Kat Dancing

While we were at World Fantasy, suricattus rightly read me out for never updating my blog. I returned from the con with every intention of shaping up and returning to a regular blogging schedule.

Unfortunately, I also returned from the con with a nasty flu.

... it still counts as reform if you're a month late, right?

Okay, I admit it. I'm not actually reforming, I just wanna gloat. One of the reasons I'm not around much is that I started up a webcomic called Sunset Grill, which has slowly but steadily eaten my time, my brain, and possibly portions of my computer's brain. (Memo to self: back up your work, you idiot.) Now, there are some other people on the web with these comic things, and today one of them tossed a mention of SG into his comic. Someone by the name of Phil Foglio.

Yeah, second panel of today's Girl Genius. Read the sign. That's my baby.

I think I may have gone up another level in geek. But if there was a pinging noise this time, I missed it, on account of running around the house screaming like a crazed crazy fangirl. No idea what made Phil pull that particular name out of his hat, but he totally made my day.

And, yes, I really do intend to reform. Of course, I also intend to clean the house, redesign my website, and show up for work on time, but blogging sounds so much easier than any of those things. Perhaps I'll actually get it done.

... February?!

Okay, I was sure I'd posted more recently than that. Sorry, y'all. The past few months have been... involved.

One of the reasons I haven't posted since February is this. Yes, I'm insane, but this one kinda blindsided me. I guess I should have realized that the incredibly long bout of writer's block would have repercussions; my hindbrain simply can't go without story for long, and given that it wasn't moving forward on the novel, it apparently decided to go sideways. Oh, well, it's new insanity anyhow.

Not that I've actually had time to gnaw my way through the writer's block anyhow. The good, the bad, and the ugly, in non-chronological order:

- Filed self-employment taxes for the first time. Goodbye, thirty percent of Dan's writing income! It was nice knowing you.

- Went to Scotland. Hello, semi-permanent state of drunkeness! You were fun, and much cheaper than you would have been in North America. Pity everything else was more expensive and I had to deal with airplanes to get there. (Oh, and the wedding was pretty cool too. Pictures! ... someday.)

- Took over the assistant cheesemaker's duties while simultaneously attempting to keep up with my own. This does not work nearly as well as one would hope. On the other hand, I do get to collect paychecks for those 50-hour weeks, and my parents are desperate enough to resort to bribes -- er, I mean a raise. No, wait, actually I mean bribes.

- Holy crap, when did I develop a social life? And why did no one ever mention that those things eat your time?

- Dealt with my brother's girlfriend's crap. This was a lot of the problem, actually; it's hard to post when your policy of not saying anything online that you wouldn't say to someone's face means you can't talk about something that's stressing you day in, day out, in a thousand little ways, none of which you can actually address because a) you must deal with this person at work and not create any more stress for the other employees, and b) she'll only take it out on your brother anyway. Ah, family businesses. I can talk about it now, though, seeing as she interviewed for a job behind our backs, quit without bothering with any of that silly "two weeks notice" crap, and spent the one week she did work explaining to my brother and all the other employees how all of this was completely justified because we were impossible to get along with. Just like every other employer, friend, or boyfriend she's ever had.

*sigh* God save me from sociopathic suburban oil trash. And I can say this online because, hey. I don't have to get along with her any more. And I would say every word of it to her face.

- Spent more time in the car than is really advisable for any human being. Darn you, social life, if I had to get you, why couldn't I have gotten the compact version?

- Helped organize the American Raw Milk Presidium Evaluation. This basically involved grabbing my mother and holding on until she stopped running circles and started talking sense, although I did write the evaluation sheet, develop the tasting procedure, and handle most of the logistics of getting evaluations back to people afterwards. Oh, and wrote press releases for it. God, I hate writing press releases.

- Won a major award from the American Cheese Society: first place in Farmstead Cheese, and second for Best of Show. Well, not me personally. Our cheese. But our cheese did not have to write a press release (ARGH!) and send it out to a bazillion places and revamp the website and deal with new distributors and do all kinds of other crazy publicity shit, so I maintain a certain fingerhold on the prize.

However, seriously; this rocked.

