Reason Notwithstanding...

I'm still alive, though I'm sometimes dubious on the prospect. And I just sent out a query for Len, more or less on impulse. Wish me luck.

I have got to get out there and figure out what might serve for comps. Back when I was actively selling comps weren't really a thing, so it's a new trick for me; one I honestly can't take that seriously. I try, and then I get this vision of how the real estate appraisers I used to work for did comparable sales - adjust -5% because the Work is Historical and the Comp is Contemporary, adjust 15% because the Work depicts strong lesbian/horse bonds and Comp doesn't, etc. But does the camel adjust the value up or down? And pretty soon I've collapsed into a fit of giggles.

But hunting for comps ought to be fun, because it primarily involves rounding up and reading a bunch of books. You'd think I could do that much, health crap or no.

Speak and Ye Shall Find

So Thursday morning I had this medical test thing to do and it felt like I was doing "too well" with it, which would mean it wouldn't help much diagnosing whatever's wrong, and that was discouraging, but Thursday afternoon I saw an e-mail, thought, "There's another rejection," opened it up, and it was a sale. Of a short story. Within four days of saying I might spend some time producing short stories again.

It's a six-cent-a-word market, too, which feels great. (Though six cents is still not much for a word, at least it's a bit of an advance over the Depression-era word rates of so many markets. Someday I'd like to work in a field where wages are intended to be enough to live on. Without, you know, changing fields.)

You couldn't ask for a clearer signpost than that. Now I need to poke through all the short story premises in my head and find the one that's closest to ripe so I can get down to it.

And it's Newbery week, and an interesting new publications on Pleistocene art and how to see it when you find it, and altogether I could have more to trouble me than I do.

Besides, maybe doing well on the testing means I'm not as bad off as I fear I am. Stranger things have happened.

Wanders in, Muttering...

Okay, that wasn't the plan at all. I don't often miss a Garage Sale. Suffice to say I overdid things badly on Saturday and took a long time recovering. Between that and the cat knocking the water glass over on the keyboard, it has not been a productive week.

On the other hand, I think I know how to make Novel-Penny alien after all! It involves the aliens being as screwed up as humans, which strikes me as realistic (given certain premises). Which is good, because the more I write Penny's dialog, the more "right" it sounds and the more strongly I realize that she's not anywhere on the autistic spectrum or any other human neuroatypical place. She's an alien.

Novel-Skye, however, may well be autistic, so I haven't let myself off the research hook by any means. Fortunately I do have a couple of Aspie net acquaintances who can probably point me in the right direction once I'm ready to knuckle down to it. Which may be awhile, because I still don't know what Pelin's doing between breakfast and moonrise on the day his disenchantment's due. Except he still has to take that list of locations to the scryers, and Loris is going to see Pommy herself...(wanders off muttering).

Feasibility, Shmeasability

Yesterday I worked on the WIP, where again I'm having to write stuff from a point of view not the protagonist's, in order to figure out exactly what is really going on and how the villain will behave next. And I realize that I'm not going to be able to do it as originally envisioned - an awful lot of what makes me uncomfortable in this story is only worked out properly, and the assumptions behind the world are only illuminated properly, if these alternative points of view are included.

Which discourages me, because alternative points of view make everything more complex and, therefore, tougher to sell.

So, while I was being discouraged anyway, after I finished I decided to tackle the problem of whether it is even possible to translate the creative tangle of the Widespot material from a gaming context to a novelistic context. Leaving aside for the moment the knotty problem (which, if solved, will make everything else fall into place, I think) of the two alien characters, I asked myself what, if this were a modern realistic novel, would be the key peculiarity of the neighborhood, and what leaped out at me was the biracial couples. Almost everything about the setting and the characterization screams "mid-20th century south," one of the biracial couples is young and overtly political, and the other is specifically said in the family biography to have moved to Widespot because of its isolation, "to get away from parental disapproval," and in Homer's personal bio "because his folks objected to his doing right by Beulah."

