Welcome to the Dystopia

So. The electors didn't save us (it was never very likely, but this is 2016 - probability was not a limiting factor and if they'd had any guts they'd have done it) and we're living in a dystopia with an incompetent con man at the helm appointing neo-Nazis and profit pirates, incidentally encouraging devotees of every systemic evil that we've been papering over since the country was founded to come out of the woodwork and do evil by the light of day.

Well! This is not the first time the bullies have been in charge of the classroom, and we do not lack historical examples for how to behave. Unfortunately, most of them involve the most privileged hunkering down and collaborating or hiding and leaving the work of making things better to the major sufferers, who are pretty busy being oppressed and surviving - or not. A lot of people will die and someday the privileged will look back and say: "Hey, we survived, it wasn't that bad" and get angry at any one who tells us that the systemic problems still linger and if we'd look past our privileged noses and admit that, we might finally be able to dismantle dystopia.

Millions of stories are about to go down. Many will be tragedies. How many will be told?

It's hard for an artist to know what to do in these situations. Few of us have much in the way of margins in our lives, or resources to devote to dismantling the structures of horror rising up around us. We don't make much money, often have multiple jobs (the day job, the creative work, and the family work; possibly also the bureaucracy work of getting the help you and yours are entitled to), and our talents may not be well-suited for activism or actively rescuing the people who are getting thrown under the bus. It's a certain amount of work even seeing and recognizing a chance to do someone some concrete good. Jews are asking their gentile friends now "Would you hide me?" and they aren't the only ones with reason to ask that question; but I must number myself among those whose answer is: "I would, but I don't think my attic is really habitable and I'm not sure how to make it so."

I'm a dumpy little white lady who writes books for young people but can't land an agent and is therefore in a long dry spell. I have health crap, I have no energy and a dodgy memory, I have a single-income family and the car is officially dead; but I know I'm still better off than a lot of people are going to be at any given time in the next four years. (I hope, only the next four years; I know that's not realistic, but some of us have to be optimists to get out of bed in the morning.)It cannot be enough to click and reblog and send occasional small donations to a handful of important activisms, to tread water and keep stuff in the mail and maintain an escapist little simblr and grumble to my friends. But what more can I do?

And do I even have the right to keep writing and trying to sell stuff, when it's so clear to me that what publishers should be doing over the next four years is dropping all their cis-het-white-abled writers in favor of amplifying marginalized voices? Seriously, if every artist of any kind who met that description stopped producing work for the next four years, and the amount of media published remained the same, the level of representation for people who don't meet that description would increase more than the level of cis-het-white-abled representation would decrease, with a considerable net gain for the world at large.

These are things that we must all consider. What privileges do we have? Is there a way to leverage them into the service of the unprivileged? Are we terrible people if we do not go to rallies because we simply cannot face the crowds or stand long in the cold, or are too afraid of tear gas?

Which privileges are we denied? Do we deserve to have them if we don't fight for them? How do we know a right from a privilege?

Back in middle school, I heard a family friend (who would have vigorously denied that he was racist) say (in effect) that "Negroes" had done a lot of things for "Society" and deserved not to be discriminated against, but "Mexicans" did nothing for "Society" and could be excluded, marginalized, and looked down on, guilt-free. I was not brave enough to speak up against a grownup, but we were living in West Texas at the time and I was aware enough of my surroundings to think: "But without Mexicans, there is no Society here."

And this is the bottom line, this is what the con man and his cronies and those who put him in power don't realize - we are all Society. Those who survive the next four years will be diminished by the loss of those who do not - and by the loss of the voices that fall silent in order to survive.

It is our responsibility to diminish this Society as little as possible - to help others to survive, and this is important.

But it is also important to keep making a Society worth preserving. To contribute our little mite, no matter how trivial it may seem, to a world that is not unrelieved misery to live in. To encourage others to create, to empower those less privileged, and to get the attention of those more privileged. To amplify the whispers of others and to make ourselves heard amid the raucous shouting of those who think that they are Society and that anyone who is insufficiently like them has to earn the right to exist in their shadow.

Resist by existing, if that is all you have the energy to do.

And if you must die, die loudly. Make it count.

