Publishing Today

Nothing sums up modern publishing like the fact that Lois McMaster Bujold's fourth theological thriller set in the World of Five Gods did not get picked up by the publisher, so she's e-pubbing it herself.

And now I have to cave in and get an e-reader. Because there's not going to be a print run, and Bujold is a read-while-walking, read-while-eating, take-book-to-bed-to-finish-chapter-oh-look-I-finished-and-it's-three-AM author.

"The Market" is Bunk

So I've had this thing to say ever since I read the New Yorker article about how Sims almost didn't happen and how it almost didn't have same-sex relationships in it. (Go read it; it's not long.)

I have been not feeling like expressing myself on this topic here, partly for a concatenation of personal stuff crap that has kept me from feeling like posting anything thoughtful at all, and partly because this blog primarily exists to give people who google me something dynamic to see besides my peripatetic newsgroup activity, which is mostly about Forteana and gaming. Since I expect (hope) at least some of the people who do so will be agents, editors, and other people in the industry deciding whether they want to have dealings with me, my strong opinion about What's Wrong with Publishing may not be the best thing to have turning up in that context.

But you know what? At this point, I have so little to lose, screw it.

What this article crystallized for me is the reality that the people in charge of marketing, in any given media industry, don't have a clear or realistic idea of what their market is.

In this specific article, two quotes from the interviewee stand out: “I guess straight guys that make sports games loved the idea of controlling two lesbians.” and "I don’t think they understand that family friendly can include gay people." The first sentence demonstrates that he participates in the same narrow construction of the audience that he complains of in the second. He is assuming that the reason the crowd at the game expo went wild over the incidental female/female kiss in the background of the Sims video was that they were all macho jerks with voyeuristic intentions; but that's a huge assumption to make even about the audience at a videogame trade show in 1999.

Time has shown that Sims players (and bear in mind that the Sims franchise is one of the most consistently profitable in the industry) are a dedicated, creative, patient, and overwhelmingly female bunch; to the point that I default to feminine rather than masculine pronouns when referring to players of unknown gender in a sims-fanbase context online, and am usually correct. He was at the trade show and I wasn't, so it's safe to say this wasn't the case with the industry people who saw the video and that most of them were, indeed, male; but it is hardly fair to assume that they wanted to "control lesbians" rather than being excited at the prospect of a full-life simulator that is flexible enough to allow a wide range of human behaviors. That, in fact, they were decent human beings attracted by a really cool concept with vast potential.

And yet, these same assumptions about the gaming audience are repeatedly made by marketers. I see them shooting themselves in the foot over and over in advertising. A great many people who had been excited about Sims4 dropped all intention to buy it when they saw a trailer apparently targeting antisocial 13-year-old boys; and those who did not do so were discussing ways to circumvent and mod out features that they found offensive or limiting (such as an "insane" trait) at the point that I blocked the "sims4" tag on tumblr. (Because heaven spare me from edition wars and I'm perfectly happy with my Sims2.) Yes, the misogynistic jerk gamer is a reality (google "Gamergate" and see!), just as Westboro Baptist Church is, but the one is no more a fair representation of the hobby than the latter is of Christians. (And by the way, why would you want to cater to a morally bankrupt marketbase like that when you can market to people you'd like if you met them?)

We see the same thing over and over and over, where ever media are sold. I was in a panel at last year's World Con devoted to the question of why a certain niche market wasn't filled, and the panelists kept coming back to "there isn't a market" even when the market stood up in front of them and said "Here I am." I cannot hear "There isn't a market" or "the market doesn't want" or any such similar constructions, said by anybody, and not hear: "I don't know how to sell to that market and am not interested in learning."

I would like to say at this time that I do not feel victimized by this as a writer. Do I think big publishers could do a better job of promotion for the books that need it the most? Sure; and this has included me in the past; but that has nothing to do with me at the moment. Even if it contributes to the reasons why I'm not selling any new books right now, it would only be a small part of my problem.

I do occasionally, however, feel victimized as a reader. I'm a lot closer to the assumed core book market than a lot of people, and I never have a shortage of stuff to read, or come out of a bookstore without an uneasy feeling that I shouldn't have spent so much; yet even I get tired of heterosexual romantic interests, white characters, fantasy worlds based on medieval Europe, and a whole cluster of assumptions about what will appeal to me based on the idea that I'm from either California or New York, white, middle-class, and unwilling to try too hard to understand an alien viewpoint; or that, if I'm not like that, I fantasize about being that way and can easily identify with a type of person who could not be expected to identify with me. If even I feel slighted and confined, how much worse must it be for people who are dismissed as not being part of the market at all?