So, run with that - what's the earliest either of them could have gotten legally married, assuming Widespot to be in Texas? I look up anti-miscegenation laws and find that they weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967, which is later than I expected, but then I'm an optimist. (And alas, yes, Texas was one of the laggards that didn't strike the laws down till forced to.) Homer and Beulah, however, could have run off and lived together earlier than 1967, when Beulah got pregnant with Mary; so let's say the Beeches, who I can easily see marrying partly as a political statement, married in 1967. When the neighborhood starts they have a teen-age daughter, so the earliest year it can be set is - 1981. And working out the relative ages, Mary and Penny would have been born in 1960. A year before me.

Which shouldn't, actually, surprise me...

What it means, though, is that this would not be a YA story. It was always problematic, anyway, because in the neighborhood Mary and Penny - who are the characters I want to explore in book form - are both full adults. However, they are remarkably innocent, inexperienced adults, both by nature and by upbringing, and anyway a lot of what interests me is their shared childhood, so it has always seemed probable, and natural, that the book would skew young. But there is no way I am taking characters roughly the same age as me, and working out big chunks of their life experience, coincident in time with my own life experiences, and maintaining the immediacy of the YA viewpoint. Whatever I do, I doubt I'll be able to avoid the "remembered in tranquility" attitude, accessing the specific places in my brain I would need to access.

And I hate adult realism, for the most part. When I read books marketed to adults, they're almost always genre, and genre is almost always "really YA" in my private classification system. Which doesn't mean I can't write adult realism, or New Adult, or however the industry would categorize this; but does mean I'll be handicapped when it comes to marketing it. As if I weren't bad enough at that for YA and MG.

Besides, it has to be multi-POV. That's a given. I can't possibly pare the Widespot material, whatever it turns out to be, down to "Mary's Story" or "Penny's Story." It has to be the community's story, with Penny and Mary as flagship characters at most. And here I am back where I started, exhausted from fighting my tendency to write stuff that is just too damn hard for me to sell.

And it was time to quit anyway, so I went and caught up on my tumbler dashboard, where the agents-and-editors wishlist pops up with this gem of hope: I'm on the lookout for YA, NA, or Adult that alternates POVs like a boss. Character development, perspective, & voice.

Hurray! I'll send her - um - I'll send her - um.

Dadgum it.

I've been fighting this tendency so long, I don't actually have anything like that ready to go right now...No, wait, maybe Astral Palace will do. I need to look at her accepted genres.

And that, brothers and sisters, is why exhausting your strength fighting your native tendencies is a bad idea. When the opportunity arises, you want to be ready to jump on it.

Huh.

This plot turns out to have a lot of elements I'm not at all comfortable with.

Which, given that this plot has been emerging kind of like a Rorschach test out of my subconscious, is interesting.

I wonder if I can flip any of it, so that instead of perpetuating tropes that I regard as invalid I can subvert them?

I wonder if I'm wasting my time?

(I must be in the mid-book slump here, if I'm at the "its hopeless I'm wasting my time" stage. This thing's had such a weird trajectory...)

Nice While it Lasted

Writing straight through seems to be done by now. It looks as if it's time to write a scene no one else will ever see from the villain's point of view. The one where she starts scrambling madly. Because it's not enough to know what her plans were, now that it's clear that not one of her plans has survived collision with other people's secrets. In a lot of ways, I'm finding, she's working as much in the dark as the protagonist. Pelin's memory loss wasn't even a contingency plan. It was the inspiration of a moment.

This all means that time is critical to her and that all the unwise moves she's been making publicly have been valiant attempts to keep her balls in the air long enough for them to come down in the correct order. This means I have to shorten the timeline - the pressure on her is enormous.

I wonder if this means I need to expand to her POV?

Part of me hopes not, because I've done a fair amount of alternating POV in my life and I want this to be different.

Part of me hopes so, because I'm writing a lot more words than can fit in the final book just to figure out the plot.

Not the time to decide that.

Organization

Outlining, drawing maps, creating timelines, organizing notes, diagramming political structures, and so on, can be massively helpful in sorting out plot and character problems.

Or they can be a displacement activity.

I defy anybody to be able to tell the difference, until afterward.