Not Sure How Much This Helps

Despite frontloading a lot of the second-guessing of myself, and going in with a sense of not having a damn thing of use to offer; despite both of us being unreasonably tired and Damon missing half of Saturday due to health crap; despite a surprisingly small dealer's room (no t-shirts? How can there be no t-shirts?), Armadillocon was good for me this year.

I can never remember what I say on panels, though I always think afterwards of things I absolutely should have said, but after each one someone in the audience sought me out to remark favorably on what I said, and moreover on how I said it. I always have the vague sense that I've talked too much (and too loud, and too diffusely) and not said any of the right things, but the audience - or these specific portions of the audience anyway - perceives this as me being passionate about things.

That is certainly true as far as it goes. And apparently the other panelists don't find it too obnoxious, either, because when the ghost story panel was short of participants, at the tag-end of the day Saturday, someone I'd been on with earlier in the day invited me to get out of the audience and onto the panel. So I did. Because, ghost stories. And we were all weird by then anyhow, it wasn't just me.

I once again sat through a panel on promotion and was once again admonished that all sales involve "selling myself" and once again concluded that if that's true, I'm screwed, because I can't sell myself. This is not reluctance; this is not naivete; this is not cowardice; this is demonstrated fact. You might as well tell me to flap my arms and fly to the moon, or do a pull-up (honestly, how? I've never managed even one; I can't even bend my elbows), or fall asleep because it's bedtime. I've had 54 years to try this advice and it's not going to work because I can't do it, and my ability to network at all is small.

But I have sold books, and I have given workshops and been on panels that apparently were good for some of the participants, and I do get traffic on this blog, and somehow I've accumulated 337 simblr followers as of this morning, the vast majority of whom are not spammers, without any promotion at all. This is all small, but real. I'm okay with small success, and all my small successes have been the result of me telling stories and talking about the things I care about and basically engaging passionately with something, and conveying that engagement to people outside of it.

I do not know how to translate Being All About the Story into, say, a living wage.

But it's clear enough that Being All About the Story has to be where I start, or nothing else is going to happen at all.

Armadillocon 2015

I just booked Damon's membership and our room for Armadillocon 2015.

I'm not sure why they want me. I'm not sure I'm a draw. I'm not sure I'm up to it. But I'm going and it'll sort itself out.

Because nothing good happens if you don't give them a chance; and the bad things that can happen aren't that bad.

Starting over and over and over and over...

Starting with the gunshots trims the first chapter too much. You don't know Len and if you don't know Len it's not worth it to keep reading. I'll never sell it like this and I don't know where to start now.

This is what I get for following advice about how to make your query and first pages attractive...I should know by now that what works for other people doesn't work for me, and no one can tell me what will work, because nobody knows. It's trial and error time again and I have no way to measure success short of acceptance, which means I could get several rejections even with the winning format and never know I'd hit it.

Life in the skinny part of the bell curve is tough, film at eleven.

Tax time again.

We always try to get ours knocked out in February, so it's not hanging over us. All I have to do is make sure the writing ledger is in order and show up at the appointment along with Damon on Monday.

I keep making tea and hoping it'll enable me to move ten feet into the chair in front of the desk with the ledger on it.

It's not working.

There's something about numbers, like a repelling force field.

Do as I say, not as I do. Keep up with your ledger during the year and have everything ready to go at tax time. So you don't have to go through this.

Synaptic Miracle; or, Thank You, Melissa Etheridge

So my brain has not been behaving in the way I'm accustomed to think of as "normal," lately, and I'm more worried about stuff than I normally am about Health Crap because if the brain doesn't work, nothing works. But -

All my life I have been unable to listen to instrumental music. Without associated lyrics, a bar of music slides right off my ears unless I have, thanks to recording technology, heard that identical bar of music several hundred times. I'm always about half a beat off the music when dancing if I'm trying to follow the music instead of matching my partner (which makes me an annoying partner), and one reason I have never gone out of my way to go to many concerts is, that they always lose me when they play those long instrumental riffs that musicians love so much and which are designed to work the audience up into an orgasmic state.

