I am pouting because I have failed to transform into various famous people.

Famous people I am not:

Amanda Palmer
Stephen Sondheim
Bernadette Peters
Poe (singer/songwriter type)
Audra McDonald
Angela Lansbury
Lynn Nottage
Timothy Near
Tony Kushner
Lanford Wilson
Christine Baranski
Carol Burnett
Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer

The list continues in this vein for quite some time.

Interestingly, I don’t find myself particularly jealous of other prose fiction writers. Octavia Butler will always kick my ass up and down the page, but that’s okay. She’s just made of gold-plated awesome, and I’m fine with that.

If this were a serious post, I would meditate on how I’m not jealous of writers because I am one, because I know what that path looks like. I would recall how I was 22 when I first heard the Dresden Dolls and just about to graduate from college and living in a beautiful beach town that was drenched with sun, and the world seemed like that beach town, opening onto an ocean of possibility. And now that I am 29, choices have been made and options severed. And while I always knew I was never going to be Bernadette Peters, it was less clear then what I *would* be.

As this is not a serious post, I will end on this: Damn it, universe. It is completely unfair that I am not, currently, Amanda Palmer. That’s right, universe. I’m calling you out for being kind of a jerk.

Relatedly:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html

She gave that advice to our whole novel-writing class, but she repeated it to me in particular several times. As someone who tends toward short stories, and sometimes toward poetry, I want to have control over every. damn. word.

But novels are bigger than that. I end up choking myself off into very nicely written lyrical sections that can’t connect with anything of greater breadth.

I was reminded of this when I picked up an old teacher’s book on playwriting which advised novices not to adhere to rules they’ve built up in their heads about how plays should look. The kind of thing he meant, he continued, was personal rules, things like “each act must contain three scenes” or “no scene can have fewer than four characters in it.”

As I attempt to write in novel length, as I try to give up control, I realize how many of these rules I have. In short stories, they give me some advantage. Writing with a rule like “each section can be no more than 300 words” turns the writing into a kind of game, gives me an experimental form and structure to react to. I enjoy setting rules like that for short stories, and changing them from story to story.

But it’s a different process, this novel thing. Giving up control… I don’t like that. It’s not my native habitat. But I’m going to learn how to do it. I’m going to take control of losing control. Or something like that.

How do you balance control and writing? Do you switch between poetry, short stories, and novels? Do you disagree with the premise that novels require less control than shorter forms?

Is any blog post that ends with asking questions forever going to be too reminiscent of this?

To sum up the article:

After a drawn out process that began at the end of last year when it missed payments to top publishers, Borders Group has given in to the inevitable and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy… Borders said it will close approximately 30% of its current store base, about 200 stores, within the next several weeks… According to Borders, the financing should enable Borders to operate the stores that remain open in a “normal course”… The announcement made this morning was foreshadowed last night when it implemented an ordering freeze and Ingram, its lifeline to the publishers, stopped shipping books. Publishers are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars…

The most obvious problems stemming from this seem to concern mainly small press publishers who have national distribution. I was wondering how small press publishers who don’t have national distribution (and I think a number of the contributors/commentariat at this blog are involved in non-national small press publishing in some way?) think this news will affect them. Positively? Negatively? Not at all?

With just chain around, nationally distributed small press publishers may have to be more conservative with the kinds of work they put out, to make sure that it can get picked up by the remaining chain. Do micropresses anticipate that change in small presses rippling out to them?

I feel like it was a really good year for published sf/f. I found lots of stories I’m enthusiastic about, and lots of new authors. Discovering great new fiction and great new authors is one of life’s pleasures, I think, so I’m eager to share!

“Flying in the Face of God” by Nina Allen – My favorite novelette of the year; I’m really pleased it’s online. About alienation and the way people change, and how it is that some people go and others stay.

“The Life Cycle of Software Objects” by Ted Chiang – This stunning novella considers the invention of artificial intelligence not as something that changes the world, but as something much more mundane–sentience that humans would abuse or ignore, the way we abuse or ignore zoo animals. Intensely detailed, immensely fascinating.

“The History within Us” by Matt Kressel – I’m not sure how this one will come across to readers who aren’t steeped in the science fiction tradition. I’d be interested to know whether the themes come across, or whether it’s just confusing. Anyway, I recommend people check it out, it’s weird and strange and wonderful, and of particular interest for the way it deals with genocide and memory. I reprinted this in the anthology of the decade’s best science fiction and fantasy that Sean Wallace and I edited this year.

