According To Hoyt

I often have prophetic dreams. Yes, I know what you’re saying, there on the other side of the screen: “ooookay, another crazy writer.” And yet, it’s true. I often dream things that are going to happen, in some way – though the details can be horribly fuzzy or even wrong, the main thrust of the dream will be right.

I’m not going to claim it’s any kind of supernatural – I’d much rather it weren’t, in fact. I prefer to think it is the result of clues too subtle for my conscious mind to process, but clear to my subconscious. The only thing that doesn’t fit in this is when I dream of someone I haven’t heard from in years, and I wake up and the phone rings, and it’s that person. That gives me the idea that the universe is somehow a mechanism where these things are connected in a way we don’t perceive yet and perhaps can’t consciously. I like that too. It makes it a cool science fictional universe. “My friend thought of me, and the butterfly flapped its wings, and…”

Most of my prophetic dreams are about such exciting things as “an old friend will call you.” Or perhaps even MORE exciting things such as “tomorrow, you will see a mushroom on the side of this tree” or even MORE exciting such as “at a future date, you’ll cook steak and your younger kid will REALLY like it.” I mean, they don’t even rise to the “you’ll meet a tall, handsome stranger” level. They tend to be very short for one. You know, if I dreamed of a worldwide war, I’d probably dream the two minutes between waking up and turning on the TV with the sounds in the background either thunder or artillery.

Sometimes they give away a little more. Two of them stand out in memory because they relate to writing. In one I was reading a magazine with my story on it. This took place at an awards banquet. That last was spurious wishful thinking. The story, already written, did in fact sell a week later. (Plaudit Cives) It was my first short story sold.  (Well, first to be published.  By that time I’d sold Thirst four times, but it only saw light of day on the FIFTH.)

Then there are any number of them where I’m signing stories I haven’t written, and then I wake and don’t know what the stories were, so I forget the title.

However, one of them will be of interest to any fan of the Shifters’ series.

I’ve told this at a number of conventions, so you might have heard it. In 03 my first series had finally died and I’d broken up with my third agent. I hadn’t managed to sell any science fiction novels, which some of you know is where my heart and soul is. (No, I’m not saying I don’t like writing mystery and fantasy. If I didn’t I wouldn’t write them. I’m saying I fell in love with SF first and that like any first love this makes it special. Also, IMHO this makes my writing style even in mystery and fantasy “a little science fictional”.) Everywhere I turned, I got told “Fantasy outsells science fiction twenty to one” and I felt I’d never sell sf. Even in short stories my sales record for sf was half what it was for anything else. So… I felt adrift and a little lost. I got the contract to write Plain Jane under a house name, and while that’s easy for me, it wasn’t something I wanted to do a lot of. One book every few years was plenty. I wondered if I’d ever publish anything in fantastic literature again. Heck, I wondered if I’d ever publish under my own name.

And then I dreamed I was at a signing at the Mission Palms in Tempe, Arizona. This might be an incidental detail, since we’d just been there for a World Fantasy. I also dreamed my kids were in college, and grown (which seven years ago they definitely weren’t) and we were congratulating ourselves in getting everyone into the con, because at least one of them had flown from somewhere else I got a feeling in the East. (One is now in pre-med and living at home to cut costs, the other in a highschool-college dual program, also living at home.) At the time the younger was in elementary school.

Anyway, in this dream, I was sitting at the table and this woman came up with a HUGE box of my books. Now at the time I’d published exactly three books, so… OTOH this was a scene I’d often seen, sitting next to Dave Drake or other bestseller friends, so I figured it was filler. Still OTOH (I can haz as many hands as I wantz, thank you!) the dream had THAT feeling which can better be described as: In prophetic dreams I’m my dream self, but also my dreaming self. There’s the one who does and the one who watches.

As the fan started pulling books out of the box and putting them on the table, my dream self said, “Wow, you have everything, even the Shakespeare series.”

And she said “Yeah, I discovered you with your shifter series, and I went and bought everything you ever wrote.”

Now, at this point my dreaming self perked up her ears. I’d never written anything with – I presumed – shape shifters. As the fan enthused about the genius of setting an urban fantasy around a diner, and handed me the book I got a horrible shock. And I mean horrible. If you’ve seen the hard cover of Draw One In The Dark, you’ll understand. (And if you know that when he selected that cover Jim Baen was probably already suffering from the issues that killed him a few weeks later, you’ll understand even better.) And my dream-self said “Oh, good LORD you found one of the horrible cover hardcovers!”