One artist I always go see, though, is Melissa Etheridge. Not only does she do an amazing live show, of which her albums - good as they are - are the merest shadows; but listening to the albums was a major emotional support for me during the Year From Hell, especially during the months when I had no choice but to process a lot of Stuff on my own, because the entire support network was hit simultaneously and no one had any energy to spare for more than mere survival. I was sitting at the soul-sucking day job day after day, typing up real estate appraisal reports and using lunch hours to run (literally; it's about 10 minutes on foot from the office to the hospital Damon was in) to visit my nearly-dead husband, and then at the end of the day visiting him again and going home alone. I couldn't have done it without Melissa on heavy rotation on my computer playlists. (Fortunately I was mostly in a room by myself and I don't think I made anyone else in the office hate her.) Going to every public appearance of hers within driving distance is the least I can do in return, and I always enjoy the show and emerge feeling stronger. But even Melissa loses me on the long instrumental riffs - even in "I'm the Only One;" even in "Like the Way I Do." I just - I can technically hear them, but I can't listen to them. They can't do to me what they're doing to the band and to everybody else in the audience. I'm not technically tone deaf, but my brain doesn't do music, as music. It can only do music as language.

Until her recent concert in Austin, when suddenly, starting with a "I'm the Only One" coming surprisingly early in the program, and continuing through a relentlessly hard-rocking set with almost no downtime, none of the softer numbers except "Come to My Window" (which isn't that soft), I got it. I don't know how, and I can't reproduce it in memory, and I would be surprised if I could get it again at a concert by a band I'm less emotionally connected to, but my brain definitely did do something at that concert that I had every reason to think it didn't possess the correct synaptical connections to do. And it wasn't just familiarity, because Melissa mixed things up from what I'd grown accustomed to - new band, backup singers (which she's never had before), a completely different concert structure, and instead of saving one of her familiar hard rockers for the encore she went with "Monster," which is from the new album and I'd only heard it a half dozen times, not having had the new album very long before the concert. And of course the point of those long riffs is that they're improvisations (or apparent improvisations) and expansions, novelty inserted into the predictable course of the piece.

At my age, new synaptic connections are rare. Brain activity after about 25 is less about learning new things than about refining old connections and extrapolating from experience - I have never seen this particular problem before, but it has elements in common with this, that, and the other situation that I have encountered, and those, these, and the other skills that I've already mastered will enable me to deal with it.

But I must have formed some new connections in order to experience the concert in the unprecedented way I did.

So there I have proof that my brain has undergone some changes recently - and that this doesn't have to be a bad thing.

Maybe I could even manage some math? Naw, let's be realistic here. I cannibalized those synapses to expand my sense of narrative structure decades ago. Besides, I have a husband who can do math for me; nobody but me can mediate music for me.

And once again, I owe Melissa Etheridge some hearty thanks.

Fear of?

I was migrainey this weekend, and could not make myself write a blog post. Sorry. Much better today, but getting a query out and starting a new sewing project are time consuming.

I am also having a little difficulty, at the moment, forcing myself to perform serious, coordinated, public speech. This makes querying very hard indeed, as terror seizes me in the moment before hitting "send" or sealing the envelope. I don't know what this terror is about, but it's remarkably similar to fear of the dark, both in the way it feels, and the degree to which it is productive or meaningful.

The good news is, it's only fear. No one has ever yet chopped off my hands for daring to send a query, any more than the monster has ever seized me from behind on my way to the bathroom. The important thing here is to know that, once I get the button hit or the envelope sealed, the fear will go away. (As it will when I return to bed, feeling every so much better. And no, it never, ever occurs to me to turn on the lights.) So that's an incentive to do the deed and get it over with.

This is not the same as a full-on anxiety attack. I don't get short of breath, I don't shake, my chest doesn't hurt, none of that stuff. If querying gives you those symptoms, seek professional help - it's no good resigning yourself to never getting what you want because your body is doing stupid crap to you so you can't take the steps necessary to deal with it. Not when there is such a thing as professional help!

If you're afraid of doing something that is necessary to get what you want, and it's not a full-on treatable condition, and you don't face the fear down and do what is necessary - you not only not going to get what you want, ever, guaranteed; but you will also continue being afraid. All that is necessary to make that sick feeling go away is, to do the necessary thing.

Anyway, if I fail to meet your Free Idea Generation needs in the future, I suggest you get on tumbler. The thing is overflowing with them. Rejected Princesses, for example, chock-full of real-life (more or less) heroines you never heard of. Medieval POC is also chock-full of inspiration. So, see, you don't need me! (Slinks off to cut out slacks.)

