was the reason I had such a hard time getting through the story.
I don't know. I liked it, and I do want to read more of the series. I just had a hard time sinking into it for any length of time. Does that happen to anyone else? Any ideas why?
Angie
I don't mean the kind of "good" book that's a classic, or something the critics have raved about -- the kind of book you feel you should like, even when you don't. I mean the kind of book you're really enjoying, where you like the characters and the plot is interesting and all that, but for some reason it's just really easy to put the book down and wander off to do something else, like, every few pages. :/
I just finished a book like that. It was m/m romance, which is a genre I enjoy. I liked the characters and their relationship arc -- I particularly liked that the writer never took the easy path to shoving them together, but made them legitimately fight for it all the way through, with good reasons on both sides for doing so. The writing itself was clear, with few or no confusing or annoying bits. I finished it pleased and satisfied, and looking forward to getting the next book in the series. Which hopefully won't take me months of on-and-off reading to get through.
About the only legitimate criticism I can think of is that the setting was kind of spotty and confusing. The book was a fantasy, set on an invented world, and the characters travelled through a number of lands, kingdoms, etc. There were different peoples, each with their own culture and language and such. All this would usually be good, but I had a hard time keeping track of who was which and where they were, so a reference to a Blah from Wherever would have me pausing to wrack my brain for a memory of when the Blahs had been mentioned before, and where Wherever was in relation to the lands 80% of the story took place in. I could tell that the writer put a lot of work into her worldbuilding, and did a good job of it; she just had a hard time communicating it to me as the reader in a coherent manner which would let me grasp her world as a whole, and see how all the pieces fit together.
If this had been a hardcopy release from a New York publisher, it probably would've had a map in it, and I would've referred to it fairly often. Having that graphic showing exactly where different places were in relation to one another, which land this town is in and where exactly the river by the protag's village runs, would've helped a lot. I felt like I was expected to know exactly where the protag was going when he travelled north along the winding coast road, but the lands or towns up there had been mentioned some number of pages back, and I didn't remember them; a map would've let me check quickly and easily, and then get right back to the story. I've never seen that kind of map in a fantasy e-book, although they're common in hardcopy books; this is probably something e-pubs should consider.
But most of the time when I wandered away from reading, it wasn't at a point where the writer had tossed out the name of a people or a place I should remember but didn't, so I can't really swear that was the reason I had such a hard time getting through the story.
I don't know. I liked it, and I do want to read more of the series. I just had a hard time sinking into it for any length of time. Does that happen to anyone else? Any ideas why?
Angie
Friday, January 1, 2010
Intermittent Fasting
Natasha asked about the intermittent fasting I've been doing, and my answer was too long for a comment, so I'm posting it here. She asked whether the fasting got easier as you went along.
Actually, the intermittent fasting is a lot easier than I thought it'd be, and has been from the beginning. It might be different for other people, but for me, just knowing that I'm not eating anything for twenty-four hours makes it much easier to completely ignore the whole concept of food for that period, whereas trying to eat every day but eat less or only eat certain things means I'm focused on food but having to restrain myself while eating, which for me is difficult to impossible.
I've been thinking about it as being like an addiction. Figure, if someone's an alcoholic, and you said to them, "Okay, you have to have one beer in the morning, and one glass of wine at noon, and a shot of vodka in the evening. You can't skip any of them but you can't have any more than that either," wouldn't you expect them to fail? We expect that the only way for an alcoholic to control the addiction is to have no alcohol, period, and that any slip is likely to lead to a binge.
But if someone's addiction is for food, they can't just go cold turkey, or even work up to never eating again. It's exactly like the program above, only with food instead of alcohol, where they have to indulge the addiction just a little bit, but then are expected to back off through sheer will power, multiple times per day. That's not how addictions work, or rather, that's not an addiction control strategy which is at all likely to be successful. It makes a lot of sense to me that it just doesn't work for most people who have this issue. The intermittent fasting lets me go cold turkey a day at a time, every other day. It's not quite the same thing, but it's close, and it works.
I get hunger pangs once or twice on a fast day -- not just the munchies or whatever, but real, hollow-ache-in-the-stomach pangs -- but if I ignore them they go away in five or ten minutes and then I'm fine. And on days when I eat, I just eat normally and don't feel the urge to binge on twice as much food as I'd usually eat, which was something I was sort of expecting when I started. My "normal" is more than most people, but then I'm 5'11" and muscular, aside from all the fat, so trying to cut back to 1000 calories a day wouldn't be healthy for me anyway. My normal amount, cut in half by the every-other-day pattern, seems to work nicely.
And because I always know on a fast day I can have whatever I want tomorrow, I can out-stare whatever goodies we have around the house, because it's not forever; I can have some tomorrow. Or right after midnight, if I'm still awake and still want to. I've only blown it -- planned to fast and should have been able to do so, and then broke down in the middle of the day -- once, when we had leftover bacon in the fridge. :P
When I had that awful gastritis back in March, I tried to go back to fasting after about a week or ten days, and that didn't work, but that was something else. It wasn't a matter of breaking down over some particular item; I got the hunger pangs and several hours later they were still there and had gotten a lot worse. I figured, "Okay, fine, I'm still recovering from being very sick. My body wants food, so I'm going to feed it." I was eating light and bland anyway, because my stomach was still delicate for most of that month, but I waited another couple of weeks before trying the fasting again. I still lost weight that month, with no upward spikes in the middle, so I'm sure I did the right thing.
Another key component of the program (I got all this from Steve Barnes's 101 Program by the way; the diet-and-fitness is only part of it; scroll down a bit to sign up for the 101 for free) is to increase your exercise level while restricting food intake. If you only diet, then your body's metabolism will naturally slow down to accommodate what it registers as a famine condition. If you only exercise but ignore what you're eating, your body will make you hungrier to balance the increased energy expenditure and you'll tend to eat more without realizing it, and level off on your weight. Doing both at once helps keep things balanced to burn fat. I've fallen off on the exercise part and didn't lose anything significant over the last three months or so, so I need to work on getting back to that. Still, I'm pleased with the total result for the last year.
Angie
[ETA: Comments closed because of spam.]
Actually, the intermittent fasting is a lot easier than I thought it'd be, and has been from the beginning. It might be different for other people, but for me, just knowing that I'm not eating anything for twenty-four hours makes it much easier to completely ignore the whole concept of food for that period, whereas trying to eat every day but eat less or only eat certain things means I'm focused on food but having to restrain myself while eating, which for me is difficult to impossible.
