"I joke about sex because it's funny when you're frightened."

[greygirlbeast]

Yesterday, I did 1,024 words on "The Melusine (1898)" for Sirenia Digest #31, but did not find The End. Because this is one those pieces. I meant it to be a vignette I could write in two days. It has, become, instead, a full-fledged short story that has, so far, required twice that number of days. If I'm lucky, I'll finish it today. Truth be told, I did not have time to write a short story just now, as the deadline for The Red Tree looms so frightfully near, and I have written only the prologue and that one chapter. And we know about authors who miss their deadlines, don't we? Or did you skip yesterday's lesson?

Yesterday, two years ago, Sophie died. That damned old cat. How can it have been two years already? We moved her ashes with us from Atlanta. I wasn't about to leave her ghost lurking about that godsforsaken city alone. And who'd have thought this annoying Siamese bastard named Hubero Padfoot Wu ever would have stolen my callous heart? It's a world of damned unlikely twists and turns, I tell you.

And on this day four years ago I wrote the following:

Lately, I can't seem to get past the cold fact of "popularity contests." We tend to use that phrase in a strictly pejorative sense, as in, "I don't want anything to do with that. It's just a popularity contest." And yet, that's what publishing is. If you win, it's because you've cracked the secrets of the popularity contest, and if you fail, it's because you never figured it out, or never tried, or no one ever paid to put you at the top of the list, or whatever. And adding to the frustration is the importance of happenstance in this whole enterprise. How does someone achieve popularity? Well, I have to admit, at least in the short run, money helps. The more money is spent promoting your books, the more chance is weighted in your favour. But it's not at all unusual for books with huge advertising budgets to fail. In fact, that's what usually happens to books with huge advertising budgets, if only because that's what happens with most books (and forget the highly questionable and rarely questioned, even if often parroted, Sturgeon's Law; it's about as useful and relevant here as any adage). What really makes for success is that intangible, elusive ability to appeal to large numbers of people, for whatever reason. Authors tend to achieve success in the marketplace by one of two routes: a) an ability to speak the common tongue and tell stories that resonate with a large number of readers, or b) a knack for being in the right place at the right time. In either case, it's mostly luck. This is not an issue of art, or of quality, or of effort. No matter how hard one tries, or how well one writes, the odds of success are roughly the same. The work ethic fails here, along with all those American fantasies of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps and naive beliefs that quality will out.

Four years on, I still haven't gotten over being appalled at the whole high-schoolish "popularity contest" aspect of publishing. Likely, I never, ever shall.

Now that the heatwave has abated, I am being preyed upon, or falling victim to the seductions of, another of the Nine Seven Deadly Sins of Writing —— Distraction. How am I supposed to sit here, in this tiny office, writing about a fabulous clockwork Western America, an alternate reality with mechanical mastodons and zeppelins and mysterious carnival tents that reek of the ocean, when I could easily be at Beavertail, or the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, or the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, or visiting Lovecraft's grave at Swan Point, or talking with Panthalassa at Moonstone Beach, or meeting Bob Eggleton for coffee to discuss The Dinosaurs of Mars, or taking in a movie at the Avon on Thayer Street, or searching for trilobites at Lionshead on Conanicut Island, or reading old books in the Providence Athenaeum, or taking the train down to Manhattan? I mean, sheesh. There was nothing to do in Atlanta —— nothing worth doing —— but now i am here, and there are a hundred things to do on any given day. What odd gravity holds me in this chair, I'll never know.

Last night, more unpacking, mostly fossils for the big display case, and a few recent skulls. Three starfish from Jacksonville, FL. Then we watched the very first episode of Deadwood for the fourth or fifth time, because I needed a dose of Al Swearengen. Then there was more unpacking, and bed a little after 2 ayem.