Authors Lead Exciting Lives

I sat down this morning knowing that Pelin was being followed, but not knowing what he was going to do about it.

I left off with him stepping out from behind a tree in front of the person on his tail and asking "May I help you?" I know what the next line is, but not much else.

Writing this book is like stepping off a cliff in the dark every day. Sometimes I plummet, sometimes I find a path, sometimes I find a single stair under my foot but can't see whether it's attached to anything, and sometimes, I have to get out my trusty toolkit and make a stair, from scratch, out of the materials to hand.

When you're afraid of heights and can't eat any of the food provided at amusement parks, you have to make your own thrills, what can I say?

Public Service Announcement of Permission

Periodically, as I drift around the internet, I run across people sending signals out into the void, asking followers, friends, and random passersby: Would you be interested, would you read, should I do, I want to but I don't know if anybody else would -

Basically, the internet is full of people afraid to access their own creativity without permission. From somebody. Apparently any random person on the internet will do.

So I always stop and give them permission, even if I think the project they describe is cliched, dull, impractical, or otherwise Not For Me. Because that doesn't matter.

Market research is for people who are already in touch with their creativity and are looking to apply existing skills more effectively or direct existing work in the correct direction. Don't mess with it if you're just starting out; if you've never written or drawn anything not for class before; if you're thinking about producing a fan work and feeling insecure; if you're in the process of discovering the creative possibilities of your favorite game + text + Photoshop.

So if you are such a person, listen up. This is your random person on the internet, sending your permission out, randomly.

You are allowed to create something that's terrible, learn from it, and apply what you learned to another work.

You are allowed to create something mediocre, and learn from it, and apply what you learned to another work, or to making this one better.

You are allowed to create something only you care about.

You are allowed to start creating one thing and find out you've created another.

You are allowed to write a full outline and depart from it; to write a full outline and discard it; to write a full outline and stick to it; to blow off outlines and create by the seat of your pants. (Even if you don't wear pants. No one cares what you wear when you create.)

You are allowed to start and finish with a cliche; to subvert it; to make fun of it; to dig deep into it and find the hidden kernel of truth that keeps it coming back.

You are allowed to abandon a project, convinced that it's crap, and come back two years later and realize, It doesn't have to be crap, you know how to do this now.

You are allowed to finish a project for your own satisfaction. You are allowed to walk away from it. You are allowed to cannibalize it for future works.

You are allowed to enjoy yourself. You are allowed to enjoy your work. You are allowed to be driven to screaming frustration, savage self-doubt, and conviction of inadequacy in the middle of enjoying your work.

You are allowed to create something, and share it. You are allowed to create something, and keep it to yourself. You are allowed to create something, and then destroy it (but I don't recommend that; you often hate your best stuff in the heat of creation).

You are allowed to change formats. You are allowed to be old-fashioned. You are allowed to try new things. You're allowed to copy old ones. You are allowed to be weird. You are allowed to be staid. You are allowed to be slick. You are allowed to be rough.

You are allowed.

So go. Make something.

Then do your market research. And while you're doing that - start making another thing.

Panic

Con registration opens tomorrow. My first panel is at 1:00 on Friday, on Texas Gothic, followed immediately by one on the Future of the Border.

Why am I even on the program? I haven't published in the genre since 2004! I'm not on top of the field! Nobody'll have my books for sale and nobody'll want them anyway! All these people I'm on panels with have qualifications and I'm just a casual autodidact who checkmarked a questionnaire based on "Hey that's interesting!" Nobody knows who I am and by the time I'm done making a fool of myself nobody'll want to! I've made no prior arrangements and don't even know which of my friends will be in town when! This is the big leagues what was I thinking committing to do this? Aaaaaagh!!!!

Yup. Right on time.

But now that I'm over 50, I have access to a calm center that knows I won't even remember my panels afterward because the Public Persona will be in charge. And I'll do better than I think and worse than I could imagine and the worst thing that'll happen is, that I won't do my career any good and will pass up an opportunity. But the best thing is -

I have no idea what the best thing that could happen might be. And that makes it worthwhile.

