"I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must"

Feel free to grab this image and use it 

I don't particularly like Salman Rushdie. I haven't been a fan of crude, crass satire since I outgrew MAD magazine. But there's tremendous danger in keeping silent just because you aren't the immediate target.

Censorship is one of those things that can creep in on little cat feet. The nasty, rude, and badly written stuff on the fringes is easy to object to. It offends just about everybody. So it's easy to tell them to shut up, go away, you're just cluttering up the landscape.

Then the questions start about whether the better written satires are in poor taste. Whether offending anybody, or the chance of offending anybody, is a bad idea. Whether those offended people have guns and might kick in your door.

Jihadists? Maybe. Or maybe it will be governmentally sanctioned door-kickers.

Censorship is alive and well in the United States, of course. I first became aware of it as a comic book fan through the work of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- why does such a thing even need to exist? Because the fringe stuff in the comic book world is nasty, rude, badly written, and offends just about everybody.

Does it have a right to exist? Absolutely. Should the creators be called out on their rudeness, use of awful stereotypes, misogyny, and bad writing? Absolutely.

And on a more personal note, I've been mildly censored myself. Self-publishers may remember the purge of incest, under-age, and other fringe pornography from the ebook shelves a year or two ago. In the midst of all that, Kobo.com quietly threw my Disciple, Part II out of their store and blocked it. They never said why. I can guess, but why bother? I took all of Disciple out of Kobo and I won't do any further business with them.

Fortunately, I can do business elsewhere. But as I said, censorship can creep in quietly. It doesn't take masked thugs with guns.

Just some thoughts. What have the Charlie Hebdo shootings made you think about?

ETA: the CBLDF is brave enough to post the images -- bless them.

Common cause with other artists...

I don't talk to much about my personal life, but a conversation at a club recently brought this up.

Since I've been living on my own -- about six months now -- I've developed a habit of going to clubs. Never did that when I was younger, even though I have always loved live music and the thousand flavors of electronic music in particular. I'm still a shy person, so I go alone. Strictly for the music.

But I've also made a habit of going to shows put on by local deejays. Young guys and ladies who are still building their reputations and a fan base. I can relate to that, as a self-publisher. I know what support from a non-family member means when you're trying to earn money as an artist.

Given that these are small-time deejays, they play in small clubs to small audiences and it makes for an intimate setting. They were quick to start recognizing me and always come over to say hello, which is very sensible from a self-promotion viewpoint. Being shy, I've never been good at that sort of thing.

That got me to thinking about the parallels between how different artists try to earn a living and what I could learn from these kids. I don't know a lot about how it works for new deejays, but I hear mutterings about unreliable bookings and slim pay. The struggle to find the balance between giving away free samples and charging money for your work sounds familiar too.

I also couldn't help recognizing the incestuousness of the scene: most of the people at the shows are either fellow deejays or girlfriends/friends of deejays.

As a follow-up to my post about visual artists, I'd like to expand that to include all fellow artists. Back in the day, I was guilty of using Napster and Limewire to collect mp3s. I limit myself to legit freebies now, and I support musicians by going to clubs, but I still don't pay much for my music.

We all know how hard it is to make a living off of art. I think we owe it to each other to be as supportive as we can.

What do you do to support the arts in your area? Do you find local musicians or bands to support? Dance troupes? Theater groups? Post something and maybe it will inspire another reader.

Be glad, as a writer, that you can get by with pen and paper if you must and don't have to drop hundreds of dollars on a mixing deck like the one in the photo. That's a smallish one, too. Yikes.

On the off chance that you're a fan of techno/house/drum & bass/etc., some links: the GLAS Mix Project crew here in DC. Also, Dancekraft. Specific DJs: Confetti, the house queen of Baltimore, Traxiom, who can put me in a dance-floor trance even when I'm alone, and DJ RND because I loves the deep house.

What's SF got that fantasy doesn't...?

Science fiction has a long history of offering critiques of contemporary society, and of deliberately wrapping social issues in fictional trappings to make it "easier" for the audience to think about the issue at hand. This is known widely enough, apparently, that I recently heard that from a friend who isn't even much of a genre fan. (His opinion being that you should face the real issues in all their painfully unjust glory. He has a point.)

Fantasy does not have this tradition. A handful of writers have a reputation for social commentary within fantasy novels -- such as Terry Pratchett -- but it's not common. Or, at least, it goes unnoticed and unremarked-upon.

I've heard it said that whereas science fiction looks "forward", fantasy looks "backward" and is a re-imagining of how things "used to be". Perhaps it's some essence of human nature that makes it easier for us to relate the future to the present. Maybe we're thinking of how to get there from here even if it's only in the most abstract way.

