[Fractal Interpolation] Episode 31 - NO APOLOGIES
Episode 31 - NO APOLOGIES
2018–07–31
TOC
- Input
- Hello
- Where I’ve Been Lately
Input
Wrekmeister Harmonies – You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me (Youtube Link).
You’re going to hit play on that video and think “well, he’s on his ambient thing again”, and then in 20 minutes you’re going to think “I don’t remember putting on this doom metal album”. Everything Wrekmeister Harmonies does is like that, and it’s brilliant. It’s like if the members of Sunn O))) very slowly snuck on stage during a Godspeed concert and no one noticed until it was too late.
Hello
I’m not going to apologize. Well, except to my friend, A., who woke me up with a message saying “Y U NO NEWSLETTER?!” But other than that, as I’ve learned, nobody cares to be reminded that you haven’t done the thing in a while.
So, I’m not going to apologize for that. But in this case, an explanation is actually useful…
(And, no, you didn't miss one because the Episode numbers don't match up. I had apparently made some errors, but I actually counted by hand for this one so we should be accurate for the time being.)
One thing that should be mentioned up front is, of course, The Circumstances, which make it hard for everyone. Or, as above friend followed up, “‘I can’t even’ is a valid response”. And yeah, that’s a thing, but frankly the less said about that the better, except to say that if you want a good article about what it’s like to try to write under The Circumstances, Scalzi’s got that covered.
The more immediate problem is this: the original intent of this Newsletter was “what’s on my mind”. Often, what’s on my mind is some weird ideas, and I like to talk about weird ideas. Ultimately, my career goal is “Get Paid To Talk About Weird Ideas”, that’s kind of the core ideology around here. So, practically, this newsletter winds up being me going off for about 1000 words on whatever weird thing is in my head, in a way that approximately emulates having an actual coherent concept. The thing is, though, that I also have a Patreon, and the updates there are ostensibly about my professional life. And my professional life has been the thing On My Mind most often, recently. So, I’ve been having a variation of The Filing Problem.
The Filing Problem is a phrase that I coined for myself years ago that probably has a better, more scientific name, or is maybe a subset of an actual thing that no one but me cares about defining explicitly. It’s the issue where you go to write down an idea, and you spend so much time trying to figure out where to put it, or what to name the file, or which color paper it goes on, or which pen to use, that you never get around to writing it down. I’ve invested a lot of effort creating workflows to avoid The Filing Problem when it comes to some random idea, so for those I just put them in what is essentially an Inbox and file them later depending on what they turn into (who wants a newsletter about my weird hybrid Zettelkasten/org-mode method for thinking in text?). But there’s a different scope of that psychology that gets caught up on the question of “where will this be published if at all”, which I have not solved. It’s led to this sort of fragmentary smearing of my work across multiple spaces, and it is a matter of not a little shame for me.
So I think “I should talk about what’s on my mind, but maybe that should go to patreon, or maybe just on twitter, or maybe I should take a photo of my Indecisive Face and post it to instagram, or…” and then I don’t send out anything and you all wonder if I’ve been eaten by wolves.
So. Mea Culpa, and, fuck it, I’m just going to tell you about my professional life. My apologies to all of the professional writers who read this, for whom it is probably a hoplessly naive sketch of something they alredy know by heart.
Where I’ve been lately
First and foremost: Actual Writing! I’m still working on my second novel. Long time associates will recall that the first novel is a hot mess of all the ideas I had for the period it took me to write it– rookie mistake, but I’m learning over here. So, that one’s going to get chopped for parts, and in the meantime I’m working on something simpler. In theory, simpler. That’s a discussion for another time. But, for the moment, I’ll just say that it’s a noir detective story that takes place in an alternate history Roman Empire circa 1930s, it’s about… well, I’m not going to tell you what it’s about, because I think I know what it’s about, but I’m approximately 45,000 words in on a first draft and that might be wrong by the time you see it. That’s how this works.
