mrissa | Entries tagged with full of theories

Those of you who have known me for a long time know that Christmas Eve Day used to be my special holiday with my dad. We would go out for lunch and people-watch and maybe buy a last stocking stuffer or two (but maybe not). The important part was that we would spend time together talking over the year we'd had and the year to come. My dad talked to me about his work from the time I was in the late single digits, and took me seriously when I talked about mine, so he made space from very early on for me to talk about what I was hoping to do in my writing and what I thought I had done. And it was very cool and very useful, and I miss Dad but also I miss this.

I am really, really resistant to anyone acting as Substitute Dad. (No, more resistant than that. Seriously.) But as I said to T when I was talking about this earlier this season, "I don't have special lunch with anybody else on Christmas Eve now...but I still have to eat lunch." And that analogy is kind of where I am with the stock-taking part: I'm not going to have a special lunch with one other person to do this stuff, but it's still really good for me from time to time to sit down and think about the big picture. From time to time.

Some friends were looking at doing prompts from year-end assessment projects, but when I looked at this, they were far more general life stuff than I wanted. I have no objection to taking stock of one's life! Sometimes a great idea! But it's not the same thing as looking at one's creative work in specific. The two definitely inform each other, it's just that the general-purpose "what travel plans do I have in 2023?" "who do I want to see more of in 2023?" questions feel like questions for a different time to me right now. Some of the cues for self-reflection and planning in a more general sense can be repurposed for a more focused one for creative work. But others just felt extraneous and beside the point.

This is all a work in progress. I'm not done with this yet, and some prompts worked better for me in this moment than others. But here's what I ended up with, in case it helps anyone else. I found that it works better for me to be as concrete and as specific in my answers as possible and to limit myself to things that I can do, not things other people might do or reactions other people might have. Here you go:
What do I trust in my work
What am I proud of in this year's work
Where do I want to be brave in next year's work
Where will I draw energy for next year's work
What will I love in next year's work
One big dream for my work next year [this is one where it's easy not to be concrete/specific, and useful to fight that urge]
What was fun this year
What kind of fun do I want to have next year
Best thing I discovered about my work
What I want to write (subcategories: poetry, nonfiction, fiction)
For each item on my project list: how do I feel about this project right now? What do I need in order to make progress on it? What do I need in order to make it feel really great?

I am sometimes extremely resistant to doing this. I have written two new short stories and two poems this week as acts of avoidance of doing this. That's no bad thing: now I have four new things I've written that I had not written last week. More of this may happen before I've finished the prompt list. That's okay. I'm patient, by which I mean I'm stubborn. And if this doesn't work, I'll try something different.

Yes, it's time for my year-in-review post! It's been a year full of discoveries and adventures, sometimes even in the good way. (We try to make it in the good way.) We've gotten to the point where poems are not an exception, they're just a thing I write now and going forward, and that's weird, but again, we try to make it weird in the good way. I notice a shift toward more science fiction and less fantasy, but that may be balanced out by the fantasy novella I'm revising at the moment. We'll see. Or it may not, that may just be where my head is right now. That's okay too.

I'm sorry to see Daily Science Fiction shutting its doors, as they have been a fun and interesting magazine for several years now. I love flash as a length that allows me to experiment and play with form, so less of it--even just one magazine less--is sad for me. On the other hand, I'm happy with the story I wrote that closed out my time with them. I have hopes of continuing to enjoy work with the other editors I worked with this year, and I have seven things already in the works for 2023 and beyond--a lovely feeling of continuity and possibility. Also I accidentally started a new story yesterday. Ope.

Short stories:
The Plasticity of Youth, Clarkesworld, February
An Age-Based Guide to Children's Chores, Daily SF, March
Family Network, Nature Futures, May
The Splinters of Our Bond, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May
Michigan Seems Like a Dream to Me Now, Daily SF, September
Out of the Red Lands, Analog, September
Bonus Footage, Asimov's, September
Merry Christmas from the Bremmers, Nature Futures, December

Poems:
Revelations of the Artificial Dryads, Not One of Us, January
Identity, Uncanny, September
Dante on the Metro, Mobius, November

Essays:
From Panic to Process: What Taking Criticism Actually Looks Like, Uncanny, May

Last week on Zoom, my dear friend John Wiswell (read his work! I recommend it!) asked me how I handle book recommendations, with the sheer amount of reading I do. With a data set that large, how do I approach the question? he wanted to know. And I've been thinking about how to articulate it ever since.

If you read here regularly, you know that I say at least a little bit about every book I finish. Every book. If I finish it, it gets mentioned in my book notes here twice a month. This started back in the early days of blogging--no seriously, we're talking more than twenty years ago at this point--when I was trying to post every day, which was the style at the time. And some of what I'm thinking about on any given day is the thing I'm reading, so that was going into my daily blog post. I found it useful to be able to look back and say, here's which book this was, here's how I felt about that, but daily blogging was no longer a thing I wanted to do, so I consolidated it. Later I started doing periodic and then year-end posts that were just lists of short stories that I have enjoyed.

With short stories, while I sometimes find things to say about them on twitter other than "this is good," the list just goes up as a list, rarely any commentary. And the thing is: they're short stories. They are not a commitment. Click on them, read a few lines, find out if you're interested! But also know they exist. Obscurity is the greatest enemy of short stories (poems too).

With novels...well, let's take a recent example that was an eARC so it got reviewed here in advance of the bimonthly book post. Brotherless Night, by V. V. Ganeshananthan. I used all sorts of positive language--"vivid," "humane," "nuanced." I said, "I loved this book so much." Do I recommend it to you? Well, sure. That is: I said things about it that should help make it clear whether I recommend it to you. Because there are very valid reasons not to choose to read a book about the Sri Lankan Civil War--one of our family member's family members on the other side of the family personally fled that conflict, for example, and if those people look at it and think, oh, I hope this is beautifully done, I hope it's a great book, and also I cannot take any more of this, I had too much of it in real life? Valid.