The fan said something like, “Oh, yeah. It was hard, because once the series went bestseller those got even more expensive, but I’d heard you talk about it, and I wanted it.”

At which point my dreaming self went “best seller?” and under the guise of fidgeting while talking to fan, looked the book over thoroughly, noted Baen on the spine, and read first two pages and the back.

Now, I’ll not the series hasn’t gone bestseller – YET – perhaps it never will and that was a spurious detail. OTOH for reasons I have no space or time to explain, it was odd selling it to Baen at all. (For one my agent had other ideas at the time, but her hand got forced by circumstances.) The HORRIBLE cover was a second, bizarre coincidence. As was the fact that the publisher didn’t kill the series after the dismal showing that cover induced. So, maybe it will hit bestseller yet, who knows? It would seem to require a reprint of the first book, but that might change as digital books take over.

Meanwhile the answer for why I wrote the George and Kyrie and Tom and will continue to write them as long as the publisher buys them is “Because they’re dreams, and they need a chance.”

I promiss to do a proper post tomorrow.  But for now, enjoy.  (Thank you, Charlie.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYdDRTRaWr8&feature=player_embedded

I grew up in an odd time, in a very odd place. In practicality this means my reading had to suffer through two disparate but essentially the same blights.

When I grew up most of the books considered suitable for a young girl my age (what Regency Romances would consider a young girl of quality) dripped in Catholic and/or quasi-Victorian morality. No story could pass without beating home the “point” of the story. This annoyed me even in stories I otherwise liked. My brief and intense fascination with fairy tales for example led to reading all of the Countess of Segur – however I kept rolling my eyes at her heavy handed morality lessons.

I don’t remember if the Countess of Segur’s books (I wonder if I can now download them somewhere for free?) had that most ridiculous of bits at the end – the clarifying moral – it went something like this “Moral of the story: if you don’t do onto others as you wish it were done onto you, you will come to no good.”

These often caused me to fling books against walls.

And then the Portuguese revolution happened and the ethos of the sixties hit Portugal only one decade later.

Understand, my dears, by then I was so totally hardened against these didactic lessons in my books that it took me about -7 seconds to identify the new morals. Less than that to start spoofing it in the essays that guaranteed me As in school. I’m still rather proud – as far as one can be of a piece on cleaning ladies that I think my teacher slept clutching for several years, she was that fond of it. It was about the poor exploited cleaning lady who had to clean other people’s dirty houses, and how her knees hurt and she was illiterate and… I didn’t mention the fact I actually knew a few cleaning ladies who – in the seventies job crunch – were college graduates. Or that the good ones could clean a house in a couple of hours, clean five houses a day, probably not pay taxes (they were paid in folding money) and lived much better than my family (which I grant you was in deep financial trouble at the time.)

[Still later much too long after this, only least in the last few years, I’ve learned that doing that sort of thing is easy but makes it hard to live with myself. Perhaps it is the onset of middle age, but I’m simply not willing to play that game anymore.]

So, what does that have to do with anything? Well… The thing is those “morals” never left most books. I know why. At least until very recently, if you wanted to even get published, you had to make certain “identifying noises” to let the publishers know you were on their side. This is usually the fashionable/academic side, since that’s what gets identified as “smart” and most editors/publishers are liberal arts graduates.

If you are rolling your eyes at me, try this experiment – go read my book, Darkship Thieves, and have the main character be a male. You’ll never sell it (even if you adjust the romance <G>). No, I’m absolutely serious – I tried. For thirteen years. I got told my main character was a psychopath. If you have an action adventure character with er… marked character flaws, you can sell the character as a she, not as a he. This is by no means the only trope one has to put in. I know for a fact, without being told – I’m a liberal arts graduate, thank you – that if I want to sell the book about the overthrow of a murderous religion, it best be a patriarchal one, not a matriarchal one. The other things are so ingrained, I can’t even list them, but I’ll know if I’m about to break them. (Baen is the exception for this, btw.)

So, what is this in the name of? Well, you know my theory of writing doesn’t include sending messages. For that, there’s western union.