- Threw a picnic for the local Slow Food chapter. That was pretty fun, actually, and not a lot of work, except for the mad cooking and cleaning frenzy at the farm. But it says something about your workload when organizing and providing meal and entertainment for fifteen people barely makes a ripple in your schedule.

- Survived.

And now somehow it's August, and I'm putting out a webcomic, and I have a friend coming end of the week and another next week and Dan's parents at the same time or maybe a bit after and one of our vendors visiting and a party the week after that and two presentations to write because my mother is sending me to San Francisco at the end of the month. Did I mention bribery? Bribery is cool. Do I know anyone in San Francisco? Does one still have friends after not posting for six months? ...it is still August, right?

I think 2008 will officially go down for me as the year of The Blur.

Kinda cool Blur, though. And I will at least try to keep people more updated on which direction I'm falling apart in from now on.

Signs you may be falling behind in your housework, #442: you have to evict a spider from your dishwasher.

Of course, the whole "can't see the counter for the dirty dishes" thing might have been a clue too. I'm such a slacker.

In other news, my book is kicking my ass. I had to give up on Novel in 90 because focusing on word count was just bringing me down: too many days when I could only get 250 good ones, too many other days -- like today -- when I had to use up precious writing time untangling a plot snarl. A few hundred words of brainstorming later, and I have a tentative plan. It's a scary plan, because it takes the book in a very different direction than I was expecting and I'm not sure I can fit everything I want into it and it basically has the potential of collapsing on me like a bad cake. A very fragile plan. But once I'd thought of it, it was pretty much either back away knowing I was chickening out on something that would make this a better story, or suck it up and ride the tiger.

Nice Mr. Tiger.... *sigh*

You know, this writing thing used to be easy. I was writing crap, of course. But I might still be writing crap, and I really, really miss the easy.

It's been... a couple of days. Bah. The power went out twice yesterday, which was Very Bad. We need power for a lot of things. Finishing the cheesemake we're in the middle of, for example. Getting water to our cows. Cooling our cheese. Milking. Lights, which are a wee bit important when your job consists of washing cheeses in a windowless, underground cellar.

The power idjits got things straightened out finally, but everyone went home exhausted and in a foul mood.

Other, random stuff:

This amused me. I mean, really. Do I strike anyone as an R-rated kind of gal?

Mingle² - Online Dating

That's what years of swearing and discussing kinky animal sex will get you, I guess.

Oh, and I got a rather nifty message from this author which pretty much made my day. I'd corresponded with him briefly before, clearing up some stuff about the agent list. I run the list because, well, because it sort of grew on me without me noticing, and I don't really expect to get anything out of it, but hearing that I contributed to somebody's book deal (however indirectly) is a bit of a warm fuzzy. Also, the book sounds cool, and we need more cool books in the world.

And finally, the inevitable --

Rewrite Progress

144 / 172 (83.7%)

Comments: Nothing much to say, really. I'm getting near the end of what I think of as the really messy part, aka "over three-quarters of what I've written". It'll be interesting to see if the non-messy bits live up to expectations.

Changes: Replaced panicked authorial leap with an actual logical sequence of events. Curse you, logic! The panicking was much easier.

Gratuitous progress post:

Rewrite Progress

56 / 172 (32.6%)

Comments: Today wasn't half bad, actually. First I went through two chapters that were in pretty good shape, once I hammered an extra character into them, making me feel like my writing wasn't complete crap. And then I went through a chapter that was entirely discarded subplot, meaning that I got a high page count and felt like I accomplished something. Hooray for silver linings!

Changes: Added an antagonist. Now if only he would do something.

Writing post! Flee, those of you here for the cute animal stories! (Hmm, I should post some more of those soon. The girls have been quite cute lately.)

So I had this book. It started out with the working title of Bestiary, which I've tentatively changed to Kith and Kin. And, considering that I have about 86,000 words of material, I guess it's more accurate to say I have this book. It's just not a finished book.

I hit what should have been the downward slope of the book, and I choked. This was not entirely unexpected, as my book-writing pattern tends to look something like this:

a) Write.
b) Hate writing. Go back to beginning and rewrite.
c) Write.
d) Hate writing. Go back to beginning and rewrite.
e) Write....
f) Repeat ad infinitum until I somehow reach the end of the book.

