Writing – Page 12 – Teel McClanahan

Thoughts on ‘new year,’ ‘old decade’

I suppose we’re a week into the new year now, it’s getting “late” for one of those year-end/new-year type of posts. Especially in internet time. New Year’s memes were born, blossomed, and wilted in the space of hours – I watched a few of them come and go and get replaced by newer, even-shorter-lived ones on Twitter over the weekend. A few of them drew my interest, got me thinking, but my thinking lasts longer than online conversations. I’m sure I’m not finished thinking, yet.

One of the thoughts was related to the apparent ‘new decade’ (no need to get into technical definitions and ‘counting starts at 1’ – my beliefs about time are far and away less specific, & more meaningful and orderly) and the question of what one was doing 10 years prior. On Twitter this was often read as 10 years ago to the minute; I suppose it was fun for people to think about a 10-year-old party on New Year’s Eve. But a lot can happen in ten years. A lot happened in mine. Ten years ago… Ten years ago I’d already begun painting again, a bit, though I still hadn’t re-started my writing. Ten years ago I’d just begun creating online comics for the first time. Ten years ago I was living in Tempe. Ten years ago I cut my hair off: New Year’s Eve 1999 I had hair so long I could sit on it, New Year’s Day 2000 I had “normal” short hair. Ten years ago this month I was getting fired (technically I quit) from MicroAge for insubordination for calling out my boss’s incompetence in front of the other employees (he & I & his boss & HR all agreed he was incompetent and that I was right about everything except saying so where the other employees could hear), and later that day I was getting hired at Realink. It was nearly ten years ago that Sara said yes. (Did you know she said yes, once?) Continue reading Thoughts on ‘new year,’ ‘old decade’

“new” book: Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut

I’m becoming more free, more liberated in how I think about and how I operate my publishing company. So Monday morning when I saw yet another review of Lost and Not Found which seemed to have misunderstood the entire point of the book and to have interpreted the heart of the book to be a mis-step and an incoherent disappointment… I realized that instead of just thinking about releasing an alternate edition of the book, it was fully within my power to actually release it.

So I took some time on Monday and put together a quick “Director’s Cut” that had all the love story and fantasy adventure that had ended up being the last third of Lost and Not Found, cut out the few scenes that had connected it further to the confusing-and-irrelevant characters-who-get-found-and-forgotten, and re-attached the part of the story that goes to Skythia (released earlier this year as a short story in More Lost Memories). I wrote a few words about why I was creating the Director’s Cut, put them up on modernevil.com. I wrote a quick marketing summary so I could put the book up for sale as an eBook on Smashwords. Whoosh, from frustration at people misunderstanding my book to publishing a version of the book that those frustrated people would hate outright, in the space of an afternoon.

Yesterday I sketched for a while & then painted an image for the cover. I’ve been thinking about doing this with other books (have you seen the covers of More Lost Memories and Cheating, Death?) and I’ve finally decided to do it with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: I’ve put the painting I did for the cover art up for sale at a price that will allow me to fund a paperback release of the book. If you buy the art, I’ll make the book available on paper. ((Alternatively, if I can get, say, 25 people to pre-order a paper copy, I’ll make the book available on paper.)) Otherwise, it’s going to remain available only in formats that cost me nothing to make available: eBook (and probably audiobook, later this year, especially since I’ve already recorded most of it).

I’m thinking of trying this with some of my future books: Release them as an eBook and if 1) enough eBook copies sell or 2) the original painting for the cover sells or 3) enough people are willing to pre-order then I’ll put out a print edition. Because realistically, right now, I’m not even breaking even on the publishing costs. I sell too-few copies. I’m not saying this is permanent/final, especially since I sell a lot more paper copies by hand (and make more money per copy) than I sell eBooks, but I figure it’s worth a try. It’s my publishing company, I can do what I want, right? The only rules to follow are my own.

So, here’s the brief marketing summary I wrote for Smashwords:

A non-traditional story; no real conflict, no struggle, no antagonist, and -some would say- no plot. A love story of fantastic proportions, of two people who realize that the less-than-comfortable normalcy they’d felt responsible to is the only thing keeping them from achieving true bliss. With a faerie, titans, a two-headed monster, a flying city, amazing museums, unusual time mechanics, & more.

And here’s the page-or-so I wrote “About the Director’s Cut”:

Lost and Not Found was the first look at the storybook universe expanded upon in Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, and Cheating, Death. This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found comes closer to my original intent, and to the original first draft of my 2002 NaNoWriMo novel, originally released in limited edition under the title Forlorn. Forlorn was written in the final 8 days of November, after a similar ordeal to the fictional one presented in Lost and Not Found.