And of course there are less extreme reasons why a book might not be for you! At least one of you regular readers, for example, basically never likes children's books. Never. No picture books, no MG, no YA, she's tried it, she keeps trying again at least once a year that I see, she does not like children's books. I try to give enough information that major predictable categories like that will be clear--that she will not think, oh wow, humor and friendship and the lore of the Indian subcontinent, I definitely should pick up this Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality! And then be extremely disappointed for something that is not a flaw in either her or the book, just a mismatch.

So...this ends up leaving me feeling like I don't want to do "best books of YEAR" posts right now. I could do them with category markings ("best MG," "best poetry collection," sure), but most of how I want to talk about books--most of how I want to recommend books--is with a lot of context. And one of the things that does is make the line between "best" and "not really quite there" pretty blurry. So what I try to do instead is to bring things up in context--when somebody says they like historical fiction, for example, I will mention Brotherless Night. (Bullets can't stop me from mentioning Brotherless Night at this point.) I will talk about Andrea Barrett's recent collection and how she's done worldbuilding stuff in historical fiction that is almost analogous to a fantasy world but with actual history. I'll talk about my surprise at enjoying The Marriage Portrait as much as I did but that in the end I wanted it to go more places than it went--and I'll reply to what the other people are saying in that conversation, how they feel about historical speculative conceits in this context, how soon "history" starts in their tastes, all of it. I want recommendations to be a conversation, and there are very few contexts in which I don't want to have that conversation. "Ooh, I've thought of a book you might like" is one of my favorite sentences. Even if I don't, mostly, end up wanting to make a book list at the end of the year and draw a bright line through the murk. I like the murk, is the thing. Having thoughts instead of ratings is another of my favorite things.

New essay today in Uncanny! The Precarious Now is about the trials and tribulations of writing near-future SF or contemporary fantasy in a time of rapid social change.

...trials and tribulations, but also practical solutions, I hope. Because on some level we all know this planet keeps on tilting swiftly, the question is what we're going to do in the meantime.

New essay out today! Uncanny has published The Roots of Hope: Toward an Optimistic Near-Future SF in a Pandemic.

I'm trying to practice what I preach in the above with the story I'm working on. I don't think that optimistic near-future SF is the only thing that's valuable right now, but I think it's a thing that's valuable right now, if you can manage it. So I'm trying to manage it. And the above essay is a practical look at how.

The other major question(s) my friend had about revision was: how do you know what needs to be done? And how do you know when you're done?

Okay, so: what you're doing, in general, as a writer, is: you're cultivating taste. You're cultivating your taste. I don't mean that you're shaping your taste to an external standard of The Canon, although you can do that if you like. I mean you're figuring out what it is that you like and how it's achieved in practice.

You can skew your taste a particular direction--Hugo nominees, say, or stories published in a particular magazine. But you pay attention to what you're reading, what you like about it, what you notice about it and don't notice. You look at sentences, paragraphs, chapters, sections, books, series; poems, short stories, novels, travelogues, articles, all of it. You see what grates on you, what makes you wander off, what compels you. What do you like. And how does it go.

So then when you're looking at your own manuscript, where are the things where it doesn't. The things that you don't like, the things that make you go: ugh that is the third time that one word in this paragraph and not for comic effect, or: wait, have we heard that that's the case? is this a good time for that reveal or is it catching us off guard in a bad way? or...dozens of other things. Larger things too, things that are more particular to you, revelations you wanted the reader to have that didn't come through, elements that you wanted to include that fizzled and need to come out. Ways that the thing you wanted to write and the thing that you wrote have not lined up. Ways that you have changed your plan since you started and the traces of the old plan are still there. Ways that you have learned to see what is good and this is not it yet.

You can make lists if you want, if you feel like that will help. Other people have certainly made them for you, around the internet, things that are good to look for in a manuscript. If you like particular elements--if those are things you want to do--but you only notice them about stuff you've read later, in conversation when a friend points them out, those might be good to check for on a conscious level rather than expecting to notice them in your own work as you read. But they also might be good to just...have a friend who notices those things read for. It's totally okay to have someone else flag things in a revision for you. You don't have to be good at finding everything to revise yourself.

You also don't have to do everything a friend flags for you. Right now I'm having a long, involved conversation with a friend about their manuscript, and the result may well be that they leave the major element we're talking about exactly as-is. They may do acres of rewriting. I don't know. I don't even have to know. Because being a first reader, beta reader, even a sensitivity reader, whatever terminology you use...it's not about my ego, it's not about seeing my vision realized, it's about helping my friend with their revisions in their project. Which is, we have both noticed, not my project.

So: how do I know when I'm done? When I've done the stuff that needs doing. That sounds circular, but for me, setting a limit on each round is a good thing. You can always find something more to change--always. Ideally you will keep growing as a person and as a writer. The goal is not to be perpetually revising the same manuscript for the next fifty years. The goal is to make this manuscript as good as you can make it right now, for some value of now.

So for me, I do multiple rounds of "right now." I write the thing, I let it sit a minute. Then I read it through and revise it into coherence and send it off to first reader(s). Then I think about what they said and do those revisions. Then I either send it to editors if it's short or to my agent if it's long.

For long pieces, my agent has revisions, and we talk those through and think about them and I do them, sometimes in multiple drafts, until it's ready to go out. And then we rejoin the same stream as with short pieces: editors have it, they ideally want to publish it, they ask for revisions, I revise it, it gets published, I see all the things my current self could do better.