But, as this method is rather time-consuming and had a lot to do with why my last book is desk-drawered after I reread it and realized I'd kinda rewrote all the shiny out, I was really, really determined to make it through this one without stopping.

I failed. 86K, and my dropped subplots came back to bite me in the butt and I suddenly had no way to write an emotionally satisfying climax.

So I sulked. Then I picked up Holly Lisle's Create A Plot Clinic, which is less the methodical trudge than it sounds than a really nifty set of methods for generating ideas and getting them on paper. I got ideas. I made plot notes. And, at the end, while I had a clearer notion of where I needed to go, I had to admit that I needed a better feel for where I'd been. I had all the bits for the climax, but the spaces between bits were going to kill it for me.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying y'all are going to be getting rewrite metrics for a while.

Rewrite Progress

26 / 172 (15.1%)

Comments: Out of 26 (single-spaced; I am paper-cheap) pages, I have eight with writing on them that I want to keep. Eight. And two scenes. Out of my first three chapters, I have two whole scenes that I still think work.

I hope to God the rest of the book isn't this far off target.

Good Bits: You must be joking.

There's a discussion going on over at the Crusie Mayer Writing Workshop about character creation and profiling. This is an expanded version of my post there. Seeing as I didn't want to, yanno, totally spam their comment section.

---------
I've never had much luck with things like the Myers-Briggs or archetypes. Occasionally they spark something, but mostly it's because I'm sitting there picking nits ("Well, heck, my character would never do that -- she'd do this and this and this.") I did find enneagrams kind of interesting -- thanks for the mention, colognegrrl.

I do find character sheets and lists of questions helpful. Not for my major characters; generally, by the time I'm writing a book about someone, my brain can eat lists of questions like candy. But when my minor characters start misbehaving and fading into the wallpaper, I start making sheets for them.


My current character sheet originated from one Holly Lisle posted on her site a few years back, morphed to suit me.

This is my sheet. Now with bonus commentary!

Name: (I am not a name Nazi. Unless there's a specific culture or influence, I tend to just run random name generators until I get one I like. This one is good for real names; I use my own for made-up ones.)

Age:

Physical Description: (Sometimes I have an idea what people look like. Mostly I don't, and they end up medium height with medium-length brown hair and sort of medium features. Being me, I built another random generator to help with the problem.)

Current Place of Residence:

---
Origins Section

Birthplace:

Describe the character's hometown. (This is here because I write science fiction. Made-up place names without further detail are worth what you pay for 'em. So this will usually be something like "small frontier town" or "hippie commune on industrial world" -- anything that gives me some real meat to work with.)

Describe how and why did the character leave home -- or why he/she didn't. (She ran away! No. There are too many drifting orphan characters in fiction, IMO, simply because people can't be buggered thinking up reasons for a character to be where they are. Lazy is boring.)

Describe the character's family or lack thereof. (This is where I start getting a feel for a character's family, what place they have in the character's life, and so on. Family's very important to me; once I make myself color in those vague figures in a character's background, a lot of things start falling into place.)

---
Occupation Section

Explain the character’s current job or lack thereof. (Pretty much everyone has a reason to hold the job they hold, and it will say something about who they are and what their ambitions are.)

Describe other jobs the character's had and why he/she left them. If this is the only job, explain why. (This can be a very dull question -- as for the entire series of characters I had who were career military -- or a very important one. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground for me.)

List one or more hobbies. (I hate this question. I suck ass at thinking up leisure activities for my characters. Which is, in fact, why it's on here. My brain does not exercise unless it's made to.)

---
Relationships Section

Describe character’s immediate family - spouse, children, pets, et cetera. (My characters tend to be very dull in this area. Must work on that.)

Does the character have enemies? Does the character have any close friends? If not, why not? (Another area that's either somewhat perfunctory or very, very, very important. That "why not" can be a real bugger, too.)

Give a brief history of the character’s love life.

---
Motivations Section

What does the character desire?

What does the character fear?

What would the character do, or has done, to gain the former and avoid the latter?

(There's a reason this section is last... I may skip around a bit filling in the rest, but this is always the last thing I work out. It depends heavily on all the other stuff I figure out about the character. I hate it with a great and abiding passion, but it's damned important -- especially for working out the actions of minor characters, who have a dangerous tendency to passively adopt the goals of the protags or antags. If you get a name, a face, and some semblance of a personality, I can no longer afford to have you being wallpaper.)