That said, there’s always some message in books. Sometimes it’s dictated by the logic of the books. Sometimes it’s the authors’ own opinions leaking in – we’re human and we write with our lives and experience, so that will come in in world building etc.

Weirdly I don’t resent even messages I violently disagree with if the story is good enough and the development logical.

What I do resent is unoriginality, the lack of any new thought attached to old tropes. (Another thing I resent is establishment darlings preening themselves on talking truth to power – sweeties, if your publisher is one of the big ones, is behind you all the way, and started you off with enough push to have a print run in the tens of thousands, you have my congratulations and a little bit of envy, but you CANNOT have the anti-establishment mantle. Sorry, no.) I hate “boring”. And I resent long breaks in books to explain to me how caring/intelligent/politically correct you are. Oh, please. Tell the story and get out of your own way. If you must put politics/social thought in, do what Heinlein did in the earlier books, and sweep it under the rug or make it part of the story.

As for authors’ opinions OUTSIDE their books – by and large, unless they become a form of literary tourettes that leaks into the novels – I couldn’t care about it one way or another. (If one of my favorite authors doesn’t write for Nation, she should. Which is fine, provided she doesn’t write THAT in her books.) I might (do) make fun of them as I make fun of a lot of other people’s opinions particularly when those border on religion (is it not written “One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh”? Why, yes it is, by Heinlein, I think.) But then I make fun of everything including myself, because if I don’t laugh I’ll start to cry and no one wants that.

I’ll say as Phillip K. Dick is rumored to have said of Heinlein – and as I say of Phillip K. Dick – I don’t agree with a single thing he’s ever written, but I enjoy his novels. (And sometimes I can even go so far as to say – “I don’t agree with a single thing he’s ever written, or ever thought, but I love him as a person.” – which describes half my friendships.)

It is no secret to anyone that Darkship Thieves is a finalist for the Prometheus award, which is given to books of a certain political bend. I’m not going to say I put ANY political bend in there on purpose, but I’m also not going to apologize if it is there.

I’m only going to say the book is, first of all, a story. If it makes you think about the future, relations between men and women and – eventually, maybe, sort of – politics and economics, good. But I wrote it, as Heinlein said of his books “to entertain.” I’m competing with your beer money and I hope it – and the sequel – will be worth at least a six pack.

(And now I’m going to see if I can find the Countess of Segur’s books online.  Or maybe not.  No work would get done.)

Unrelated Update — Those of you who read Footprints in Your Heart about my fan/friend John aka Saint Basset in my conference being in hospital and needing prayers and thoughts — he’s home and much better, though still ill.  Thank you.

If you’re a writer and not reading this blog you should be  http://kriswrites.com/2011/04/20/the-business-rusch-royalty-statements-update/   If you’re not following what Kris has to say, you’re asleep at the wheel.

Now go and read.

Something that comes up with regularity in my critique sessions with my occasional, spatially divergent writers’ group is something we call “the ick factor.” It is also – speaking of slush :) – one of the things that often throws me out of a new author’s work. Often permanently.

To begin with let’s establish a ground from which we can discuss this. You see, it is a misconception to say we work with words. We don’t. That’s sort of like saying a painter is someone who covers canvas with other materials. Words are our base material. Like canvas – and paint, for that matter, they can be used for many things that have nothing whatsoever to do with our job.

You use words to ask someone to marry you, you use words to communicate at work, and you use words to order a pizza. None of which is a novel – though they can be part of a novel – or, probably a short story. (Though asking someone to marry you can be a short, sharp shower of… story. See the first proposal in the Pride and Prejudice mini series for instructions on how to make THAT happen.)

No, what we actually use to construct our stories is emotions. You could describe a short work, like a short story, as a tight presentation of strong emotion which will stimulate the reader to think on the subject/situation you chose to illuminate. (This is not a matter of “sending a message” just that short stories are rather pointless if they don’t leave behind a form of intellectual after taste that causes the reader to think or feel something long after.) A novel on the other hand is a sustained emotional roller coaster which amuses or distracts the reader and which might leave behind one or several impressions and thoughts.

Beginner writers, no matter what age, are very much like beginner artists, who never got to dabble with finger paints. At that stage it is easier to work with strong contrasting colors. Even in pastel, one of my most successful projects was working with three colors only: black, white and ox blood red. If you try to use more subtle tones, when just learning, you have a tendency to shade it finer and finer till the whole thing is an indistinct mess. (I’m stuck in this point.) In fact, you could say that past basic competency the painter’s great struggle is learning contrast so the picture emerges from the canvas as what it’s supposed to be, not just “blobs of somewhat related colors.”