But I cannot do them better. Because "published" and "public" are from the same place. Published means that it is no longer mine, it is also partly yours. Published means that I am still responsible for the work but free of the burden of improvement. Published means that anything that is wrong with it aside from the part on page 7 where the protagonist's name is misspelled is going to stay wrong with it, and I might say, "I would not do it that way now, I don't think that now," but that is what that story says, even if it is not what I say, now, today. I do not say "Dramma," either, I say, "Grandma," even though 40 years ago I was saying "Dramma." People keep growing. You have to let yourself keep growing. You have to say, yes, that is what I said then, I did the best I could with what I had then, now I am doing something different.

Revision is a writer's best friend. It allows us to be better than our first impulse, and yet to retain that first impulse when it's the best thing available. But like any best friend, it's a better friendship when there are clear boundaries. That doesn't have to be my particular process. It may end up with several through passes I haven't listed for the sake of streamlining, in my own case--"I revise it into coherence" may mean "I have to read it through again to make sure that x element got woven through and then again for this or that other thing." The first chapter is going to get rewritten at least twice, I guarantee it, not because I feel like that ought to happen, but because it always seems to need it. But the question can never be "if I read through it again, would I find commas to rearrange," because the answer will be yes, you will, you always will. And when you're at the point of rearranging the deck chairs, er, the commas, onward, onward, go write something else.

One of my friends has heard me mentioning that I'm revising various things, over the last year, and asked me to talk about my process a little more here. So I'm going to do that, probably in more than one blog post. Here's where I want to start:

This is not advice. This is talking about what I do. Most advice is actually that anyway; most advice is just talking about finding your own characteristic problems and how to fix them. So if you read advice that says, "make a list of your overused words and do a search on them before you turn in the final draft," what that's actually saying is, "I, this particular author, find that I overuse certain words and don't tend to catch them other ways, so here's one way I've found to do it."

I do that. I absolutely do that. I keep a list of bland and overused words, and I add to it when I notice a new one. One of the words on my list? "thing." Because "something," "nothing," "anything," and "thing" can often all be replaced by more vivid ways of saying that...uh...thing.

But the other thing people are doing when they give advice--on revision or on whatever else--is working around their own characteristic aversions. So when you see advice that says, "Print out your manuscript and highlight each sentence in a color that says what it's doing: pink for setting, yellow for dialog...," what you know is: that author has not burned their manuscript, fled screaming, and stopped along the way to file paperwork changing their name and pasting on a false mustache (or possibly shaving off their previous true mustache) on the way to leaving the state.

Which I would, I absolutely would. If I need to change the balance of elements in scenes, I need to do it in some other way than that, because highlighting scenes in that way will make me hate the entire story and also just plain not do it. Anything that makes you not do the work is the wrong tool, even if it helps someone else do the work beautifully. There is no objectively universally right tool, there is just something that gets the work done, or else not.

Lists are great for me. Other people do not work well with lists. I know this from observation. I can't explain it, but I accept it, because insisting that other people's brains work like my brain is silly. So. Lists. What kind of lists. I mentioned the overused words one.

Well, here's where the project notebook comes in: when I know that a chapter needs something revised into it, I will put that further down the page in a different color of ink than the plot notes for that chapter, with a checkbox next to it, to be checked off when I get it done. Do the ink colors have meaning? Not for me, no; they mean "I can see that this is a different thing than the thing above it." So if I happened to outline the book in L'Amant, which is a deep and lovely purple, revision notes can be in any shade of red or green or blue I happen to have on hand. (I mostly don't work in orange or yellow.) Because then I can spot them as "not done yet." And subsequent revision notes should probably go in another color--if the first round was Ink of Naotora (spoiler: it was), that's a deep red, and the next round should be something else so it jumps out on the page and I can flip through the pages and quickly check which chapters have a revision note on them that hasn't been checked off.

Then there's the list at the end of the notebook of things that I know I want to do but I don't know where yet, or things that need to be threaded throughout. These things, like "bring up more botanical mentions" or "protag defensiveness about town size" are going to take longer to check off the list, and the way that I do those revisions will be structured differently than adding a particular plot mention in Chapter 7. But either way, I have the lists, I can look at the lists, I don't have to keep track of it all because there are lists and I know where the lists are. I have the lists, and I have the actual scribbled on line-edit pages. So that's what I have for keeping track of revisions. Will that work for you? I don't know, my friend might have meant to ask what will work for her but she actually asked what I do, and that's what I actually know.

And I do have more to say on how I do revisions, and lo, I was right, that'll be another post!

One of the things I often think about advice is that it usually reflects the advice-giver's needs rather than being some kind of universal law. "Don't smack yourself in the face with a frying pan," okay, sure, but once you leave that realm, you'll run into "definitely write every day because you need the momentum" and "definitely don't write every day because you need to take breaks," and...those two things are advice designed for different people who have opposite problems. And the milder versions, "momentum is valuable" and "rest is valuable" are both true.

So I've been thinking about another pair of aphorisms in tension. And they are "it's a poor crafter who blames their tools" and "get the right tool for the job." I think this is a case where both are true and it's a matter of finding the balance and figuring out where you are on the spectrum of "how true is this at the moment, how much does this apply to me right now."

Example: for Christmas in 2018 I got a traveler's notebook. And that has been astonishingly helpful for my productivity. I was productive before, no one who lives outside my skull could deny it. And yet this: this is staggeringly useful. This is a thing that helps me be both more productive and more relaxed about it. What is this magic. It is an amazing tool for me. It is objectively much, much better than its absence. Was it worth spending the money? Oh God yes. (It was not my money, it was a gift. But if it had been? STILL YES.