I've been thinking about it as being like an addiction. Figure, if someone's an alcoholic, and you said to them, "Okay, you have to have one beer in the morning, and one glass of wine at noon, and a shot of vodka in the evening. You can't skip any of them but you can't have any more than that either," wouldn't you expect them to fail? We expect that the only way for an alcoholic to control the addiction is to have no alcohol, period, and that any slip is likely to lead to a binge.
But if someone's addiction is for food, they can't just go cold turkey, or even work up to never eating again. It's exactly like the program above, only with food instead of alcohol, where they have to indulge the addiction just a little bit, but then are expected to back off through sheer will power, multiple times per day. That's not how addictions work, or rather, that's not an addiction control strategy which is at all likely to be successful. It makes a lot of sense to me that it just doesn't work for most people who have this issue. The intermittent fasting lets me go cold turkey a day at a time, every other day. It's not quite the same thing, but it's close, and it works.
I get hunger pangs once or twice on a fast day -- not just the munchies or whatever, but real, hollow-ache-in-the-stomach pangs -- but if I ignore them they go away in five or ten minutes and then I'm fine. And on days when I eat, I just eat normally and don't feel the urge to binge on twice as much food as I'd usually eat, which was something I was sort of expecting when I started. My "normal" is more than most people, but then I'm 5'11" and muscular, aside from all the fat, so trying to cut back to 1000 calories a day wouldn't be healthy for me anyway. My normal amount, cut in half by the every-other-day pattern, seems to work nicely.
And because I always know on a fast day I can have whatever I want tomorrow, I can out-stare whatever goodies we have around the house, because it's not forever; I can have some tomorrow. Or right after midnight, if I'm still awake and still want to. I've only blown it -- planned to fast and should have been able to do so, and then broke down in the middle of the day -- once, when we had leftover bacon in the fridge. :P
When I had that awful gastritis back in March, I tried to go back to fasting after about a week or ten days, and that didn't work, but that was something else. It wasn't a matter of breaking down over some particular item; I got the hunger pangs and several hours later they were still there and had gotten a lot worse. I figured, "Okay, fine, I'm still recovering from being very sick. My body wants food, so I'm going to feed it." I was eating light and bland anyway, because my stomach was still delicate for most of that month, but I waited another couple of weeks before trying the fasting again. I still lost weight that month, with no upward spikes in the middle, so I'm sure I did the right thing.
Another key component of the program (I got all this from Steve Barnes's 101 Program by the way; the diet-and-fitness is only part of it; scroll down a bit to sign up for the 101 for free) is to increase your exercise level while restricting food intake. If you only diet, then your body's metabolism will naturally slow down to accommodate what it registers as a famine condition. If you only exercise but ignore what you're eating, your body will make you hungrier to balance the increased energy expenditure and you'll tend to eat more without realizing it, and level off on your weight. Doing both at once helps keep things balanced to burn fat. I've fallen off on the exercise part and didn't lose anything significant over the last three months or so, so I need to work on getting back to that. Still, I'm pleased with the total result for the last year.
Angie
[ETA: Comments closed because of spam.]
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Inspiration vs. Perspiration
There's a discussion going on at Nathan Bransford's place about what writers owe their readers, in the context of sequels and delays and missed deadlines. It's interesting in its own right, but what struck me was the thread in the comments about inspiration and the muse and how impossible it is to write anything at all unless the planets are properly aligned, or whatever each individual writer takes as a sign that It Is Time To Be Creative Now.
I've run into other writers saying similar things, both online and in writing books and articles. But I've also seen writers saying the exact opposite, and it seems to be mostly the full time writers, the ones who pay all their bills with their keyboards, who think that the whole muse/inspiration thing is a lot of hooey and whining. As Mercedes Lackey puts it, all that's needed is to apply seat of pants to seat of chair and do the work. According to her, writer's block just means you don't feel like doing the work, but you get a lot more sympathy and petting if you say you're blocked than if you say you don't feel like working.
Me, I'm kind of in the middle. For me, there are times when the words just flow (my fondest writing memory at this point is last October, when I cranked out 40K words of my WIP in two weeks) and there are times when I have to hunt every word down with a flashlight and pliers. I have some techniques I can use to get past a blockage, but they all take focus and concentration, and there are times when I can't muster either one.
I'm bipolar, which I've mentioned before, and my moods (which affect such things as ambition and energy level) are subject to the whims of my wildly veering brain chemistry. When I'm in a low, I can't scrape together enough ambition or energy to do much of anything at all. When I'm sort of in the middle I'm just like everyone else, and the writing is usually work but I can do it if I decide to, including working through a block.
When I'm in a high, well, it depends what kind. The best kind is what I think of as a productive high -- lots of energy and ambition, the confidence to believe I can do anything at all [this is the part known as "mania," which is where the "manic" part of manic-depressive comes from, and no, it doesn't necessarily lead one to thoughts of taking over the world ;) ] and I do some of my best work, no matter what kind of work I'm doing, when I'm in this chunk of my cycle. Some highs are less productive, though, and if I'm irritable (pissed at the world, snappish, no patience of any kind) or if thoughts are racing around in my head so furiously I can't grab on to any of them, work is pretty much out the window.
[BTW, I have no problem talking about any of this. If anyone is thinking about writing a bipolar character, or is just curious, feel free to post here or e-mail me and I'll be happy to answer questions.]
Of course, the times I enjoy writing most is when I'm on a productive high. Story ideas pour out, and I have enough focus to concentrate on a single story and make significant progress with it. Even when I'm in the mid-range, though, I can usually manage. I might have to kick my butt to get it into gear, and put in some Seat Of Pants In Seat Of Chair time to work through whatever problems might crop up, but I can do it, and if I don't it's my own fault.
Recognizing where I am can be a problem, though. It's a forest-and-trees thing, where the person experiencing an episode is too close to the issue, and possibly too judgement-impaired, to be able to spot what's going on. I don't know how often it's suddenly hit me that, hey, I've been depressed for a while now. Or, wow, irritable high! Sorry, everyone! (The recognition usually hits after the fact, unfortunately, when I've shifted back a bit and my judgement is better.) So there are times when I'm trying to make the words come and they just won't, I can't focus enough to work on a story because there are six or ten other ideas all shouting at me from behind my eyeballs, and trying to chase them down is just pointless and frustrating. I'd rather do that, though, than not try to work when I could if I only would try, you know? Although I'm not successful at making that happen a hundred percent of the time, either. :/
That's me. It's hardly ever boring [wry smile] but I deal with it as best I can, and occasionally I crank out a story I think is pretty good.
