Both And

I'm finding it challenging to perform both the business and the creative sides of writing at the same time. The two mindsets are so radically different and use diametrically opposed creative processes that I find I have only limited success at doing both at the same time. The most I've been able to manage is both in the same weekend. Lately, I've been doing the agent search during the week and hoping that I have brain cells left over to work on the next short story/novel/series (no, I'm not yet sure what it will be! Sheesh) on the weekend.

I'm hoping for early success at the agent search in large part because I want to get that over with so that I can concentrate on the creative side. I do approach my writing as a business, albeit one with a very long product development cycle. I'm seeking an agent now because that's what happens when one has product development at a point where one needs the additional investment of an editor and publishing house.

While I'd love to be in the "I'm Getting the Next Round" sort of deal on the Scalzi scale, I can't bank on it. I know that the "investment" won't be more than a modest one, most likely a "Shut Up!" kind of deal, no matter how long I've taken developing my "product" or how much I've spent to finish it.

But I hate thinking of my writing as "product." I don't write to produce "product" but to tell a story, to create and explore worlds, and questions, and characters. In the story I'm shopping I've set up two radically different cultures, with ancient ties and enmities. The dominant culture thinks the sub-culture is something to ignore or exploit, depending, but what they'll find is that the two cultures are, actually, interdependent. There's a balance between the conflicting modes and economies and cultures.

It was a hell of a lot of work to set up, damn hard to weave the story back and forth between the two POVs and keep both moving and interesting, and creating worlds and histories and even writing plays. In verse! (and then cutting lots of it, but the plays were written).  Work? No kidding. And some of the most enjoyable work I've ever done. I love that stuff and I can't see ever not doing that sort of thing. My bookshelf grew by a significant percentage to hold all of the books I used for research. How fun is that?!

And now I'm starting on the next series: seeking out books/authors to read to begin building the world, carefully considering who would be the best to tell what story, all of that. A new long product development cycle, going much more slowly than the last one because I've had to spend lots of time on the business side of things. Ok. That's the way it works. But I can hope for a quick resolution so I can go back to doing what I love: creating worlds and characters and then putting to the test.

1:11,000

One chance in 11,000. That’s what an article in Poets & Writers magazine gave as a back-of-the-envelope estimate for the chances of a new author not getting a rejection from an agent based on an unsolicited query.

Those kinds of odds are nearly enough to be discouraging. Of course, the chances of being noticed by an agent isn't random and the odds are much better than playing the lottery which is random. There are ways to improve my odds:

• The odds improve when I target my queries are sent to agencies that are open to new authors.
• The odds improve when I target an agent who has shown, through previous sales, to be interested in taking on a project like mine.
• The odds improve when I craft a query letter that successfully represents my novel and showcases my writing abilities.

But  the process by which an agent determines which project she might take on as described in that article isn’t random, pull-an-author-from-a-hat. The example used was of how I, as a reader, might choose a book from a table in a bookstore: glance at the title, at the blurb, see if it grabs my attention. If so, read further. By doing the best job I can to put my query into the hands of an agent receptive to what I’ve written, I’ve improved my odds significantly.

Great. That, and the hope that the agent has the right cup of coffee on the day he gets to my query letter probably improves my odds to 1:6000. As a rough estimate, of course. Maybe those odds are a bit discouraging.

What really improves my odds? Actually sending that query out. Excuse me. I have work to do.

The Nothing

I wrote the other day about how the time I worked at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival thirty years ago affected me in ways both subtle and profound. Like all of its kind, the Festival is a place of wonder, of creativity, of bawdy jokes, lewd and wonderful songs, and general silliness, with amazing performers and talented crafters.

It's also a business.

To the best of my knowledge, the owners of the Festival don't own the land it sits own. It has had a long-term lease on a bit of rocky ground outside of Shakopee, MN, owned by a gravel company. Thirty years ago, the stone being quarried from the earth took place at least a mile distant, no intrusion upon those who wanted to do something utterly silly for six weekends a year.

But every year, the quarry took out more rock, moving the boundaries a bit closer. But every year, the economics of the faire changed. The lease on that quarry land went up. Rents were re-negotiated. Tastes changed (or so we're told). Actors were paid less, performers had their contracts cut, sending some of the best acts to other faires.

The Nothing moved closer.
When I'd last worked there, the performers parked on a broad expanse of trampled green grass which provided a pleasant walk to the performer's gate (or a quiet spot to snog while parked in the car ofter the sun went down). Sure, the car got a little dusty being parked out on a field, but no matter. We worked out under the sun, we drank and laughed and sang and acted the fool. All was right with the world.