As I see it, a character sheet -- or a personality test, or any other method of character generation -- is only useful for one thing: making you think. I rarely use the stuff I write on these sheets in my stories directly. It hardly ever matters that a minor character has a deadbeat brother or is scared of commitment. But it makes them real to me. It makes me treat them like real people, instead of handy tools for the manipulation of plot. That's why the sheets I use tend to be very general. Long lists of specific detail don't make me think; they make my brain shut down in self-defense, and I start making stuff up rather than finding it out. The same holds for most of the personality tests. They don't help me treat my characters like people: they make me treat my characters like Skinner pigeons. Push X button to engage Y reflex.

However (as Jenny says) many roads to Oz. Thank God. It would be an awfully boring world if we all wrote the same.

Welcome to 2007. Please turn off all electronics during takeoff and keep your seats in their upright and locked position. Your ticket is not refundable.

Frankly, I can't say I'm sad to see it go. There were good parts: no year spent with Dan is entirely wasted, and getting married turned out to be both fun *and* (since everyone obligingly gave us money as wedding presents) profitable. But it was a hell of a roller-coaster ride. I will take my next one with less unpleasant surprises and stress, kthanx.

Writing-wise, last year's goals were:

Draft the Babel series.

This failed to happen so totally that it's laughable. Instead, I got stuck at 34K, moped around for a bit, wrote 10K on the sequel to Harmony I promised I wasn't writing, moped some more, and finally got sucked into my side project Beastiary. Oh well. The best laid plans, and all.

Plan and begin drafting the untitled, vaguely conceptualized new story, hereby working-titled the Beastie Story.

... See above. Oh, well, considering I'm 28K or so into this one, I guess I get to count it.

Keep sending Harmony to agents and publishers until someone accepts it or I run out of addresses.

The stats for Harmony:

31 queries sent
28 rejections (counting 2 rejections by no reply. Damn you! I want my stamp back!)
2 waiting on replies
4 partials requested: 3 were rejected, 1 I got just before Christmas and haven't written the extended synopsis for yet.

So I guess I get to count this one as well. This pretty much exhausts my list of agents. I'm eying my list of publishers, but... my faith in this novel is low right now, not because of the rejections (I mean, four partials! That's not half-bad for someone with no writing credits) but because I've done that thing where I, yanno, kept writing, and my skill level is... so much higher than it was this time last year. I could do so much better with this idea if I wrote it now.

Bad Kat! No rewrites!

Remain sane.

... uh, I think I need a second opinion on this one.

So that's two of four with one a draw. Huh. That is actually a lot better than I thought I'd done. Let's hear it for low expectations!



This year, I resolve to... uh... make some resolutions that don't involve writing. Because I have a life! No, really! (I think it's under the couch somewhere.)

- I will take care of my body. I've been very lucky, body-wise. Sure it was cranky sometimes and useless frequently, but it's generally behaved itself and stayed out of my way, traits I also look for in cars and computer operating systems. This year, though, was finally too much for my body, and it's made itself heard. So okay. I will start eating like a real human instead of a college student. I will walk places instead of driving like a lazy-ass. I will start going to the gym. I will keep going to the chiropractor. I will even do the stupid hamstring stretches he proscribed me, though I reserve the right to whine when they hurt.

- I will work on my time management. Thing is? Most of the stuff I list above I actually like doing. I like cooking, I like eating real food, I like walking, and I like swimming (sorry, still don't like the hamstring stretches). And there's plenty of other things I'd like to be doing more of... reading, writing, keeping up with housework, spending real time with Dan. But most of it gets pushed aside because I "don't have time". The truth is closer to "I have time, I just don't have much discipline." Less excusing, more doing.

Writing-wise, I want to:

- Finish Beastiary. I'd like to have it done before calving season, which should be somewhere around the 20th of March, and it would be wonderful to have it revised and ready for submission by the end of the year. But life happens. I'll settle for having it done.

