A Call for First Readers
Filed Under: My Writing, Writing Process
I’m looking for 3-4 individuals who would be willing to review the new Roundbottom posts before I make them live on the site. I need fresh eyes that can catch bad sentences, stupid grammar, stupid anything really. Without an editor in the process, I worry about publishing some really subpar. I’m less concerned with storytelling conventions, as this project is an experiment in different methods there–but anyone interested in providing me feedback, shoot me an email. I’ll take the first few people interested. Thank you in advance.
The Addictive Properties of Creative Work
Filed Under: My Writing, Writing Process
As I enter a phase of high productivity, I am reminded of the parallels I detect between the way I interact with my creativity and the effect of addictive drugs (as I have read, anyway. I’ve never taken any, unless you count xanax.)
Acts of creativity bring on an emotional and energy high while I am in the act, but after the work is done, that high dissolves rapidly and often becomes a full on energy crash. Novelists call it the post-book blues, I think? I get the post-Flickr upload blues. I wonder if chemically, the act of creation operates in a similar effect–or is it really just the zen state that we enter when we act without thought, when we are in the “zone” that has the high/crash/addictive properties. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem in that context.
I find that the best way to keep from crashing after a project is to roll immediately into a new one. Finish a photoshoot, process it, upload it, bask in the awesome comments of my blog readers, and at least do 20-30 minutes on the next thing. The basking part, the positive feedback, is part of the addictiveness as well, and the part I don’t manage as well. It stretches out the high, I think, and carries the good feelings from the creation onward longer. After I post new pictures, I have a hard time leaving the computer, and not refreshing Flickr and checking my email 10 times an hour. I find myself craving that injection of warmth, and as it peters off, as all things do, then I get cranky and low. I’m trying to value feedback a little less, but given that my self-esteem is tied in some ways to the external perception of me, it’s not an easy thing to do. “Awesome image/story/website” are the phrases that boost my self-confidence more than almost anything else. I’m trying to change that, but that’s another subject entirely.
Do any of you have this problem of the post-work crash? How do you deal with it? What are your coping strategies?
Postmortem:”Babe, I Am Going to Leave You”
Filed Under: My Writing, Speculative Fiction, Writing Process
Yesterday, I released my intensely personal story of death, Led Zeppelin, and how families cope with death, “Babe, I am Going to Leave You” as a CC-licensed story. A friend asked what my thinking was behind doing this, so I thought I’d break it down in a blog post, in case anyone else was interested.I wrote this story, over the course of about a year, in an attempt to come to terms with my own father’s death from cancer. I always intended to try and publish it somewhere like any other story I wrote, but once I tried doing so, I found I had invested too much of myself to be able to handle the rejections. Most rejections are slightly painful, but you can shrug them off. I just couldn’t shrug off rejections to this story.
I struggled with whether I should essentially “self-publish” the story. I don’t have a large readership here. I’m not John Scalzi or Jay Lake, although I hope to attract as many followers some day. Am I the only writer who wonders about maximizing the audience for their stories, or do we all worry about that? I don’t make much money from my stories, so I’ve focused on growing an audience more than the money.
I also worried that some would see releasing the story myself as a coward’s way out. I do feel guilty for not trying harder to find a place to publish the story that could have given it more readers than I could on my own. The story is, in a big way, my way of honoring my father. Did I do him honor just releasing it to the handful of people who read this? I don’t know. I was tired of having it here, and having no one read it though. I really wanted to do good with this story. I had experienced something profound and painful, and I wanted to help others get through a similar experience. The chance to do some good, even a little, is what convinced me it was the right thing to do.
I want to thank those of you who linked my story in your own blogs. I really appreciated that. It made me feel much more like I made a good choice here. And those of you who have written me, thanking me for posting the story. I am glad that it has helped you.
In the future, I will definitely continue to release reprints of my stories online under the Creative Commons. It can only help a writer at my stage of career. I don’t think I will release any other unpublished stories though, because I think it’s too easy and attractive to circumvent the rejection/acceptance process.
For example, I have this story about a plague that turns famous people into plastic statues and about the people who collect the formerly famous like baseball cards. It’s got a very political slant, and never found a home probably because of that, or maybe because it’s not as funny as I think it is. There’s a strong temptation to just publish it on the web, especially because it’s partially about Bush and he’s about to leave the White House (I hope) and the story will lose its relevancy at that point. I don’t know. Maybe I can find a publisher for it int he next 9 months. Or I can sell it as alt-history futurism later.
Still, regardless, I am glad I released this one story this way. Thank you for reading it.
The Role of Idea in my Fiction
Filed Under: My Writing, Writing Process
Part of my minicrisis last week about writing and getting back to it was that I was having trouble generating the ideas part of the equation. This is almost always my starting point; a cool idea that I can at least delude myself is something new that I haven’t seen done before. Or a twist on an old idea. Just, something fresh. Some people might start with a plot or a character, but I don’t find myself working that way.My flow is Idea->Character->Plot ->Theme magically appears when it all comes together. Theme for me is a mysterious thing that the subconscious puts into the work. It’s like the underpants gnomes from South Park/Slashdot meme: Step One: Get Idea, Character, and Plot. Step Two: write story. Step Three:???? End Result: Theme (Profit!).
Lately, I have been trying to establish an idea for an overall mood when I start a piece, particularly in my fantasy stories. From my reading of classic, non-genre short stories, it seems that mood is the most important thing. Stories can get away with not having a plot like genre readers expect, because the way the story makes you feel is the whole point. I think genre stories are often thought as being about how they make you think. There’s no reason they can’t be about both, and I suspect the most successful stories are ones that do both.
I think I’ve been working on the mood/how the story makes you feel thing for a while now, but I came to it first by trying to be funny. Later, I broaded my emotional horizons, you could say. I think “The Yeti Behind Me” (Published in the Fantasy Sampler) is my most successful story for creating a mood. Followed by an as-of-yet unpublished story called “Maggie’s Man.” But even early work like “Girl with the Sun in her Head” had some of this. It wasn’t intentional then, but it ended up in there anyway, and I’m sure that’s part of why it sold.
I don’t know why, but I have real trouble trying to put a mood into a more science fictional piece. For some reason, when I work in that mode, thinking about things like emotional content is much harder. The analytical very easily overpowers the emotional for me. It’s something I really need to work on, because I would like to write more science fiction than I do.
