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.
Showing posts with label Widespot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Widespot. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
I Know, It Looks Like I'm Goofing Off...
See, here's the thing. My brain keeps on working, making stories, regardless.
But it doesn't always work on stories I know how to sell, or that the market will treat kindly if I do sell them; and sometimes I find myself returning constantly, obsessing over, a story I know I can tell, but which I also know would be read wrong by half the people who read it and 90% of the people who didn't if it ever actually sold and somehow picked up buzz and folks did in fact read it.
Like the story dealing with how women are socialized into not recognizing that all the sexual power naturally belongs to us, with an extra layer of misleading us into believing (when we discover that fact) that it's the only power we have (and that it's wrong to use it); which is spinning itself out of the Widespot backstory for me -
It'd be a risk to write that, but hey, I can't sell the stuff I know how to sell right now, either, so what am I risking, really? I could tell that story and maybe somebody'd get it and that would be all to the good so who cares if I have to go to new places in the writing to do it, right?
Except that the way it's shaped now almost everyone would think of it as "that story where the girls are dating a father and son." Which, ick, who'd pick that up? Nobody who'd enjoy, understand, and benefit from the story I'd actually write, for sure.
So I'd have to back it right out of the Widespottian origins (which I'd have to do anyway because not only the names holey cheese the names but Penny Weiss, as is, is firmly embedded in the Sims2 alien offspring concept, with mpreg and green skin and the whole nine yards), which leaves me with themes and no characters, which is not a place I can start from. (Diagram that sentence. I dare you.)
And I'm too much a child of the 20th century to feel comfortable writing a book that is front and center about sexual mentorship, which is what the Mary/Valentine story turned into as I played my own version of the hood, and which deeply impacts even what I'm doing with Penny, because Penny and Mary tell each other everything and Rhett (whose bio I'd write differently if I did it now; instead of Rhett believes in male privilege so thoroughly he doesn't even know he believes in it, it'd just read Mommy Issues) is at the beginning of a road Valentine's already been down. So it'd have to be about something else.
And you know, there could be worse B plots than the sexual mentorship one for a story about an alien/human hybrid who regards herself as an anthropologist among the humans, if I could come up with some alternative to Penny's origins which would still leave her with the asexual hermit father and the BFF down the road. And if Penny's actually bi and in love with Mary while experimenting with Rhett (only it can't be Rhett because the father/son angle is too distracting for the audience)...Changeling, fairy child, alien, isolation, the isolation is essential as is Mary's biracial status - hey, that actually ties in with Penny's anomalous birth, too, at a metaphorical level...
So, it's a jungle in here, rampant undisciplined growth threatened by the napalm of self-censorship, the occasional tiger roaming around, beautiful and dangerous and threatening to eat me alive. I'll work it out or I won't. And it's less than a month to the Paleoamerican conference anyway, which could send me spinning in a completely different direction.
Excuse me, I probably need to clean something. Isn't it wonderful how the brain keeps chewing away at this stuff while you're cleaning?
But it doesn't always work on stories I know how to sell, or that the market will treat kindly if I do sell them; and sometimes I find myself returning constantly, obsessing over, a story I know I can tell, but which I also know would be read wrong by half the people who read it and 90% of the people who didn't if it ever actually sold and somehow picked up buzz and folks did in fact read it.
Like the story dealing with how women are socialized into not recognizing that all the sexual power naturally belongs to us, with an extra layer of misleading us into believing (when we discover that fact) that it's the only power we have (and that it's wrong to use it); which is spinning itself out of the Widespot backstory for me -
It'd be a risk to write that, but hey, I can't sell the stuff I know how to sell right now, either, so what am I risking, really? I could tell that story and maybe somebody'd get it and that would be all to the good so who cares if I have to go to new places in the writing to do it, right?
Except that the way it's shaped now almost everyone would think of it as "that story where the girls are dating a father and son." Which, ick, who'd pick that up? Nobody who'd enjoy, understand, and benefit from the story I'd actually write, for sure.
So I'd have to back it right out of the Widespottian origins (which I'd have to do anyway because not only the names holey cheese the names but Penny Weiss, as is, is firmly embedded in the Sims2 alien offspring concept, with mpreg and green skin and the whole nine yards), which leaves me with themes and no characters, which is not a place I can start from. (Diagram that sentence. I dare you.)
And I'm too much a child of the 20th century to feel comfortable writing a book that is front and center about sexual mentorship, which is what the Mary/Valentine story turned into as I played my own version of the hood, and which deeply impacts even what I'm doing with Penny, because Penny and Mary tell each other everything and Rhett (whose bio I'd write differently if I did it now; instead of Rhett believes in male privilege so thoroughly he doesn't even know he believes in it, it'd just read Mommy Issues) is at the beginning of a road Valentine's already been down. So it'd have to be about something else.
And you know, there could be worse B plots than the sexual mentorship one for a story about an alien/human hybrid who regards herself as an anthropologist among the humans, if I could come up with some alternative to Penny's origins which would still leave her with the asexual hermit father and the BFF down the road. And if Penny's actually bi and in love with Mary while experimenting with Rhett (only it can't be Rhett because the father/son angle is too distracting for the audience)...Changeling, fairy child, alien, isolation, the isolation is essential as is Mary's biracial status - hey, that actually ties in with Penny's anomalous birth, too, at a metaphorical level...
So, it's a jungle in here, rampant undisciplined growth threatened by the napalm of self-censorship, the occasional tiger roaming around, beautiful and dangerous and threatening to eat me alive. I'll work it out or I won't. And it's less than a month to the Paleoamerican conference anyway, which could send me spinning in a completely different direction.
Excuse me, I probably need to clean something. Isn't it wonderful how the brain keeps chewing away at this stuff while you're cleaning?
Thursday, May 2, 2013
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.
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.
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