Archive for » May, 2008 «
Oh the irony of posting an article on web serials and then me taking mine down. That’s not to say to stop reading them. Please don’t but I just couldn’t take mine anymore.
It’s not that the time constraints were getting to me, not really. It was the work itself. I hated it. Loved the idea, still do but I’ll be damned if I let something that sub par represent my writing. The worst of it? The voice. I addressed this concern earlier here and I was hoping I’d be able to work through it and I sort of lied to myself and rationalized and hoped that I was just being a little over-critical of my work when deep down, I knew it was as bad as I thought it was. When a review confirmed my suspicions, I said screw it, it’s not worth it.
To write in general is certainly worth it but to continually put effort into something I just don’t like purely for the sake of time management is simply a waste of my time, especially when I put my WIP on hold every other week on order to write and edit the next chapter in this series. I want to write something that I know has an inkling of a chance to make it to the end and pretty much everything except that serial has that chance in spades. With my WIP, from the little snippets of descriptions I’ve given and the sample pieces that I’ve had critiqued, it’s generated a bit of a buzz and gotten people interested already. Yay! Granted the stories morphed significantly from those initial writing pieces (which I will post here eventually) but the concept, the idea and where I’m taking it has got people intrigued by it. But most importantly, I’m happy with the story I’m creating and the words that I’m writing even though they’re crap.
Not really crap but yes, crap. It’s a first draft. No one’s eyes will see this version except my own and I’m purposely just pumping the story out in order to just get it out. It’s sub par but that’s what edits are for, as well as rewrites. But the fact is I’m excited about the crap. I’ll probably pee a little with the finished product at this rate.
Have I ever said how much I love these books? I’m sure you’ve seen them before at your local bookstore. They’re local interest books highlighting the town you’re standing in and the surrounding areas, visually recounting the local history, how the town came to be, hot points of the past, major events and so on. If you’re a history buff like me, snagging one of these for your own personal collection just to have the pictures is a definite plus.
Yes, I am from Connecticut and yes, I am currently living here but why a beach town in California? First off, this was no easy book for me to get without having to order it. Thankfully I was able to pick it up while I was in San Francisco for my reading. It was just local enough to the city that Barnes and Noble had this doozy on their shelf. I quickly grabbed it and had to pound on my chest a couple of times to restart the heart when I realized how much is cost. For a paperback book 128 pages long that has at most 10,000 words which are all captioning pictures, it cost $20. From the looks of it, you’d probably never think that much. I certainly didn’t but I guess it could be considered a research text or the price can be set that much because of the amount of research that went into it. Either way, it was 20 bucks. Ordering it online wouldn’t have cost me much less, especially when shipping was factored in.
How I love the Snarkives. And it’s always nice when I see eye to eye with Miss Snark (which happens more often than I just let on). In one of the posts buried in the list of thousands, she applauds The Spriggan Mirror author Lawrence Watt-Evans for serializing his work on the web. This was thee years ago this guy did this. Now I will readily admit that I’m very new to the whole web serial thing and as far as I’m concerned, it sprung up out of nowhere about 5 months ago. Now I know that’s not the case but is it really this old? If anyone has been in the game longer than I have, let me know.
Now, I’m not familiar with Watt-Evans (if anyone else is, let me know) but according to his site, he has a bunch of books published with Tor Publishing plus contracts so it’s safe to say he’s not representative of the majority of web serialists out there. This guy is a professional, quite literally, and he decided that due to fan requests, he was going to continue writing a series for his fans online when it was dropped by the publisher. The catch? They had to donate in order to get the next chapter released, which they gladly did and it worked. They soaked up the book and it was eventually e-published. It appears that he started another one as well although the site itself seems rather out of date. However, at the end of it all, he barely broke even on costs and even he stated that he hardly made minimum wage. Yes, he was in it for the money first and foremost (at least that’s what I took away) and for the fans second but in the end he still serialized one of his novels on the web.
I’m trudging my way through Miss Snark’s archives and somewhere in there she posted this article regarding creative writing workshops and just what they churn out. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of the creative writing workshops. Lets face it. I wouldn’t be where I am now in my writing skills if I hadn’t taken them but, on the grander scale, perhaps they may be a little more harmful than helpful, especially for the susceptible minds that are willing to do anything and everything to “make it big” in writing (really, quite a laughable concept, go ahead, say it out loud and NOT make a funny face).
In the writing workshops I took, the emphasis was on quality, seeing the flaws in your own writing and carving out the better writer in you. These were taken at a state university so they were blissfully free of most of the pretentiousness, although I can’t say that there weren’t any people that couldn’t tell you what the inside of their own ass smelled like. Unwarranted and small dog, especially for where we were.