In response to the criticism and feedback from a very vocal and adamant subset of the people who read Forlorn, and based on advise about what “all” fiction “needs” I spent the following year trying to find ways to give the story I’d written in Forlorn things like conflict, character arcs, and a three-act structure. I ended up cutting Skythia out completely, and writing a significant amount about the writer’s life and the journey toward the heart of the story, which I’ve always believed starts with the word ‘Forlorn.’

I released the First Edition of that expanded, “fixed” book as Lost and Not Found in 2004, and I’ve been receiving two kinds of feedback from readers in the five years since then: One group of people liked the book right up until the word ‘Forlorn.’ This group thinks the rest of the book is a “wrong turn”, and they were disappointed by it. The other group of people typically don’t even remember what happened in the book before the word ‘Forlorn.’ They understood the heart of the story to be the same thing I did, and they loved it.

This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found is bound to divide readers in the same way, though I expect to a more significant extreme. The people who would have been disappointed by the end of Lost and Not Found will be disappointed by this entire book. The people who would have loved the end of Lost and Not Found will probably love this entire book. And I, increasingly emboldened to do what I want to do with my books and with my publishing company, love the idea of releasing a Director’s Cut of the book, one that I prefer and that I think my true audience will prefer.

why, goals

I’ve always been interested in the answers to procedural whys. Why is it done this way, why not that way? I’ve also been interested in asking the deeper meaning whys, usually still about the way the world works and what it asks of me. Why do I have to do this at all? Why do people behave the way they do? I’ve rarely been good at answering why.

I’m still thinking about my life, my work, money and motivation and all the rest. I recalled reading several places lately talk about a dichotomy they perceive in reasons for writing, and knowing that it is a common conception – and a dichotomy usually brought up to paint one side as pretentious and tell them to get on the other side or they’re going to fail. See, there’s this idea that writers are in it to make money or they’re in it for the art (at least two bloggers in the last week spelled this “ahht” – just to be sure their readers understood they consider art-for-arts-sake pretentious and despicable). I keep reading people who believe that anyone who is writing “art” or who feel they “must” write, but who aren’t serious about doing whatever it takes (and here they usually have a plan or idea for how low one must go, how hard one must work, and exactly how to accomplish “whatever it takes”) to make money is in for the dreaded “rude awakening,” and they’d better start thinking like a businessman or else.

Of course every time I read such a thing, every time that dichotomy is presented, my initial reaction is something like “what if neither of those is my reason?” What if I don’t even know what my reason is? What if I’m not interested in or motivated by money? What if I think “serious” art and literature seems mostly pretentious and/or unreadable, too? What if the closest thing I have to an answer to why I write is that … I was going to write, anyway, I may as well sell it? Wait — that doesn’t answer the question! That’s why I’m running a publishing company & putting out & selling books, not why I write. I have no idea why I write! I just know I do.

I write. I’ll keep writing. I’ll write >1 book a year, even if I have to work a soul-crushing job, for however long I survive such a hopeless situation. Since switching to being a full-time creative, I now write 2-4 times as much (and paint >5 times as much) as I did when it was just in my off hours. (oh, and I podcast my writing twice a week, every week – which I never had time for before) I may be earning next-to-nothing (so far) doing this, but I haven’t found a job yet that was worth my life – though I have found that most other jobs would cost it. That may be reason enough, I suppose, for doing things the way we are – that if I have to stop doing this and rejoin “the workforce” I’ll soon die.

I don’t really “get” goals. Goals. I don’t get it. Add that to the list of things I don’t grasp. Ooh, there was this one time, for four or five years straight, where I tried to figure out “goals.” Eventually I hit a philosophical roadblock of breaking it all down until it was clear that “goals” and “values” and such were all totally arbitrary – usually unconsciously given to people by their families and their cultures, but almost never actually, meaningfully, reasonably and independently developed.

I’ve never been very good at goals. I’m good at action, at doing things. Getting things done, I can do. Having goals and priorities… not consciously or intentionally, no. You may think it’s just a difference in phrasing for me to say, for example, “I didn’t set a goal of writing Cheating, Death. I decided it was time to write a zombie book, I thought about what I wanted to write for a while, then I sat down to write it and, two weeks later, it was done.” With art, I usually just start with a blank canvas and see where it takes me. With all my other books, I haven’t usually decided what they’re going to be about before I start; I just start writing and find out what the story is as I write it. Inasmuch as I have goals, they’re either immediately carried out or I procrastinate for a while first, and then immediately carry them out.