- Begin working on the Dual Worlds book. This is a rather cool idea that's been kicking around in my head for a month or two, though I need to find a plot and file off more Tough Guide to Fantasyland serial numbers before it's workable. If there was one thing that the failure of Babel and the success of Beastiary taught me, though, it was not to skimp on either the worldbuilding or the necessary cogitation time. Four months slow but steady work has given me a much better foundation to work on. Again, in an ideal world, I'll be writing this sometime in the fall, but I'll settle for having it in a state to start by next year.

- Write and submit at least two nonfiction articles. Because I really fell off the wagon with this one, and I miss it. Both the validation of having something published and the quiet pleasure I get from writing them. And I know I have two article ideas ready to be polished up, so there.

- Remain sane. Because it bears repeating. Mmm, crunchy sane brains!

Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 589 words.

Comments: I don't know what it is, but this book seems to require more stopping-and-thinking than anything else I've ever written. I mean, I know where I'm going, whereas before I was flailing blindly. So why did the flailing result in a steady 1K per day, whereas following my own breadcrumb trail requires much stopping and thinking and scribbling in notebooks?

I blame the birds. Darn birds! Get away from my breadcrumbs!

(Less blind alleys this way, though.)

Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Note to self: sentences must end.

Snips: No. There was some kin body language that I'm rather proud of, but it doesn't snip well.

For various reasons, inspired by various posts: a roundup of my views on self-publishing. Non-writer people may quietly sneak out the back door now.

Point the first: writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Writers -- traditionally published or otherwise -- take a while before they start making a living wage off their work, if they ever do. How long a while depends on how good they are, how lucky they are, what their definition of "living wage" is, and, what kind of support they get from their publisher. Since the answer to the fourth question will always be "zero" for self-published writers, "a while" will most likely be longer for them than for others.

If you think writing is a good way to get rich and quit your day job, here's a dollar. Go buy a lottery ticket. The odds are better, and it will spare us all so much time and suffering.

Point the second: self-publishing is not a moral stance.

You are not a bad person if you self-publish. (You are a bad person if you're one of the innumerable scammers who tend to run self-publishing companies, but I digress). You are not necessarily a good person if you traditionally publish. There are some well published, well-documented assholes out there. You are not necessarily stupid, clueless, talentless, and doomed if you self-publish; you may be the first two and end up the fourth if you fail to do thorough research, but then, you won't be spared that seeking publication through traditional means either. Those who don't believe me need to check out Writer Beware.

Those who automatically apply the "bad, stupid, clueless, etc" label to the self-published, or those seeking self-publication, are generally aspiring writers desperate to sound like they know what they're talking about. More rarely, a professional writer will put her foot in her mouth. Industry professionals are a lot more cautious about the whole thing.

Point the third: "self-published" is not a statement of quality.

A self-published book is not automatically a bad book. as arcaedia points out in the post I link above, there are a lot of reasons a good book could not get published: because the subject matter wasn't "timely", because all the slots for the year were already filled, because while the book was good the audience was just too darn small to waste precious slots on it, because the marketing department, in its infinite wisdom, misread the market. These aren't the sob stories I hear from authors: these are the sob stories I hear from agents and editors about the "one that got away", the good, good book that they just couldn't beg, borrow or steal a contract for. It happens, and we all know it. And some of these bad-luck books will end up self-published.

On the flip side of the table, "self-published" is not a statement of quality. It makes no statement about the quality of the book at all.

A book published by a traditional publisher has, by necessity, gained the enthusiastic support of numerous people. The author obviously thinks it's publishable, or he wouldn't have submitted it; the editor thinks it's publishable; the agent thinks it's publishable. Depending on the size of the company, there will be a variable number of other people that the editor has had to convince that the book is publishable. Now, these people are human, and sometimes they make mistakes, but the crux of the matter is: at least one person besides the author, who had no personal connection to the author, looked at the book and went, "yup, this is good. This could sell."

When a book is self-published, the only person who has to think it's publishable is the author.

As jaylake has recently pointed out, the writer is the worst judge of their own work. All the people who submit to the slushpile at a major editor clearly consider themselves publishable too, and yet Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Tor says she rejects 6o to 75 percent of the stuff in her slushpile for reasons like "author is functionally illiterate" or "author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs." That's not even a quality issue; it's a readability issue.

But all of those authors think their work is good enough to publish.