The Nothing moves closer.

This year, we drove out to the Festival, down a bumpy and narrow gravel road, to the bottom of a gravel pit. Huge mounds of sand and stone towered above us, forcing us to wend our way between them, looking for an open place to park. For several years, my friends who worked at the Festival had been commenting on the ever-present dust resulting in "Fest Crud" that ended up afflicting pretty much everyone who worked out there. I now got to see where the dust came from.

That isn't early-morning fog making a haze of this shot.

We parked on the gravel, surrounded by silica sand, and got out of the car. The festival was right there, only about 50 yards away. Unfortunately, it was also about 50 yards or more above. A sheer rock wall towered over us, huge boulders strewn about at the base of it from the last blast that brought the Nothing ever closer to consuming the Festival.

It's a business, and if it doesn't make money, it won't be around, dust or no. But it also exemplifies the worst elements of American corporate culture. The owners of the Festival knew 30 years ago that they sat atop a quarry on land they didn't own, and they did nothing. Instead of making the Festival a better value for the ever-increasing ticket price, they made it more common. The best place to see this is the food: everything that you get out at the Festival you could get out at the State Fair or the freezer section of the local QuickieMart, with the possible exception of turkey legs. Instead of investing in the best of the current acts that roam from faire to faire, they relied on their old standbys Puke and Snot (emphasis on "old") to draw crowds. No acts are being groomed for the main stage when that act finally hangs up their swords. Already, one of the original performers has died, so, just like the quarry, it isn't some unforeseen calamity approaching. It's lack of planning. It's "what does the bottom line look like this quarter?" kind of thinking.

Instead of building up new acts, encouraging young performers, and paying the current ones well enough to give them the opportunity to hone their craft, the owners cut wages, end contracts, and generally treat the workers out there as expenses to the business instead of the means by which the business continues. In short: there is less music, fewer original acts, over-priced bland food, and lots of dust.

The Nothing is here.

I'm sure the owners are making a tidy sum off the estimated 300,000 people who go to the Festival each year. Very little of that seems to go to the performers or crafters or workers in the food service areas. The grounds (what's left of them) seem to be in relatively good shape, but even there the shoddy business practices are apparent. Before the last weekend of the 2011 run, a fire took out several food concession stands. I visited the faire this year on the last weekend in 2012, a full year later. The food booths had been rebuilt, yes. Going full blast, slinging tasteless, overpriced food to all and sundry.

The booths hadn't been painted. In the "fantasy Renaissance village" ye olde unpainted OSB faced the paying patrons, their entre to the Renaissance. The disdain for both the workers and the customers is painfully obvious.

These are tough times for any business. But any business that relies on coasting through the tough times, taking what is best and making it more common, while ignoring the particulars of the market that you occupy, is the sort of thing that makes companies fail in tough times. As usual, it falls onto the workers to make up for the shortsightedness of management. The people who work (both those actually under contract and the "playtrons" who actually pay at the gate just so that they can play) at the Festival are, and have been, amazing. They love what they do, they bust their asses, they get sick because of long days and poor working conditions. But I'm afraid their dedication is going to come to Nothing. I don't see any transition strategy for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. I seen an exit strategy. When the quarry wants its land back, I see the owners cashing out and going into retirement, the richer for having made us poorer.

The Nothing will be all that's left.

You did What in High School?

Before high school, my geek pedigree wasn't too different from countless others: I'd been writing for years, starting my first novel with another friend when I was in 6th grade if I recall correctly. I sang in choir and both sang and acted in plays in various venues. I loved to read, to write, to sing, to create, and imagine. Once I got into Lindbergh High School, the creative geek quest continued. I sang in a garage band for a brief shining moment (which I remember quite fondly but I’m not sure my bandmates can say the same). I continued to make attempts at writing stories long and short.
My sophomore year I joined the Lindbergh theater group and worked both on- and back-stage, performing and running the lights. The theater group was under the direction of William John Quincy Lauder III, aka Willie. He was … a unique individual. I considered him a great mentor and inspiration. He suggested, to me and others in the theater group, that we check out the first year of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival Academy, to be held that summer of 1981. Many of us took him up on the suggestion and began the summer school with the goal of becoming a performer of some sort out at RenFest.

I had no clue that being at RenFest would change the course of my life.