“On the Banks of the River Lex” by N. K. Jemisin – Death wanders an empty New York.

“Ponies” by Kij Johnson – Short, intense burst of surrealism.

“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim – Funny, interesting, unusual. Time travel shown through a series of broken images.

“The Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland – Contemplating how views of 9/11 have changed and are changing.

“Surrogates” by Cat Rambo – A science fictional look at alienation in marriage.

“Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu – Science fiction tropes applied, via metafiction, to outsourcing. Very smart fiction, intricately layered characterization.

Of course, Locus Magazine has its own list, and I found this one from Jason Sanford interesting.

One piece of advice that got picked up and repeated was the idea that if you were working on a project, and found out that you had six weeks to live, and then would be willing to set aside the project, it was the wrong project.

I really dislike that advice. It seems to me that it originates from the same place that makes writers say things like “a real writer *has* to write” or “any writers who can be discouraged, should be.”

First of all, if we take a class or race or gender analysis, of course this is an easier thing for people who are reasonably well-off, or not mothers, or part of the dominant culture to say. They’re going to have a lot of advantages in not getting “discouraged.” Everything from bias in the system to more concrete and nameable problems like poverty and being the caregiver of small infants and so on.

But even ignoring that, I don’t think the idea that writers *have* to write has much traction. I don’t have to write. I have to eat. I have to sleep. I might miss writing. I don’t *have* to do it.

I feel like saying “I *have* to write” is a way of absenting oneself from agency over the decision, consciously or subconsciously. Writing is a risky career choice and one that doesn’t always yield a lot of concrete reward or social approval. But if one pretends it’s not a choice, then one doesn’t have to worry about those things, or at least not in the same way. It’s not their fault that they aren’t making more money; they *have* to write. They don’t have to doubt themselves; they had no choice. Likewise, how could you be so cruel to doubt them when this is something they must do to survive?

Art is cool. But it’s not bread.

And if I had six weeks to live, I would want to spend as much of them with my husband, family and friends as I possibly could.

I had to think about this recently because I came a little close to dying. Not as close as other people have been. I don’t want to make too much of my experience. But it changed the way I was looking at my life, and inevitably, it changed the way I was looking at my writing. For a while, I was viewing myself and my future with tunnelvision, as if I didn’t have a future to write in.

There were things I regretted about that. I wished very much that I would have been a better person. I wished I had experienced more. And sure, I wished I’d written better things, which in my framework of thinking about things would make me a bit of a better person (although I have to emphasize that I don’t think basing one’s self worth on one’s achievements is a *healthy* metric), and it would mean I’d had more experiences.

But what I really would have wanted, what I really would have missed, was time with my husband and my parents.

I don’t know. I don’t want to be maudlin about this. My intent isn’t to be all after-school-special I-wish-I’d-spent-less-time-on-my-work value-your-friends. But life has its beautiful, messy, wondrous parts, and art is–for me at least–an intense way of communicating them, of discussing the experience of being human, of bridging the gaps between our isolated little skull-bound brains.

But my commitment to communicating, in the abstract, with a future, imagined audience, must ultimately weigh less than my commitment to spending a few more hours of my last days with my husband.

I’ve been honored to know that my stories have reached people, and moved them, and made them think. This is one of the things I treasure about my life. But I don’t flatter myself that future generations will be impoverished for the lack of my last, six-weeks-to-live masterpiece. And I do flatter myself that my last six weeks, and my family’s, would be impoverished if I spent my time on that and not on them.

I don’t mean this as an argument against art at all. When there’s more than six weeks to live, obviously, calculations change. It’s worth it to me to eschew an hour or six of my husband’s company so that I can write a novel that it gives me joy to write, and hopefully gives other people joy to read. Hell, it’s worth it to me to eschew eight hours of his company a day so that we have enough money to live the way we want to live; we could undoubtedly subsist on less money earned in less time. (As an aside, I feel like I have to mention the projections that hand-to-mouth foraging societies are projected to have functioned with people working about ten hours a week, which provided them with a rich diet that may have been nutritionally superior to ours…)

Art is amazing. Life is amazing. Human beings are amazing. And if I didn’t think so, if I wasn’t awed by the complexity of it all, then I, personally, wouldn’t write at all.