All of those authors are self-publishing.

Readers are not interested in becoming slushpile readers. They do not read for charity. They read to be entertained, and they expect what they read to conform to certain basic standards. When 6 out of 10 books they pick up from a specific source are unreadable -- not mediocre, not bad, not even craptastically bad, but unreadable -- they will start to avoid that source.

(Don't believe my stats? Look at POD-dy Mouth's. Ten percent of the books she read were so bad, she couldn't get past the first page. The only traditionally published book that struck me as being that unreadable from page one was Joyce's Ulysses.)

Self-publishing has a major filtering issue. Until it's dealt with, self-pub will be barely a footnote in the marketing world, and it will carry a stigma of the second-rate. It's unfair, but then life is also unfair.

Point the fourth: a publisher does a great deal more than print the book.

An off-the-cuff list of things that, say, Bantam-Spectra will do for books it publishes:

- Edit it.
- Copyedit it. (Yes, there's a difference.)
- Provide it with cover art.
- Send preview copies (ARCs) to reviewers, booksellers, and others in hopes of getting their attention.
- Send ARCs to other authors on its list in hopes of getting a cover blurb.
- Write ad copy -- back cover, inside flap, teaser page, and what have you.
- Possibly include ads or samples of the book in the backs of other books it publishes.
- Possibly provide promotional materials, like bookmarks, for the book.
- Possibly fund other marketing campaigns -- posters, special bookstore placements, giveaways, contests -- for the book.
- Distribute the book: it will be at least potentially available in major and independent bookstores across the country(s) and on Amazon.com.
- Do a big enough print run of the book that it will be affordable by market standards, and warehouse the extra copies.

Again, there will be mistakes. Budget will be lavished on a real loser of a book, while the year's real find starves to death in a corner. The cover art will suck. The ad copy will suck. The print run will be too small and they'll refuse to do another. The print run will be too big, and there will be too many returns, and the author will quite unfairly see it reflected in her royalty statements. But they will do it all.

Whatever company an author chooses to self-publish with will do none of this. He will have to do it all.

A great many people do not realize this when they choose to self-publish. Of those that do realize it, not all realize just how ineffective their attempts at marketing will be when compared to what the big boys do, or how expensive it will be when they're footing the bill up front. Amazon.com listings are easy enough to come by, but shelf space in major bookstores? Forget it. Most of the chains won't even special order self-pubbed books anymore, having been burned by the "promotional techniques" of certain scam publishers one too many times, and they certainly won't allot precious shelf space to them. The rest -- well, the rest simply costs money and time.

It's not easy being a published author either, and any published author who thinks she can sit back and rake in the cash is in for a nasty surprise. But she will at least have some support. The self-published author is doing it alone.

Point the fifth: writers really don't like hearing this.

Writers are as a collective neurotic, egotistical, insecure, poorly socialized, and insanely desirous of attention. I speak from experience here. They also have serious reality issues. This is perhaps to be expected of people who spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, creating their own worlds, to the point that they, say, nearly walk out of Wal-Mart with a map they are convinced they want before they remember that, no, it was a character who wanted it. (Silly, silly character! There are no Wal-Marts in the desert! ... uh, not that this really happened to me, or anything. *ahem*)

Sit a group of writers down and try to explain the hard facts of publishing and marketing to them, and there will be a lot of out-of-tune humming and absent-minded staring-out-the-window. They can be trained out of this, but the basic desire to deny reality -- or at least warp it to their personal desires -- will remain.

And the thing that writers really, really don't like to hear, the thing that will bring out the humming and the staring and perhaps even the fluffy blanket, is that their book is not good enough.

Good writers learn to deal with this. They learn to take the slam critique, or the rejection letter, or the bad review, and learn what they can from it, and toss the rest over their shoulders. Good writers become better writers.

Bad writers do not learn this. Now, bad writers with enough talent may become successful writers -- yet another sign that I do not run the universe -- but they don't tend to become better writers. And rather than face up to the grain of truth in that critique, rejection, or review, they start doing what they do best: inventing. Inventing reasons for the badness that don't involve their book being bad. My critique group is full of losers! Those critics are just jealous -- someone must be paying them to say bad things about me! Publishing discriminates against men!