If you keep telling yourself not to do it because it's a displacement activity, though, odds are good it's exactly what you need to do; while if doing it leaves you with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, odds are good it's substituting for actual work.

But what if you get both? Hmmmm....

All generalizations are false. Just do the best you can.

Old School

I'm gonna have to go longhand. I've tried and tried and I cannot sort out this plot problem in type. I need illegible scribbles, a notebook, and curling up in a chair.

I wonder if anyone understands the neuroscience behind this? It's not as if I can't think while typing - I do it all the time. It's a certain kind of thinking I can't do without a pen in my hand.

And yeah, it sorta does have to be a pen...

The Main Event and the Side Trip

My primary goal is to tell stories.

Given the reality of modern life, I have always framed my goal as "writing stories and selling them for money." Which I have not been able to do for much too long a time. It can be hard to sit down and write the story, knowing how hard it will be to send it out and out and out, to try to sell it to agents or editors or anybody, before it will ever see a reader, and the reader is the point, because you're not telling a story in any meaningful way if nobody hears it.

I often reflect (when I see, for example a fine actor stuck with an awful script) that I am fortunate that my vocation is one I can do without anyone's permission. I can write whether I sell anything or not; I can keep up the attempt to sell for the remainder of my life and as long as I don't stop publication will remain a possibility; if I died tomorrow, all the stories I have sitting unsold on my hard drive could still be sold next week, or the year after, or ten years down the line, or be uncovered by archeologists teasing data out of outmoded systems and published for the edification and delight of generations yet unborn. That sort of thing has happened, and does happen, and will happen - though not necessarily to me. While an actor who was born to play Jane Eyre must be in the right place at the right time to be cast when she is somewhere within spitting distance of the right age to do it, or she will never play Jane Eyre and may well be remembered, if at all, as "the girl in that Tampax commercial" or as the eternal best friend or as the queen of her local dinner theater. Compared to performers, I have all kinds of control over my artistic output.

This reflection is less comforting on some days than on others.

But I do have a secondary artistic goal, which I have only gradually come to recognize as a motivator as great as the prime storytelling urge. I have a thesis to prove: That as human beings, we are all creative, if we allow ourselves to be. This is a goal which, by its nature, I cannot accomplish by myself. All that tossing off an idea a week proves is that I can do it. It's up to other people to see me do it, and see how I do it, and realize that they can do it, and finally take their own ideas and do something with them.

Whatever it is that they are equipped and prepared to do.

I wish, in short, to empower people, and inspire them to find their own creativity - as all the authors I've read in my life empowered me to do. And I do sometimes find out I did this with one of the books. I remember one school visit seeing a board game, made as a class project, based on Switching Well. Kids draw pictures illustrating their favorite books; sometimes I get to see one of mine. Sometimes I'll hear incidentally of kids who tried something one of my characters did; or of a teacher who incorporated searching for locations from Switching Well into a trip to downtown San Antonio. This sort of thing doesn't pay the bills, but is more of a visceral thrill than getting a check. It feeds a different part of the self. One, frankly, that is normally kept hungry.

The urge to empower creativity in others was a major motivator behind making Widespot (that, and playing with a different storytelling medium at a time when I couldn't reliably handle text): I wanted to see what people would do with the characters and situations I handed them. I was mostly thinking about how they'd play out the storylines in their different games, looking forward to seeing how they'd resolve the immediate dilemmas I handed them, and then the secondary consequence of it further down the line - the genetic bottleneck resulting from the Hart family's breeding simultaneously into every other family in that tiny, tiny town.

But they do a lot more than that. My chief playtester designs clothes for the characters, as well as expanding their backstories. One player, who writes quite well, started documenting her game in illustrated story format on her Live Journal, developing the characters as richly and individually as anyone could ask. Furthermore, when she decided she needed family pictures, she went to considerable trouble to create them - pictures of a dead character, of a teen character as a toddler, an old character in his prime, adults in their teens. Another, whose creative urge is to build worlds, remade the entire neighborhood as a Stone Age settlement! These are all things I could never do, which would never have occurred to me, which now exist because of me. Hardly earthshaking - but real.