It's true I'm a crappy marketer myself. I don't know how to sell stuff; because the moment anyone tries to sell me something, I don't want it. I want to find things for myself. I wouldn't presume, in the normal course of things, to tell somebody else how to do their job, especially when I know their job is one I couldn't do.

But in this instance - I'm right.

And I may not know how to solve this problem; but I do have enough faith in marketing people to believe that, if they can have that epiphany and realize that they are defining the products they represent right out of a huge potential for growth, they can learn how to change their approach to exploit that potential.

Scouting the Competition

So I was drafting a query, and the submissions guidelines I'm following ask that the author do a little work upfront and give examples of books that the work in question would be competing with head-to-head in the market place. A labor-intensive request, but a reasonable one; and after all, I have an internet.

And no matter what combination of search terms I use (fiction lesbian historical YA 2014 is typical), I turn up more hits than I would have expected.

Not all of which are actually relevant, for one reason or another. And there's some overlap. But - and this is the point - every search turns up something unfamiliar, that I didn't know was out there.

It behooves us to remember that, no matter how unusual the property, no matter how rare the premise, no matter how underserved the audience, and no matter how on top of things you think you are - you are not the only one interested in it, somebody is publishing it, and you are not familiar with everything published about it.

So maybe yours is the work that will hit it big and make whatever it is you're doing go mainstream in a big way. Or maybe somebody else is about to do that and you'll catch the first wave of the trend, quite by accident. Or maybe you'll languish in the midlist like all these other books that weren't adequately hyped. Or maybe you're not as well educated as you think you are and it's time to knuckle down to reading and truly educate yourself.

And isn't that kind of exciting? C'mon, you know it is!

These books aren't your competition. They're your team. And it's bigger than you thought it was.

May Day is for Revolution, Right?

So, today's the start of We Need Diverse Books tripartite campaign, which begins with sign-picture posts (captioned so blind-enabled browsers can read the signs in the picture; this is the kind of detail that people who don't need something often overlook) of reasons why we need diverse books, and culminates in going out and actually buying diverse books.

So make a date with your bookseller this weekend.

I have never understood the mentality that assumed people, especially kids, didn't want to read about people too different from a narrow norm. I have always been more interested in a book if the protagonist wasn't too much like me. I know what it's like to be me. One reason I read is to get a break from being me.

And face it, if you read English-language media, you already have a fair grasp of what it's like to be a cis-het white middle-class American or British person, regardless of who you are.

I tend to write protagonists who are more or less like me, because that's sure ground. In an ideal world, or even a sensible one, everyone would do this and there'd be a proportionate number of available books covering all the bases. This does not happen. People like me are disproprotionately represented in media; and people like John Green are disproportionately represented in awards, panels, and reviews. And this is silly, as well as unfair to everybody. Including the people like John Green, who is not being challenged to be the best he can be by competing on a level playing field with the women of color who have to write and market so much better than he has to, even in order to get a review.

Which places a burden on those of us who partake of privilege, however innocently or unintentionally, to write diversely. This is scary; but it is also exciting to try out other identities. For one thing, it means - research!

Which research is made much harder by the historical narrowness of media representation. (Heavy sigh.) If I want to find out what it was like to be (for example) a medieval person of color, or a blind woman in antebellum Texas, or a nineteenth century Apache little person, I've got my work seriously cut out for me, reading all around the subject and, sometimes, even finding appropriate lines to read between. Ideally I should today know people who resemble my protagonist in some way, and run the work by them, and ask them questions that aren't too obnoxious; which is problematic because I'm not much of a people person.

The internet is a big help with this. But sometimes - okay, a lot of the time - I won't even know what questions to ask. Or that I even know a person who is appropriate to ask, because you can't know if a person you've been talking to online about cats or sewing or gaming is black or autistic or intersex or whatever unless the subject comes up, and why should any of these things come up in those conversations? (So thread drift is your friend.)

Which means that when I try to write diversely, odds are good I'm gonna screw up.

But you know what? I can screw up writing undiversely, too. I'll just screw up in ways that are unchallenging, comfortably familiar. Boring even. I could even be rewarded for those screw-ups, and I am just about mature enough not to want that.

And when I express these concerns about writing diversely - which I know is extremely common; people don't want to lose their liberal cred by "doing it wrong" - to someone from an underrepresented group, they always say the same thing: That none of us should be limited in the points of view from which we write. That saying a white person can't write about American Indians is the same as saying that an American Indian can't write about white people. Which is clearly and egregiously racist.