Now: if my productivity device had been an extremely fancy laptop instead of a traveler's notebook, this math would be somewhat different. Or if I was finding productivity leaps from a different system every month. Because then you start asking: are these genuine productivity leaps? But I think we're culturally skewed toward Puritanism in some ways. We're skewed toward sit down, shut up, you can't possibly benefit from the thing, do not ask for anything.

Except...hammering with a hammer is better and more efficient and safer than hammering with the handle of a screwdriver. You can hurt yourself doing that. There's a reason professionals use a hammer. No one is going to hurt themselves trying to write in a spiral notebook from Walgreen's instead of a nice traveler's notebook, but it's entirely 100% possible that they might not get as much written. I myself have written on basically anything, computer, paper, whatever. The back of junk mail. Just to prove to myself that I can, that I don't need a special system, that if I'm in a random location with scrap paper I can still write. I still do that now, so that I don't get too precious about having to have things exactly right. Buuuut having things that I like is actually great and it is totally okay if you want things that you like too.

And the difference between, for example, really good artist-grade colored pencils and the bottom of the barrel cheapest colored pencils is staggering. You literally can make immensely better art with the good pencils. That's not being "precious," that's not being spoiled or demanding or a snob, that's...there is a difference in the quality of what comes out.

I suspect that nobody reading this has infinite choice. I suspect that I have not attracted any billionaires to be regular blog readers. (If so, hi! I have a whole list of artists you could patronize, billionaire reader!) So it's a matter of balance, balance, balance, as in so many things. I just...feel like there's a certain amount of cultural default that if you purchase organizational tools to make things easier, you're being self-indulgent and you don't really need them, and I want to push back on that. Sometimes the right tool that fits your hand is amazing, and you can do better work with it. Hurray for finding those moments. Let's celebrate them when we can. Even when they seem random and weird from the outside.

I want to be clear that I am not saying that Patreon and similar social supports are bad in any way. I support several! I think they're good! I ponder having one myself! In fact, writing this post reminded me to go subscribe to another! What I want to noodle with in this blog post is: I think that since they're fairly new, we don't have an entirely good handle on the social intricacies of them, as a community. Certainly I don't! And I would like to talk more about them. Please, please use the comments to do that if you also have thoughts, if you think I'm wrong or missing things, etc.! If you have good answers, I would like to hear them!

So. I can see three main reasons to support a Patreon (or similar, I'm going to shorthand it to Patreon). Project support: you like the specific thing that the person is doing on their Patreon and want to get the installments of it. Art support: you like the work they're doing in general, and you want to see that work continue whether the specific updates/installments are your cuppa. Personal support: you think that the person is worth supporting whether they're doing specific work at this exact moment--for hope of future cool work, in appreciation of past work, because this is an easy way for you to slip a personal friend a few bucks even though you think their art is kind of meh, "other."

I don't think that it's necessarily clear to the person who has the Patreon what proportion of each of those things their supporters has in mind with their support. I mean, there are some accounts that have monthly support and are not providing updates/installments of any kind of backer reward, so they're pretty sure that you're not there for the project support! But in general I don't think feedback is very clear on which things you're there for. It also may not be very internally clear to you. Also! Also your proportions of type of support can shift over time. Friend doing a cool project can stop that project and start a new project you're less enthusiastic about...but still you believe in Friend's work. Or Friend can hit one of life's road bumps, but you believe that they'll get back on track and in the meantime you're happy to support. Or! Friend was in one of life's road bumps and you were supporting, but now they're doing something specifically awesome!

So into this set of inputs comes several social problems. There is the Bored Now Problem. If you have a friend whose traditionally published books you were buying, and you get bored with them, a traditional publisher will not give them an itemized list of who has and has not bought them--but they will definitely see if you've dropped their Patreon. Do we have to follow indefinitely if we were mostly on a Project support basis and that is no longer interesting? Is the protocol to politely not notice who has dropped you? Is any feedback possible there, or do they just have to guess why people would have dropped? Can they ask, if they notice a specific or a general downturn in support? If they do ask, will they get honest answers?

Then there's the Lurkers Support Me In Email With $5/Month Problem: if the person has started doing mildly odious things, when is that worth withdrawing your financial support? if you know they really rely on backers? if they're more than mildly odious, deeply odious? does the answer change based on how much of your Patreon backing is skewed toward each of the categories? Do you tell the person why you're not supporting them any more or just back away quietly? Does the answer change based on how much you've had a relationship vs. how much you've been an anonymous fan?

There is the What Did I Incentivize Problem, and I think of that a lot when I think about setting up a Patreon. I write flash fairly quickly. I could easily set up a flash-a-month Patreon. Do I want to make sure that I write at least one flash a month, every month? and that I prioritize them for a Patreon rather than for a professional market I would currently send them to? I already think about this for things like blog projects. I think about it when I consider pitching essays--I love essays, but I pitch fewer of them than I could, because I don't want to get into a position where I'm resenting essays for taking time away from fiction that I value more. I want to be doing the amount of them that I value.

I guess I am currently concerned that a lot of people right now are in a place where they really really need the money from their Patreon and they cannot tell how important the specific project is to their patrons giving them that money. The feedback mechanisms are slow and have a lot of social awkwardness built into them. So there's a lot of early-project feedback, sort of: "would you support me beginning a Patreon that was set up like so"--but this is basically never set up with a control group so that the artist can see what another group would support if it was set up differently. They can see what people did support and what they didn't stop supporting but not where the priorities are.

There's a lot of inertia in that system. And I feel like some of the people who most need the impetus to level up in what they're doing also most need the money they're getting from Patreon. Now...would they be getting impetus to level up from not getting paid? Quite often no. Quite often having zero dollars a month from their art/projects would be giving them impetus to do something far worse for their art/projects with their time, like...not art at all.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is: for people who are setting up something like this, how do you build in checks and balances so that you don't set it up with a feedback loop to reinforce the wrong thing? Do you set up a regular check-in with yourself to see how you feel about the balance of stuff that you're doing? Is there any way to have trusted patrons you can ask? How do you manage emotions around who does and does not support your Patreon (knowing that people honestly may have trouble keeping track of who even has one and what they're doing with it)?