How about you? Where does your opinion fall on the inspiration-vs.-perspiration scale, and what do you do about block?
Angie
I've run into other writers saying similar things, both online and in writing books and articles. But I've also seen writers saying the exact opposite, and it seems to be mostly the full time writers, the ones who pay all their bills with their keyboards, who think that the whole muse/inspiration thing is a lot of hooey and whining. As Mercedes Lackey puts it, all that's needed is to apply seat of pants to seat of chair and do the work. According to her, writer's block just means you don't feel like doing the work, but you get a lot more sympathy and petting if you say you're blocked than if you say you don't feel like working.
Me, I'm kind of in the middle. For me, there are times when the words just flow (my fondest writing memory at this point is last October, when I cranked out 40K words of my WIP in two weeks) and there are times when I have to hunt every word down with a flashlight and pliers. I have some techniques I can use to get past a blockage, but they all take focus and concentration, and there are times when I can't muster either one.
I'm bipolar, which I've mentioned before, and my moods (which affect such things as ambition and energy level) are subject to the whims of my wildly veering brain chemistry. When I'm in a low, I can't scrape together enough ambition or energy to do much of anything at all. When I'm sort of in the middle I'm just like everyone else, and the writing is usually work but I can do it if I decide to, including working through a block.
When I'm in a high, well, it depends what kind. The best kind is what I think of as a productive high -- lots of energy and ambition, the confidence to believe I can do anything at all [this is the part known as "mania," which is where the "manic" part of manic-depressive comes from, and no, it doesn't necessarily lead one to thoughts of taking over the world ;) ] and I do some of my best work, no matter what kind of work I'm doing, when I'm in this chunk of my cycle. Some highs are less productive, though, and if I'm irritable (pissed at the world, snappish, no patience of any kind) or if thoughts are racing around in my head so furiously I can't grab on to any of them, work is pretty much out the window.
[BTW, I have no problem talking about any of this. If anyone is thinking about writing a bipolar character, or is just curious, feel free to post here or e-mail me and I'll be happy to answer questions.]
Of course, the times I enjoy writing most is when I'm on a productive high. Story ideas pour out, and I have enough focus to concentrate on a single story and make significant progress with it. Even when I'm in the mid-range, though, I can usually manage. I might have to kick my butt to get it into gear, and put in some Seat Of Pants In Seat Of Chair time to work through whatever problems might crop up, but I can do it, and if I don't it's my own fault.
Recognizing where I am can be a problem, though. It's a forest-and-trees thing, where the person experiencing an episode is too close to the issue, and possibly too judgement-impaired, to be able to spot what's going on. I don't know how often it's suddenly hit me that, hey, I've been depressed for a while now. Or, wow, irritable high! Sorry, everyone! (The recognition usually hits after the fact, unfortunately, when I've shifted back a bit and my judgement is better.) So there are times when I'm trying to make the words come and they just won't, I can't focus enough to work on a story because there are six or ten other ideas all shouting at me from behind my eyeballs, and trying to chase them down is just pointless and frustrating. I'd rather do that, though, than not try to work when I could if I only would try, you know? Although I'm not successful at making that happen a hundred percent of the time, either. :/
That's me. It's hardly ever boring [wry smile] but I deal with it as best I can, and occasionally I crank out a story I think is pretty good.
How about you? Where does your opinion fall on the inspiration-vs.-perspiration scale, and what do you do about block?
Angie
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
On the Organization of Bookstores
Carleen has a poll over at White Readers Meet Black Authors, asking whether bookstores should have a section for African American fiction. Head over and leave your opinion.
Me, I have a few thoughts, which tend to distill down to "This is complicated."
Because basically, it's all about authors wanting readers to find (and buy, and read) their books, and readers wanting to find books they'd want to buy and read. So there's actually a larger issue here of bookstore organization in general, as opposed to just a question of whether books by Black authors should all be shelved together in their own section. So where will readers most easily find books by Black authors?
Well, if the main criterion readers are searching by is the race of the author, then having a special section for Black authors might be the way to go. Want Black authors? African American section. Want Hispanic authors? Latin@ American section. Want Asian authors? Asian American section. Want gay authors? Gay Studies section. (Which is its own issue, because shelving novels with sociological studies, sex manuals, gay history and gay travel guides does not sell a lot of fiction.) Want white authors? Ummm... well, that's the rest of the store, basically.
Which is where my main problem with this kind of sorting comes from. Giving each group its own little ghetto-shelf in the store doesn't do very much to encourage people to buy books by writers who aren't just like them. And by "people" I mainly mean "white people" here, because a Black reader who wants SF has to go to the SF section, and an Asian reader who wants romance has to go to the romance section; it's not like there are duplicate stores complete with genre sections for each racial group. They might browse through "their" race's special lit section too, but they'll hardly ever find anyone else in that aisle.
Reading other discussions of this subject, I've seen people of color, both readers and writers, commenting with about equal energy and numbers on either side of the issue, and there is another side to it. If it's mainly Black people buying books by Black writers, then putting all the Black writers in one section makes it easier for the target audience to find them. For writers, it's playing to their core audience, and for readers, it lets them hit one spot in the bookstore instead of rambling all over.
To me, this seems like surrendering to the racial barriers, though. It'd never occurred to me, for example, that there were romance novels with Black characters until someone online mentioned them. Once I thought about it, sure, it made perfect sense that Black women would want to read romances too, and would want to have books about people like themselves. But they weren't (and even now, still generally aren't) shelved with the rest of the romances, so readers who just want "romances" without having any particular preference about the race of the main characters won't find anything but white romances unless they think to go looking in the African American Lit section, or wherever that particular store or chain has the Black romances stashed. Impulse buys on the part of the other 80% of the reader market are forfeited when the books aren't shelved in the place where most readers looking for a given genre would go looking for them.
The argument, though, is that virtually all the people who would actually buy the book are going to be looking in the "Whatever-American Lit" section, that putting the book somewhere else will forfeit the purchases of people who shop there and not in the genre section (and there are people who do that -- I've seen them arguing in favor of the special sections on that very basis) while gaining few or no new readers from the genre section. It's a smaller market, but it's theirs and these authors don't want to miss out on a chunk of it by gambling on maybes.
Fair enough.
I think it's a shame, though, that people who might well be interested in a book by a writer of color, whether they're consciously looking to choose books by writers with a variety of backgrounds or whether they just think that some book which caught their eye looks interesting regardless of the author's race, are unlikely to ever run across such books in stores where they're all sorted away into their "special" sections.