And not just mine. Before high school ended, a huge percentage of the theater group was working out there every weekend.

Many continued to perform there for decades. My run lasted only about two full years, parts of two or three others. Perhaps, if I'd been in a position to continue out there as some of my friends did, I would have figured it out, gotten it out of my system. There are a few of those friends who are so done with the place they never want to step foot out there again. Not me. I now go back every year, and also go to my more-local Bristol Faire as well.

I was a writer before I went out to RenFest and I've been a writer since. But because of RenFest, I became a better writer once I discovered the impossible beauty of Shakespeare and other Renaissance poets and playwrights. I developed a love of history that leads me to try to understand the very alien culture of medieval and Renaissance Europe and add those facts into my stories. I became fascinated by the way our culture has changed over time: language, music, society, technology, beliefs. And how they don't, for the foundation for so much of what we do today got its rebirth in the Renaissance from classical roots.

In college I stepped back from theater and performance and focused on writing. One of the primary classes I took was a creative writing class. But since the instructor for that class condescendingly volunteered that he had read, perhaps, "one or two good" fantasy stories, I pointed my quill at much more realistic stories than I had up to that point. I wrote and rewrote vague coming-of-age stories, some with romances, some with no dialog (one, memorable at least to me, with both a romance AND no dialog). These slice-of-life stories meandered for page after page and never really came to any conclusions.

I got all As.

But even during that time I began writing a series of vignettes that centered around the RenFest. I peopled these stories with characters  that I'd met out at the faire and put them through various conflicts, only some of which I'd actually experienced myself (to the point where my memories of what I did and of what I wrote have overlapped to such an extent that I’m not sure which are which). The characters and the setting provided me with a surfeit of situations to explore, from the safety of my writing desk.

Most of those stories were coming-of-age issues. I was early 20s, in school and then recently married. I'd passed through many stages of life in a short time and I found the liminal space, the thresholds, to be utterly fascinating. Still do, even though I write about them far less often. But the questions that I struggled with then, as those vignettes coalesced into my first complete novel length work, were larger. When I found myself on a 22 acre stage doing improvisational street theater for 10 hours, or so, a day, it forced me to engage with what the question of who the fuck did I think I was to be doing such a thing?

Sometime, late in the run of that first year, that question stopped being rhetorical. I mentally took a step back and began examining the different facets of who I was. I had the great good fortune of being able to see that I presented a different facet of myself depending on where I was. If wearing the clothes of a 16th century peasant, then that’s who people took me as. Those of a 16 year old high school student? Same. Church choir, food service employee, son, brother: set the stage and put on the costume and I played the role as expected.

Again, however, it was the liminal spaces that brought me up short. Who was I when I was off-duty at RenFest but still on-site? Or off-site but with the others in the theater group who I knew on-duty? Transitioning from one space to the other made it apparent to me how much of who I was relied on where I was and who I was with. The, not artificiality of it so much as the constructedness of it, became a rough point in my consciousness.

Yours Truly

Through my writing, I’ve been rubbing at that rough spot ever since.

Cultural Templates

I've begun the research into what will become the world for my next novel. I think it will be a story of the Fae, so will involve immortal beings thousands of years old, their technology and culture. So, of course, I watched a handful of Dawson's Creek episodes.

There are assumptions made by all of us as to what form our relationships will take. We also make assumptions about our friends and family and their relationships, all based on our culture, what we know of their culture, etc. Watching Dawson's Creek, I got to see how the writer(s) of those episodes portrayed the young people, their group of friends, their relationships, sexual or otherwise. Particularly how the dynamics of the group strained and were changed when two of the people began a sexual relationship.I found it fascinating to discover what the depiction of the reactions told me about the assumptions -- shared between the writer and the audience -- of how this newly sexual couple should/would react and exist amongst their friends.

I also read this article on the Moral Case for Sex Before Marriage and thought that it did a great job of arguing the case for moving beyond the religiously inspired cultural assumption that the "best" way of forming a relationship is a chaste one until marriage (which, while dominant, is still only one of many templates for how relationships will proceed). It also laid bare the distance between how people act and how they say they should act, as well as the shift in cultural mores and assumptions that are made over time. Technology, exposure to other cultures, and actively working to progress toward a more egalitarian society work changes on our cultural assumptions regarding relationships. There wouldn't have to be such strident insistence on the Only Right Way to have a relationship if it was assumed by all to actually be THE only right way.

