Good, right, saleable

My last angsty friends-locked post seems to have generated a variety of different responses, based on what people thought I was getting at. Here's the thing: I have three different axes for judging the work I'm doing. They're not entirely orthogonal, but they also aren't the same thing. There's good, there's right, and there's saleable.

Saleable is the easiest because you can (eventually) prove it. Did someone give me money for this piece? Then it must be saleable. QED. Is it 18,000 words of distinctly adult fantasy, and has it been rejected by three markets already? Possibly not very saleable.

Right is easy for me to judge in here and impossible for you to judge out there. Right has to do with how it all feels as I'm doing it. Right is when the words are flowing and everything is fitting together. Right may not sing on the page, but it will sing in my fingers.

Good is when the finished piece, with as objective a gaze as I can muster, has a range of positive attributes. You're going to have to judge good for yourself. It's going to vary, but there will be common features. The plot will make sense. The character motivations will be internally consistent and externally not too psycho without a reason. Etc.

I can swear to you that there are pieces that felt right but were neither good nor saleable. (This is where the phrase "murder your darlings" comes from: just because it flows out of you doesn't mean that anyone else should have to step in it. Bad writers get in grooves, too. And some good writers get in bad grooves from time to time.) There are pieces that look good to me but have not sold so far and were stone bitches to write. And while I hope not to do too many pieces in the category of "saleable but not good or right," I have read enough professionally published pieces of utter crap in the last few months to know that saleable-but-no-good is a thriving category, and I'd be willing to believe that some authors sweated their butts off for every word of those sold stories.

The problem when things aren't feeling right is that you-all can point at my bibliography page if you want to prove I can sell stories, and you can point at a story of mine and tell me things you liked/respected about it if you want to prove I can write good stories, but you can't make things feel right as I'm writing them. (Can you? Because if you can, be my guest.)

Things look a little better than they did when I was whinging under friends-lock. I've worked on Thermionic Night in a productive direction. This morning I had bits of "Carter Hall Sweeps a Path" come out against my will, and I've worked well (er, "rightly"?) on "Swimming Back from Hell by Moonlight" and "Singing Them Back."

I'm not going to have "Singing Them Back" finished by Christmas, so those of you who wanted a copy will just have to wait. Sorry.

Oh, and one more thing: markgritter and I are heading for Omaha tomorrow morning and returning Sunday. I will be on e-mail there. I may or may not post to lj or read other people's posts right away. Have a merry Christmas if you want one. Otherwise have a good weekend.

Mind games

Advice to Minneapolitans: do not go to Ingebretsen's two days before Christmas Eve. All der Scandos are trying to get deir meatballs and sausage, ya. Lines like mad. I wouldn't have gone myself if I hadn't had something to pick up on my grandmother's behalf.

Anyway, so (no shit?) there I was, standing in line at Ingebretsen's. Before I decided to get Iron Sunrise out of my purse and start reading it (yes, I have a big purse), my brain had automatically launched into playing Explaining To Time Travelers. As I was driving home from all the errands, it occurred to me that not everyone may do this. My brain, when it's in an inherently boring situation and oughtn't to be coming up with important things that will get forgotten later, will, without conscious decision, start providing explanations for the current (boring) situation for characters from different historical eras. What would strike an ancestral Viking as odd about standing in line at Ingebretsen's? What would my flapper Gran have found strange if she had observed the whole thing when she was in her teens? What about someone from a future? Etc. Usually it's someone in my head going, "What's she doing?" and then we're off from there. For some reason, who/when it's supposed to be is always clear from the tone. Can I tell a 10th century Castilian from a 22nd century Tibetan in my head? Well, yes, naturally.

I also play Stuck On A Spaceship, which I've been playing since I was 12 at least. You are going to be stuck indefinitely in a reasonable but confined space with 16 other people. You get to pick which 16. Blood kin not allowed: no more than one person from any family group. Marriage kin is allowed in genetically distinct groups: you can choose your husband or your sister-in-law but not both. Those friends of yours from college who are brothers? Can't have both.

Do any of you do this sort of thing? Do you play specifically similar games or just generally similar mental things? And do you consciously say to yourself, "Ah, time for Explaining To Time Travelers," or does it just happen when your brain is otherwise not immediately occupied by your surroundings?

A few days ago, elisem asked if anybody practiced constructing wishes just in case one was confronted with the standard genie setup. I do that, too, actually, just not as often. Also my brain automatically finds the prime factors of numbers, but that's not so much along the lines of a game. It doesn't occupy me. It's just as if something in the back of my head announces "2x11x13!" when it passes a license plate that says 286, without intent or effort on my part. And I pat that bit of brain on the head -- very good, mathbrain, go back to sleep -- and go on with my life. Also with license plates -- and sometimes markgritter and timprov have been known to play this with me -- we'll try to come up with a word that has the letters on the license plate in it, longer than 5 letters, in that same order for bonus points. So sometimes I drive past PDT 286 and have parts of my brain announcing, "Expedient!" and "2x11x13!", while the conscious parts of my brain are working on driving and on the book and on who knows what else.

They're very enthusiastic, the bits of brain that do this kind of game.

This may be more than you wanted to know, but I'm curious about brain games now. I can't remember whose law it is, but someone assures me I can't be "the only one who." Anyone?