I don't think this situation can be solved to everyone's satisfaction, unfortunately. Someone in the comments to Carleen's post suggested shelving books in both places -- the special ethnic section and the relevant genre section. That sounds good in theory, but unless you're already a pretty great seller, getting a bookstore to stock multiples of your book can be tough. Heck, these days getting them to stock one copy can be tough. And I've never worked in a bookstore, but there are probably inventory and tracking issues with cross-shelving too.
Brick-and-mortar stores are just too limited to solve this problem. Luckily it's not the only option.
This is a situation e-commerce handles perfectly. Since there are no issues around the physical location of the books, it's just a matter of building your search database to handle any sort of query a customer might have. Want books by Black authors? Ask for a list. Want SF books by Black authors? You can have that too.
Or you should be able to have it -- there's no technical reason why "romance novel 'Black author'" should be an impossible search. Practical application lags, unfortunately (just try to find those Black SF authors' books at Amazon, for example) but the potential is there; it only requires making use of the available tools.
If online bookstores realize we want to be able to search this way, then there's no reason they couldn't virtually shelve any book in as many "sections" as will help readers find it. Beloved could be in "African American Lit" and "Literature" and "Fantasy" and "Bestsellers" and "Books-into-Movies" and anywhere else anyone can think of to put it. Or rather, it can carry any other tags or keywords anyone can think to hang on it. Any individual book can be found in a dozen different places around the virtual bookstore, giving its author the greatest chance of catching the eye of a new reader or being found by their core audience.
Everyone wins.
Angie
Me, I have a few thoughts, which tend to distill down to "This is complicated."
Because basically, it's all about authors wanting readers to find (and buy, and read) their books, and readers wanting to find books they'd want to buy and read. So there's actually a larger issue here of bookstore organization in general, as opposed to just a question of whether books by Black authors should all be shelved together in their own section. So where will readers most easily find books by Black authors?
Well, if the main criterion readers are searching by is the race of the author, then having a special section for Black authors might be the way to go. Want Black authors? African American section. Want Hispanic authors? Latin@ American section. Want Asian authors? Asian American section. Want gay authors? Gay Studies section. (Which is its own issue, because shelving novels with sociological studies, sex manuals, gay history and gay travel guides does not sell a lot of fiction.) Want white authors? Ummm... well, that's the rest of the store, basically.
Which is where my main problem with this kind of sorting comes from. Giving each group its own little ghetto-shelf in the store doesn't do very much to encourage people to buy books by writers who aren't just like them. And by "people" I mainly mean "white people" here, because a Black reader who wants SF has to go to the SF section, and an Asian reader who wants romance has to go to the romance section; it's not like there are duplicate stores complete with genre sections for each racial group. They might browse through "their" race's special lit section too, but they'll hardly ever find anyone else in that aisle.
Reading other discussions of this subject, I've seen people of color, both readers and writers, commenting with about equal energy and numbers on either side of the issue, and there is another side to it. If it's mainly Black people buying books by Black writers, then putting all the Black writers in one section makes it easier for the target audience to find them. For writers, it's playing to their core audience, and for readers, it lets them hit one spot in the bookstore instead of rambling all over.
To me, this seems like surrendering to the racial barriers, though. It'd never occurred to me, for example, that there were romance novels with Black characters until someone online mentioned them. Once I thought about it, sure, it made perfect sense that Black women would want to read romances too, and would want to have books about people like themselves. But they weren't (and even now, still generally aren't) shelved with the rest of the romances, so readers who just want "romances" without having any particular preference about the race of the main characters won't find anything but white romances unless they think to go looking in the African American Lit section, or wherever that particular store or chain has the Black romances stashed. Impulse buys on the part of the other 80% of the reader market are forfeited when the books aren't shelved in the place where most readers looking for a given genre would go looking for them.
The argument, though, is that virtually all the people who would actually buy the book are going to be looking in the "Whatever-American Lit" section, that putting the book somewhere else will forfeit the purchases of people who shop there and not in the genre section (and there are people who do that -- I've seen them arguing in favor of the special sections on that very basis) while gaining few or no new readers from the genre section. It's a smaller market, but it's theirs and these authors don't want to miss out on a chunk of it by gambling on maybes.
Fair enough.
I think it's a shame, though, that people who might well be interested in a book by a writer of color, whether they're consciously looking to choose books by writers with a variety of backgrounds or whether they just think that some book which caught their eye looks interesting regardless of the author's race, are unlikely to ever run across such books in stores where they're all sorted away into their "special" sections.
I don't think this situation can be solved to everyone's satisfaction, unfortunately. Someone in the comments to Carleen's post suggested shelving books in both places -- the special ethnic section and the relevant genre section. That sounds good in theory, but unless you're already a pretty great seller, getting a bookstore to stock multiples of your book can be tough. Heck, these days getting them to stock one copy can be tough. And I've never worked in a bookstore, but there are probably inventory and tracking issues with cross-shelving too.
Brick-and-mortar stores are just too limited to solve this problem. Luckily it's not the only option.
This is a situation e-commerce handles perfectly. Since there are no issues around the physical location of the books, it's just a matter of building your search database to handle any sort of query a customer might have. Want books by Black authors? Ask for a list. Want SF books by Black authors? You can have that too.
Or you should be able to have it -- there's no technical reason why "romance novel 'Black author'" should be an impossible search. Practical application lags, unfortunately (just try to find those Black SF authors' books at Amazon, for example) but the potential is there; it only requires making use of the available tools.
If online bookstores realize we want to be able to search this way, then there's no reason they couldn't virtually shelve any book in as many "sections" as will help readers find it. Beloved could be in "African American Lit" and "Literature" and "Fantasy" and "Bestsellers" and "Books-into-Movies" and anywhere else anyone can think of to put it. Or rather, it can carry any other tags or keywords anyone can think to hang on it. Any individual book can be found in a dozen different places around the virtual bookstore, giving its author the greatest chance of catching the eye of a new reader or being found by their core audience.
Everyone wins.
Angie
Thursday, November 20, 2008
FEEDJIT Wierdness
I installed FEEDJIT's live traffic feed -- rather than a map, it's a list of recent visitors, showing what country they're from and what web site they came from -- on my other blog. It gets like zero traffic so far as I can tell, and I was curious to see if anyone was lurking.