We can't limit ourselves without limiting others, too.

The reach should exceed the grasp, or what's a heaven for? (That's Robert Browning, a cishet white middle-class 19th century Englishman writing as a cishet white middle-class Renaissance Italian. You see how hard it is to get out from under? I'm sure somebody from an underrepresented demographic has a similar quote I could go for, but it isn't culturally positioned to be in my head ready for use.)

If making the world better were easy, everyone would be doing it.

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's Getting Better. Let's Pick Up the Pace Here.

It is never wise to rely too much on the assumption that what you happen to come across is a fair representation of reality. After all, we all see what we see because we look where we look. In order to understand the world, we have to examine it consciously and go into new places, look for new things, pay attention to details where we normally look at wholes, and at wholes where our attention is usually zoomed down to fine details.

But we all start with what's in front of us, and a juxtaposition of stuff floating across the screen in front of me when I was noodling around yesterday startled me into an invigorating, if intimidating, glimpse of reality.

First came a much-reblogged Tumbler post concerning the depiction of same-sex relationships in popular media, specifically movies; how "The girls are never supposed to end up together," how boy-girl relationships can be anything, go anywhere, be intercepted by story at any point. If a boy and girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, we know and they know that by the end of the movie they can be lovers and this can be accomplished by one kiss, no angsting, as part of a larger arc that may or may not focus on their emotional lives. But if a girl and a girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, the odds are huge that by the end of the movie the one who isn't the protagonist will be standing on the sidelines being sweet and supportive of the all-important heterosexual relationship her BFF has gotten into during the movie; or even if they do wind up together, the movie will be about the struggle to face up to the fact of same-sex attraction. Most stories with queer protagonists are still coming-out stories first. And, given that we structure our lives around narrative, this is discouraging for the young queer, or the old one, trying to find the storyline that works for her life.

Immediately under this in my dash was a picture sequence of two male sims getting engaged.

I see a lot of such pictures on Tumblr, because I use it mostly to post pics from my game and follow what other people post about their games. The Sims2 program starts everybody off dead center on a scale of attraction to male or female, and the player (or a program modification installed by the player who wants less control of the process) determines the sexual preference and to a certain extent the gender orientation of the characters by decisions and actions during play. It's difficult, though not impossible, to model bisexual and transgender identities in the game; but any player can pretty much make any sim gay or straight at will. The sims themselves do not care.

And hardly any simmer I've ever run across didn't love having same-sex couples in their games. Sororities seethe with Lesbian Drama; male couples raise rampaging hordes of adopted and alien-hybrid children; generals and high-level politicians and small-town matriarchs welcome their sons' husbands and their daughters' wives with open arms; children grow up with two of one parent and none of the other, or with three grandfathers and only one grandmother, or (I have a kid like this in my game) two mothers with two fathers living next door, and never think it strange. Because it isn't. The vanilla code distinguishes between joined unions and marriage, but you can mod that out. You can even get same-sex pregnancy mods, if you want, or use a simple cheat to simulate artificial insemination.

What this tells me is that the movies, and to a certain extent even books (which are always ahead of the visual media in reflecting social change, if you read the right books) are missing a trick here.The General Public, or at least an economically viable chunk of it, is way past ready to get beyond the coming out narrative. We're ready for media to get with the program and treat normal stuff as normal, to proceed with the story (and get to the cute animations that we can't help snapping pictures of and showing each other online because although yeah, we've all seen the wedding video and the slow dance and the leap-into-arms hug in our own games, the pixels are individuated enough that they do not get old.)

Yet the institutions of media continue to behave as if this stuff is controversial, uncommercial, and barely in demand at all.

And then a little later, across the same dashboard, I get another reblog which gradually led me back to the UCLA Newsroom website, and a story about a study demonstrating that shows with racially diverse casts and creative teams do better in the marketplace than shows with primarily white casts and creative teams. Which nevertheless still outnumber the diverse shows.

Which is huge, as anyone in YA and children's literature can tell you. Non-white characters and authors are out there - but it can be so freaking hard to track them down, to get people of color onto bookcovers even when the protagonists aren't white, even to keep character tags that indicate ethnicity, and the reason we're told time and again is that white characters sell better and that non-white characters have to be handled with kid gloves so as not to offend anyone.

As if being left out completely isn't offensive.