Real enough to tide me over, to get me through the days when the idea of sending yet another query to yet another agent makes me want to scream and tear my heart out; through the days when solving the plot problem seems, not impossible, but not worth the effort because at the moment I can't believe I can ever get another book through the publishing process.

Which is the moral of the story. Primary goals, by their nature, are big and elusive and time consuming. You have to work on them constantly. But you have a right to nourishment; and secondary goals may be more achievable, short term. They're worth making a side trip or two for, as long as you don't lose sight of your primary goal.

And you should check your goals occasionally. Because sometimes you haven't stated your primary goal correctly. But that's another topic for another day.

When you can't decide...

Risk it.

Sometimes, you're looking at guidelines and you think, Maybe this story I wrote awhile back would do for them. Or, maybe it wouldn't.

So, your reread the story. And it's better than you remembered; but you're still not sure, even after running a polishing cloth over it again while thinking about those guidelines. Okay, it's fantasy but it's subtle; okay, it's a YA but it's a youngish (or oldish) YA; okay, it's women's fiction but...

So you reread the guidelines, and this part over here makes you excited and that part over there is discouraging, and you've heard a rumor about this editor, but nothing in the guidelines or your knowledge base about the market absolutely precludes the story you have in hand.

Then you send it. Because you can't sell it if you don't send it. And if they don't like it, what's one more rejection, really? Especially when this is one time when you know "wasn't a good match" probably is the real reason for the rejection, so you won't go examining the rejection with a magnifying glass, inventing implications about how your work sucks and you should go dig ditches. (And you need to get over doing that, by the way. There's a thousand and five reasons to reject a manuscript, only one of which is "it stinks.") But if it does sell - well, that's a triumph as well as money, isn't it? The cost/benefit analysis works here.

I'm assuming, of course, that the story is good; that you have read the guidelines more than once; and that you are facing a true point of ambiguity, not a limitation that makes no sense to you. If you think your time travel story is fantasy because time travel is not scientifically plausible, but the editor thinks it's science fiction because the time travel goes to the future, that's a legitimate difference of opinion and you learned something about that editor for the cost of the time it took to submit. If you think your 3,500 word story is perfect for a project with a 3,000 word limit, and send it without cutting 500 words, that's a waste of your time and hope, because the person sorting through the slushpile (or, in this day and age, the slush e-mail address) looking for the inappropriate submissions that don't have to be read because they didn't follow the guidelines won't care what genre it is when she sees the word count.

What Goes On Behind the Writing Eyes

So the deal is, the novella requires a frame story. The whole thing falls apart without it, because it's a jigsaw puzzle. Something has to hold it together. And the frame story has a POV character. Who is learning a job. Which she has taken for personal reasons. So she's emotionally invested in her work. But.

If the question: "What does your POV character have at stake?" cannot be answered by reference to the text, you're not done.

Learning the job is not a stake. Caring about the client base isn't a stake. Even wanting to do well at the job because of how it affected those you loved is not a stake.

The crux, when Amy lets go of the duty to her mother, has to be a crux for Carrie, too. Who is also there because of her mother. Who does not appear.

What exactly is she risking?

There's also the question of why Fuhrman has been in an entry-level position for 50 years. Even for a dead man that's a long time. And no, "he likes it and isn't ambitious" isn't good enough.

Progress is a Stupid Word

The expectations it arouses don't reflect the reality.

I've got a story more than 10,000 words long, but shorter than 15,000. It's a pretty good story, though. I decided this week it was ready to go somewhere, if I could find any place likely to take it. So I spend some time turning up possibilities.

And I go in for the last grooming edit.

And I realize, no, there's this problem that's going to prevent anyone from taking it, and the market for short novellas is so small, I can't afford to waste any shots. It can't go out as is, sorry. And solving that problem is going to suck creative energy off the WIP.

But it's got to be done, because even with that big flaw, it's a pretty good story; and once I fix it, it'll be good.