The box-flap doodle art auctions have begun! Two of them, which is all there shall be. There's the "Cephaloflap" and the "Monster Doodle." Take your pick, or go for both. All proceeds go to, well, stuff. There's always stuff. Stuff is not free. Except for free stuff, of course. Frell, free stuff is cool, right? So, I'll even throw in a free moonstone from Moonstone Beach, collected by mine own hands, to each auction winner. So there. Go forth and bid, ye bloomin' scallywags.

Also, Spooky's birthday still has not been moved from June 24th, despite appeals to the Homeland Office of Birth Date Relocation, and you can find her Amazon wish list by following the button below. Me, I need more caffeine, obviously.



Shit, it's Friday the fucking 13th. Good thing I'm not triskaidekaphobic or paraskevidekatriaphobic.

Comments

I joke about trash 'cause it takes class to be enlightened...

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I think we disparage the popularity contest because we tend to think that the popularity is shallow and/or hollow. There's only the flash, the surface, no substance, underneath.

In the end, though, I don't think that matters, too much, if you're trying to eat food, and that eating depends on people liking you, for whatever their reasons.

We do what we can, though, and we tell people about those whose work we enjoy, and maybe that telling hits enough people, or the right people, and then there's more people, and they tell people.

At least, that's what I tell myself, and that's what I hope, because your work's a bit too good to go without a large, Large audience, and you can't really keep writing that work, if you don't have food to eat.

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

"How does someone achieve popularity? Well, I have to admit, at least in the short run, money helps. The more money is spent promoting your books, the more chance is weighted in your favour."

Gotta' wonder, too, as the Writing Workshop Industry takes wing, how much spending money to achieve popularity is tied up in THAT particular game ...

(a) Spend $1,500 bucks for a week with commercially successful author(s) ...
(b) ... who may (or may NOT) know how to teach ...
(b) ... network, get known in an intimate circle of wannabes ...
(c) ... one of whom MAY end up an editor at some house or 'zine that'll publish you.

Can't afford admission? Solace in something Rod Serling once said: "Sooner or later, good writing gets noticed." (Perhaps, like Hemingway's words, a lie ... but a pretty one.)

Auctions

[cliff52.livejournal.com]

I can't help but think that this is a good idea. You may want to hold onto all the box flaps...

[stsisyphus.livejournal.com]

Nice Title. Where is it from?

I still haven't gotten over being appalled at the whole high-schoolish "popularity contest" aspect of publishing.

Which, of course, just makes me wonder what exactly you encountered to make this old distaste arise to the fore (or more likely, the rear...of your mouth where one tends to accumilate bile from dyspepsic eruptions...).

[jtglover.livejournal.com]

Four years on, I still haven't gotten over being appalled at the whole high-schoolish "popularity contest" aspect of publishing.

I haven't seen much of the back end yet, but as a reader it seems like every so often you come across an author who's been publishing steadily all along... whom you liked just fine... but you hadn't heard was still alive, let alone still publishing. It's strange to see how much buzz certain authors or markets get -- writers with very few publication credits, or markets with very, very low visibility outside of the hundred or so people who read and publish there.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I understand completely about your aversion to leaving Sophie in Atlanta. I felt the same way about my savannah monitor Afsan: after he died, I made sure to get back his ashes, because I was going to be damned if I'd have left him in Innsmouth West.

I had another savannah, a baby, die on me about three months later of unrelated causes: I had already received a job offer to move back to Texas at that point, so I kept him in the freezer until the move and put him in a cooler for 24 hours. As soon as I crossed the state border into California, I stopped, found a spectacular spot on the side of a mountain on the Siskyou Pass, and buried him there, covering the grave site with quartz chunks that were eroding from further up the mountainside. As much as I detest my ex-wife, I wouldn't have left her in Portland unless I was physically unable to move her corpse, and were I to have been diagnosed with a terminal disease while I was there, I was determined to die anywhere but there just so any obituaries wouldn't associate me with the place.

Yeah, I feel about Portland the way you feel about Atlanta. How can you tell?

[kalamah.livejournal.com]

I imagine that your Sophie is with my Tabitha. In the afterlife, the next life, rounding the Wheel of Life...