Efficiency, organization, and the self-awareness fairy

Recently a new writer I shared a ToC with asked me for advice, and it dovetailed nicely with a conversation I had with timprov, so I thought I'd put one piece of my thoughts here.

Writers have a lot of choices in how to try to get our work out to the rest of the world. You can submit to agents, send your stuff directly to major publishing houses, go for the small/indie press route, look for an e-book publisher, self-publish on a website or in e-book or in hard copy.

When you are choosing one of these options, make a mental list of all the things you fully intend to get done in a given month, with the deadlines attached to each. Include large projects in whatever work you do; include small personal things like flossing and working out and using up the spinach before it goes bad. Figure out how many of these things you get done as intended and on time, as a percentage of your total.

Ask yourself: do your expectations of whatever form of publishing you have chosen depend on one or more people, including yourself, managing to exceed your hit rate on getting stuff done in an efficient and timely fashion? If your happiness with a particular form of publication depends on everybody else (or even yourself!) having a much higher hit rate than you have managed yourself, probably either your plan or your expectations should be adjusted.

The self-awareness fairy will surely visit some of you, and at that moment you may say, "But I'm a total flake! Other people will surely have a higher hit rate than I do! They are far more organized and efficient!" Then ask yourself: are you the only total flake who wants to work in the arts? Really?

The self-awareness fairy visits others of us and says, "I am way, way more organized and efficient than most people." If yours goes that direction, by all means take it into account in your expectation structure. Ask yourself: when in my life have I encountered entire groups worth of people who are at least as organized and efficient as I am? Should my plans depend on such groups springing up without that being their unifying factor? Also ask yourself: is my current level of organization and efficiency something I can rely on maintaining in the face of adding a great many other chores of type X? X will vary for you. For some people, doing the work of marketing one's own book will disproportionately sap one's energy; for others, dealing with an unknown number of other people doing an unknown number of other tasks will be as draining.

But for heaven's sake do not rely on a plan that assumes that other people are all far more efficient and organized than you have ever managed to be. It will lead to tears.

A different song

So one of the things that's been going on here recently is that I was trying to figure out how to be able to make my good singing and my audible singing more...um...the same. Because I was not having a lot of success with timprov being able to hear me over the guitar, for one thing. I have talked before about how I do participatory music but not performance music, but that's a thing that affects participatory music. It doesn't have to be a big performance.

When I mentioned to timprov that this was something I was trying to figure out, he took me through a few things that were incredibly simple and worked. So yay for success! We have done a few things lately like having me sing a song for him while he tried to figure out the chords for it, since he can both play the chords and hear the notes now.

But it was sad to me because I realized that I had been actively taught wrong. Not just not actively taught right, but some of the things that my old church choir director, who was a very dear person, had explicitly taught us with teaching songs I can reproduce to this very day...were wrong. Were directly, exactly, the opposite of what you want to do when you're singing to get a good pure tone with volume control. What I was taught to do with my head and neck while singing was just exactly opposite. And now that I know it, I can look at footage of singers and go, "Uh, yah. They are all doing the opposite of what she taught us to."

Several of my experiences with this sort of thing were things I was aware of at the time and resented. I was, for example, taught that the Germans sunk the Lithuania, and that the Pentagon was on the Acropolis. I was taught that all electron shells after the first one contain eight electrons. And I fussed and fumed and fulminated against the teachers who taught me these things. But with this choir director...I'm just sad. I have fond memories of her. I can't dislike her. And yet she taught me a thing that has made an activity I enjoy more difficult than it had to be, with worse results, for literally thirty years, and I am only 33. I don't really know what to do about that except to be sad and baffled.

Ganymede, by Cherie Priest

Review copy provided by Tor.

I hate zombies, and I eye steampunk sideways, and I still pick these up and read them promptly every time one arrives in my mailbox. There's just something I find compulsively readable about them.

In each of the volumes, Cherie has a disclaimer about how this is alternate history about zombies, dammit, so writing to her about how she's got the history wrong is beside the point. And I simultaneously get what she's saying there and don't entirely agree. I know how it goes when the story you want to tell doesn't overlap very well with explaining every last little thing, and how readers who nitpick are not always looking at things productively. And yet when we write with alternate history settings instead of straight-up imagined world settings, it's for some reason, some power that comes from those connections, and you can't really say, "I just want the powerful stuff and not the inconvenient stuff."

Well, in this volume Cherie did some things that quieted one of my few negative reactions to her earlier works. I had felt that the way the South handled African-Americans' status and rights had glossed over some pretty important historical attitudes, and while I understood that was not the story she wanted to tell, it made me sort of squint sideways whenever it came up. Well, in Ganymede it's a lot closer to the story she wanted to tell. We get a lot of perspective of free people of color in southern regions in this book, and their world and worldview made me a lot more interested in the rest of what was going on.

The beginning and ending aren't precisely a framing device, but they refer back to the rest of the series and ground the book in the rest of the series. I'm hoping that doesn't put off new readers, because I think this is otherwise a perfectly sound book for starting the series, and it may well be my favorite. Less of the gas masks and goggles, okay, but more Marie Laveau, which for me is a win-win but for other people should at least balance out.