Which doesn't necessarily mean it's saleable in the current market, but I can't help that. The current market may have changed drastically before I fix this.

And this is why writers can't think about progress. So much of the progress we make feels like running in circles.

Well, Duh.

It's kind of a slog, on a day-to-day basis (I'm still a long way from the 10 pages a day I think of as "normal"), but now that I'm writing the scenes that don't belong in the final book, it's blinking obvious that this is what I've needed to do with this story for the last umpty-ump years since I stalled out on it.

The thing is, since the protagonist's had his memory fiddled with so that he thinks (erroneously) that he knows the solution to the mystery of his missing brother, and is working to cover it up, and since his brother isn't the only person missing, and since the whole story is about his uncovering the truth and confronting a reality that doesn't mesh with his memory of it, a number of vital characters can't be allowed on the stage at all, at least not until the end game. He can't have honest conversations with anybody - either he's lying or omitting information, or the other party is. Yet the off-stage choices of other people, about which he knows nothing, create the situations in which he must act, and his responses to those situations in the context of what he thinks he knows are a major monkey wrench thrown into the work of plot, counter-plot, conspiracy, and detection.

I established a long time ago that the only way I can write a plot is to write from ground-level, scene by scene, and asking myself, Okay, what does this person do now? at every juncture. I have a general outline, yes, and a direction the story is going - I can't start a book till I know how it ends - but the details of what happens, and how character A reaches point B, I can't know until I write the scene.

This method requires that everybody in the story must have agency - there are no pawns in the world in my head. Everyone does things for reasons, whether what they do is flub an assignment, plot or expose a crime, or carry a cup of coffee across the room. So I have to know all the characters to some degree or other.

And I can't know them till I get them on stage.

Since starting the scenes-to-be-excised, I've already learned that Countess Posy, pathetic as she seems to Pelin, and hapless as she often thinks she is, is a good organizer of people and data when she's not overwhelmed by her bad situation; that Colubria is an immigrant keeping her original culture's animistic religion alongside her adopted country's worship of the Triune Goddess, and doesn't see any contradiction there; that Duke Verlui, though promiscuous with women, is faithful to a particular man; and that Hirca's bluntness is at least partly a reaction to the way her anomalous social standing forces her into situations in which she does not and cannot have full participatory rights or a clear role. I always knew she and Pelin had superficially similar self-protective shells; but I didn't know what hers was about.

None of that makes sense to you, but trust me, these bits of info represent huge strides forward in under a dozen pages. Which is pretty impressive when I consider that the first glimmer of this plot and these characters occurred to me in junior high school.

This stuff takes a long time to get ripe, you have to give it the right environment, and most importantly - you have to do it the way you have to do it. Not the way that seems efficient or sensible.

People whose modes of creation are efficient and sensible need to recognize how lucky they are.

Private Pleasures

One of the sweetest, least shareable things in the world is going back over a manuscript you'd lost all enthusiasm for, to run a polishing cloth over it out of a sense of duty because you get a submission window to a publisher you always intended to send it to but couldn't for whatever reason, and realize, This doesn't suck.

This is, in fact, pretty good.

Yes, it's good in a way that's hard to pitch, but if you can manage to get somebody past the sales pitch (always the problematical bit) it has a real shot at publication, and even at becoming one of those books that people love in isolation. Because it's not very likely to hit the zeitgeist in a bestseller kind of way, but an under-the-radar favorite kind of way, whose readers discover each other and rejoice and become a little private club, is not out of the question.

Which would be plenty good enough for me. But will a publisher see it that way in this climate?

Never mind. It's in the mail. It has its fair shot at the market. That's all I can give it.

Don't throw them away. You can learn to love them again.

It Takes Two (or More) to Polish

Yeah, I'm here, but it's hot.

Here's an example of how important revision, proofreading, copyediting, and fresh eyes are. I don't care what your medium or your target audience.

I was giving another Sims2 Neighborhood builder a hand with a project he'd undertaken which had been overtaken by Health Crap, and with three people working on it we thought we had it good to go. This is the third or fourth draft of this hood and we thought we finally had all the i's dotted and the t's crossed, though we did still have some differences of opinion on individual details. So we put it up for playtesting again.