What’s my “5 year goal”? I was thinking about this a bit lately (I was extrapolating from a more current train of thought, to try to wedge the way I actually think into the “goals” thing that everyone else is so fond of), and came up with something like: After 5 years (by the end of 2014 or so), I hope to have 20 to 30 books in print (Cheating, Death was my 11th book) and to have created 300+ new pieces of artwork. (Which got me thinking about how I’m going to need to redesign wretchedcreature.com in the next year or two, to accommodate so many new pieces.) Not much other detail has come to me re: 5-year-goal, since then… but I don’t usually think in terms of goals. And this is really just an extrapolation of “I’d like to write 2 to 4 new books a year, and to try to create at least 5 new pieces of art every month.” Which is a set of goals I’ve created for public appearances – literally, I set down and drafted those so that when people asked, I would have something to say. It’s based on factors such as past experience with my own writing speed and professional artists’ statements about minimum production levels.

Speaking of which, I’m beginning to run into problems with overproduction. I have a huge inventory of blank canvas just waiting to become art, but a big factor in my procrastination is that I’m running out of wall space. I’m not selling as fast as I’m painting. I’d like to be painting more. I’d love to be able to be painting every day. I can’t. It’s unreasonable. Not only do I not have a dedicated space to paint in right now (ie: I paint in the living room, which is a high traffic area of the house), but if I did paint that much, I would be producing art significantly faster than I’m currently able to sell it. (Did I mention I just dropped all my art prices? Seriously – significantly lowered! Go! Look!) So part of why I picked 5 for my fake goal was that if I did manage to hit it (and if half or more of that was mini-paintings) I wouldn’t find myself up to my neck in art.

Of course, a solution to that problem is probably obvious to you business-minded folks. Obviously, if I would just sell more art, I wouldn’t have trouble storing new art. Gosh, why didn’t I think of that? It’s the same thing with the income problem I mentioned yesterday – if I would just sell more books, sell more art, et cetera, I wouldn’t have this problem. If I would just write more commercially, or if I would be more outgoing, get better at marketing and at publicity and at putting myself in front of people, and a dozen other things that give me panic attacks… yeah, maybe. Continue reading why, goals

independence in words is not seen as equal

This will probably be a bit of a ramble. I haven’t fully thought this out, though I’ve been thinking in this area of thought for some time, now. I may write a more coherent post/essay on this or a similar subject in the future. This is … well, this is me writing my thoughts out on my online journal. It’s part of how I work through thoughts & feelings, sometimes, and you either already know that or you’re new here.

There exists a great disparity between the creation of literature/books (and perceptions thereof) and the creation of other forms of art. One key aspect of this difference is in the concept of independence, and it is brought into clearer focus in the idea of the editor. In writing, there is a commonly held belief that all writing needs to be edited – and not just edited, but that it needs to be edited by someone who is not the author, and preferably by someone whose whole job is to be a professional editor. This belief extends outward to create the impression in many minds that all writing which has not been filtered and perfected by professional editors is bad writing. ie: only books published by a major publisher are worth reading. That is the extreme view (though also the widest-held view in the profession), and there are a lot of hangers-on; that professional copy-editors, typesetters, cover designers, web designers, publicists, et cetera all need to have a hand in forming a worthy book. The author cannot, independently, create something worth reading; this reads to me as a loss of authorship. (See also: authority)

Other forms of art do not (exclusively) hold such strange beliefs. If a musician creates a work of art independently, it is not pre-judged and cast aside without being listened to. If a Mozart or a Beethoven, a Trent Reznor or a Moby sits alone by themselves and carefully crafts the exact piece of music they -as the artist/author/creator- want to craft, that’s acceptable. The independent, unsigned musician playing all their own songs a live, local gig is a much-loved creator who gets respect from music-lovers. (And if/when they get signed and get an editor/producer to help them “polish” their sound, it’s common for their existing fans to complain! To say that editing the music took away the best of it.) When a painter or a sculptor is the sole creator of a work of visual art, that’s the expected and normal course of action. If an independent filmmaker is the writer/director/producer/editor/star, it’s impressive and may actually help sell the film. All these arts are judged on the artwork itself – we listen to the music, we look at the art, we watch the film.