Yeah, well, when all the books with black people on the cover are shelved under "African-American Studies" instead of "General Fiction" in big box retailers, it's not surprising if they don't sell it well. That's not the fault of the characters or the cover designer! But the place to deal with that isn't on the supply side; isn't to capitulate before being challenged; isn't to assume that this perceived marketing reality is inevitable and unfightable.

Or even true, as anything other than a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The moral of yesterday's dashboard is clear. The audience for diverse stories about diverse people exists. It is easy to be afraid of the economic consequences of writing for an invisible audience - but the secret, I see, is not to limit oneself to the visible audience, but to go forth and tear down the screens blocking them from your sight. They're out there. We can find them.

For one thing, we are them.

Now we just have to stand up nice and tall and speak nice and loud and make ourselves visible to the gatekeepers. This is taking too long, and media representation is an important part of social change. It's not enough to hang out whispering to each other on tumbler and Facebook. We have to vote with our dollars and our library cards. Complain as loudly and directly and vociferously of being stifled as the whiny minority complain in order to stifle us. Go into bookstores and ask for books with transgender protagonists; they'll find them for you. Go into libraries and check out books by Hispanic authors (whatever "hispanic" means anyway) on a regular basis. Talk up your favorite diverse shows to your co-workers in such a way as to coax them out of their comfort zones to watch and enjoy them too. Squee loudly about realistically depicted disabled characters, in public. Do amazon searches for "bisexual protagonists," "Native American / Indian authors," "black YA" whatever, and gripe to the management when you get inappropriate results.

Don't be didactic, but be proactive.

Write the book you want to write; and at the same time, create the demand you want to fill.

You are not the only one.

Statistics

So, Widespot's gone live, and I can see why so many talented people in this world are satisfied with amateur publication.

It's all about immediate feedback. Sullivan's been on sale for over a month and I have no idea if anybody, anywhere, has bought it. I'll find out when the publisher sends me accounting information, and publishers are traditionally very laggard in this matter. Even modern e-book retailers send you an accounting at most every month or so, and traditional publishers send out biannual statements summarizing transactions for the six-month period previous to the six-month period just ending. Fanmail is likely to be sent to the publisher, where it will sit till someone has an idle half hour to collect up accumulated fanmail and shove it into an envelope. I've gotten letters written in class by elementary school students who are in middle school by the time their questions reach me.

But if I look at the download page for Widespot, right there at the top I can see all kinds of statistics. Since 11:44 AM yesterday, I can see that the download has been looked at (as of right now this minute)1,276 times. Wow! I can even see, if I click a link, who is commenting, and what kind of comment it is - who is "favoriting" me, who is "thanking" me by hitting a convenient button (equivalent to Facebook's "like" button), and even (because Mod the Sims has a feature that tracks numbers of posts and uploads and changes how your username is presented accordingly) how many of the people doing those things are people of high status in the community. And of course I can see how many downloads I have.

It's a lot like counting Facebook friends and pageviews, or (as writers so often do) the Amazon ranking for your book; except I don't know anyone who really understands Amazon rankings, and these, like those of most blog/fanfic/whatever publishing communities are pretty self-explanatory.

Mesmerizing.

But most writers, in my experience, are also depressives, and no matter how hopped up you get, the numbers are always spinnable in a depressing direction. 1,276 people (roughly; I don't think I've accessed the thread more than half a dozen times since noon yesterday, so call it an even 1,270) were interested enough to view the description of Widespot. Yay. But only 96 of them have downloaded it. That means that, since yesterday, my work has been rejected 1,174 times! AAAAGH! And only 56 people have thanked me. So have the other 40 tried it and not liked it? And only six people have "favorited" me, some of whom are my known friends and probably are only doing it to be nice. Oh, the insecurity!

Don't do this to yourself, people. Insist on fair accounting from your publisher, do a better job of self-promotion than I do, participate in whatever little pond you find yourself a big fish in - and let it go.

'Cause counting your pageviews will only make you crazy in the end.

Gatekeepers

With rare exceptions, we all find our way to the audience through a number of people. Editors and critique partners, publishers, marketers, educators, reviewers, legislators, and in the case of the younger audiences particularly, parents, often have a lot more direct control over whether our work ever hits the target audience or not.

So we try to please them. We datamine rejection letters for hints, revise according to advice and try again, agonize over making the perfect query, study the markets till our brains bleed. And far too often we forget some important things.

First, that the gatekeeper is not the audience.

Second, that the gatekeeper does not owe the creator anything (outside the stated terms of an existing contract).