It is the same way for writers, really. One of my more common critiques when reading someone’s beginning work is “it’s pleasant enough, but you don’t have a story. You have a series of incidents.” That is because people are trying to write as life happens, and life has no coherent narrative. Narrative is what we impose on it. In the same way if painters try to paint “true to life” and forget that they’re doing three dimensions in a two-dimensional medium, they end up with “muddle.”

But like beginning painters, most beginning writers, consciously or not, reach for the primary colors: anger, fear, grief, joy, laughter and, yes, ick.

Beginners – not all of them, I started with a novel – tend to start with a short story, because they figure it’s easier to sustain the mood through three or four pages than 200 (this is correct. But it’s also far more difficult to make the mood relevant.) And they reach for the big, big emotions, because those are more relatable to for them, and therefore they imagine they can make them more relatable to the reader. I think this is often why new writers have to be “inspired”. I.e., they have to feel that emotion to be able to write. This is not a reliable way to do it, but then they are beginners and sometimes it works.

However, sometimes they don’t have those emotions on hand, but they still want the readers to feel SOMETHING. One emotion some reach for is humor and if they’re of a natural comedic bend, they can pull it off. (Humor is however much harder to sell. First because of fact that not all senses of humor are alike and the gap is harder to bridge than in other emotions. You could say everyone cries the same way but everyone laughs differently. But more importantly, I suspect my friend Kate Paulk is correct and most of the entertainment field has been taken over at the managerial/promotional level by minor demons and, as Umberto Eco taught us, the devil does not laugh.)

The other common emotion that newbies reach for, and which is much more universal than humor is … disgust. We all have basic ick factors: excrement and bodily functions; rotting flesh; gross (I mean that literally) anatomy. To paraphrase Pratchett, we all know there are green wobbly bits in there somewhere and none of us, frankly, wants to think about them too much.

Disgust, if combined with another driver, can be a powerful way to pull a reader into a story. For a combination of “Oh, my G-d, I don’t want to look but I can’t look away” consider my friend Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International. The beginning hit my ick factor so often that I’d have flung it across the room – except that at the same time he was dragging me along way too fast on the pace of the book and the question of whether his character would survive. It’s a beginning like a punch in the gut. You want to step away, but you can’t, and by the time you realize the guy survived you’re bonded to him for good and will stay with him come hell or high water for however many books.

So, it’s not like I don’t understand the temptation. I do. But I almost feel like Larry should have little stickers on the beginning of that book saying something like “this experiment was carried on by an expert. Don’t try this at home.”

The more average use of disgust is to have a oh, hum story where someone is being showered in a long, blunt shower of sh*t – literally. Or a story in which the big point is that ah ah “They’re zombies. They’re rotting. They smell.” Um… mkay. But if you actually succeed in making the reader feel disgust in those circumstances and if the audience you’re writing for is not into – Thanks again, Kate – what Kate Paulk calls “the meaty skull with reptiles” type of art, then… well… you’re going to make the reader ill and the book will get thrown against the wall.

Keeping the reader horrified but reading on involves being at the level of expertise where you at least know a hook when it bites you in the nose. Preferably you’re at the point where you perfectly balance ick and pull, because that’s irresistible. If you must have too much of one, have too much of the hook, because everyone’s ick factor is different and if yours is set high, you’ll lose more than half the readers.

Take the beginning of a novel by a talented but utterly clueless beginner that I read in the last month. We have rather standard fantasy tropes, but murkily discussed in a way that really doesn’t make it very clear what the world is and/or what exactly is happening or why the characters are doing what they are.

There are several mistakes in there already, of course, but the wordage is pleasant enough and you go along on the principle that “this can be edited into sharpness.”

Except that on page three you hit one of those icks, relating to “things that one shouldn’t visualize ANYONE eating.” If you manage to swallow hastily and go past it, three pages later the author starts throwing excrement-related humor all over the page and the book goes against the wall. Hard.