I've only gotten three legitimate comments the whole time I've had the thing. I'll admit I don't update it all that often, and pretty much everything that's there is also here (the idea being that readers who weren't interested in the writing craft/industry posts could just watch that one for releases and such) so I wasn't particularly expecting to see a bunch of lurkers reading today. (Although it'll be interesting to see if anyone shows up next time I do post something.)
What I do get a lot of, though, is comment spam. I probably delete at least a dozen a day, sometimes twenty or so. Wordpress has a good filter so they hardly ever get past the Possible Spam Please Moderate queue, but they do show up, and sure enough I've had a few this morning.
When I checked the FEEDJIT list, though, the only hits that showed were my own. o_O So... how am I getting all this comment spam if the spammers aren't actually hitting the site?? Anyone have any ideas?
Angie
I've only gotten three legitimate comments the whole time I've had the thing. I'll admit I don't update it all that often, and pretty much everything that's there is also here (the idea being that readers who weren't interested in the writing craft/industry posts could just watch that one for releases and such) so I wasn't particularly expecting to see a bunch of lurkers reading today. (Although it'll be interesting to see if anyone shows up next time I do post something.)
What I do get a lot of, though, is comment spam. I probably delete at least a dozen a day, sometimes twenty or so. Wordpress has a good filter so they hardly ever get past the Possible Spam Please Moderate queue, but they do show up, and sure enough I've had a few this morning.
When I checked the FEEDJIT list, though, the only hits that showed were my own. o_O So... how am I getting all this comment spam if the spammers aren't actually hitting the site?? Anyone have any ideas?
Angie
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
New Column
I have a new column up at Romancing the Blog. This time I'm talking about pro writers blogging, and whether it might be a good idea to have multiple blogs (or journals or mailing lists or forums or whatever) for different types of posts, so people who just want to know when your new books are out or how your dog is doing can subscribe to your more "mellow" blog without having to scroll past your political analyses or your dissections of someone else's book.
I'm responding to a couple of other posts that went up within the last few days, but you don't have to read those if you don't want to; I'm pretty sure mine makes sense on its own. The earlier topics were about whether a writer should express strong opinions on their blogs, or even controversial opinions. My thought was compartmentalizing, so readers can choose for themselves what they want to subscribe to.
What do you think?
Angie
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Non-Disparagement Clause?
Has anyone hear ever heard of such a thing in a lit contract? I sure haven't, and I certainly wouldn't sign any contract which had one.
From Absolute Write (post #89 and a bit of commentary after) through EREC, someone named Cant was asking whether there's a way out of a contract if you strongly suspect your publisher is about to take a nose-dive, but he didn't want to give many specifics because there was a non-disparagement clause in his contract. (It came out later, though, that it was Cacoethes Publishing, and the discussion was moved to that thread.)
Beth Bernobich, in post #96, said she had a non-disparagement clause in a short story contract once, and that the (unnamed) publisher refused to budge on it. That shows that it's not just a fluke with a single publisher.
In all seriousness, the presence of a non-disparagement clause or anything similar in a contract is, to me, a huge sign lit up in neon saying "We're going to mess you over and don't want you complaining to anyone about it."
I guess that makes it a good thing -- nice of them to give writers such an obvious "Flee For Your Life!" signal. [wry smile]
And just what would "non-disparagement" cover, anyway? Would it cover anything negative or even questioning one might say about the publisher? That sounds awfully open-ended; I didn't think the courts liked that sort of thing. Or would it be more like existing libel and slander laws, where you're free to say what you want so long as you can show that it's true? If that's the case, then a non-disparagement clause wouldn't prevent someone from posting on their blog that "Fly By Night Press hasn't paid me in three years, hasn't answered their phone or e-mail in two and a half years, and I just spotted my book being sold in B&N with the FBN owner's name on the cover." (Assuming it was all true, of course.) So what's the point, then?
I'd love to hear an opinion from someone who's actually up on related law, because this sounds incredibly iffy.
Angie
From Absolute Write (post #89 and a bit of commentary after) through EREC, someone named Cant was asking whether there's a way out of a contract if you strongly suspect your publisher is about to take a nose-dive, but he didn't want to give many specifics because there was a non-disparagement clause in his contract. (It came out later, though, that it was Cacoethes Publishing, and the discussion was moved to that thread.)
Beth Bernobich, in post #96, said she had a non-disparagement clause in a short story contract once, and that the (unnamed) publisher refused to budge on it. That shows that it's not just a fluke with a single publisher.
In all seriousness, the presence of a non-disparagement clause or anything similar in a contract is, to me, a huge sign lit up in neon saying "We're going to mess you over and don't want you complaining to anyone about it."
I guess that makes it a good thing -- nice of them to give writers such an obvious "Flee For Your Life!" signal. [wry smile]
And just what would "non-disparagement" cover, anyway? Would it cover anything negative or even questioning one might say about the publisher? That sounds awfully open-ended; I didn't think the courts liked that sort of thing. Or would it be more like existing libel and slander laws, where you're free to say what you want so long as you can show that it's true? If that's the case, then a non-disparagement clause wouldn't prevent someone from posting on their blog that "Fly By Night Press hasn't paid me in three years, hasn't answered their phone or e-mail in two and a half years, and I just spotted my book being sold in B&N with the FBN owner's name on the cover." (Assuming it was all true, of course.) So what's the point, then?
I'd love to hear an opinion from someone who's actually up on related law, because this sounds incredibly iffy.
Angie
Friday, September 26, 2008
Freebies
I just finished and mailed off a freebie for one of Torquere Press's anniversary promotions. They're doing a Road of a Relationship theme, similar to the holiday Advent promotion back in December, with a free thingy (story, recipe, puzzle, whatever) each day of the month. My day is the thirtieth, which is part of the "Anniversary" chunk of the road; I'll post a link to it when it goes up.
I wrote a sort of an epilogue to "A Spirit of Vengeance," called "The Last Anniversary." It shows the boys finally getting together, along with how Josh and Kevin met, and some scenes from Josh's life after Kevin's death. I also included a Chocolate-Chocolate-Chocolate-Chip Muffin recipe I've been working on for over a year. The muffins appear in every scene, and it was fun to be able to include them. :)
The story part is a bit over 3K words long, which makes it just long enough to be a Sip -- a stand-alone short story. On the one hand, "The Last Anniversary" isn't actually a story; there's no real plot arc. It's just a series of scenes, to let readers see the HEA which was implied in "Spirit," plus a few other key events in Josh's life related to his relationships. It wouldn't have worked as an actual story, or at least I don't think so. On the other hand, writing it was just as much work as writing a short story. On the third hand (hey, I write SF and fantasy, remember? [duck]) the last scene, at least, is something some of my readers have wanted, and I'm hoping they'll be happy to see it.
