Born to be unmarketable
I'm from Canada, where it's a long-running joke that our celebrities have to wear name tags. It's certainly true that being an artist in Canada is not a job that makes you rich unless your name is Margaret Atwood; as my dad likes to point out, even Pierre Berton — one of our most celebrated writers — had a day job. But Canada also puts a lot of public funding into creative works, even (or especially) works that have no hope of turning a profit; as a culture, we seem to understand that art has value even if it's not commercially viable.
It was only once I started working in the entertainment industry that I realized this attitude is not the norm. Especially when I'm dealing with Americans. It's hard to talk to these people for any length of time before the conversation turns to target demographics and markets, customer funnels and pitch razors. I'm not even sure they know they're doing it; it's like they're incapable of thinking about the craft in any other terms. The idea that a piece of art can exist just to exist, not necessarily to make money, isn't just baffling — it's controversial. I've had people get angry with me for saying it.
This difference in outlook may just come down to the fact that Canadian culture isn't exactly hot property on the global stage. Which could put Canadian artists in solidarity with many other creatives who are too weird, too queer, or too foreign to survive in the US-dominated commercial entertainment machine. If we don't tell our stories, who will?
New on Ko-fi: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God," Chapter 3
Chapter 3 of "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" is now up for all supporters on Ko-fi. If you don't want to read the story in serialized form and would prefer to get it all at once, you can also buy the entire novelette as an ebook.
This Week's Links
AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications
The question shows Anthropic trying to get around a problem it’s helping create: people relying so heavily on AI assistants that they struggle to form opinions of their own. It’s also a moot question, as Anthropic and its competitors have created AI models so indistinguishable from human speech as to be nearly undetectable.
Turning Off the TV in Your Mind
The problem is that if you’re “thinking in TV” while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints. I don’t believe in rules for art. But I believe in general principles. One is that it’s typically best to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in. A novel will never beat good TV at being TV, but similarly TV will never beat a good novel at being a novel.
A novelist's guide to poisoning, part 1
Stuff your mediaeval monarch's food taster won't save him from: sauteed mushrooms.
The story I'm working on at the moment requires me to look up how to make a firebomb. I'm definitely getting arrested this time.
-K