The past doesn't seem to provoke that sort of analysis of the present. If you present a minority population living in segregation and repression in a science fiction story (such as District 9), people notice and comment on it. If you do it in fantasy story... hmm, having trouble coming up with an example. Which is part of the problem, admittedly.

A lot of fantasy stories center on princes, nobles, the "gifted" who've risen above poverty -- whereas I've always been fascinated by the lives of ordinary people in fantasy worlds. Melusine has an MC who was still hacking out a living as a ghetto thief, there's an example. Personally, I want the stable-boy's perspective, I want to hear about why a woman has to take in laundry to pay her rent -- or the nail-biting dangers of putting herself on the street corner to do the same. What does a ghetto look like, in high fantasy? What stories happen, in there?

Why does fantasy always focus on the rich and powerful? Because everyone else is too busy keeping body and soul together to go on amazing quests and save the world? As if those are the only stories that matter...

I want to shout out to Chris Gerwel here, because of his recent blog post about realism and the quotidian fantastic. I'm thinking I'm going to be guilty of writing a fair amount of quotidian fantasy (lol, love the pretentious name) in my writing career. It's definitely an interest of mine, and in fantasy more than science fiction.

Disciple's main character is a peasant girl who has worked hard to become a healer. In Hawks & Rams, one MC is a shepherd boy and the other's a border patrol Ranger. Recently, some more thoughts have been bubbling up and I've codenamed them "Wharf Rats" -- you can guess why.

Those thoughts are coming in response to real-world stories I've been hearing of late (from that friend who doesn't believe in disguising issues). Which doesn't surprise me because I've found that the best genre ideas come from outside the genre. The further outside, the better.

Are there any fantasy stories you'd point to for their social commentary?

ps. Writing the tweet announcement for these posts often gooses me with things I didn't think of. Would social commentary in fantasy be too... boring?

Controlling the plot bunny population

Spay and neuter your plot bunnies!

Good luck with that. Now that I'm reaching the end of Disciple, I've been suffering an explosion of plot bunnies. In case you didn't know, "plot bunnies" are story ideas that pop out spontaneously -- usually branching off an existing story. Good stories tend to inspire a lot of plot bunnies. Plot bunnies interbreed freely and can lead to some wild stuff, especially on the porny side of things.

I picked up the term from the fanfic community. I wasn't a writer of it, but I did read a fair amount.

Since Disciple's my own story, these aren't fanfic ideas so much as potential future stories -- but not all of them are going to work, necessarily. Some are quite vague. Some would set precedents that I don't necessarily want in this universe. Some are openly non-canon and I'm not going to go there at all. Some are more or less porn, and... well, okay, I've written some of those already but nobody needs to know about that.

Plot bunnies are a good thing, in the long run. The headline is a joke -- don't try to control their population. Let 'em breed. I write them down once they're at least a sentence long. I check on them every so often. They mutate when you're not looking. Cannibalize each other. I've been working on Disciple for a long time, and facing its completion... and knowing I'll soon be tending my plot bunnies... it's bittersweet. A bit disconcerting. But I thought I had it under control.

And then I was assaulted by a completely unrelated tribe of plot bunnies. After starting to write this post, I watched this episode of NOVA (there's a link to the video there) and had to beat the plot bunnies off with a stick. The strongest absorbed the others, got his teeth into me, and I had to add him to the Brainstorm Zone -- which is a whole Scrivener file I created for ideas.

It brought to mind a recurring writer-interview question, since I've had to write a lot of those recently: where do you get your ideas? Good Lord, where don't you get ideas? And I've never quite understood why people are so protective of ideas. They're a dime a dozen. It's execution of the idea that takes work, talent, and ought to be protected. And charged for access to.

So watch the episode. Your plot bunnies will be different from my plot bunnies. Your final story, if you write one, will be different from mine, if I write it. No worries.

How do you manage your plot bunnies?

The lure of reviews

I have been soliciting reviews for Disciple, Part I on Goodreads, and I've gotten a few nibbles, sent out a few copies. Didn't expect someone to read and review so quickly, though. I saw the "1 review" indicator on my author dashboard and...

When I set out, I told myself I wasn't going to read any reviews at all. Because I've heard the same horror stories of nasty reviews, authors shooting off at the mouth and destroying their reputations. It's ridiculous to think that everyone who picks up Disciple will love it. There's bound to be someone who finds it -- I don't know -- pretentious or twee or whatever. Gratuitously graphic.*

But I clicked before I could think. And then I read the first half before I fully realized it. So I might as well finish, right?