Third, that other gates are out there.

Widespot is currently sitting in the moderation queue (essentially a slushpile) at Mod the Sims, a large download host which has evolved procedures to control what kind of content it provides. This is my second time through. The first time, I misunderstood many points on the submission format desired and messed up the submission so badly they had no choice but to reject it. I had to re-take all the pictures, which is far more difficult for me than someone who sees straight lines can easily understand. Then the moderators closed the moderation queue for a period of time necessary to clear out a backlog and update some of their policies, which took over a month; and then I had to double-check the revised guidelines and reassess my drafted submission document before finally starting my submission thread, shortly after hundreds of other people with smaller submissions had swooped into the queue ahead of me. So now I'm waiting.

That all sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Then this will sound familiar, too. The original rejection, an obvious series of cut-and-paste boilerplate, cited crimes of which I am guiltless, though my botching of the format may have misled the moderator in charge of accepting or rejecting it into thinking that I was. I expect these objections to be dropped now that I have (I think) done things right. But a couple of items do give me pause. Like this one:

Item 3: ... your sim does not represent a unique and different overall look. While your sim may have an interesting face, anyone can create interesting faces spending a few minutes fiddling in Body Shop - the idea is to create a unique overall look... The submission guidelines clearly state that sims without custom content created by the uploader (i.e., new eyes, new hair, a variant skintone) will not be accepted.

Leaving aside the vexed and unanswerable question of whether anyone else ever would produce Dixie Land's face, and granting its theoretical possibility, the citizens of Widespot are not the shells generally uploaded for sharing, but characters in an established neighborhood with an ongoing storyline. It is Dixie's looks in combination with her stats, aspiration, biography, relationships, and history in the context of the whole neighborhood that make her and the other citizens of Widespot both unique and fun to play (as my playtesters assure me they are).

I more or less expect the story content of the neighborhood to be treated as the necessary custom content in this instance. Insisting on other kinds of custom content, such as genetics or clothing, would be counterproductive. Firstly, because Widespot is intended as a Base Game Only/Custom Content free neighborhood which anyone with a Sims2 game can drop in and with a minimum of hassle. Custom content would be unnecessary padding and violate the purpose.

Secondly, I can't make any other standard kind of custom content. Wouldn't know where to start. I can't do visual media to a professional or even amateur display standard, as I've demonstrated to my own satisfaction many times. I can make story and character all day long, and frequently do. Demand exists for inhabited neighborhoods with ongoing storylines, and this is where I can make a contribution. So I think my sims fit the intention of the guidelines even though they violate the letter of it, and I think the moderators will recognize that.

But you know what? I could be wrong. And if I am, Widespot will be rejected and that will be that. Because I'm not going to shoehorn stuff that doesn't belong, which would make me less satisfied with my work and would please my target audience less, into my work just to get it hosted. I'll find some other place, with different criteria, or no criteria; or I'll put a link in the sidebar of the blog and keep it on Mediafire as long as I can, directing people to the blog in my sig; or eventually I'll write off spreading it any further and be satisfied with the dozen or so people playing it now.

If, however, the moderator doesn't like the house the Lands live in and makes specific suggestions about how to make it acceptable without adding anything not available in the base game, and I can make those changes around the Land family as they are frozen in pause on the Friday morning that I intend the story to begin - heck, yes, if that's the only thing standing in my way, I'll do that in a heartbeat. Because the Land house really is a bit of a mess. It's playable, and to a certain extent the mess is deliberate, as it's supposed to have started out as a one-room cabin and added onto willy-nilly as finances allowed and a growing family required; but I got contradictory feedback on its aesthetic in playtest and I stopped fiddling with it more because I'd run out of ideas than because I was truly satisfied. As long as the concept of the house isn't violated by a suggestion, I'll tweak it as often as I need to in order to get it uploaded in the place I believe the intended audience will find it most easily.

The difference is that adding custom content would violate the work and, therefore, make it less suitable for the target audience; but changing the arrangement of a few walls and floors in the house may substantially improve it. These are the only considerations that matter, in the end.

If a gatekeeper rejects your work, it will not be (necessarily) because the work sucks; nor will it be because the gatekeeper is a Philistine with no taste; and it certainly will not be (in any viable market, even the internet) because the gatekeeper has some animus against you personally. It will be because, in the gatekeeper's judgement, the audience he's serving will not be well-served if he passes it. He may be right; he may be wrong; that is not the issue. The gate keeper controls this gate and if he won't let you through, you need to go look for another gate. Don't stand at this one whining to go through - you'll just make yourself obnoxious.