During the classes, and even still now, I loved my teacher. Not in a Cameron/House kind of love, just that I’m forever grateful for what he taught me and he taught it with an added level of snark and self-mocking and I think would be devoid in other literary teachers at the hoitier toiter schools. With hindsight though, I can’t help but see just a slight hint of snobbishness there in the fact that my teacher hated genre anything and would steadfastedly jump on anything that was genre and try to mutated it otherwise. I know that firsthand. I had written a genre piece once, horror, which made him want to put his head through a wall but I will readily admit the advice he gave for it made it a much better story. Reading it now . . . I don’t think it’s so great but from what I remember of the first draft, much, much better. Oh what would he say to know that I’m actually writing in the bane of genres, fantasy?
It hit me all of a sudden when I was at work today, taking notes on a story idea that popped into my head . . . OMFG I’m a YA author! I don’t even like kids! Well, not that I think they’re the bane of existence but I’ll stick to having none of my own and schleping that responsibility onto someone else’s shoulders. I have a dog. He’s a handful enough.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while, especially with my WIP because, thanks to the agent blogs I’m reading, they all say to know who your audience is in a query because, in so many words, you’ll look like an ass if you don’t. To determine audience, it’s usually by the age of your MC. Well, the starting age of the MC in Diamond Crier is 10. In my Coney Island piece? 8. Both will show the aging of the character and for DC she’ll be somewhere in her 20s by the end and, now that I think about it so will CI although CI might being two books and the second will not, in any shape or form, be YA if for nothing more than the age of the MC alone. Tack on the ages in this new story idea? 14 and 17.
Where the fluck is this coming from? And, obviously, it was purely subconscious until my subconscious decided to slap my face with this notion. Am I really a YA author? DC is certainly going to be a bit darker than the other two but is it still YA? I don’t know what it is with fantasy but it seems to make me have young MCs. The only remotely close exception would be CI because it’s a first person past tense POV with the adult MC recounting her past.
In one of his columns for Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King openly chastised the Massachusetts legislator for trying to enact a law that would ban kids under 18 from purchasing violent video games. I’m convinced he can only make me love him more.
In so many words, he believes it should be in the hands of the parents to control what their kids do and don’t see and yes, I wholeheartedly agree. He even brought up a rather valid point: a seventeen year old can walk into a movie theater and see the next slash ‘em up flick yet he won’t be able to go to Target and purchase Grand Theft Auto. Makes sense, right? O_o
Scary enough as this is that parents just can’t bring themselves to break their friendship with their children to ban things from their own house, it could get even scarier if they started banning certain books that minors would otherwise have access to. Yes, yes, I know. The idiots* have been attempting to do this for years. God forbid Mark Twain, the civil war era writer, didn’t use “African American” in his works. Racist propagandizer he is! But think about it. In the same scenario as above, a seventeen year old can go see Saw 47 but can’t pick up The Shining. Please tell me I’m not the only one going cross-eyed at that prospect.
I echo King’s point pretty much down to the letter. Parents need to start putting a hand in to raise their children, to put their foot down and not allow things they find objectionable into their homes instead of suing this company or that for exposing their child to it, nevermind it was their money that bought the product to begin with. At the same time the government needs to take a step back and stop going to such lengths to protect us from ourselves. I was 4 or 5 the first time I saw the first Poltergeist and probably about 7 or 8 the first time I saw The Exorcist. Did I try to masturbate with a crucifix? No. Why? Because by parents liked the movies, watched them with me and explained things to me, explained that it wasn’t real (regardless of the fact my mom wouldn’t allow a Ouija board in the house thanks to Linda Blair) and I wasn’t allowed to watch these things on my own.
It’s blog chain time again and I’m next up in the chain gang. Soma, my predecessor, talked about rejection and how, regardless of what’s said, it’s always personal. Alas, I must disagree. To a point.
If you get a rejection letter back saying, “This blew dogs for quarters. Do us all a favor and never set pen to paper again,” then yes, I would have to say that’s pretty personal and that would probably be a rejection I posted on my blog, with name, to show just how much of an ass said agent was. But after reading a few agent blogs and getting their take on the slush pile, it’s really hard to sympathize with writers who just don’t get it.
If you do get it, and you understand that a pile of form rejections means that it’s something you’re doing wrong, then you’re good and I’m sure you’ll work to improve that. If you don’t get it and see a pile of form rejections as X number of agents overlooking your talent and they don’t know what they’re missing, I’m really not going to pity you when you get a rejection of the type above.
I’ve been writing since I was 9 and submitting since I was 17 (16?) and getting overwhelmingly rejected ever since, with a sprinkle of happiness in between. I never once, in all those years, wept over a rejection, nor did I become discouraged or throw myself a pity party. A rejection came in, another submission went out. If enough of them came back on one piece, I realized, as a lowly teenager, that the piece just wasn’t good enough and to stop submitting it, which I did. The harsh reality of publishing is not everyone is good enough to get published. Thanks to self-publishing, any schmuck with a word processor can publish his masterpiece and proclaim the fallacy, “I’m published!” but outside those delusions of grandeur, most of the writing out there really isn’t good enough.