So much for resolutions. I am weak. It was a nice review, too, so I'll probably be weak until I hit a nasty one.

The only good can of worms to open.
Photo by stef~, on sxc.hu.

* This is a whole 'nother can of worms, because my main character, Kate, is a sixteen-year-old girl. Somebody is bound to think "This is a YA book" at some point and then be horrified as the plot developments of Parts II - VI roll by. I'm sure I will be hearing about that. DISCIPLE IS NOT AIMED AT THE YA MARKET. Though teenaged readers are certainly welcome. I don't think that sheltering teens from the ugly real world does them any favors.

p.s. Tomorrow I'll be doing the Next Big Thing meme/bloghop over at Disciple of the Fount -- and there will be a big announcement! Though if you go over there now you'll probably notice the new tab and figure out what it is for yourself.

Maturity, perceived age, and development

Perceived age of characters is a tricky thing. Since I'm currently 41, it's been a long time since I was a teenager. My teenage years aren't exactly memories that I cherish, either. My main character Kate starts Disciple at sixteen years old. The story will finish before she turns eighteen -- or not long after, at worst. I do not consider Disciple a YA story, though I don't doubt that teenagers might find it interesting.

Kate has been confronting me with questions like what is "maturity" and how is maturity demonstrated and what is "appropriate" for a given age and level of experience -- partly because she starts out "more mature" due to the cultural expectations put on her, and partly because she goes through so much in the course of the story.

In the course of preparing Part I to publish and revising Part II, I got some whiplash from meeting the (slightly) younger, (much) less experienced version of Kate.

I saw some vintage photos, recently, of child laborers from the turn of the 19th/20th century, and wondered what they were like as people. Were they angry that they had to work, or did they simply accept it as "normal," maybe something they felt obligated to do to help support their parents and siblings. Did they "act out" in reaction to it? Some of them had cigarettes in their mouths; it's entirely possible they were drinking, too. What did "adults" think of that -- did they pull up a stool at the bar and commiserate, or did they shake their heads and dismiss it as childishness?

It's possible some of them were sober, hard-working, kids who never questioned that this was what they wanted. Maybe they welcomed the responsibility of a job and felt it was a validation of their worth.

People come in all flavors, after all, at every age.

Getting back to Disciple, I'm more worried about Kate sounding like a 40-year-old than about her sounding like a 16-year-old. It's my opinion that the maturity level we perceive as "appropriate" for a given age is highly dependent on culture and affluence. But, as has been reported in a variety of (fascinating) places, the teenaged brain is noticeably different from the adult brain, and that needs to be taken into account.

How those difference manifest is heavily shaped by culture and affluence -- which is why I brought up the child labor photos. Compare those kids' lives to a well-off high school grad who's working a part-time summer job because s/he wants to, not needs to. People talk about how kids are in such a hurry to grow up (usually with a shake of their heads). I doubt anyone said that of the child laborers.

This post is already turning into a ramble. In short, I feel comfortable with Kate "sounding" older than 16 because in her culture, she's expected to be married, a mother, and running a household at that age. Due to the story, she's actually responsible for much more than that. And yet, I can't have her acting with all the mature perspective (lol) of a 40-year-old.

What does your character's culture expect of children and teenagers?

See also: Demonstrating maturity

Post-UB thoughts on self-promotion

I spent a week talking about self-publishing over at UB. The last post was about promotions, which a lot of writers dread. Myself included. Self-promotion isn't easy, but you need to do it.

I dread housework -- but that has to be done, too.

I strongly believe that there is an audience for anything. Any movie, any book, any music album, there's a paying audience out there who will enjoy it. The difficult part is finding them and telling them why your book/movie/album would be enjoyable for them.

Everything about self-promotion ties into either finding your audience, or communicating with them.

And yes, it's a lot of work because there are seven billion people out there and even with all of the internet's gee-whiz social networks, those audiences are hard to find.

And no, it's not easy to communicate why your book is interesting in the small amount of time people will give you before they tune out or are distracted by some shiny thing. There's a dose of luck involved too, which you can't plan for.

They say the first rule of self-promoting is to get out there and be a real person with real interests and real input to give. I'm not so good at that; I read many blogs, each day, and have nothing to add. Move on to the next one. There are many blogs that I simply can't post comments to (I wish I knew why, and yes I've tried to get around it.) There are some online communities that I wander through on occasion, such as Absolute Write. I tweet once or twice a day. I mark books I've read, on Goodreads, but don't have enough opinion to write a review. Pinterest has fallen off my radar for a variety of reasons.