Within 24 hours we had four or five tweaks that we'd missed, settled the difference of opinion based on feedback, and been alerted to a huge problem - one of the families was appearing, in certain views, with the text for one of the families that ships with the game! This makes no sense! And it was only happening to one person.

After two or three days of head scratching and grilling this player about her game configuration, another playtester had an idea, did an experiment, and gave us The Big Clue. As an artifact of how the neighborhood was originally set up, certain strings of text in the translation files for languages other than US English got duplicated from a premade neighborhood. The person with the problem had a game set to UK English, which was sufficient to trigger the glitch. Once we knew that, it was a piece of cake for the programmer among us to prevent, and the tutorial on creating neighborhoods has been duly updated with a warning about the practice that got us into trouble.

And this is why it bugs me that publishing companies have gradually downsized their copyediting and proofreading over the decades; why so many creative people find beta readers and test audiences an important part of their process; why self-publishing will always be a crapshoot; why I give Damon manuscripts to read for logic and continuity errors; and why whatever it is you do, you need to set your ego aside and listen to feedback from anyone who is kind enough to vet your work. Just because you can't see a problem doesn't mean it's not there. Maybe you're too close to it to see it; maybe you know what's supposed to be there so well you see it even though it's not; maybe it's not physically possible for you to see it because it only appears under conditions you have no reason or ability to replicate.

It's your name on the work, so you're responsible for the final result; but you can't do quality control all by yourself. You need someone to spot you.

Time to be Flexible

An IT person was once approached by a business administrator frustrated by the persistent refusal of IT to submit time estimates on the grounds that there was no basis on which to make them. The business administrator asked: "How long does it take you to write a line of code?"

If you substitute "line of poetry" or "sentence of story" in that sentence, you will be able to make much the same response as the IT person did, whether you've ever written a line of code yourself, or not.

Because it's all the same thing. Lines and sentences, paragraphs, books, coherent arguments - they're all an end product of a process of accumulation, analysis, experiment, test, refinement, reanalysis, revision, more accumulation, etc., that takes as long as it takes. You can, with deadlines and good work habits and concentration, move them along efficiently; but what you can't do is multiply the length of time it takes you to do one unit, multiply it by the other units, and come up with a realistic time estimate. Time estimates are always guesses based on your past experience, your sense of the complexity of the task relative to other similar tasks, and hope.

I've been writing this stupid one-line pitch more or less continuously since, I dunno, May? Maybe April? It rolls around in my head and whatever I do to it, it's still dreadful. I have the entire rest of the query put together. Only the damn pitch holds me up.

So I'm going to go start a major rewrite of the lesbian western (except I think it's more accurate to call it a transgender western). It'll take less time.

But I'll still be working on the pitch.

Maybe one day I'll wake up with a workable draft of it in my head. Probably about the time I hit a snag in the rewrite. If I'm lucky.

Timing. I Don't Have Any.

You know how sometimes all you want to do is fire off a quick query before you settle in to concentrate on some different project, but you suddenly see how you might restructure large chunks of the book to make it move faster, which might or might not make it more saleable?

Yeah, well, that's where I am with Len. I'm also supposed to be working on a pitch line for Nightmare in Shining Armor and reading up on Texas/border history and folklore so I can hold my own at WorldCon. But I'm wondering if maybe I should start with the shots Len hears, flash back a bit to leaving home and Maudie's rejection, reveal all that in bits and pieces. Basically start at the end of chapter three and spread the first two chapters out to appear as internal reflections during the slow bits of Len getting from Point A to Point B.

Because the problem I have over and over is that, told linearly, the first two chapters don't mesh well with the main action of the book. The characters in them don't even appear again till the final chapter when she runs into her brother at the State Fair. I'm not certain that this is a weakness in the book in any absolute, objective sense; but I'm certain it's a characteristic of the book that makes it harder to sell to a person who got 150 new queries today and still has 20 she didn't get to yesterday. I'm also certain it doesn't hurt anything to experiment with it - the old version will still be there, after all. So I'll be doing it, but I have to stop myself from sliding right into it. This is a full-focus job.