Yet with writing, the independent author’s creation is judged without being read, more often than not. The author is told “…a book really needs an editor’s collaboration, no matter how good the writer is.” (That’s just the quote/link I have today – I see comments like these go by every day on Twitter.) That no one should ever Self-Publish, that independent publishing is a joke, that all self-published books are crap. There is a rash of book reviews going around the internet right now, wherein self-published books are “reviewed” negatively without even being read. The reviewers aren’t even stating something like “this book was so bad I only read the first 30 pages, and here’s what I think of them,” they’re writing the reviews as though the whole book had been read. In one case last week there was one where the “reviewer” didn’t even have a copy of the book! They were reviewing it based on the marketing blurb & publisher info! Even self-publishing advocates start from the basis of “every book needs professional editing” and will gladly point you in the direction of editors-for-hire. Most of the people I’ve heard from who proudly stand behind independent publishing say the same things. It’s endemic.

Why does such an inequality exist? Why are independent music, independent visual artists et cetera seen so differently from independent authors? Why isn’t there a balance? Professionally edited/produced/polished/marketed music is able to live alongside a flourishing independent music scene. Graphic designers and professional illustrators are able to co-exist in the world with independent visual artists. Why do publishers, writers, and even a lot of readers maintain that they cannot suffer independent authorship to exist? Why, in fact, isn’t it cherished and encouraged by the most discerning readers?

In music: the masses like the pop music and the heavily-produced music, and the audiophiles and people who care about music the most prefer independent, local, and live music. In visual art: the masses are swayed by a well-designed ad and a slick website, and art critics and collectors pay attention to independent artists whose work pushes the limits of understanding. In film: the big audiences turn out to see the dozen big, dumb blockbuster action flicks and a dozen cookie-cutter horror flicks a year, and the discerning cinephiles support a landscape of hundreds of independent films every year. In writing: only the slick, heavily-edited books with mass-market appeal are worth reading, and the most avid readers and book buyers seem to agree with that sentiment. Huh? What?

Me? I’m an independent creator. I create visual art. I create books. I create websites. I create podcasts. I create music. I create short films. I create sculptural furniture. I do it all myself. I am the author of my art. It isn’t for everyone, it isn’t meant to be – I’m not creating lowest-common-denominator/homogeneous work for mass consumption, I’m creating independent/original work for the discerning mind.

I just don’t understand why that’s okay with 9/10ths of what I create, but not with my writing.

Cheating, Death – chapter 13 (ie: complete!)

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Whew. Done! Now I just have a whole stack of things to do! But at least the 1st draft is written! One of the first things I have to do next is print it out and read it for the first time. I’ll do this out loud and make notes as I go. It’s a pretty good way to see if it all works, and whether any sentences need work. I actually read quite a bit of it out loud as I was working on it; since beginning podcasting all my fiction, I pay a lot more attention to making a good read-aloud book.

Speaking of the podcast: No voices, for this one, just narration and enough vocal variation to be able to tell any two lines of dialogue apart. Also, based on a schedule I’d just laid out, I should be able to start this one on the Friday after Untrue Tales… Book Three is complete and then post two chapters a week (one chapter per episode, like FWYCR) from 11/13/09 to 12/25/09. Because, yeah, I’m going to post the stunning conclusion to the novel on Christmas day. :p

Oh, in addition to writing chapter 13, I’ve also written Appendix Z, included here:

Appendix Z: About the Zombies

Some helpful information about the zombies in this book:

Zombies are slow.

Zombies are stupid.

Zombies do not use tools.

Zombies do not use language.

Zombies do not experience romance.

Zombies are not just old, hungry vampires.

Zombies do not want to exact revenge on the living.

Zombies do not have any magical abilities or super-powers.

Zombies can only be killed by damaging or destroying their brain.

Zombies eat the living, and are attracted to the motion and commotion they make.

Zombies like eating brains, but are not possessed of superhuman strength, so how are they supposed to bite through your skull?

Zombies who did manage to eat the brains of their victims wouldn’t be much of a threat, since they’d prevent the spread of zombie-ism by doing so.

Zombies are created when a human has had fluid contact with a zombie; primarily via saliva transmitted into a bite wound.

Note: Hell is not full, zombies are not a sudden and global phenomenon bringing all unburied dead to life, the dead are not clawing their way out of graves, and this book’s cover is intentionally misleading.

Zombies spread quickly because the living are stupid, too.

I’m posting it here because it’s at the end of the book, which means it isn’t in the free preview. Which still contains (roughly) the first four chapters of the book. Have you checked it out, yet? You should. The full book’s price is, as promised, at the full eBook price of $4.99 (subject to change) over at Smashwords. It is currently in its first-draft, unedited state. Please let me know if you find any problems or errors in it, so I correct them before I send it to press (probably next week). When it’s corrected, I’ll update the Smashwords copy again, and release it to “Premium Distribution” as well.

Time to go throw it into InDesign, so I have a page count to submit for the PCN request. I hope you enjoy it.

Go read Cheating, Death now.