And on the flip side, as a patron of these things, how do you know when and how to extricate gracefully? What are the protocols for what feedback you can give kindly? Even--especially--if that feedback is, "Y'know, this stuff is great and all, but I would still support your Patreon at this level if you were doing way less, so you can maybe relax a little"?

I've published short fiction with Tor.com before, but this is my first essay with them!

Beyond Cinderella: Exploring Agency Through Domestic Fantasy. Go, read, enjoy!

Arkady Martine, Django Wexler, John Chu, and I had so much fun teaching the workshop at 4th St. Fantasy convention last year that we're doing it again this year...but with a twist! This year's theme is "Getting Unstuck." Participants in the workshop should submit pieces they're stuck on--not outlines but some prose written--and we'll use tactics both usual and zany to get through the block. We'll work on identifying patterns that contribute to getting stuck as well as ways out.

The deadline for signing up for the workshop is May 20, but it's first-come first-served--AND convention membership rates go up on March 1--so now is a great time to sign up!

Recently I was a guest on the Breaking the Glass Slipper podcast. BtGS is a feminist SFF podcast that wanted to do more episodes on intersectional issues, so we talked about disability representation in SFF. You can give it a listen here!

(I will confess that I am terrible at listening to podcasts myself, but it can be so much fun to be on them--one gets into good conversations. So we'll see if I can't get better at this.)

Last week I finished watching Season 2 of The Good Fight on CBS Some Access (that's not what they call it, but...welp). I really loved the show from which it's a spin-off, The Good Wife, and they kept some of my favorite characters and added a few new characters I like a lot. All the things that frustrated me most about the original show were gone, plus they had kept the rich and extensive universe of characters going. Yet I found watching this season a slog--I was going downstairs to watch it with my workout with a little distaste rather than a lot of excitement--so I had to think about why.

The Good Wife had fictional court cases inspired by real ones in recent headlines, starting from the first season. That wasn't new. But The Good Fight doubled down on the contemporary references. It is a show that is entirely about American politics in 2018. There's a lot that's directly about Donald Trump and his effects on local and state level politics. There are also plotlines that are less inspired by and more copies of current events in other areas. Even plotlines that are supposedly about the characters' love lives are often also about the fate of protesters or how candidates are presented in modern elections.

I sympathize. I do. There's a lot out there, and sometimes just screaming into your pillow is not enough. Sometimes you really want to scream something in words, that someone else can hear. Words like, "What is even going on," and, "I am not okay with any of this." I get it. But I think that there's a paradoxical effect where the closer you get to an actual nonfiction commentary without being one, the harder it is to take.

I think the people who wrote M*A*S*H are a great counterexample here. M*A*S*H is set during the Korean War, but even a cursory glance tells you it wasn't about the Korean War. It was about the Vietnam War. Not only does the quagmire timeline not make sense for the US's presence in Korea, none of the characters' backstories do either. Anyone over the age of 22--so all of the main characters except Radar and maybe Klinger--but probably just Radar--should have WWII experience if they're regular Army. If they're not, they should still have the perspective that came of having their country in an all-out world war within the last decade. But they don't seem to. What they do have, eventually, is Colonel Potter, the old-timer with world war experience that he's always hearkening back to--but not recent experience, of course. This makes no literal sense, but it makes complete emotional sense when you consider that the show is really about the US troops in Vietnam instead.

Why bother? Why use one war to comment on another? Why remove your characters that far? If they wanted to talk about current events, why didn't they? For me, one of the answers is: it can get overwhelming. Dealing with news stories and then having your fictional entertainment copy those same news stories exactly: it's too much of one thing. Which is bad enough when that one thing is chocolate peanut butter ice cream, far worse when it's a specific corruption charge.

Another answer is broader thinking. One particular policy discussion can start to fall into "denounce this one thing, this one thing is bad." In real life, that can be necessary! But art gives us the chance to look for patterns. To ask, what kind of thing is this, where have I seen it before, where might I see it again, would it still be bad in those contexts too or is there something specific to this one. What are my actual principles here, when removed from the immediacy of people I already know I trust or distrust? How would I react to a situation like this one if there were a few things different? and what does that tell me about this situation?

Of course my bias is toward indirect comment because I'm a science fiction writer. M*A*S*H may have been the first Vietnam War commentary I encountered, in reruns my parents watched while they were making supper, but The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is also pretty influential in my line of work. Haldeman is a Vietnam vet who had things to say--and he used the depth of hundreds of years to say them. Haldeman also wrote War Year and 1968, both of which are non-genre novels inspired by his experiences--both of which are very different from The Forever War. Indirection and shift of perspective give you different art, even when it's coming from the same person.

I'm not giving up on The Good Fight. I hope that it manages to find its footing and a place to stand where it can create commentary that stretches beyond the current moment, that gives us a lens that allows us to look into that moment without damaging our eyes with the intensity. But my preference as a reader and as a writer is going to continue to be work that tries to find a different angle for perspective and illumination.

I leave this evening for Copenhagen. Among other things while I'm getting ready to go, here's my latest essay in Uncanny Magazine, https://uncannymagazine.com/article/the-seduction-of-numbers-the-measures-of-progress/ --"The Seduction of Numbers, the Measures of Progress." Go, read, enjoy!

There are two standard cultural narratives about being unexpectedly deprived of internet, at this point in our relationship with that piece of technology. I bet you'll recognize them both.

