Only three not-very-random things, but I'm thinking of <user site="livejournal.com" user="wilfulcait

[mrissa]

1. I have been feeling very internally quiet lately (=last few weeks to month). I'm able to overcome this when I'm with people, either in spoken conversation or in e-mail. But it's there to overcome. It's not a bad quiet. It's just quiet.

2. I got some short stories submitted again today, and I had the realization that I really don't have that much old stuff out there. A few old stories. But most of what I'm sending around is from this calendar year or last. I've written seven short stories this year, or I really wouldn't have much in circulation.

Mostly this is good: it means that I've either sold or trunked most of my old stories. It means that a lot of what's out there is what I've done in the last year. But I have a pretty firm psychological attachment to having stuff out.

To put this in perspective, I have seventeen short stories making the rounds right now and an eighteenth waiting because it's a Carter Hall story, and I'm giving On Spec first crack at those since they bought the first two (and anyway I like On Spec). And sending them, like, twelve Carter Hall stories at once seemed like a bad idea for everybody. I know that for a lot of short story writers, seventeen short stories running around in the world sounds like a lot. But this is less than it's been in ages. The main goal is to sell these things, but -- I'm not sure I'm ready to deal with not having very many things bothering editors right now.

I'm also not ready to take time away from the book to write short stories, and if I try to say that I am ready, kick me sharply in the shin. This book deserves attention and real work, not fussing and puttering and wandering off in search of instant gratification. That doesn't mean I won't write any short stories before I finish this book -- I almost certainly will. But I'm not going to put a big focus on clearing the decks until I'm done with it to the point where it's gone to alpha readers. So I will just have to deal with not having as many short stories wandering the planet as I'm used to.

3. The genre "X + Memoir" is annoying the crud out of me right now. I quit reading a library book about building YA collections for libraries because the author had mixed it with self-congratulatory, not-very-good memoir. And now I'm reading a book about India where the author has mistaken me for someone who cares about his childhood. The rest of the book is actually about India -- it's not a memoir that happens to be set in India or anything like that. It's talking about the political events since 1947. But with a big chunk of authorial childhood to swallow on the way. Memoir is its own genre, people. It's a genre that requires skill. You can't just throw it in with whatever else you're doing and have it come out right. If you want to write a memoir that also deals with your life as a brain surgeon or an expert on African-Indian relations or whatever it is that you're good at, great. But you have to be able to write a good memoir, and having some interesting thing that you know a lot about does not make you a good memoirist. It may or may not make you a good person to write about that thing you know a lot about. But it does nothing whatever for your skills in memoir.

This reminds me of fabulists who put poetry in their novels. Sometimes there are people who really are good poets as well as fabulists. But mostly no. I include myself in this: I have an occasional clever turn of phrase and/or thought, and I have written silly poems on more than one occasion, but if I'm going to write a novel featuring Teh Gr34t3st Poet Evar, I will not show you their poems, because I? Am not the great poet ever. Nor can I play one on TV. So if you have a perfectly good book idea about subject X, making it a memoir about subject X should not be your automatic next step. Are we clear on this? Good.

Comments

[aet.livejournal.com]

The genre "X + Memoir" is annoying the crud out of me right now. I quit reading a library book about building YA collections for libraries because the author had mixed it with self-congratulatory, not-very-good memoir. And now I'm reading a book about India where the author has mistaken me for someone who cares about his childhood.

I wonder, is it that I find childhoods a bounding experience in general, or is it that I have simply better luck with the memoir genre (or I ask less? That is also possibility)

I liked very much the most recent ones read - "Out of Egypt" by Andre Aciman and "Apricots on the Nile" by Colette Rossant. And there was an Aciman quote that made me think of you:

“But there was another reason for my father's visceral aversion to hilba. He, like his mother, disliked all kinds of recognizable ethnic odors, thinking that the more Westernized a family, the more odorless its home, its clothes, its cooking.

It would never have occurred to either of them that all homes bear ethnic odors, and that anyone born in Alexandria would just as easily have sniffed out a Sephardi household like ours, with its residual odor of Parmesan, boiled artichokes, and borekas, as they themselves could recognize an Armenian kitchen by its unavoidable smell of cured pastrami, a Greek living room by the odor of myrrh, and Italians by the smell of fried onions and chamomille. Working class Italians smelled of fried peppers, and Greeks smelled of garlic and brilliantine, and, when they sweated, their underarms smelled of yogurt."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, and I don't know what books are available to you right now -- while the "we're going to call this X other genre but a third of it is memoir anyway" phenomenon is not brand-new, it seems to have gotten worse lately, and those may not be showing up in your libraries and bookstores yet if there's slow capillary action going over to Estonia.

Or you may indeed be finding memoir mixed into everything else and have better luck than I do. That's entirely possible.

[aet.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I HATE not being born American - I would so like to take it granted that I could rely on bookstores and libraries!

I seek Internet for reading material, so I find EXACTLY the same things as Americans can (just that I have to wait for month or so until I get what I found in real life).

And memoirs is not the only mixture thing - it seems also get harder to find plain mysteries, as usual there is a mix of mystery/chicklit; mystery/fantasy; mystery/romance and so on. It seems to be either some common development in getting more genre cocktails or there is just so much more material of that neither fish not meat kind that one wanders eventually into that ghetto no matter what one searches for initially(I have been up to my hip in cookbook-memories, but some of those are not at all recent releases ...)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is why "stitial arts" is listed in my interests: I like interstitial things sometimes, but sometimes I just want something that's smack in the middle of its genre.

(Of course, I tend to have different ideas of where the middle is than some people, but that's a separate problem.)

Thiz Po3t R teh Suxx0r!

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= Once upon a time I had a girlfriend who wrote poetry. We got into an argument over The Diary of Laura Palmer (or whatever the title was), a spinoff from the TV show Twin Peaks. The diary was full of bad poetry.

My girlfriend complained about the bad poetry. I thought it was entirely appropriate for the character. She was mad at me for thinking that. For all I know, she might've written a poem about it after we broke up.

Re: Thiz Po3t R teh Suxx0r!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, if your character writes bad poetry, by all means write bad poetry. But what happens a lot in fantasy novels -- especially the kind that sell well to the junior high set -- is that someone is unironically OMG THE BEST LYRICIST THE PLANET HAS EVER SEEN!!!!! And you read them and think, poor planet.

Re: Thiz Po3t R teh Suxx0r!

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Yeah, cause we never have people getting called that who don't deserve it.

Where's my Sneaky Uncle Walt icon?