I'm in a relationship that one could call "non traditional." That means that together my GF and I had to create what she called a "deliberate" relationship. We sat down and discussed/are discussing, the terms of our relationship. We delineate both boundaries and expectations. We make mistakes and misunderstandings, of course, but that means we go back and clarify. There are far fewer assumptions, and the ones that we run into we root out, pull up into the light of day, and examine to see if there's anything worth keeping.

This is hard work.

But if I may continue my metaphor a bit, it's work like gardening is work. There is something very beautiful and nourishing as a result of all that work. But what is there is unique in my experience because it is based on what the individuals involved want from the relationship, not what is assumed based on cultural expectations.

One of the ideas that I'm considering as part of the world building for my next story/novel is creating a culture for which that kind of lack of assumptions regarding relationships is the norm. Or rather, that the assumption of the culture is that each relationship is consciously created based on the needs and wants of the people involved. There are no assumptions about genders of those involved or numbers of those involved. The duration of the relationship is not assumed: it is assumed neither to be fleeting nor forever. (the only time the culture insists on  something different is when children are concerned, which makes sense given the rest of the culture which I haven't written about here).

What would such relationships look like? I feel like they'd be better for the people involved. I could be missing something. Perhaps there are several "templates" or relationships so that people can at least be in the same hymnal if not singing the same song.Another challenge is that I'm not setting up a utopia. What are the problems associated with every relationship being built from scratch every time?

Where is all this going? Not sure. These are just some of the several threads that I notice dangling because I'm in the stage of novel writing where I go looking for threads. But it could be pretty interesting, if I can find the story that weaves the threads together.

Hunger Games, movie and book review

Last week I watched the movie Hunger Games and last weekend I read the book by Suzanne Collins. I’m not usually a YA reader, although I’ve read more in last year than I usually do. My gf had bought the book on Kindle and so, when we were together last week, we watched the movie on PPV. I was impressed enough to ask for the book, and she was able to loan me the first one.

Now, having both watched the movie and read the book, I have to say that the movie was one of the best adaptations of a book into film that I have ever seen. Like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, the writers managed to capture the essence of the book and make a movie out of it that captures the story but makes it a movie, not a book. No mean feat.

Reading and watching movies are such completely different entertainment modes that it amazes me how often people expect movies to be "just like" the book and vice versa. They want the story the know from the book and are (almost universally) disappointed when the viewing experience doesn't manage to capture the reading experience they had (I'm not even going to go into the whole participatory element of reading. But I could. You stand warned). Utilizing differences between those two types of experiences to tell the best story that the movie medium allows, while still retaining the impact of the book is impressive. Take Point of View for instance.

The book is told in first person point of view. For this story, it is the perfect choice. We get to experience Katniss’ reactions to the events in her world, learning just enough at just the right time to keep the world understandable for us (always a challenge in any SF/Fantasy or Historical fiction where the world building has to happen fast enough to allow us to follow the action but not so fast we lose track of the action in the details of the world). The first chapter of Hunger Games is the perfect first chapter. Plenty of action, smooth introduction of characters, just the right amount of world building. I think that most of this is a credit to the choice of first person as the POV.

In the Games section of the book, the close POV heightens the feeling of dread as she doesn’t know (so we don’t know) who of her enemies is where. We get her dread, her resilience, her pain, her motivations as she tries to stay alive in the game. I don’t think that even a close 3^rd would have given the readers as much. At the end of the game, we get to follow her thoughts as she realizes that the double-suicide would mess with the gamemakers’ plans and to the extent that (she hopes!) the gamemakers will interrupt them before they're both dead. Because we know her true motivation, that she know what would push the gamemakers and chose that action because of it, we then know at the end that she *did* rebel as far as they were concerned. The danger as it is shown at the end of the story is real. The same is true for the “romance” between her and Peeta: we see her motivation and so we know it is a ruse for her, even as it becomes gradually more than a stratagem. She doesn’t know, and so we don’t, just how much of it is a ruse for Peeta, and just how much is heartrendingly in earnest.

The movie, however, is a movie. First person isn’t really an option. And, for the film, it wouldn’t be a good idea. This is a visual medium and we want to be able to have the expansive scope available to us. The film makers can raise the stakes by showing us how close her opponents are, for example, showing us what she doesn’t know. Effective in the movie given the visual medium. Would not have been as effective in the book. Because it is 3rd person, we get to see the machinations of the president and the efforts of Haymitch and others on her behalf. This works in the movie to add tension. In the book, it might have worked as well, but the close identification with Katniss worked better.