And for pity's sake, don't mutilate your work to please a gatekeeper. You'll regret it, I promise. Consider all suggestions as dispassionately as you can, see if your judgement coincides with his on this point, and only make changes that your judgement approves. For what profiteth it an author to gain publication, and lose the point of book?

I admire gatekeepers. They are, for the most work, overworked and underpaid. I've seen editors in the office and at home, and you would not believe the places they find to stack manuscripts, or how much work they have to get through with how little help. Most of them can't do any actual submission reading at work because they're too busy doing other parts of an editor's job. Librarians and teachers and parents are in much the same boat, and I presume that other kinds of gatekeepers are, too. If submission guidelines are difficult, it's because the number of people who think they've made something good enough to share far exceeds the number of people who truly have, and even some of those people have not taken sufficient care to be standing at the right gate. The more of these people who can be eliminated before the gatekeeper has to waste any time on them, the better for everybody.

Nobody owes me, or you, or anyone, publication. The loyalty of the gatekeeper is not to the creator, nor to the shareholder (if there is one in the market in question) but to the audience they conceive themselves as representing. Which is as it should be and I, as a creator, would not ask anything different of them.

Which doesn't mean I'm not really, really tired of sending queries and partials and fulls out into the cold world and never seeing them again except with the word "no" stamped on them. Especially when I know, as well as anyone ever knows these things, that the work is good. That isn't always what matters, in this imperfect world.

But that's life.

Genesis

This has been a month of quiet, almost sub rosa publication for me, with Sullivan appearing as an e-book and my Sims2 neighborhood, though not yet officially hosted anywhere, being played by a handful of people who PMed me about it to whom I sent the Mediafire link, and as a consequence I've been turning over in my mind the possibility of a series of blog posts about bridging the gap between creating something and publishing it.

It is a peculiarity of our age that traditional venues for publication are consolidating and growing less accessible at the same time that new ones are proliferating, along with windows into the affairs of others; so that where ever I go on the internet I encounter two kinds of people: those who think there's something special and esoteric about creation and publication, and those who think that there's nothing special about either at all and anybody can just go and do them. The first sort of person is likely to never venture to do what she wants because she thinks she's not special enough; the second is likely to rush in and attempt to publish too soon, with less than optimal results.

My main thesis is that we are all creative. Since we are a social species, we often wish to share that creation; but creating and sharing are two different things, and different kinds of work require different kinds of sharing. One may know how to do either thing and not the other, or find that habits developed in the process of sharing (for example) new recipes may not serve us well when we want to share a portfolio or a story. That's certainly what I found when I decided to make Widespot to share; yet I soon found an underlying unity between the experience of making the game neighborhood and making a book. So I was thinking a post or two of practical advice, extracting this underlying unity and giving examples of how the same principles apply, might be useful to beginners in almost any field, and the first thing I thought was: "Start with what you know."

But the more I tried to shape that first paragraph mentally, the more I realized that what you know is not where the process of creation or of publication starts.

They start with desire.

We all have the raw desire to create. If anything is a human universal, this is; and if some creative force suitable to be called God exists, then this creative desire is the divine connection between it and us. We create things we need, certainly; but more than that, we create things to create them. Scratch marks on stone, tunes hummed through hollow reeds, stories in word and gesture, piles of pretty rocks - we like to make them and we have always made them. It's fun. And beneficial, not only because we create things we use, but because we train our minds and our hands and our senses into competence, until we can make clothes that fit, food fit to eat, shelters that keep out the wind and the rain, stories that help us make sense of our lives, rules that keep most of us at peace with most of the rest of us most of the time. None of us is good at any of these things when we're born, but we learn them, and learning is fun, and fun is learning.

So we all start with play.

Creation is fun.

That's principle number one.

"But what about clothes?" I think. "I don't make clothes because I like to; I make them because if I don't, I don't have clothes that fit." And that's true - we all make things out of necessity as well as pleasure. But then I realize, I also don't create my clothes from scratch. I follow a pattern, modifying it as needed, and sometimes, when I'm familiar enough with it, and comfortable with it, I will make a major change to a pattern, like adding sleeves or pockets or something. But before I ever go so far as to design clothes, I would have to reach a point of actively liking to sew; and even if I designed a few items for me, I would require a certain level of competence before I felt called on, or any desire to, design them to share with anyone else. I'd have to know that my experience solving the problems of fitting a new design to my own body would be useful to others out there, somewhere, trying to get clothes that fit their bodies; and part of the draw of publishing a design would be to give those people something that would please them. It's work I can't do, until I've played with it awhile.