And the pitch line for Nightmare is as fun as ever. At the moment it reads: Galen drinks foster sister Bethany's blood to drain the bad stuff out of her life; but their shared fantasy deteriorates even as it comes true when Galen's called on to slay a vampire. Pretty sure that sucks. Which isn't as big an asset in the genre as you'd think.

Brevity Sucks. But Achieving Brevity is Fruitful.

I'm writing a one-sentence pitch.

No, really.

I know it looks like I'm updating my blog and my simblr and catching up on newsgroups and running to the post office and rubbing cat tummies and staring hopelessly at the jungle aka my yard and wondering how to tell the oregano from the horseherb at this stage and reading e-mail and - but the backbrain is on it and I can't focus too hard on anything else while it's working.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The trouble is, the plot is complex and fantasy and backstory-heavy and the character arc is gritty-realistic and not foregrounded because Galen doesn't talk about his inner life or even admit he has one so back off Jack, let's talk about something important, like Anything Else. And the entire story is Galen's POV. I hadn't realized till I started trying to distill it down to one enticing line how masculine Galen is, and by "masculine" I don't mean macho and tough and all that BS, I mean needy, inarticulate, and deeply embarrassed. I mean he wants to Fix Things without talking about them. I mean desperate for someone he can trust enough to Protect and Serve. I mean convinced that it's nobody's job to take care of him and if he doesn't look bulletproof, if he doesn't do everything exactly right, if he ever admits even to uncertainty, he'll be rejected and left to rot alone.

You know that self-abnegating, angel-in-the-house, everyone-else-first, I-have-no-needs thing women do? Galen does the male equivalent of that. The big difference is that women will talk about the fact that they do it and men won't.

And so far figuring out all this is no help whatsoever in creating a pitch line. Because the pitch line will work at the same level at which Galen is willing to talk about things, the surface level about turning into a vampire assassin in a high-fantasy setting and completing the job and dealing with the consequences.

And how to cram all that into a sentence without sounding merely silly? That is the question.

Excuse me, I have to go check newsgroups and e-mail and pace and find out what the cat wants and eat chocolate. The debt the publishing industry owes to the ready availability of chocolate is staggering.

Odious Comparisons, or Why I Am Midlist

So yesterday I got my first-quarter - actually first month, since it came out in March - royalty statement for Sullivan, That Summer. Five copies sold. Oh well.

But check out the downloads page for Widespot. It became available at almost the same time as Sullivan, and as of this writing it's been downloaded 548 times!

So my exercise in making something for a game that is no longer supported or sold by the company that owns its copyright is almost eleven times more successful than my book in a popular genre. Sigh.

I can whine about it, or I can learn from it. From what differences does this discrepancy arise?

It's not quality, I can tell you that. Both are solid, workmanlike storytelling.

Comparing across formats is always problematic because the technical requirements of storytelling in different formats - book, video, game, oral transmission, graphic - vary so much, and though techniques from one medium may be usefully translated into another (considering "camera angles" in a novel, say), they will not have equivalent values. Creators are often the worst judges of their own work, also. However, I'm in position to state that the same degree of care and creativity went into each; that both spring from the same fangirly place in my psyche; that both were created under considerable internal pressure, to the point that I could not leave them alone over an extended period of time. If work and care count for anything, in fact, Sullivan ought to be the better work, since I had almost ten years to polish it (I think it first forced me to write it around 1995) and I have a lot of experience and skill in prose storytelling. Possibly Widespot benefits from unstudied naturalness or something, but I doubt it.

Price should not be a factor. Widespot is free, of course, but Sullivan is only $4.99. And whereas Widespot is only useful to Sims2 players, Sullivan is available in trade paper and a variety of electronic formats; and Widespot is only available at a single website, while Sullivan can be acquired through the publisher or a variety of other retailers, including big players like B&N and Amazon.