The first one goes: I didn't realize how much I was missing by looking at the internet until we had an outage and then I stopped and smelled the daisies and talked to my family and my life was so much richer and I resolve to do without the internet loads of times going forward yay. The second: I didn't realize how dependent I was on the internet until we had an outage, and then I was frustrated and agitated and could not cope and oh golly I guess I have a real problem here and I resolve to do without the internet loads of times going forward yay.

You can see why these are stories, I guess, because "I already knew this thing and lo here it is" is not much of a story. Except when it goes against the standard cultural narrative, in which case sometimes maybe it is.

We had a long internet outage yesterday morning, and it completely disrupted my morning routine. Usually I read social sites and news of various types while I'm reading my breakfast in the morning, and I use streaming video to watch something during my workout. Yesterday I checked my phone to make sure there was nothing urgent, read the newspaper with my breakfast (instead of with my lunch as usual), and watched video on DVD with my workout. In short, I coped just fine, there was no failure of cope, there was not even a moment where I wailed, "But what will I do?" But it was an annoyance, and I feel fine about that because I have considered how I use the internet in my morning routine and am happy with it. The internet is a tool, I'm happy with what I use it as a tool for, there does not need to be a ritual chanting of "fie upon you, get away foul internet."

I have also said several times recently that I want to improve my relationship with doughnuts. Specifically, I currently eat a doughnut between zero times a year and twice, and I feel that three or even four doughnuts in the course of a year would be superior. People are making lots of fancy gourmet doughnuts these days, and I feel that trying a few more of them on rare occasions would improve my life in a tiny but measurable way. I do not have to participate in ritual decrying of doughnuts as bad for me. Of course they would be bad for me if I was eating tons of them all the time. But I think that my current doughnut count is actually slightly low. As a sometimes food, sometimes could come around more often. Not a lot. Just a little.

So...I think it's worth noticing, when the shape of the narrative isn't fitting. I think it's worth noticing when the story doesn't do what it's supposed to do. I get on the internet in the morning, I check in with my friends, I read a bit, and I'm good with that. I'm happy with my tools. I hope you can be happy with yours too.

I'm teaching the critique workshop at Fourth Street later this month--it's June oh good gracious it is June--and there are all sorts of things that we are just not going to have the chance to talk about, since we're only doing a little bit of panel discussion and a lot of critiquing. I watched a movie about an improv group, Don't Think Twice, that made me think of a topic that is certainly outside the scope of that panel discussion, so here we are! I really liked the movie, and I recommend it to people who are in creative pursuits, especially people who are in creative relationships.

The thing that they can't really fit into a well-composed movie of about 90 minutes--and oh gosh I am glad they kept it to that rather than letting it sprawl--was...well. I feel like, especially early on, especially the first time you get a well-functioning creative group, whether it's improv or a band or a writing critique group or what. Even if it's a group of two. I feel like there is a certain sense that you will never have something like this again. That it must be preserved at, if not all costs, certainly very, very substantial costs, because it is your only chance at such a creative synergy.

And...it is. And also it's not.

A well-functioning creative relationship is worth working at. It's worth preserving. Definitely not to be thrown away at a whim. And when you look back at someone's life as a whole, there are clearly creative partnerships, working relationships, in which they functioned like no other time. People and dynamics that were better for their work than any others, that turned out to be irreplaceable.

But.

You can't tell in advance which ones those will be, necessarily, and which ones will just be really intense for the person in them and kind of useless for the work. You can't tell which will be lead-ups to something even better, even more fulfilling and interesting.

Which is not an excuse to treat other humans badly. I mention this because of the opposite: it is a reason not to be treated badly yourself, not to stand by and watch while someone is treated badly, on the theory that the creative relationship is indispensable. It's even a reason to pay attention to whether the work that was wondrous and irreplaceable a few years ago is still going that way. Because "this isn't working well for me" is enough reason not to keep critiquing together, not to keep performing together, whatever it is you're doing. It's not trivial to find people to work with. Sometimes it's not even possible. But that doesn't mean that the person or people you're working badly with now have to be clung to and endured no matter the cost to yourself or others.

So how do you evaluate? Well, I don't honestly know for other creative relationships. But for writing critiques, there are several things: Do you still want to work with the person/people? Are you looking forward to their feedback, do you think it will be interesting? If you had to choose someone to work with now, would you choose this person/group? Do you think you know in advance what they're going to say about everything you do, and if you think that, are you right? Do you find yourself unproductively annoyed or frustrated by more of their feedback than not? (Sometimes useful feedback can be annoying on the way in, and it's up to you how much of that you're up for. But unproductive annoyance is another matter.)

One of the tricky ones: if these things are true, how enmeshed in a group situation is the person? How possibly would it be to get yourself out, and how worthwhile? Sitting through "I think you should describe the living room in excruciating detail on the first page" is annoying; being in a crit group with someone you know to be a bigot is far worse. Disagreeing with someone persistently about what a story should do is bad; being in a group where someone is allowed to treat you with contempt while the rest of the group doesn't seem to mind it is in a different category of bad. Sometimes it's worth enduring a group where the fit has gone slightly awry if it's mostly still a good group. But there have to be limits, and some part of you will know where they are.

"This isn't working for me" needs to be a fine thing to say in critique relationships. "I just don't have the time to dedicate to this group that I used to/that I feel it deserves/etc.": an entirely valid reason not to do it. A lot of times writing groups just quietly reach a natural end date even if they're working well when they do meet, because the rhythm of people's work isn't conducive to the rhythm of the group. But if you don't want to get feedback from people on your work, you do not have to. Even if it's otherwise working fine. Even if "everyone else" seems happy with the status quo.