But. It is a different story than the book. They are both good, they are both effective, they are both eerie and enraging as hell. In both cases, the writer(s) used the medium best to tell their story.

One quibble: the “meta” fact of the movie wasn’t played up as much as it should have been, in my opinion. The book, being a book, telling us about the televised Hunger Games, gives us a distance. We’re not watching the games, like those ghouls, those decadent assholes in the capitol. No, we’re with Katniss, in her story, not outside of it. Watching the movie, however, is the same psychic distance as watching the televised Games would be for those other decadent assholes. The movie could have made much more of this by using shots that showed the story as if we were seeing it on TV. More “hidden camera” shots, more documentary style filming. We should be uncomfortable watching the violence. We know it’s not real, but our society has very little compunction about watching simulated violence. Being made uncomfortable by that, wouldn’t have been a bad thing.

Let's Get the Band Back Together

Tuesday night, Smokey Wizard Bacon got “the band back together.” Not sure if it was for one last heist or not, but we had a good time. Kat Beyer was with us and she brought the two things she came out with this summer: her baby and her book The Demon Catchers of Milan. We talked for a bit about the trials and tribulations she went through getting both moved into production.

I enjoy my writing group and find them to  be a great group of people. We now have one book in print, two of us commencing an agent search, another one close to finishing a second novel-length project, and others working on various short story projects. I’ve tried to think back to when the group began and honestly can’t anymore. I remember it began at WisCon, I remember bringing it up in a “living room” with Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner and having a few people talk to me immediately after the discussion and us forming a group. We’ve met monthly since. IDK, a decade now?

Kat managed what I’m just now trying to figure out: how to shift from creative mode to business mode. She’s offered advice and that’s been great. But now it’s on me: getting the pitch/log line (I hate both those terms) that encapsulate and elucidate my novel, create the bones for the query letter, and a draft a synopsis (it’s down to five pages. You can’t ask for more of me!). Now it is down to divining who, out of the thousands of agents working in the field today, do I send the query to so that I don’t waste my time or theirs. There’s a certain amount of analysis paralysis going on, but since it seems each agent is a Use Once then Discard kind of proposition, I don’t want to engage until I’m ready, my project is ready.

One of the things I didn't realize was that Kat knows Patrick Rothfuss, and that he lives in Madison  (I wonder if she knows him well enough to invite him to an upcoming SWB gathering?). She knows all kinds of interesting people. That is one thing that I do not do well at all: networking. Kat is a wonderful person: charming, intelligent, kind. She's made all kinds of friends at WisCon and those friends became important to her in the agent search process. I mean, good on her, but those aren't my skills. Are those like other skills, something one can learn? To add to the already- long list of skills needed?

That Time of Year

Maybe it’s the time of year. Labor day has come and gone, Autumn is near, and I’m getting geared back up to get to work. I always liked school – even high school, but particularly college – so perhaps at this time of year the old habits kick in and I’m more open to the rigorous work of writing and reading.

Sure. That works. We’ll go with that.

Not that I’ve been uninvolved since the last real update to this blog. At the Weekend with the Novel, I got great feedback on how to proceed. I dove into the polishing process of the manuscript and began to build up the sales documents for the novel: query, pitch, synopsis, etc. In April I went to the UW Writers’ Institute and had the opportunity to pitch my novel to Laurie McLean. In early May I went to Amsterdam on a working vacation, and in late May I attended WisCon.

Then, I got distracted. I waited to hear back from Laurie and when I got her very polite rejection I didn’t jump back in to the fray. Other things to do, don’t you know. Like biking. And dealing with record-breaking heat. And I’m sure there were lots of other things. Must have been.

But that “working vacation” I mentioned needs to be paid for, or at least justified. I’ve spent over 5 years on a novel, I’d like to see if it will sell. I’m feeling the very powerful itch to be writing again. I need to get back to the business of being a writer, and that (unfortunately) involves the writing business.

Part of that process is going to be this space. Not only writing about the process but also just getting back into writing. The earliest writing on this blog kept to a strictly limited scope: about writing, my writing, and that process. <<Yawn>> I’m sorry, I nodded off for a minute. I’m interested in a lot more than writing, so I need to write about a lot more than writing.

So, I’m going to write about the things that interest me. You’ve been warned.

*** edited to add tags, fix typos ***

Wow! It is really dusty in here.


Hello? Anybody home?