So play, or pleasure if you prefer, is the bedrock on which we create and the background that enables us to publish effectively.

That's point number one, and I'll leave you to ponder it while I work out what point number two is, possibly this week.

(We're all making everything up as we go along, mostly, anyway. You understand that, right?)

Excuse me...

Idea Garage Dale? I was in a hurry yesterday, wasn't I?

The e-version of Sullivan, That Summer is available from the publisher now and will go out to distributors next week.

In case, you know, you want to buy one. (I have good reasons for not working in advertising.)

This post doubles as a test of the setup for mirroring the blog at the appropriate Facebook site.

Sullivan's Cover!

I just sent off the galleys for Sullivan, That Summer and got a final of the cover in return. Not bad for a stock photo, huh?

Also, the release date has been moved up to February 17!

Idea Garage Sale: Wherefor Aren't Thou?

So I'm wondering - where are the queer literary takes on Shakespeare?

Recasting the culture's iconic literature to highlight the characters and concepts present, but not truly represented, in the original is a standard way of establishing a dialog between broad culture and individual experience, questioning received wisdom, or even just jolting modern audiences into seeing the classic work as relevant to modern day concerns. It doesn't often produce great literature (What do you think, is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead great? How about West Side Story?) but hey, what does? Nobody's surprised to see feminist glosses of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet with interracial casts.

The queer thing just seems so obvious. Think of all the cross-dressing in the comedies! Think of all the female parts - great female parts, Lady Macbeth and Juliet and Beatrice - first played by prepubescent boys in drag! Think of the characterization of the Duke and Olivia in Twelfth Night! Twelfth Night's genderbending creates such violent emotional reversals in the final scene that I found it a useful work to reference in the lesbian western. Len speds part of her scant income on it first of all the unfamiliar Shakespeare plays available to her in the bookstores of San Antonio because of the extended cross-dressing, hoping Viola's story will give her useful hints. She's disappointed in that; but it enables her to have an illuminating conversation with Di, so her money is not wasted.

But shouldn't there be, somewhere, a text exploring the situation with the possibility of same-sex pair-bonding not assumed away by magic hand-waving?

Where is the queer version of Romeo and Juliet? I can't believe there isn't one.

Maybe they exist and can't find publishers due to the continued squeamishness of the industry, or distaste for the ways the news media can be expected to react to them. If so, and someone reading this is the author of such a thing, listen up: This is the age of the niche market. If you can't get it over the transom to the mainstream houses, look farther.

Stupider concepts have seen print.

But for pity's sake, do it well.

I Guess I Have to Buy an E-Reader Now...

Queer Teen Press's boilerplate is better than any big publisher's contract I've ever signed in a couple of respects. Every contract should have an "if publisher goes belly-up, rights revert to authors automatically" clause! It's never happened to me, but oh, the horror stories I've heard! No advance, but the royalty rate is generous, so we'll see how it goes. As I said earlier this week, I wrote this in the mid-90s and have never been able to shift it, so that makes it a good book to launch upon the dubious seas of the virtual book market.

Sullivan, That Summer made me write it out of the depths of my crush on Dana Scully on The X-Files (I would like to emphasize that the crush was on Scully, the character, not on Gillian Anderson; though I will happily watch anything GA is in.) It's about meeting your idols, mostly, and the fact that this happens in the context of a lesbian coming-out story is, not exactly incidental, but not the most important thing about it. But it's not edgy, which mitigated against it when I first wrote it, and it's essential to the story structure that an adult protagonist remembering the main action of the teen years intrudes occasionally, which mitigates against it these days, even though the difference between teen Cherry and adult Cherry is not profound. This, for example, is Adult Cherry:

When I get home, I stagger through the claustrophobic entryway to the living area. "I'm dead," I announce. "All is lost. Order my plot."
Chris, dressed for the office, but barefoot, continues tossing salad. "What's killing you this time?"

Obviously, she pulls this teeny drama queen stuff all the time. Mostly as a joke. Mostly.

I wish we had progressed to the point where this book could wind up in a place where a general audience, not just an LBGT one, was likely to find it, but after all we're in the age of the niche market, and after an eight-year gap in the career, I'm not going to quibble about where I make a sale, just so I make one!

I just hope there really will be some money in it.