The problem with this -- aside from the basic, you know, inability to learn -- is that such people are ripe for a con. There is nothing that draws the sharks like the scent of self-illusions.

Anyone who looks to submit their work to any publisher will have to pick their way through this sea. Scam agents. Scam small presses. Scam editing services. All kinds of people willing to tell you just what you want to hear while they take you for all you've got.

But self-publishing has its own friggin' ocean. The people who turn to self-pub are often those who've been turned down, repeatedly, by larger, more reputable presses. They're rejected. They're humiliated. They're secretly afraid that all those faceless people who told them their book was not good enough may be right. They can feel a dream slipping through their fingers, and they're desperate to keep it.

They are fucking ripe to be plucked. And plucked they are, by the thousands, many paying as much as $5000 to get their books published or signing truly terrifying contracts with their "publisher". And the victims now don't just have pride and their writing on the line any more -- there's all that cash they paid out, too, and the humiliating possibility they've been not just rejected but subsequently hookwinked. Their book-peddling takes on an edge of desperation that not only drives away potential readers but gives more savvy self-pubs yet another stereotype to fight.

Conclusion.

Is self-publishing "wrong"? Of course not. It can be the wrong choice, and people have made and will continue to make terrifying messes out of their lives via self-publishing. A far larger number will coast along happily, make the occasional buck, and continue to write bad books secure in the knowledge that they're "good enough" and don't have to learn anything new. And a smaller number than either will make genuinely good writers out of themselves and possibly even achieve financial success. The odds are abysmal, but then, if any of us were good with numbers we wouldn't be chasing wordcount.

Is self-publishing the same as traditional publishing? No. What many self-published writers fail to realize is that the simple act of publishing a book does not get them any respect. It does not make them significantly different than the aspiring writer next door. Self-publishing is hard work, but to the general reading public it says nothing more than I thought my book was good enough to publish!

The general reading public wants a second opinion. In fact, the general reading public wants a third, fourth, fifth, and tenth opinion, which is why big publishers spend all that money putting ARCs out to reviewers. But as a self-pubbed, you're going to have to provide them those extra nine opinions before you get so much as a second glance, and you're going to have to do it by yourself. You're on your own out there.

Traditional publishing is not perfect, but it does have filters built in. What self-published writers have done is essentially move themselves from slushpile to slushpile, in hopes that readers will be less unkind than editors. On the downside, it's a pretty slim hope. On the upside, you only have to feed yourself from the proceeds, so you can be content with a much smaller profit margin than the houses would be.


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Hello, you've reached the bottom of Kat's long and involved ranting. If your final conclusion is that Kat is pretty sick of both the whining of the self-published and the unthinking knee-jerk EBIL declarations of the determinedly aspiring... have a cookie. After reading that whole damned thing, you deserve it.

In more industry-related news, it appears that Publishing Discriminates Against Men.

The writer of this post has unassailable logic behind him: after all, he's a man, and no one will publish him.

I suppose it was only a matter of time. Writers across the board like to blame others for their rejection letters. And it is true that there's an increasing number of female literary agents, female editors, female writers, female... well, females, all around. It's the kind of thing that makes the gonads of a certain type of male retreat into his upper body cavity: my gods, they're women! And they have power over me!

Because it's Sunday and I feel like eviscerating someone, let's examine Mr. Borelli's logic.

1) Louis L'Amour couldn't get published today, because he was a man who wrote for men.

It's entirely possible L'Amour couldn't get published today. He wrote mainly Westerns, a dying genre, and he wrote relatively short books which probably couldn't get published in today's market. Though, having read a bit about L'Amour, I suspect he'd have quite cheerfully written longer books in a different genre. The man was a realist.

I read L'Amour quite cheerfully as a teen, and liked him; he wrote good, fun stories with likable characters, including the women -- not exactly Buffy-esque girls, but not fainting daisies by any means. And, ah, guys? You read it for the guns and the steel-eyed cowboys. We read it for the romance. That was why L'Amour was such a successful writer: he knew how to appeal to a wide audience.

Perhaps Mr. Borelli needs a new example of a Manly Man who writes for Men and couldn't be published today. L. Ron Hubbard springs to mind. Oh, wait -- Hubbard sucked so much he had to start his own religion to get his misogynistic epic published. So... eh... Ian Fleming?