Now, I know the psychological mechanism behind this train wreck. The author knows, at some level that the story doesn’t grab enough. Probably because the author knows that both world and characters are so imprecise and hazy as to be a muddle (or as my painting teach called it “mud”) on the canvas. There’s nothing there to grab the reader. And so instinctively and – trust me – blindly the author reaches for the things that evoke a reaction in the author because… (Duh! #winning!) they can’t fail to do so in the reader.

And the author is absolutely right. It evokes a reaction. You gag, you go “ew” and throw it against the wall.

Now you can’t make a coherent book without the big emotions. Well, at least if you’re not trying for literary post modernist. And no matter what you’re using, some people will be “icked” by it. But don’t rely on the big emotions – PARTICULARLY DISGUST – to carry you through. Think of them as garlic. Some people like a lot of garlic, some people like a little, but if all you can taste in your dish is garlic only a very small percentage of people will read it.

And if the other emotions are garlic, the ick factor is three-alarm pepper. While some people want to have their mouth set on fire and most people can tolerate a pinch of the stuff, your greatest audience will be somewhere between. The more you shovel it in, and the fewer other appeals the story has, the more audience you’ll lose.

The ick factor is not a cure all for insufficient skills in fact it should be locked in your tool box until you are competent with the other tools.

I’ve beat up on editors for unprofessional behavior towards writers, and I’ve beat up on writers for being wussies about rejections. Today, girls and boys, dragons and butterflies, we’re going to look into everyone’s favorite punching bag… The slush pile.

Or rather, we’re not just going to look into the slush pile. We’re going to look into beginning writers and why they really, really – really, really, really – need a second opinion. And not just from their dog or girlfriend. Particularly in these days when anyone can just throw their work on Amazon or self-publish for nothing. Because you run a risk of making a really big – not to say huge – mistake if you do it without vetting.

There is a peculiar arrogance to a beginner writer, a particular certainty that their work is the best thing since sliced bread, peanut butter and the invention of the rotto tiller – the sort of brass faced “read me, I’m wonderful” that nine times out of ten means this person can barely string a sentence together, has half a dozen words in the first paragraph that don’t mean what he thinks they mean, and is either playing with a world/idea that has been done to the point of nausea or most of the world is still in their heads and what’s on the page is a disjointed mess.

Conversely, the beginner writer who slips their work at me reluctantly and only after I asked to see it is, nine times out of ten either already publishable or very close to it.

I thought this was a peculiar curse of publishing, which makes the current system – dependent on self-confidence and self promoting – a peculiarly counterproductive one. But it turns out it’s actually the curse of any task whose completion doesn’t show immediate and concrete results, at least according to this article: http://www.damninteresting.com/unskilled-and-unaware-of-it

For those of you unwilling to click through, the idea behind that article – which is research supported – is that the less skilled you are at a task susceptible of personal evaluation (i.e., not whether you mowed the lawn or not) the more likely you are to think you are extremely competent at it.

The thesis is that until you gain basic competence you don’t see your own errors. I have to say I have found this to be true for myself at any variety of crafts (from crochet to embroidery) as well as at art and writing. It is not till I learn SOMETHING about the tasks that I start seeing all the errors I made in the early projects that, when I did them, seemed perfect.

Apparently this correlates to the four stages of competence theory, which can be summarized as follows, in progression:

1- Unconscious Incompetence

The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit.

2 – Conscious Incompetence

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit.

3 – Conscious Competence

The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration.

4 – Unconscious Competence

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. He or she may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

These four stages correlate completely not only with my writing, or my progression in art – where I am, at best, in stage 2 – but with such tasks as fine-chopping an onion without either cutting myself or being excruciatingly slow.

Unfortunately confidence seems to move in inverse progression through the set. People in the stage of unconscious competence, often assume that they’re not very good at all because they still see how much further they have to go. This unfortunately means that if you get to stage four without showing your work to anyone, you’re not going to have the courage after that.

It also means that slush piles might drive most if not all editors insane. I’ve read some of these and the sheer volume of unadulterated, imaginably bad… Raw sewage that hits those is almost unbelievable. A lot of it is literally incomprehensible. And then there’s any number that’s just understandable enough to be repulsive.

Oh, come on, Sarah, you’re saying. Surely writing doesn’t fall to incompetent-but-unaware. I mean, people have been reading their whole lives, so they know what makes a book/story.

Uh… yeah, theoretically. But the problem is when it’s your book/story you have to be playing chess on both sides – to learn to be both the writer and the reader, and not to read into your stuff more (or sometimes – ick, trust me – less) than you put in. Until you get there you’re often unconscious incompetent. Very, very incompetent.