Because I don't know, no one ever knows, and it can't happen if I don't go out there, bite off more than I can chew, and chew till my jaws ache.

So I'll carry lots of banana chips and some frozen water bottles, get caffeinated to the gills, talk too much when I don't talk too little, and then next week I can be wiped and recover.

So if I miss the garage sale on Sunday, you'll know why.

See you there?

Why It's So Hard to Get Anywhere in this World

One of the great things about social media is that it's possible for the inexperienced, the curious, the amateur, the naive, and the isolated to listen in on, and even participate in, the conversations of the experienced, the accomplished, the professional, the sophisticated, and the well-connected and pick up early on whatever ideas are going around, more easily than ever before.

That's one of the awful things about it, too.

I hear, and once in awhile participate in, lots of conversations these days about the portrayal of marginalized groups in the media, what's wrong with mainstream habits, what's right with them, what more could be done. The Bechdel Test. Cover whitewashing. "Strong female characters." Bi-erasure. On and on and on. Somebody publishes something, it goes online, it gets comments, which draw more comments, which get quoted and Liked and reblogged and commented on and expanded and questioned and vehemently argued with and spin off new conversations of specific relevance to niche media and amusements - Is LARPing ableist? How sexist is the gaming industry? And on and on and on.

These are good conversations to have, and good ideas to ponder, because, face it, we are all ableist, sexist, racist, and so on, as an inheritance from our past, and the only way to stop being that way is to become aware of it. But -

There's always a but, isn't there?

One of the things I see, poking around in the back recesses of fandom, on the fringe of a bunch of things because that's where I naturally live, I see an unintended consequence of following these conversations.

Okay, two. One is that if you try to read all of it, you'll never write (draw/compose/program/whatever).

And another is the problem of the old man, the boy, and the donkey, who tried to please everyone, pleased no one, and lost the load of wood and the donkey. Or the problem of the caterpillar who can't walk because he can't figure out which foot to move first. I see it a lot - the person (usually female, sometimes male; usually young, sometimes middle-aged or old) who should be creating is instead paralyzed into inactivity by all the things she needs to do in order to produce the right sort of work. Will her story pass the Bechdel test? Is she being ableist? Is she writing the wrong kind of heroine? Does she have enough people of color? Is she the right color/gender identification/body shape to write this story? How can she be sure she's not just writing a silly Mary Sue story? Will she not only be able to do a good enough technical job, but produce an empowering, inclusionist work that will empower people rather than adding to the sum total of the world's screwed-up-ness?

Because heaven knows, it wasn't intimidating enough wondering if anyone would ever want to read the thing, or if you were imitating Tolkien too closely, of whether fanfiction is strictly speaking legal, or how copyright worked; which is the kind of thing I used to worry about back in the dark ages before social media.

So, if you're ever in that situation, or know somebody in a similar situation, remember this.

You won't get good if you don't do the work.

You don't have to show anyone your work until you're ready and it'll never be ready till you work on it.

If you don't do anything, it won't matter what you've done.

No one can do everything.

Discussions of this sort are intended to empower the disempowered and make the world better. If instead they paralyze you - stop listening to them. Withdraw. It's okay to do that. Things like the Bechdel test are tools to use when appropriate, but they won't always be appropriate. No work can include everything. You don't have to fix society single-handed.

The voice in your head saying excitedly: "You know what would be great? A deaf detective who is routinely underestimated because of the deafness and uses that to her advantage. If the heroine of this story set in the upper middle-class closed and gated community is black and the fact that she's black in a gated community is not the point of the story. Oh, wow, I just figured out that the reason this love story isn't going anywhere is that the supposed love interest is the wrong gender!" That's the voice of the Muse. Listen to it. Embrace it. Participate in any discussions that make that voice sing.

The voice saying: "You can't write that. That won't work. You're not good enough. You'll screw this up. You're not qualified. If you put in this good thing you're really doing this bad thing. Sit still. Don't move. You can't do it. You'll only make things worse." That's the Devil of Disempowerment. That's the voice these discussions are trying to still forever. You won't be able to silence it completely, but you can, in fact, build a cupboard in your head, shove it in there, lock the door, and tell it to STFU. And any discussions that let the Devil out of his cupboard - avoid them. However good they may be for society, and that's not your call, they're not good for you; and that can only be your call.