So, for the writers out there (most of you, I think), how much work would you do for a freebie? I'm not regretting this at all; I'm just curious. I've heard some writers insist they'll never write anything for free, or even that they won't write anything for less than some particular minimum per-word payment. How do you feel about that? Will you write and publish something you know you won't get paid for? How much? Any boundaries?
Angie
I wrote a sort of an epilogue to "A Spirit of Vengeance," called "The Last Anniversary." It shows the boys finally getting together, along with how Josh and Kevin met, and some scenes from Josh's life after Kevin's death. I also included a Chocolate-Chocolate-Chocolate-Chip Muffin recipe I've been working on for over a year. The muffins appear in every scene, and it was fun to be able to include them. :)
The story part is a bit over 3K words long, which makes it just long enough to be a Sip -- a stand-alone short story. On the one hand, "The Last Anniversary" isn't actually a story; there's no real plot arc. It's just a series of scenes, to let readers see the HEA which was implied in "Spirit," plus a few other key events in Josh's life related to his relationships. It wouldn't have worked as an actual story, or at least I don't think so. On the other hand, writing it was just as much work as writing a short story. On the third hand (hey, I write SF and fantasy, remember? [duck]) the last scene, at least, is something some of my readers have wanted, and I'm hoping they'll be happy to see it.
So, for the writers out there (most of you, I think), how much work would you do for a freebie? I'm not regretting this at all; I'm just curious. I've heard some writers insist they'll never write anything for free, or even that they won't write anything for less than some particular minimum per-word payment. How do you feel about that? Will you write and publish something you know you won't get paid for? How much? Any boundaries?
Angie
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Evaluating the Data
Do you care who it is who's commenting on your writing?
I never have, and have always had a hard time understanding people who react negatively (and sometimes obnoxiously) when they get feedback from someone they don't personally know, or someone who's not a writer, or someone who otherwise doesn't have whatever qualifications they feel someone must have in order to comment.
To me, any constructive criticism is data and it's all useful. Even if I examine it and end up deciding that the commenter simply isn't a member of my target audience (someone who thinks I should get rid of the romance in what's clearly a romance novel, for example [cough]) and decide not to act on the expressed opinion, I now have a bit more information about reader views and tastes than I did before.
Comments are either useful or not, in and of themselves, independent of who's making them. A well-stated and reasoned comment, which clearly has some knowledge of craftsmanship behind it and which refers specifically to a line or paragraph or other specific chunk of a particular story of mine is always worth getting, even if it's written by someone who's "just" a reader, or a stranger, or a nonymouse. On the other hand, if one of my very favorite writers in all the world said, "Seriously, this needs some work," I'd probably thank them for taking the time to comment, but wouldn't value the feedback very much because, wow, vague. :/
Some writers get personally offended when someone offers concrit to a story which has already been published. I don't get this either, because pretty much any mistake I made once, I might well make again and hearing about it even after the fact lets me make a note of it and take care not to make it again next time, even if I can't edit the story which was just published. Learning from my earlier mistakes is always desirable, and I honestly don't care who it is who points me toward the lesson.
Maybe it helps that I "grew up" as a writer in some fairly intense workshop environments. When you get serious pros and intense hopefuls all in the same bucket and have them tearing apart each other's stuff, with the idea that it's better for your workshop peers to spot something than that editor you're hoping will offer you a contract, you learn pretty quickly that concrit is gold and that excessive ego does nothing but block you from any hope of being published. (And in all honesty, the old GEnie SFRT was not for the faint of heart nor the thin of skin, whether you were in the workshops or not.) I grew an adamantium hide in the early years of my online participation as a writer, and while I'll admit that's an advantage which not everyone has, I can only suggest that anyone who wants to be a professional writer grow one of their own as quickly as they can manage. This is not a good business for the delicate or sensitive to be in.
Maybe it's the fact that I value my writing, my skill and my hope of improving both, much more highly than I value the delicacy of my writerly feelings. Sure, I wince for a moment if someone says they didn't care for one of my stories, and I get horribly embarassed if someone points out an obvious flaw I missed. But I want to learn and grow as a writer more than I want to avoid those wincing embarassments, by a few orders of magnitude. I want to know what people think and why, and what they think is problematic or just plain wrong, and the why of that too.
Anyone who can clearly explain what they liked and disliked, what they thought was going on and what they thought was going to happen next, where they laughed or winced or gasped, where I fooled them and where they saw right through my attempted misdirection, what they think worked or didn't work with specific examples and reasons for it all -- anyone who gives me that kind of feedback is going to be one of my favorite people ever, and I don't care who it is or whether I know them or whether they're a writer or whether they're someone who wandered by and posted anonymously. It's the data I value, not the source. Good, clear, useful data is always valuable and always makes itself obvious; I don't need an attached name or title or resume to help me decide whether the data is useful.
Or at least, that's how I see it. How about you?
Angie
I never have, and have always had a hard time understanding people who react negatively (and sometimes obnoxiously) when they get feedback from someone they don't personally know, or someone who's not a writer, or someone who otherwise doesn't have whatever qualifications they feel someone must have in order to comment.
To me, any constructive criticism is data and it's all useful. Even if I examine it and end up deciding that the commenter simply isn't a member of my target audience (someone who thinks I should get rid of the romance in what's clearly a romance novel, for example [cough]) and decide not to act on the expressed opinion, I now have a bit more information about reader views and tastes than I did before.
Comments are either useful or not, in and of themselves, independent of who's making them. A well-stated and reasoned comment, which clearly has some knowledge of craftsmanship behind it and which refers specifically to a line or paragraph or other specific chunk of a particular story of mine is always worth getting, even if it's written by someone who's "just" a reader, or a stranger, or a nonymouse. On the other hand, if one of my very favorite writers in all the world said, "Seriously, this needs some work," I'd probably thank them for taking the time to comment, but wouldn't value the feedback very much because, wow, vague. :/
Some writers get personally offended when someone offers concrit to a story which has already been published. I don't get this either, because pretty much any mistake I made once, I might well make again and hearing about it even after the fact lets me make a note of it and take care not to make it again next time, even if I can't edit the story which was just published. Learning from my earlier mistakes is always desirable, and I honestly don't care who it is who points me toward the lesson.