Maybe I'm not a real person with real interests. :)

But my audience is out there somewhere. I know a few things about them: they like stories that move, active characters, authenticity and detail, darkness without being hopeless, and a dash of whimsy.

I just need to find them.

If I can't trust the online reviews...?

I'm late to weigh in on the kerfuffle over paid reviews and using sock puppets to write your own reviews. So I figure you already know why it's happening.

I understand why authors pay for reviewers and use sock puppets. I sympathize, even. There's so much out there to distinguish yourself from -- it's a sea of people screaming for attention, waving promotional flags, and shooting off rockets. The deck is stacked against you, and it's a huge deck.

A blogger posted recently that he was struck by how he can't trust any online review of a product, when he thinks about it. And that's true. Who are you going to believe: fifty reviews on Amazon, or your mother saying "I couldn't put this down"? My mother and I don't always like the same books, of course, but there are a lot fewer variables involved in deducing whether I'd agree with her than whether I'd agree with fifty random people who may or may not actually exist.

It made me think of Pandora. Pandora.com uses a "genome" (Music Genome Project) to analyze the music you tell it you like, and introduces you to new music based on that. It's done a good job on me, overall. It figured out that I like David Bowie, on its own, and it introduced me to a number of musicians who I wouldn't have found otherwise. It's had trouble figuring out why I don't like Led Zeppelin, but I have trouble explaining that in any case. (I ought to. I just don't. Pass the Pink Floyd, please.)

For example, here's why Pandora said it picked a particular Celldweller song for me: Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features house roots, four-on-the-floor beats, electronica influences, danceable beats and affected backup vocals. Now, I don't know what those terms mean in a technical sense, but Pandora's right. It's a track I like.

Maybe we need a system like that for books. TvTropes has been kind enough to create a definition for nearly every story element under the sun, so the "genome" exists already. We just need a way to tag stories appropriately and software that takes your profile of likes and matches you up.

Because I have as much trouble finding books I like as anyone else. In all the upheaval that ebooks have brought to the publishing world, there's one definitely good aspect: the free samples. I've downloaded dozens of free samples of ebooks, and I've bought exactly one of them. There's a second that I've been meaning to buy, but my physical TBR pile is a big enough problem.

If people are worried about the honesty of the reviews they're seeing, I can be rigorously honest about why those dozens of samples failed to sell me their books. But I'm not here to be a grouch.

LOL: look for my new blog, Book Grouch, wherein I will beat up your sample... submit your sample and wear your honestly earned bruises proudly...

So: if we can't trust online reviews, is there a better way? Or is risk simply a part of life?

In other news, I am blogging about self-publishing over at Unicorn Bell this week, so see you next Tuesday.

Crisis of confidence

For one of my guest posts, I sent a writer's-blog post to a reader's blog, and the owner emailed me to ask for something more appropriate -- which she was completely right to do, but in the course of that she said something that crops up in my head regularly.

"Who... are you...?"
John Tenniel's illustration, Alice in Wonderland

(paraphrasing) "Who are you to give how-to advice to writers?"

My first urge, naturally, was to find a sword and fall on it because: who the hell am I? Nobody. I'm nobody. I have no grounds for advising anybody.

Then again, we're all nobody out here in the writing blogosphere. Almost all. Big-name writers aren't going to give away advice for free (and I don't blame them) because their advice might actually be worth something. Though if you've hung around the blogosphere long enough, you've heard all the advice there is about writing, in a few dozen different forms.

Honest, it's all out here. The pros can explain it more concisely, or more thoroughly, but it's all the same advice and none of it is a magic formula for becoming a good writer.

As I said in the post about seeing: oh shit, nobody can tell me what to do.

So I can spew out advice to my heart's content because all of it is worth what you're paying for it. I can't tell you what to do. YOU HAVE TO GO AND DO IT.

And also, I've observed a recent rash of statements to the effect of: I queried too soon. I self-published too soon. Too soon, too soon. As soon as someone can quantify "too soon," please let me know. I expect it will involve the magical knowledge of what a given individual's peak skills are, charted against their current level of development. I'd pay real money for that. Seriously. Can you imagine? It would be uplifting and crushing at the same time: I'm near my peak, but I'll never be as good as (famous author).

You have to start somewhere. Or, don't start. That's an option.

The Olympics always strike me as having a certain relevance to writing. Wired ran an article recently about the astounding amount of training and technology that goes into sports at that level, and I always wonder about the balance between training/equipment and raw talent. Because if you put me through a training grinder, yes, I would undoubtedly become a better runner, swimmer, what-have-you. Would I be a good one? Would I be Olympic-level?

Probably not.