Especially if you went for long stretches of your life without anybody caring about your creative work, it can be really hard to let go of the people who first do that. And sometimes you get really lucky and meet someone in high school or college or in your first workshop--even if your first workshop is in your middle age--whose feedback you'll value for the rest of your lives. Sometimes someone who was awesome when you were both twenty will still be awesome when you're both sixty. It's sad when this turns out not to be the case, but it doesn't necessarily reflect on you. Sometimes it doesn't reflect on either of you and you're both still awesome, you're just not the right people to critique each other's work any more.

Sometimes this means taking a leap. It means striking out without a new crit buddy, a new group, a new situation that you understand. Sometimes it's really useful to identify why something isn't working (wrong genre? wrong category? wrong life assumptions? wrong schedule?) in order to get at something else that might. It's worth iterating. But always, it's worth knowing that there is no last chance for as long as we're alive. Be kind, be thoughtful, but also be clear that there are many forms and types of critique relationship available, and you don't have to endure indefinitely in one that isn't working for you.

I made a jokey tweet (...that is entirely true) about my lack of high/low culture divide. (Specifically: "I think you would be alarmed if you knew how often, "Sir Mix-a-Lot's identical twin brother does not like big butts, and cannot tell the truth," is my IMMEDIATE response to philosophical conundrums and logic puzzles. My high/low culture separation is nonexistent, basically.") And some stranger came along and said, "And yet weirdly, you say that almost in a tone of self criticism, as if it were a /bad/ thing. :)" So first of all: good use of emoji to indicate tone in a medium not well-suited for that, stranger, well-done, I get that you are being extra-friendly.

And generally, I am in favor of this trait of mine. I don't think it's a bad thing. I don't only select friends for it...but it's strongly, strongly correlated with the people I'm closest to. The last person I talked to about Debussy, for example, is also the person who got "Hooked on a Feeling" in my head for the last 48 hours and counting (...THANKS). Another dear friend inspired me to write her a story because she loves classic space stories and mid-twentieth century British literary fiction, so I got the peanut butter and the chocolate together for her, since I like them too. It's just...an ease of conversation thing, an approach that makes it easier not to have to signal conversational turns because we're all up in those things together. But here's what I mean about signaling conversational turns when I haven't figured out whether someone shares that trait yet:

There's the problem of someone thinking that a low culture reference in what they intended to have as a serious conversation is automatically a joke. Example: someone wants to talk about writers who handle family relationships well or interestingly. They bring up A.S. Byatt and we talk about her works for some time. Great. If they think I'm changing the subject or not taking them seriously if I mention Lois McMaster Bujold (long series space opera), Fonda Lee (kung fu movie-influenced fantasy), or Hilary McKay (children's), that's not going to work, conversationally. It's not going to help. I know that some of my friends who focus on genre get immediately indignant, defensive, and declare that people who have that reaction are being jerks. But I think they don't necessarily mean to, they just...are trying to work from context they don't have.

Here's my example: when I was in my mid-teens, I had a cousin I loved very much, and she loved me very much, and I noticed she was laughing at pretty much everything I said. Not, like, hearty deep laughter. But polite laughter, baffled laughter. And I realized that we had diverged enough that she was trying to figure out what on earth I was saying, what would make me say the things I said, and the only thing she could think of was: she would never say any of those things except as some kind of weird joke maybe? And it was polite to laugh at people's jokes? Therefore hahaha, OUT OF KINDNESS AND CONSIDERATION. So sometimes people are not trying to be jerks about breadth of artwork included in a discussion, they're trying to get the context for what you are signaling. It's a pitfall, not a conversation-ender, if you can manage to signal clearly that, no, you are still talking about the same thing they're talking about. Communication can be achieved here. It just sometimes takes work.

The other end of the spectrum comes when people have past bad experiences with people trying to one-up and show off with how superior their tastes are. This is a crappy thing to do to people, but pretending no one ever does it won't make it go away. So...if someone is trying to have a fun conversation about stuff they like, and you are trying to have a fun conversation about stuff you like, the trap comes in when they have been conditioned to read your fun as a dominance game over them, a way to show off how much better you are than them. And it's useful to try to listen to the other person's reactions carefully, to figure out when they're being ignorantly dismissive for fun and when they're protecting a bruise, where they've been smacked a bit before. (Sometimes, sadly, even literally.)

So yah: it's easy to just dismiss the line between high and low culture, to look at some of the fruitful and amazing art that comes from ignoring or even gleefully trampling it. To say, nope, we want none of those divisions here. I'm on board. And every few years someone writes a manifesto about doing just that, as though nobody who came before them ever did, instead of practically everybody. But...if we can ever leap to "maybe this person's context is different and it's worth trying a little more communication to be sure" instead of "JERKS!"...if we can think of communication pitfalls instead of insurmountable problems...that seems worthwhile to me, when I can make it work.

The hopepunk panel at ConFusion was mostly not about the -punk part at all, but Nisi Shawl's punk past weighed in for a moment, when she talked about doing it all with three chords if that many, not with complex technique, just jumping in and bashing out a song on feeling and momentum.

And I thought...wait...but...

That's not cyberpunk at all.

In a lot of ways the cyberpunk movement and the subsequent -punk movements have meandered around how much they are or aren't living up to punk's rebelliousness, sticking it to the man, going against the establishment, corporatism, whatever else they have identified as punk roots.

But musically. Let's be honest. Three-chords-if-that? Is not an accurate parallel to what cyberpunk was doing. Or any of its heirs.

Do you think they'll get offended if I call them cyberprog? Steamprog?

Can I write some solarprog? Like solarpunk but with lots of obscure chord structure and orchestration?

Should I go back to twitter now? Okay.