I’ve been having some structural issues, and I’m going to need to do a partial rewrite of those 45,000 words to get it where I want it to be to even continue past that point, but thanks to some very kind friends in The Business, I’ve had a bunch of help figuring out what that looks like, and I think I know what to do there.
And speaking of Friends in The Business, I’ve been making them. Not the usual way I make friends, out of clay and sticks and dark rituals and lonely tears, but the more professional manner of talking to actual humans. The Writing Biz, near as I can figure it from this current perspective of someone who is really just feeling my way through, here, can be expressed as a Venn Diagram. One field is labeled “Writing”. The other is labeled “Communicating with other entities who do writing and writing-adjacent things.” In the first, there’s things like “putting words on paper” and “bitter weeping about fictional people”. There’s overlap in the center, of course, where you have to do things like “send people stories” and “exchange critiques”, but over on the other side, there’s “remember there are other people who do this thing” and “meet people who can help you.”
So, I’ve been trying to go to more conventions, because that is the traditional meeting ground of my people. Since last I wrote, I’ve been to FogCon (a local Bay Area SFF convention), as well as Readercon, in Boston. Conveniently, WorldCon, one of the larger SFF Writers conventions, wherein the Hugos are awarded, is happening next in San Jose, which is basically my back yard. So, I’ll be attenting that as well. FogCon and Readercon were both wonderful experiences, meeting people in meatspace I only know from the internet or their work. I got to see some of my comrades from Viable Paradise, who I had not realize I had missed as much as I did. I’ve learned much of the craft and the business, either over coffee too early in the morning or whiskey too late at night.
It’s essential, it seems, to communicate with people in the industry. You get a lot of writers saying things like “make sure you are treating people as people, and not just as professional advantages.” Which, to me, is a little like saying, “make sure not to assume the person throwing you the life preserver can also pilot the ship”, because, really, writing is a lonely and weird business. There is a strong need, for most people, to at least comiserate with other people who spend much of their time arguing with their imaginary friends. But it is true as well that I have seen a conversation at a convention that ended in “let me know when you have an agent, because I want to publish you.” It’s mostly just that the SFF writing community, at least, is small and generally friendly, so we talk to each other about everything, so your friends are your colleagues and vice-versa. I described Readercon as “either a professional convention with a lot of hugging, or a family reunion with occasional contracts.” For me, it’s about shifting to a more active role in a community which I have been a part of since the first time I saw a rocket ship on the cover of Analog magazine when I was nine years old.
Related to that, Analog was the first of many magazines I’ve tried and failed to sell stories to. I’m continuing to work on short fiction, by which I mean the eternal cycle of writing a story, trying to sell it to a market, getting rejected, and repeat. This is not as despair-inducing as you might think, because I’ve gotten quite a few personal rejections, which are the the way an editor says “you seem to be at least a little good at this, but we don’t want this one,” for reasons that could be the quality of the story, but might also be anything from similarity with something they’ve published recently to the poor quality of the sandwich the reader had for lunch.
So, you collect rejections until you can print them out and make a paper mache effigy of your favorite editor, which you then make offerings to on an altar in the corner of your office, and eventually they will hear your prayers and you’ll sell a story. I think that’s how this works. Like I say, I’m learning here.
And that’s what’s been on my mind. I’m still having Weird Ideas, but I’m filing them for later, so as not to repeat the abovementioned rookie mistake of overfilling the novel. Most of what’s been on my mind have been things like “how do you say ‘Train Engineer’ in latin”, “what drugs produce both euphoria and retrograde amnesia”, and “goodness my friends ask odd questions.” And most of my energy has been going into either writing a novel or trying to not scare away my friends with odd questions. So, I’m still here, still working, and still hoping that all of you who read this are still enjoying it.
Oh, and in the time between writing the first draft of this and editing it, I seem to have written another one. So, hopefully you’ll not have to wait as long next time. As always, my Inbox is open.
And hey, A.: I TOLD YOU I’D REPLY EVENTUALLY AND I HOPE THIS EMAIL WAKES YOU UP TOO.
Aftermath