Maybe it helps that I "grew up" as a writer in some fairly intense workshop environments. When you get serious pros and intense hopefuls all in the same bucket and have them tearing apart each other's stuff, with the idea that it's better for your workshop peers to spot something than that editor you're hoping will offer you a contract, you learn pretty quickly that concrit is gold and that excessive ego does nothing but block you from any hope of being published. (And in all honesty, the old GEnie SFRT was not for the faint of heart nor the thin of skin, whether you were in the workshops or not.) I grew an adamantium hide in the early years of my online participation as a writer, and while I'll admit that's an advantage which not everyone has, I can only suggest that anyone who wants to be a professional writer grow one of their own as quickly as they can manage. This is not a good business for the delicate or sensitive to be in.
Maybe it's the fact that I value my writing, my skill and my hope of improving both, much more highly than I value the delicacy of my writerly feelings. Sure, I wince for a moment if someone says they didn't care for one of my stories, and I get horribly embarassed if someone points out an obvious flaw I missed. But I want to learn and grow as a writer more than I want to avoid those wincing embarassments, by a few orders of magnitude. I want to know what people think and why, and what they think is problematic or just plain wrong, and the why of that too.
Anyone who can clearly explain what they liked and disliked, what they thought was going on and what they thought was going to happen next, where they laughed or winced or gasped, where I fooled them and where they saw right through my attempted misdirection, what they think worked or didn't work with specific examples and reasons for it all -- anyone who gives me that kind of feedback is going to be one of my favorite people ever, and I don't care who it is or whether I know them or whether they're a writer or whether they're someone who wandered by and posted anonymously. It's the data I value, not the source. Good, clear, useful data is always valuable and always makes itself obvious; I don't need an attached name or title or resume to help me decide whether the data is useful.
Or at least, that's how I see it. How about you?
Angie
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
New Column
I just posted a new column on Romancing the Blog. This time around I'm talking about an issue brought up during a discussion on Torquere's Yahoo group regarding the reasons why the editor-in-chief of Ace and Roc thinks there's no print market for m/m romances. She's just repeating the party line which is passed around the New York publishers, but it seems to me that the basic premise behind that party line -- that women won't buy m/m romances because they want to insert themselves into the story in the heroine's place, and since m/m books don't have a heroine there's no part for the reader to "play" -- is deeply flawed. If it's impossible for the (presumably female) het romance reader to enjoy an m/m romance because there's no female protag, that implies that it's impossible for anyone to enjoy reading a book where there's no same-gender protag. Am I the only one whose eyes cross at that particular piece of logic...? [squint]
Aside from the fact that most of the m/m romances being sold right now -- in print as well as e-pub -- are purchased by women. [cough]
Anyway, I'm collecting data from readers -- come give me your two cents' worth. :)
Angie
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Would You Want to Know?
Oh, man.... I just downloaded an e-book tonight, a sequel to another book I enjoyed. When I got the first one, I Googled for the writer's blog and went over to say hi and how much I enjoyed it, etc., and RSSed her blog so I'd hear about future books.
So far so good except I started reading this new one, which just came out today, and there's this huge glitch right on page one. Well, it's not a massive file hash or anything but it's a mistake and it's huge to me. I have no idea how it got missed but there it is. [facepalm]
I'm thinking that maybe not too many people have downloaded it yet and maybe there's time to fix it. Can something be fixed in an electronic book after it's been posted? Easily fixed or is it a big hassle?
I went back to the writer's blog but there's no e-mail address anywhere obvious, and I didn't want to post about it right there on her release announcement 'cause that'd be kind of tacky. I went to the publisher's page and there's no way to contact the writer through them. They have a Customer Service e-mail address, but they list major problems like corrupted files and what-not and I don't want them to think I'm hinting to get my money back or anything like that, or even making a huge deal out of it because it's really not. I'm just really feeling for this writer who's all excited about her new book and here's this thing right there on page one. :( I know if it were me (and heck, it might be soon) I'd definitely want to know about it.
I'm used to being able to e-mail a writer if I see something really awful in an online story. But then, I'm used to a system where the writer can dash in and fix something like this in thirty seconds, too. If it were your book, would you want to know? Or rather, would it accomplish anything at all positive to have a reader point it out?
Angie, wincing
So far so good except I started reading this new one, which just came out today, and there's this huge glitch right on page one. Well, it's not a massive file hash or anything but it's a mistake and it's huge to me. I have no idea how it got missed but there it is. [facepalm]
I'm thinking that maybe not too many people have downloaded it yet and maybe there's time to fix it. Can something be fixed in an electronic book after it's been posted? Easily fixed or is it a big hassle?
I went back to the writer's blog but there's no e-mail address anywhere obvious, and I didn't want to post about it right there on her release announcement 'cause that'd be kind of tacky. I went to the publisher's page and there's no way to contact the writer through them. They have a Customer Service e-mail address, but they list major problems like corrupted files and what-not and I don't want them to think I'm hinting to get my money back or anything like that, or even making a huge deal out of it because it's really not. I'm just really feeling for this writer who's all excited about her new book and here's this thing right there on page one. :( I know if it were me (and heck, it might be soon) I'd definitely want to know about it.
I'm used to being able to e-mail a writer if I see something really awful in an online story. But then, I'm used to a system where the writer can dash in and fix something like this in thirty seconds, too. If it were your book, would you want to know? Or rather, would it accomplish anything at all positive to have a reader point it out?
Angie, wincing
Monday, September 3, 2007
Maintaining a Conversation
One of the things I like about blogging is having conversations with people. You know, someone says something, I comment, they comment back to me, I comment back to them, someone else comments to them too and I comment to the third person and so does the original poster, who also comments back to me.... Like people talking. It's fun and interesting and can be pretty informative as people share ideas and compare views and occasionally hash out differences in the back-and-forthing of conversation.
LiveJournal (and the other systems based on LJ's engine) has a couple of ways in which it facilitates this process. First, you can tell it you want to get an e-mail notification whenever someone replies to you. This applies to both original posts you make in your journal and to comments you make on someone else's journal. So if I comment on Mary's journal and she responds to me, I get an e-mail with my comment and Mary's reply, and a convenient link that'll take me back to that conversation if I want to go and add to it.
The automatic e-mail notification only works to comments directly under mine, though, so if Jane comments to Mary's comment to my comment, I won't get a notification with Jane's comment, although it might be of interest to me. For that, LJ has a special button (which looks like a pushpin) to tell the system I want notifications of all comments under the level which was pushpinned. So I can pushpin my comment on Mary's journal and get all the comments under mine, whether they respond directly to one of my comments or not. That way, I'll get to see that interesting comment thread Mary and Jane get going between them. Or I could just pushpin Mary's original post, and I'd get notification of all the comments made to it, no matter who made them.