I've read two blog posts by friends about exiting Campbell eligibility, about timing of publishing and keeping work in the public eye and feeling good about professional development personally even when it comes out in weird chunks. One is by Arkady Martine and the other by Jordan Kurella, and I am simultaneously happy and not at all surprised to see them focusing on the important parts, on where they are as writers and where their upcoming work will be, and not on specific awards eligibility.

Obviously I'm not in the same place; Campbell eligibility is more than a decade in the rearview for me. But the way that how work is going and what the public sees do not correlate is something that I've had to adjust to. Sometimes I can write up a storm and no one gets to read it for ages. Sometimes I'm struggling, flailing, thrashing around, and people keep smiling and telling me how great things are going for me right now, because what they're seeing is the result of a really great time.

That's how it goes. And I get grateful that I got exposed to Bull Durham early, because I get Annie Savoy's voice in my head saying, "It's a long season, and you gotta trust it." Well. Well, yeah. This is what I do. I was raised in the church of baseball, but I'm not its acolyte. I'm a writer. When I keep having story after story coming out, or when nothing comes out for ages but I'm writing like gangbusters--it's hard to smooth it out perfectly, it's hard to make it all perfectly even. A year is not the right scale for that, a year is too short. And that's okay.

So when the end of the year rolls around, I'll have some stories to link to, and I'll be able to talk about what I did, and the two won't really be the same. And again next year, the two won't really be the same. That's the nature of the beast. Being able to point to something and say, look, that's what I did, that, yes, isn't it shiny, I did something, me, and that's what it is: that's satisfying. But it's even more satisfying to know that it's the right something, long-term.

It's a long season, and you gotta trust it. Yep.

One of my friends has gone through a deeply unpleasant divorce and continues to struggle with custody, and an unfortunate thing that I keep observing is that it's almost impossible to write civil law around people whose main interest is making other people miserable. Almost every piece of family law assumes that people will act in their own interest or, if they are parents, ideally at least somewhat in their child's interest. Structuring a law that will protect the vulnerable and allow for people in the structurally identical role who are purely destructive forces to not act destructively is incredibly difficult.

Which, given what I do for work, makes me think of dystopias. And specifically it makes me think of what I do and do not find interesting in structuring them.

There's a certain school of writing, of teaching writing, that claims that we're all the hero of our own story, and sure, I buy that, but that doesn't mean that we're all heroes with great or even good motivations--even internally. Not all of us even bother to lie to ourselves about our motivations. There are people in the world like my friend's ex who will be very up-front about their desire to hurt. They are, however--and let me be very clear about this--quite boring. They are boring in real life. They are not particularly more interesting in books.

So if you choose them as your core dystopian power structure--if the heart of your dystopia is that some genuinely mean jerks have come to power, not because of an ideology or a clear set of concrete goals beyond themselves but just to screw with people in ways that aren't even all that effective compared to what they could do if they were more rational--well. I can't tell you that never happens, can I. But for me--for me personally as a reader--the fact that it's real doesn't give it a lot to grab onto. Especially if there's a speculative element to the meanness.

Here's where "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" contrasts for me with N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season--where they're not doing the same thing and not trying to. The children in torment in the former are in torment for the sake of the point being made. (Perhaps that point is walking away from utopia in fiction writing. There are worse points, if so.) But it is not, I think, intended to be practical; it is metaphorical, poetic, nonlinear. You are not supposed to be able to draw a line between the single child's suffering--and the next one when it dies, and the next--and what, exactly, about that suffering makes Omelas a supposed paradise. It Just Does. In The Fifth Season, on the other hand, it is very explicit, very extremely clear, how the suffering creates--not a paradise--but a livable society--what the consequences would be for ending it. What is being purchased and at what price.

There is value in making a general, stirring point, in rallying people to the cause of Goodness And Truth In The Larger Sense. But it's also pretty easy. Not...not as easy as we would have hoped, is it? "How do you feel about Nazis?" is supposed to be the canonical easy question: I AM AGAINST THEM. Still. Still, even with people failing easy mode, this is easy mode. Pushing a bit harder on people, handing them a decision that's made for heartbreaking reasons instead of dreadful ones, giving them characters who are trying to figure out where their compromises become counterproductive instead of characters who never had any morals to compromise...that's not the only reason to write dystopia. But it's a pretty solid one.

Last week one of my friends was saying on Twitter that he wants more of basically everything, more variations at every scale, so that there are more chances for it to lead to something cool, and I'm with him on that. And I think this is where the mechanism of Omelas comes in: I, personally, tend to default to thinking that it matters how and why your dystopia exists and is maintained. I tend to think that's relevant to its stories and its downfall--on average. But there are going to be times when you have a particular story that is just not accounted for in the laws of people behaving according to their own interests. Or when that just can't show up in the story, when the story is very short or very distracted into something else quite specific. It's worth asking yourself about the mechanism of Omelas--you can wind up with a geologic masterwork like The Fifth Season. But occasionally the answer to that question is nope, nope we're not answering the mechanism, the thing I'm doing is worth doing without poking at how. And that's okay too. Some people will--yes, sorry--walk away from it. But--variety, more, more. Humanity is impossible to account for under one set of "I'd like to see more of" or "I really prefer it when." So is its fiction.

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Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

The stories are made up, but the problems are real.

Entries tagged with full of theories

Taking stock: the writer version

2022: What I've Been Up To

On Recommendations

Yep. Still precarious.

Go ahead and mess with Mr. In-Beween though

Revision: what and when

Revision: some first thoughts

Important tools

Ramblings around Patreon social dynamics

Beyond Cinderella

We're getting the band back together!

Breaking the Glass Slipper guest

Indirection and the Horrors of the Moment

An essay for you while I go.

outage

think twice, maybe it's not all--maybe it's not all riiiight

Pitfalls of lacking a high/low culture divide

you little non-punks, get off my lawn

Timing, consistency, control

The Mechanism of Omelas