Being sensitive souls, writers don't want to talk about that thing outside our control, those limitations the Great Author wrote in our character profile. Talent. Charisma. Why does 50 Shades of Grey have it and I don't?

(shrugs) You have to go out and do it. Start somewhere.

Other Stuff

My Kickstarter project is a go! Three more days to pre-order an e-book or paperback -- I've created reward options for just the books and not the other stuff.

I'm building a book blog at Disciples of the fount for book-related info, updates, etc., so if you just want to keep an eye out for when it's released... that's the place.

E: Erotica

...and the Problem of Erotica. The eternal "Why?"

(This isn't a rant so much as a ramble.)

Plot, character, world-building, dialogue, etc., should be just as much of an issue in erotica as in any story. There exists a general perception that these things tend to get shorted in erotica and they're "allowed" to slide because... well... are we reading this for the story, or for the sex?

"Both!" everybody says... because otherwise it'll all slide into PWP crapola, right? Erotica packs far more punch when you're invested in the characters, but the development of that investment is not done via erotica. (is it? could it be?) 

How "long" are you willing to go in an erotica without any action?

When I tried writing erotica, I started to hear a heckler in the back row yelling "Take it off!" (or something more salty) in the middle of my dramatic scenes. I began to run into questions like "Why are these two fooling around on-stage?" and the more problematic "Is this really relevant?"

Many better writers than I have tackled the relevance of explicit sex to a given story. Better writers than I have succeeded in making sex important to their plotline. Personally, I think one can make a case for using a sexual scene to develop character, raise tension and, yes, titillate the reader.

It's a hook. Use it properly.

But to get back to the eternal "Why?" -- why does the reader "need" to see this explicit scene? "Because they want to see it" is a valid answer, IMO. But here's the twist: given the work you put into an erotica story -- equal to the work you'd put into any story -- why limit your audience to only those who want to read explicit scenes?

Since e-books are taking off so well, I think it would be interesting if they started featuring "extras" for those who want... more. Just a little icon at the end of a bedroom scene -- where it ends for those who don't want to know the details -- that a reader could tap to see the steamy stuff. Has anyone done this yet?

If you'd like to comment on any of the questions above, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts. If you'd like to recommend  your favorite science fiction or fantasy erotica author, I'd be glad to hear that too. I'm badly out-of-date with the erotica world.

Sex and realism

The Word-Whores topic of the week is writing about sex, and Wednesday's post "Nobody Farts During Sex" both amused me and caused some eye-rolling.

I've written sexually explicit scenes. I've written erotica too (well, I tried at least.) My characters all know that off-stage, non-canon hijinks are encouraged and getting slashed is an occupational hazard when you're starring in one of my stories.

It's not sex that's at issue with me, in "Nobody Farts." It's the intentional avoidance of reality. Farts happen, as do wet spots, sudden muscle cramps, and discovering unfortunate patches of acne/hair/moles/birthmarks/regrettable tattoos/etc. I'm sure we all could think of situations where any of those things could be used in a sexual scene to build character, charm and amuse the reader, or deliberately derail the scene to create tension.

And if you're mentally cringing... why?

Let me step back a moment. It's not for me to tell anybody how to go about their writing. I'm sure my bias is pretty obvious to anyone who follows this blog -- I take both physical and emotional realism very seriously. I strive to include those awkward details and situations because they're true and they can be just as important to the story as anything else.

Do I throw in awkward details just for the hell of it? No. Everything has its place and every place has something.

I was influenced, in this, by John Gardner's book The Art of Fiction -- about which I will write a post for the A to Z challenge in April, so I will only mention it briefly here. In the back of the book are a list of exercises which range from challenging to massively intimidating, and the one that came to my mind immediately upon reading the "Nobody Farts" post was #24:

Without an instant's lapse of taste, describe a person (a) going to the bathroom, (b) vomiting, (c) murdering a child.

Confession: I haven't written that exercise. When I first read it (as a teen), merely thinking about it was enough to rip my horizons open rather painfully. Twenty-mumble years later, I don't doubt that I could do all three of those if (a) it's what the character did and (b) the reader needed to see it in order to understand the story.

There are big questions there about Art and What Art Means To The Artist as well as The Viewer... and again, it's not my place to tell anybody those things about their own art. I can only speak for myself. I only hope to get your brain burbling about it.

And I would not hesitate to inflict farts, wet spots, or bacne on my characters -- they knew what they signed on for. The horny little buggers deserve it, practically.

Funny how quickly one can go from "farts" to "what does it all MEAN???" isn't it. :)

See also my musings on the "why" of erotica in general.