Unfortunately this is also, often, the bane of writers groups, because there is an effect associated with that. As you’re going through the stages (as the first article mentions) you’re not capable of evaluating anyone who is above you. This means unconscious incompetent will rate down conscious competent who will accept it because he/she underrates him/herself. This is one of the reasons I’m STRONGLY against anonymous or semi-anonymous, large online critique groups: after a while a certain tyranny of hte unconscious incompetent rules and destroys anyone who might have had a shot. Writers groups should be small and personal and you should be able to evaluate the person’s opinions in relation to where the person is on the writing journey.

And then you won’t risk letting your little monster into the wild, trailing excess adjectives, incoherent sentences and unresolved plots and making half of the readers scream “Oh, no, it came from the slush pile!”

Do you see yourself in those stages at all, or is it just me? Do you see the stages in others? How do you think this affects self-promotion ability? And do you have any slush horror stories to share? (I brought some slush-tentacles, if pressed to share mine.)

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

Years ago when I met Jerry Pournelle, I got him talking – I know this will shock all of my faithful readers – about Heinlein. He mentioned I live in the town where Heinlein lived for a long time. I knew that. I’d even ferreted out the true address, because the one in Grumbles From The Grave is wrong.

In fact, the house has been up for sale twice, but the price grazing the half million is much too rich for our blood. The house is near the Broadmoor, in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in town. I don’t think I’m giving too much away and at least the last owners had grown resigned to leading people through the house on impromptu tours. (I think they took down the distinctive number pictured in Grumbles, though, which is how I found it, one happy Spring morning, while driving the preschooler and the toddler to the zoo. (And I regret to report it my dears, but I made a total and absolute fool of myself, getting out of the car and standing on the road, touching the mailbox and crying. Yeah, okay, I’m a deranged fan as well as a writer. Though I’m happy to say I’m way too shy to EVER be a stalker. Also to stalk most of the people I’m that nutty on I’d need a time-travel machine or a ouija board.)

I confess I’d never thought very deeply about the location of the house, or its cost. I knew, having read Grumbles, that it had been built from scratch to their specifications, and since it was nigh to the only five star resort hotel in town, I assumed it was expensive even when built. I mean, the EARLIEST I remember being aware of such a thing as advances or how writers got paid (I think before that I had a nebulous idea writers were employees, hired by a company and put on salary to turn out x number of books a year – which, btw, might NOT be a bad model, if they’re going to be as bad as they are at tracking sales. Some of us would probably take write for hire for a book a year for a minimum of x and x years, provided we could write our own stuff on the side. Some of us have kids and obligations. More on this later.) was a notice in a Portuguese paper that Heinlein had got eight million dollars advance for Friday. So… expensive resort hotel… about right.

But Jerry said part of the reason they bought where they did was that the housing/land/living was cheap in Colorado Springs at the time. You see, the money didn’t come until much later than that. Until then they lived from book to book. They made do…

This is a continuous discussion at every con. The older writers complain about how bourgeois we’ve all become, and in fact there is something to be said about that, except I’m writing that article – hopefully – for publication. Meanwhile the truth is more than bourgeois, we’ve gotten older. People rarely break into the field in their twenties, anymore, or if they do they’re treated as darlings and have no worries. I’m one o the younger sf/f writers at any gathering, and I can see fifty nearing at speed. At our age we have families and obligations and we’re starting to think in terms of “how am I going to live in old age.”

I don’t know anyone under fifty who expects social security to pay them much, if anything at all. I view that money as being poured down a hole. If you think you’ll see a dime from it, you’re a far more hopeful person than I. It’s demographics. There is no lock box. There is no fund. There is a new generation paying for the older. Which works great if the new generation is bigger than the retiring one. AND all of them are employed and… Uh… you see the issue right? (Don’t blame me, I tried to have eleven children.) The way the market as been, both for me as a writer – yeah, I broke in in the quarter of 9/11 – and for my husband in tech, we have some money set by, in retirement funds we can’t touch, which would see us… through a year, I think. IF we’re extremely lucky.