But art is not only important if it’s the kind of art that would be written in someone’s last six weeks.

And artists aren’t only real artists if they would spend their last few days creating art.

It turned out the research application isn’t as useful as I’d expected–it’s usually so much cheaper to buy a used paperback of a research book than to get it on the kindle that I generally go that route, assuming the research books I want are even available on the kindle.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, was how much the kindle has facilitated a return to my pleasure in reading. I didn’t expect to enjoy reading on the kindle. I had a lot of romantic notions in my head about the feel of paper books, the smell of them, the comforting turn of the page–I thought that moving away from all that into something that seems as, I don’t know, disembodied? as the kindle would distract me from enjoying the words.

But ultimately, it turns out the words are a lot more important than the media through which I consume them. Reading on the computer has always annoyed me a bit because it sometimes causes me headaches, but without the backlight, the kindle e-ink removes that problem, and suddenly I’m a convert.

During and after grad school, I read a lot less for pleasure than I had before. I burned out a bit, partially because of reading for school, and partially because at the same time I started editing, which tied a lot of new reading to my job. I’m not a magazine editor anymore, so I’m not reading fiction for work in the same steady way, and that’s given me a little more space in my life for reading.

And the kindle makes it easy to pick up books I have casual interest in, books that aren’t going to explode my world or upend my paradigms, but that are simple and fun to read. I love explosive, topsy turvy books, but I also think there’s room in the world and my life for books that are just kind of fun and pulpy, and the kindle makes it easy to access those without having to figure out a way to wedge them onto my over-crowded shelves, where Silly Werewolf Book can’t possibly compete for a permanent location with, say, Morrison’s Beloved.

Just for the record: I understand that the kindle’s record of dealing with publishing companies isn’t always awesome, and that their file protocols kind of suck. But it seemed easier to find programs online that could take e-books I purchase and convert them to kindle files, than to find e-books I buy in kindle format and break them so they can be read on other readers. Having access to the largest range of books was my priority in purchasing. Also, we can tie multiple devices to my amazon account, and then I and the other readers in my family can all share books, even if we’re non-local, which is seven kinds of awesome.

Anyway, I was surprised by how much I’ve really enjoyed my e-reader on a personal level. Are other people out there trying them out? Do you still resist them? Have you tried them and found that having paper in hand really does make a concrete difference for you?

MIA [a musician] would not have been given a podium by the cultural producers in the first place if she had been seen as fully authentic. By definition, anyone who can get to the heights of popularity that MIA attained is compromised politically. It’s similar to the selection that news or education institutions do, as put forward in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.

I suspect this is true.

One can argue, perhaps, that some of the venues that writers use for dissemination are too small to necessitate political compromise–an excellent argument for the utility of small presses!–but at the same time, usually those avenues don’t provide wide dissemination.

I can only hope that the accumulation of many pieces of politically compromised work can still create change, even though each individual work is compromised. I must hope this because it’s the same argument that applies to activism–few of us are perfect activists in our lives, and if we must compromise in order to exist, one can only hope that the cumulative effect of intentional, well-aimed, compromised action can still create political effects.

(As a side note: the few people I know who compromise very little have to work very, very hard to make their lives match their politics. And while I understand the necessity of compromise, its ubiquity shouldn’t be used to excuse it… “everyone compromises” is not a get-out-of-moral-quandary free card. Compromise is still problematic. And the people who live the politics we’d like to see enacted deserve amazing amounts of respect for their work.)

If you are one of those who is not afflicted with moodiness, I pat you on the back, but this post isn’t for you. For those of you who do get depressed, or anxious, or angry, or sad, or distracted, or whatever–how do you deal with writing and your moods? Do you have techniques to keep up your writing? Are you like me, and need to just throw in the towel sometimes?

Inquiring, moody writers want to know.

There are sentences I love for their beauty, but as an adolescent, I read this one over and over, and it would always send me into a fit of laughter.

(The descriptions of the articles are in his words.)

A Q&A with Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney about their long-standing collaboration.

A Q&A with Kate Schapira about her new book of poems, TOWN, which is an uber-collaboration with “contributions” from over sixty writers and non-writers.

And most recently, a Q&A with writer Joseph Young and artist Christine Sajecki, including some interesting art and video.

Enjoy!