I love the pushpin. It lets you follow long, multi-thread discussions between dozens of people.
At this point, though, I'd be really happy if Blogger (and other common blogging systems used out here) just had a system to let me know when someone's commented to one of my comments.
A couple of times I've seen a check-box with a label like, "Notify me of followup comments via e-mail." Whenever I've commented to a post where that option was present, I always checked the box. I've never gotten anything in e-mail from those posts, although going back and manually checking has shown that there were later comments.
Manual checking -- a couple of times a day, for a couple of days (or longer if we had a bit of a conversation going) -- was mildly annoying but not a major pain back when I only visited a couple of non-LJ blogs. Now that I have quite a list, though, it's getting frustrating. What does everyone else do? There has to be some trick to it. Is there a way to get e-mail notifications, something I just haven't found to click or check or sign up for?
If not, and if you're going back and checking for replies manually, do you have a system for that? How do you remember which posts in which blogs you've commented to and when? Do you write them all down? I've thought of that, but it seems to be rather a stone-knives-and-bear-skins solution to the problem. :/
Maybe this is why I see so few long-thread conversations on regular blogs? Any thoughts? Advice? Tricks or mechanisms I've missed...?
Angie
LiveJournal (and the other systems based on LJ's engine) has a couple of ways in which it facilitates this process. First, you can tell it you want to get an e-mail notification whenever someone replies to you. This applies to both original posts you make in your journal and to comments you make on someone else's journal. So if I comment on Mary's journal and she responds to me, I get an e-mail with my comment and Mary's reply, and a convenient link that'll take me back to that conversation if I want to go and add to it.
The automatic e-mail notification only works to comments directly under mine, though, so if Jane comments to Mary's comment to my comment, I won't get a notification with Jane's comment, although it might be of interest to me. For that, LJ has a special button (which looks like a pushpin) to tell the system I want notifications of all comments under the level which was pushpinned. So I can pushpin my comment on Mary's journal and get all the comments under mine, whether they respond directly to one of my comments or not. That way, I'll get to see that interesting comment thread Mary and Jane get going between them. Or I could just pushpin Mary's original post, and I'd get notification of all the comments made to it, no matter who made them.
I love the pushpin. It lets you follow long, multi-thread discussions between dozens of people.
At this point, though, I'd be really happy if Blogger (and other common blogging systems used out here) just had a system to let me know when someone's commented to one of my comments.
A couple of times I've seen a check-box with a label like, "Notify me of followup comments via e-mail." Whenever I've commented to a post where that option was present, I always checked the box. I've never gotten anything in e-mail from those posts, although going back and manually checking has shown that there were later comments.
Manual checking -- a couple of times a day, for a couple of days (or longer if we had a bit of a conversation going) -- was mildly annoying but not a major pain back when I only visited a couple of non-LJ blogs. Now that I have quite a list, though, it's getting frustrating. What does everyone else do? There has to be some trick to it. Is there a way to get e-mail notifications, something I just haven't found to click or check or sign up for?
If not, and if you're going back and checking for replies manually, do you have a system for that? How do you remember which posts in which blogs you've commented to and when? Do you write them all down? I've thought of that, but it seems to be rather a stone-knives-and-bear-skins solution to the problem. :/
Maybe this is why I see so few long-thread conversations on regular blogs? Any thoughts? Advice? Tricks or mechanisms I've missed...?
Angie
Friday, August 31, 2007
Acceptance!
I got an e-mail from Torquere -- they want my story! I just about died of happy when I read it! :D
I wrote back to say the terms sounded fine and I'd be happy to see a contract. [understatment of the century]
This is so incredibly wonderful I can't even express how delighted I am. I've wanted to be a published writer since I was a teenager and having it finally happen has just blown me away. I called my mom and e-mailed my husband (who's out of town) and a couple of friends.
It's not quite a done deal yet -- I suppose rocks could still fall and kill me or something -- but close enough. And of course I now have all these questions bubbling up....
For example, I know that most writers on the print side of the neighborhood tend to stick with one publisher once they've sold something to them. If that publisher declines a later manuscript then the writer can shop it around, but for the most part writers tend to stay with one publisher unless there's some kind of a problem, or if they write something in a different genre which their current publisher doesn't carry. Is that true of electronic publishers? And does it make a difference that this is just a short story, even though it'll be marketed as a stand-alone? I'm working on stories for a couple of open anthologies with a different publisher -- would this be considered uncool now? Would it make a difference if it were a stand-alone story, like a novel, I'd planned to submit to a different publisher?
I know any formal option requirement will be in the contract, if there are any, so I can wait to see about that, but I'm thinking etiquette here rather than a contractual thing. Does anyone know? Or am I overthinking this...? [wry smile]
At any rate, whee! I'll be over here in the corner bouncing around hugging everyone. :)
Angie
I wrote back to say the terms sounded fine and I'd be happy to see a contract. [understatment of the century]
This is so incredibly wonderful I can't even express how delighted I am. I've wanted to be a published writer since I was a teenager and having it finally happen has just blown me away. I called my mom and e-mailed my husband (who's out of town) and a couple of friends.
It's not quite a done deal yet -- I suppose rocks could still fall and kill me or something -- but close enough. And of course I now have all these questions bubbling up....
For example, I know that most writers on the print side of the neighborhood tend to stick with one publisher once they've sold something to them. If that publisher declines a later manuscript then the writer can shop it around, but for the most part writers tend to stay with one publisher unless there's some kind of a problem, or if they write something in a different genre which their current publisher doesn't carry. Is that true of electronic publishers? And does it make a difference that this is just a short story, even though it'll be marketed as a stand-alone? I'm working on stories for a couple of open anthologies with a different publisher -- would this be considered uncool now? Would it make a difference if it were a stand-alone story, like a novel, I'd planned to submit to a different publisher?
I know any formal option requirement will be in the contract, if there are any, so I can wait to see about that, but I'm thinking etiquette here rather than a contractual thing. Does anyone know? Or am I overthinking this...? [wry smile]
At any rate, whee! I'll be over here in the corner bouncing around hugging everyone. :)
Angie
Monday, July 30, 2007
Question About Books
Why is it that books in fiction are always dusty? It's always "dusty books" or "dusty old books" or "a lot of dusty old books" or whatever. You'd think people who love books enough to want to be writers would dust their darned books occasionally.
Angie, whose books aren't dusty
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