Suffice it to say neither of us expects to retire. I intend to work as long as I can work, at writing, if writing will continue paying (something that as of now is up in the air, but being very stubborn and a battler I have hopes of figuring out a way) after the upheavals publishing is going through. At something else, if I have to. I can refinish furniture. I’m a decent seamstress. If all else fails I can teach and tutor in languages.

Dan, likewise, intends to die with his hands on the keyboard. How is somewhat of a puzzle too, since most companies these days actively discriminate against you once you hit fifty. (Yeah, I think it’s against the law too, but there’s always ways.) However we’ll figure it out.

But this type of life requires minimizing your living expenses, paying off the house, keeping things as cheap as possible.

And sometimes I feel guilty for having taken this path at all. You see, when we were twenty (it was just yesterday, I swear) it seemed so simple. I was going to write until I had a bestseller, which would happen with my first book (more on the lack of understanding of your own incompetence when you start out later) of course, and then I’d support Dan while he got his music going. Sometimes I think I should have gone back to school and gotten my AMERICAN teaching certificate, so that we’d have been a two income family all along. (I have a Portuguese teaching certificate but I wasn’t even allowed to take certification exams in the states. My diploma, from one of the oldest universities in Europe wasn’t accepted because the bureaucracy had never heard of it.)

But then I look at our friends who did what my husband arguably did, to keep a roof over our heads. They traded in their artistic dreams, their dreams of success at the thing they loved best for a steady income… Which for my generation hasn’t been all that steady.

Dan’s career in tech through the tech bubble and the turmoil of contracting has hardly been a sinecure.

With all that – lest I seem to be whining – we’re probably in better shape than 80% of our generation. Even if we’re eating into our savings at a prodigious rate.

What is this all about, you ask? Well… Yesterday I was talking to my older son who is in pre-med and we were discussing the uncertainties attending their future, and it occurred to me, truly, that there is no safe option. In the years of accelerating technological change we’re facing, there is no career you can enter and be safe forever and ever.

Everywhere I turn, even my dentist, talks about tech that will end his job as he knows it.

So what is my advice to you bright hopefuls setting out on the glory road of writing?

1- If that’s what you really want to do and are willing to starve for it, do it. Trading in on a “real” career won’t keep you any safer. (A caveat is since I don’t approve of living off other people, be they your parents or the taxpayers, get a part time job to support your writing habit. But treat it as a way to support your writing habit, not as a career. There is a difference.)

2 – Don’t expect a bestseller right away. I know, the world cowers before your brilliance. Or at least your cat and your boyfriend cower before your brilliance, which is why, my dear, we’ve told you to stop using soap with glitter in it. BUT weirdly and more than ever now, brilliance alone isn’t enough. Luck and above all persistence come in. Be prepared to be persistent. What this means in practical terms is that you MIGHT need that part time job and a place to live other than mom and dad’s basement. Beware you might be in your late thirties by the time you even break in. This seems to be the median age for breaking in now. (Though that might change with digital self-publishing.)

3 – Once you made the decision, keep on keeping on. I wasted ten years, writing a novel then going back to work full time, then writing another novel, ensuring both my skills and knowledge of the field grew VERY slowly.

4- Through realities out of our control – demographics; the pace of technological change; other factors that would be posts in themselves – most of us now under fifty will spend the rest of our lives in times of high uncertainty, aka “interesting times.” So there is no safe place to hide. In publishing or anywhere else, you’re going to fall on your face very often. The question is “how fast can you get up?”

Over my computer I have to signs pinned. One says “Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom.” (General George S. Patton.) It went up in 2003, when the failure of my first series seemed to ensure I’d never again be published. The second went up a few years later, when I lived in fear of trying new genres and new styles because… what would people think of me? And what if I failed. But then I realized I’d already failed once by playing it as safe as I could. And I saw other people failing around me all the time, for the same reason. That sign says “If you must walk on thin ice, you might as well learn to dance.”

All publishing is FOREVER thin ice. It was when Heinlein was publishing. It is now. Like all the arts it will probably always be. The other professions are just moving towards us.

So, as you stand there, on your thin ice and take a little experimental step, think on this:

5 – One day you will die, as every human will. Maybe you’re lucky. Maybe death will come suddenly, with no time for regrets or second thoughts. Most people are not that lucky these days, though. There are sometimes years of laying in bed, unable to do much but think over the past.