P.S. Early voting this week! Have you gone out to save democracy yet? Better get on it.

My First E-Book Edition!

My first e-book is published on Damon's birthday. Yay?

The Maze got picked, as I stated earlier, because it's short. I still need to make it available via other sources (next stop, Kindle), and then I need to figure out how to actually market the thing, and then I'll be ready to decide how to proceed with the other books to which I hold reverted rights, but now it's lunchtime.

And good enough for now.

It's just a devil program...

...with evil on its mind...

So. If anybody out there reading this actually uses Word (as opposed to used by it), and is comfortable with it to the point of being able to make it do what you want even when what you want it to do is outside what the original programmers assumed you'd want - where should I look in Microsoft Word 2010 in order to figure out how to enable bookmarking the .doc I'm editing in compatibility mode? Because I can go to the screen where you create bookmarks, and it'll let me type stuff in, but it won't give me any options except "close."

I'm not asking you to solve my problem. I'll never master this hellspawn if other people solve my problems and in any case you can't see what I did. Just point me in the right direction, that's all I ask.

A friend of mine, when I was running around trying to figure out what format I should use for scanning, said she envisioned me typing it all in and revising and having it ready in about ten years. And it's true that as long as I'm going through it taking out all the line breaks in the middles of lines and the places where the text got rearranged or the scanner read a capital I as a 1, I'm tweaking it a bit.

Who wouldn't?

Hurray!

Asking questions didn't help, and googling didn't help directly, but googling and following a link and then following another link and then following another link, did.

The problem: I do not now, nor have I ever had, a Word document for the books to which I hold the reverted rights. Every single piece of advice I've been able to get has assumed the Word document, as if there aren't any other word processing programs out there, and as if Word weren't the worst word processing program ever invented (this from someone whose first word processor was built into a typewriter). So I knew I had to scan the books, but the question was, What's the easiest format to scan them to for all the subsequent conversions they'll have to go through as I try to make them as painless for people to buy as possible?

The search led me down many fruitless by-ways until I landed on the blog of someone I never heard of, who talks about a lot of things irrelevant to me, but who also has dug down to the source code and told me where I need to start and how to get from there to the starting line.

And, not to keep you in suspense any longer, the answer is "Scan it as a .txt file" and then there's a tutorial on how to turn that into a .doc file. Just .doc, not .docx, which I believe is now the devil program's default format, so if you've been using that program and still couldn't get to the starting line, maybe that's the deal.

It's way too late to start on a project that tedious right now, so I'll do a quick whip round on the housework (and by quick I mean cursory, because it's triple digits again today, folks, and I still only have air in the study and the bedroom, which can't both be run at once) and tomorrow I'll get into that temp-job state of mind - put a dress on, have breakfast, and settle down to a tedious task that at least I won't have to do tomorrow, trouble-shooting further problems as I go. I'm good at that, though I haven't temped in over ten years now and my skills are rusty. But if I can get properly into the mindset, the study will be much tidier at the end of the day tomorrow than it is right now.

Margaret McElderry

Oh.

I just heard on my writing list. Margaret K. McElderry is dead.

I haven't seen her in years and can't claim to have been one of her nearest and dearest, but she bought Otto from Otherwhere from me out of the slushpile 30 years ago, and bought my next nine books, too, so she's probably the single most important person in my career so far. McElderry Books was the second place I sent Otto, because during the market research phase I discovered (by the simple expedient of looking at the publishing information on books I liked) that she'd published a huge percentage of the books I liked best and had consciously emulated, so she was the obvious market to try to break in with. It worked, too. Every one of those nine books was edited directly and thoroughly by her, with manuscript pages shipped back and forth in boxes. Very Old School.

I met her in person a couple of times, at ALA in town and one of the times I was in New York. She was like a fairy godmother in a pantsuit. I remember somebody got her to talk about her World War II experience at dinner at ALA. She was actively recruited to serve overseas, and was bewildered by it. She had to crawl under barbed wire as part of her training, but her war service primarily involved driving generals around. I wish I remembered more of that.

People ask me occasionally "what happened," why I stopped selling things to Margaret, and I never know how to answer. I don't think anything happened, really - except for Switching Well I was at best a midlister, after Simon & Schuster bought the imprint she didn't have as much autonomy as she used to, and I think my style evolved away from being a McElderry author about the time she had to cut back her direct participation and turn most of the work over to Emma Dryden. That's how things go.

You will read many more eloquent and meaningful tributes than this one about this woman. They will all be true.

Death sucks.