If you need permission - here you go. I give you permission to do whatever you need to do to accomplish the work that only you can do.

I'm as qualified for that as anybody.

I Don't Need to Share Details Here; You Know How It Is

I had something in mind to talk about today, but now I can't remember what it is.

Now all I can think about is the fact that it is much, much easier to write a 76,000-word novel and revise it than it is to write a one-line pitch for that novel.

It is also really, really easy to come up with other chores that are more urgent than writing a one-line pitch. Excuse me, I think the dryer's stopped.

What's the Deal, Self?

I need to promote myself, and Sullivan. I know this.

I've gotten good advice from a friend. I need to follow it. I know this, too.

No danger to life and limb is involved. I don't have to leave the house to do it. I don't have to pick up the phone.

It should be driving hard. Why am I acting as if it's rat hard?

Some Things Don't Change

In a lot of ways it was easier to get things into the mail when all I had to work with was outdated print resources speaking in general terms. These days I keep up with the deal news from Publishers' Marketplace and read all the high concepts of all the new deals and think: "Agh, that sounds awful! The person who bought that won't want to even look at my stuff," or sometimes, "Agh, that's the high concept of the book I'm trying to mail! The person who bought that has already bought the only lesbian western he's going to be allowed to buy this year!" about every single entry.

Which isn't true, or not always, and in many of those cases I need to suck it up and send the query anyway, but I know that in the same way that I knew, in high school, that I could get the research paper in on time, with all the footnotes placed correctly, and get a good grade. It was intellectual knowledge only. I didn't believe it in my gut, which was convinced the only way I was going to get an A was if I could write the paper amusingly enough that the teacher read it indulgently and overlooked the glaring errors in footnote formatting (which I was doing on a manual typewriter - don't miss that!), bibliographic depth, and interpretive subtlety.

Which was a pretty constructive misapprehension on my gut's part, now I come to think of it. Now I'm older I know that lots of people wrote stone-cold boring papers and got A's, while I was getting an A+, a red-pencil smile, practice in good writing habits, and the enmity of my peers (which would have been mine even if I'd written poorly so, to heck with it) for being a teacher's pet. My gut is much less useful in parsing the current market.

I guess we don't get better at everything as we grow older.

Which isn't where I planned to end up when I sat down, but it'll do, since I'm crashing kind of hard.

I'm Scared

I have a book written. I have a hook written. I have a synopsis written. I have all the contact and submission information necessary for an agent who ought to love the lesbian western.

I don't want to send it.

Why, exactly, sending a query - a routine business letter - paralyzes me with terror, I don't understand. I'm not afraid of rejection. I don't like it, but I'm used to it. I've had lots of practice and survived without serious discomfort every time.

It's a lot like my fear of small heights. I can go up in a plane just fine (except for the excruciating pain in my ears on descent), but ladders terrify me. I feel sick and as if I'm falling off backward. I used to think this was a phobia, until the day I went through the battery of tests at the ear doctor and heard the technician say brightly: "Well, you have 0% gravity detection in your left ear." It turns out, my fear of heights is a rational one, given the fact that my body can't reliably tell where it is in relation to the earth in the absence of a direct connection!

Because they feel so similar, I'm inclined to think that my fear of queries may be, like my fear of heights, based on some similar personal idiosyncrasy. I don't know what. It's not shyness, because - though I hate meeting new people generally - I'm not shy. I don't hesitate to approach people in strange cities when I'm lost, for example, though I don't do it randomly; and I frequently approach people downtown who I see doing the Lost Tourist Dance (stand in middle of sidewalk, map in hand, and turn slowly, glancing from map to territory and back with each turn) in order to help them find what they're looking for. It's not asociality, because it's just business and for the most part I'll never meet the person I'm querying in person. I'll get a rejection and that will be that. It's not - well, it's not a lot of things and I don't know what it is, besides uncomfortable.

It doesn't matter what causes it, though. If I want to sell my work I have to send queries, just as if I want to change the light bulb or wallpaper the roof I have to climb ladders. And I can bull through either fear. Done it many times, will many times again. It's one of the few things I have in common with the heroine of the lesbian western - if either of us has to do a thing, we always prove to be able to do it.

Which doesn't prevent me from procrastinating by writing blog posts about it.