2) Mr. Borelli is getting rejected because he is a man writing for men.

A cursory examination of Mr. Borelli's writing suggests there may be a far simpler reason for his rejections. When a first chapter consists almost entirely of young, gorgeous women stroking and announcing their reverence to the main character (whose name bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Borelli's chosen pen name), one begins to suspect that this is a character who should be run past a Mary Sue Test. The secret society claptrap doesn't help. Writing-wise, we're looking at the dreaded First Chapter Expository Dump with the typical problem of too much tell and not enough show. And as a woman, having the entire purpose of women so far be worshipping men is... offputting? Yes. That's a good start.

Having female (only female ones? Really, Mr. Borelli?) editors criticize the book with terms like "male fantasy" and "male point of view" does not mean, as Mr. Borelli seems to think, that women dislike reading about sex from the man's point of view. It means that women are not all that interested in reading a book in which there are no actual women, but rather caricatures of what a man wants a woman to be, and, frankly, many men find this dull as well. Likewise books with caricatures of what women want men to be: I've been known to dent the wall with such books before now. The essential problem here is not gender discrimination. It is unreality. I read books for an enjoyable and sometimes thought-provoking window on the world, not to view someone's petty distortion of reality into what they think it should be.

And, finally....

3) More women than men read because not enough books are written by men for men, because all the books are being produced by women for women.

According to Broad Universe stats, of the books published in 2000 in the SFF genre, 67% were by men. Editing in the same year was more even -- 55% men, 45% women.

I'm not sure too few male authors and editors is the problem here.

(For bonus credit, scroll down in the Broad Universe link to the percentages of men vs. women authors who get awards. It is most enlightening.)

The stats on just how much of the fiction readership is female varies from 55% to 80% - a survey cited by In These Times says that the SFF readership in the same year, 2000, was 52% women, or roughly 20% more than women authors -- but everyone agrees: there are more women readers than men. This is not a new problem. Fiction reading has been considered a frivolous feminine pastime since the 19th century. In the 70s LeGuin was writing essays complaining that men were trained to perceive fiction (or, indeed, any type of imagination) as effeminate, and things haven't improved much. Men are reading -- most nonfiction goes to male readers -- but they're reading stuff that's "real", not that wishy-washy fiction nonsense: reading car magazines, and sports magazines, and science books, and business books. They're watching football and war movies and wrestling and porn. You know, stuff that reflects the REAL world.

(Side note: most of the men I know, and therefore most of the men reading this blog, do not fit this pattern. I apologize for the stereotyping. You guys are da bomb.)

The point is that the men who are already reading fiction (are da bomb! No, wait) are by definition not part of the group Mr. Borelli is claiming has been alienated from fiction because of all the girl cooties, and the men who don't read fiction aren't going to be tempted back by his manly ways. It's not the lack of male fiction that has alienated them. It's the very act of imagination.

And incidentally, the answer to Mr. Borelli's question "Are men less literate?" would appear to be yes. This does not surprise me. Where I went to school academic proficiency in boys was cause for great suspicion among other boys, parents, and even teachers: they were at best nerds, at worst "fags". If you had to be male and smart, you'd better be smart at something like science or math, or your fate was sealed. Small wonder guys put their focus in school on being popular or athletic rather than getting good grades. But let's belittle our pitiful excuse for an educational system some other time; the post's getting long.

More men than women are authors. More men than women are editors. More women than men are readers, but an increase in "manly" literature isn't likely to change this. It's not the books. It's the reading.

Mr. Borelli? No offense, but you don't have a leg to stand on here. Your lack of publication to-date has nothing to do with gender politics and everything to do with your unwillingness to accept well-meant criticism and your decision to keep writing self-indulgent sexist fantasies despite their artistic questionableness and lack of market. Maybe there's some equally self-indulgent sexist fantasies being written by women and getting published (though frankly, I've never seen anything this bad), and yes, that is unfair. But then it's not very fair that I can't go into a bar without getting backed against the wall by some drunk Casanova and have to bleed crabbily for four days out of every month. Life isn't fair.

Stop whining and blaming your failures on others. Write something people male and female will want to read. And fucking grow up.