In that final and terrible time, what will weigh most on you? That you never had a corporate career? Never took expensive vacations? Never got to be a great: doctor, engineer, salesman, cook? If any of these is true, go and pursue those. If you love anything more than writing, go in peace – and whistle as you go, you’re a free person.

But if you’re going to lay there, on your death bed, regretting the worlds and characters that will die with you, unknown to the rest of humanity, come back here and sit down, you’re my brother or my sister even if I never met you. Arrange your life so you can live while creating. And set your nose to the grindstone.

Are both at times hell.  As some of you know I’ve made snarky comments (which I probably shouldn’t have, but meh…) about the one sales statement I’ve got so far this reporting period.  Since I usually do that, and since I’ve long assumed my statements are the greatest form of fiction in the world, and other people’s MUST make more sense, imagine my surprise to find I wasn’t the only one with concerns.

Amanda Green writes about the kerfuffle rattling the windows of the publishing world.  http://amandasgreen.wordpress.com/  Well worth reading the whole thing as well as the blogposts she links to.  (In fact, if you intend to work in this field, you should be following both Krish Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.)  [I highly recommend their workshops, too, which give solid value for the money.  I’ve taken any number of them.]

Mind you this might all die down and quickly too.  We writers are simple folk.  The next idea for a story comes along and we forget reality and as long as we have a roof over our head and a place to plug our computer, we’re easily pacified.  OTOH my feeling is that this is the beginning of something — something I’m not sure I want to deal with.  Let’s just say my blogpost on anger last wednesday might have been all too apropos. 

And look, I JUST want to write.  That’s ALL I’m really interested in.  If I can make enough from writing to help Dan keep this house going and to have some very mild fun with Dan and the kids, (our version of fun runs to museums and walks in the park, okay?) I’m perfecly contented.  A cutting-edge lifestyle I do NOT have. 

However as Ulysses (and George Washington!) found, sometimes even the most devoted of private citizens have to leave their plows behind.

Did I mention I NEVER asked to live in interesting times?

p://dieselsweeties.com/readby/theme/twitter/story.php?pag

This will be a scattered post, however I trust it will also be self explanatory. It ties in marginally with my post about fans and the relationship about authors and fans.

When I started out with Baen and was given my own conference, I had very few fans at first (my last book had come out years before, and the book with Baen was still due.) Among the first was John, who more or less single handedly harassed me about rewriting and starting to post Darkship Thieves which led to its being bought.

As I came to know John, I valued him for his insouciant sense of humor – he needled me on my occasional bottomless lack of self-confidence by calling me “dumbass” when I doubted myself, and referred to my Magical British Empire series (which has ONE gay shifter. Okay, two, but…) As the “Gay animal porn” series – sometimes sending me highly inappropriate but very funny videos when I was going through a rough patch. (This was not homophobia, their closest family friends and some of the very few trusted sitters for their daughter are a gay couple.  It was just his way of picking on me.) I also found there was a more serious man beneath the silliness: he was principal caretaker for his daughter who is an atypical angelman’s syndrome child, with other – as yet undiagnosed – complications. His choice to not intitutionalize the profoundly handicapped child cost him his opportunities of employment and caused serious financial hardship. And while I understood his reasons (he shuddered to think of what might happen to a non-verbal girl child in an institutional setting) I very much fear that in the same situation I couldn’t do what he did. In other words he is a far, far better person than I am.

John neglected his own health while caring for his daughter and when you’re in your fifties and have not coddled yourself, this is not a safe path to take. A few ignored issues have caught up with him and he’s right now in the hospital, struggling between life and death.

I’d like to beg everyone’s prayers – if you’re a believer – or good thoughts on behalf of John, known in my conference in the bar as Saint Basset. He’s battled long and well, but he can’t leave the field yet. Too many of us need him on this side.

Note – Dave Freer and I have talked to Baen about doing an anthology to benefit/set up a fund for John’s daughter. Unfortunately this kind of thing is very slow, and our intention to start a storyteller’s bowl on her behalf got sidetracked as the horrible economy and whatever is happening to our field (more on that later) put a terrible strain on our finances causing us to scramble for survival. So…. Everything is delayed and given how things are right now, I’m not sure that storyteller’s bowl is a good idea. I do know that both John and his wife would be loathe to accept handouts, but they would be all right with a project that provides their daughter with some income/security.  I just have to figure out what that might pay off short term.

http://www.robertahoyt.com/comics.html