Ah, but here's where the law of supply and demand comes in. Whereas the demand for LGBT YA literature is much higher than the demand for premade Sims2 neighborhoods, and the supply is not as great as it ought to be, the proportional supply-and-demand is skewed against me in the literary market, and for me in the gaming market. The number of populated premade Sims2 neighborhoods available is small, and the proportion of them that contains corruption (bad code that will eventually render the neighborhood unplayable) is large (and includes the original neighborhoods shipped with the game!); though I have no statistics on the matter, this supply is nowhere near big enough to satisfy the demand. The pay rate is low, the currency of tender is intangible, and the market is shrinking, so my only competition is from other people who were intrigued enough by the creative problem of making one to assay it and motivated enough to complete it. LGBT literature, on the other hand, is a growing market in which it is possible to make money as well as ego gratification, so competition is stiffer.

The size of the pond is also relevant. MTS is the oldest and one of the largest (possibly the largest) fan forum the Sims franchise has online. Even people who don't like to hang out there, even people who rag on their upload policies and sneer at their downloads, check it out periodically. Within this tiny pond, I was able to hitch a ride aboard a good big fish.

Queer Teen Press is a small, niche venture; small enough that I didn't submit Sullivan there till I'd run out of mainstream publishers to try it on. It's one of a number of specialty publishers taking advantage of the digital revolution to launch, all vying for a good lane position on the information highway. Even within the tightest focus of this particular niche market, consumers are bombarded with more information than they can possibly absorb; any given company, let alone any given publication, in this market needs as much luck as skill in order to catch the attention of an interested buyer.

And within the small world of each pond, at MTS I'm a talkative poster who has become familiar to a fair proportion of the other participants, while at Queer Teen Press I don't really know anybody. MTS is part of my normal social milieu. Queer Teen Press is just another place where I submitted a story over the transom. I have a platform at MTS; I have none with the queer YA audience.

Nor do I know how to get one. I'm not a teen, and although I self-identify as bi I've never been part of the queer subculture. I live within a heterosexual marriage, for heaven's sake! And I'm just not social enough professionally; I never have been. I can make friends with other writers, but when it comes to being a personal presence to the audience - I suck at that. I'm sufficiently aware that most people who've ever met me have either been indifferent to or have actively disliked me (and that I could never isolate what I did to bring that on) that the idea of going out and trying, with an ulterior motive, to put myself out there were people can get to know me makes me physically ill. And even the most basic social networking with a purpose seems to be beyond me. Sullivan has a Facebook page, but with the best will in the world I haven't been able to find things to put on it and I'm not even certain it's published properly.

Maintaining a simblr (a Tumbler page consisting mostly of game-related pictures)? Ffft, that's easy! I can tell myself that nobody looks at it, really, except my friends who are genuinely interested and whose game pictures I'd also like to see more of, though I've been pleasantly surprised to find some "big name" simblers whom I don't know personally following me back. I promote Widespot accidentally, as a byproduct of stuff I do for my own amusement. I want to promote Sullivan, but can't relax and do it naturally.

Sometimes you know exactly what the problem is, and still can't solve it.

So that's where I am. Suggestions appreciated; but don't get your feelings hurt if you give me viable solutions and I'm too chicken to implement them.

Yet Another Sewing Analogy

So I'm making a pattern I've never sewn before, and on Friday it came time to make the back center seam of a bodice with a lining and no zipper. I read the directions, and they made no sense. None. I tried to follow the directions and they still made no sense. I manipulated the pieces as directed and it all seemed physically impossible. So I gave up.

I woke up a number of times during the weekend, worrying about this bodice.

Yesterday I went back to it. And it was easy. Obvious, even. This despite the fact that I was pretty light-headed, which makes seeing how two-dimensional patterns translate into three-dimensional garments exponentially more difficult for me.

Sometimes you have to let a problem rest and let your backbrain deal with it. I can't promise it'll take as short a time as a weekend. That block at Ch. 10 I referred to awhile ago has been there a good deal longer than that. But the backbrain does in fact keep working, out of sight, if your frontbrain will let go of a problem and allow it.

They don't seem to be able to work simultaneously, sorry.