Erasing History

I may as well have titled this one "Stepping Into Controversy."

As most of you know, I have some problems with the current Woke-Scold movement in both our industry and in the world at large.  We are so afraid of offending any sensibility that we applaud the super-sensitive and walk on eggshells, lest the mob turn against us for some perceived slight we didn't even intend.  Those who scour both modern books and the annals of history looking for those without the proper mindset seem determined that all wrong-think will be expunged.

The most recent example of this, and more of why I hold disdain for the current traditional publishing industry, is the excommunication of John W. Campbell from society.  Now, Campbell has been dead for nearly 50 years, and he was hardly what one would think of as an enlightened thinker.  He stated some rather out there - and by today's standards, noxious - views on race and science.  Although some may wonder just how much was genuine(writer Joe Green said that Campbell would often take a devil's advocate position simply to make things livelier), a good bit of what he said would make most folks cringe.

But that's not good enough for the Woke-Scolds.  Nope, they want to erase him from history, remove his name from the award, and hope all is merry again.  This is Stalin-esque, and it should make the stomach turn of any fan of writing.  Although I'm certain that some of the Woke-Scolds that read this will claim I'm defending Campbell's views(they'll do that because they're perpetually mad and don't want to engage on the substance of an issue), what I'm taking issue with is removing from history one of the most influential writers in science fiction.

Analog just removed Campbell's name from its aware for Best New Writer.  Some great folks have gotten this award, from George RR Martin to Carl Sagan, and Campbell's name is on it because the magazine that gives it out, Analog(originally called Astounding Science Fiction), was founded by him.  While one can take issue with some of what Campbell said, there's no doubt about his influence on the Golden Age of Science Fiction.  Who knows where we'd be without both his science fiction writing and his promotion of it.  By pretending he doesn't exist and trying to remove him from the award his magazine pioneered, they are engaging in the same kind of censorship most writers claim they abhor.  The funniest part is that they even quoted George Satayana in justifying it("Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it") without realizing that the quote was a warning, not the opening sentence of an Orwellian instruction manual.  By doing this, they are not only trying hard to forget the past, but they are almost guaranteeing that folks will repeat it.

The Woke-Scolds have invaded the writing and publishing industry.  One cannot get into the field, or stay there, if one does not hold the right views.  It's a sickness, and I'd venture to say that only a small minority actually believe in this PC crap, while the rest are scared to death of running afoul of it, so they'll mouth the right words to stay employed.  Moreover, those who genuinely believe, don't even understand the language they use to condemn it.  Jeanette Ng called Campbell a fascist in her recent acceptance speech for the award, showing she has no clue what the word even means.  Fascist has become a catch-all for what the Woke-Scolds deem as immoral thinking rather than any form of political view of way to run a government.  Those ways are repugnant, of course, but not everyone who takes a different position is a fascist.  Further, it does a great disservice to the millions of dead who died fighting actual fascism to use the word as some kind of "everyone I don't like" term.

And it's not like Ng had the courage to refuse the award.  No, she still wants the accolades.  She just wants to rail against her perception from modern perspectives about someone long dead.  Using this as a yardstick, no one from any past era will ever pass muster.  For that matter, those of today won't pass muster years from now, for who knows what future slights will be used to erase today's people from history.

(BTW, I found it particularly ironic that she went on a tirade against racism without any self-awareness on her part,  saying, "Through his editorial control of [the magazine] Astounding Science Fiction, [Campbell] is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists."  Quite the broad level of generalizations there in casting such shade...I thought that showing such disdain about a group of people based on race was verboten)

Believe it or not, I actually did debate whether or not to write about this.  It's dangerous in today's world to evoke the ire of the online mob, but it's time folks stood up to these people who would erase everything but their view of the world in an attempt to purify the world for the rest of us.  When we let such Woke-Scolds go unchallenged, we cede them the stage by default, acknowledging that they own the narrative and that the rest of us should shut up and maybe occasionally nod along about how smart they are.  Sorry, but I was born too argumentative to do that.

Like I said earlier, I'm sure many will take this as some kind of perverse endorsement of Campbell's execrable writings of the time.  I can't stop people from being stupid on that.  I'm just pointing out that erasing folks from history who don't meet your standards will leave you very few remaining.  We don't live in a pure world, and our history is especially vomitous at times.  That doesn't justify removing it because it makes you feel icky.

Book Store Crap

At an airport recently, I had some time to kill.  So, naturally, I went into the largest bookseller I could find in the terminal and started browsing.  What I came across left me feeling...underwhelmed.

For starters, a large number of the fiction works were this "woke" crap that tries to make some social justice statement and does nearly everything but tell a good story.  Characters should move the plot along; they shouldn't be the plot.  If they are, then your story is secondary to anything you're trying to say.  More than that, most folks read books to escape rather than be preached at.

Then there were novels covering mundane stories that I really don't care about.  Okay, maybe I'm a barbarian who doesn't know good literature, but I don't need slice-of-life tales - I want something to whisk me away to a place I can't find in the real world.  Yes, it should be realistic within the story, but I can find folks having affairs and crying about their children going off to college by going outside; I can't find a 20,000 year old spacecraft buried in the Amazon forest that may have sparked life on our planet.

These bookstores will only carry traditionally published work, and their stock validated most of what I've said about the traditional publishing world.  There was no risk, and there was nothing to make me think.  Further, most of it seemed to be garbage that a nine year old could poop out during daily writing time in school.  Needless to say, I walked away without buying a book.

It really is frustrating to see this kind of...I can't find another word to adequately describe it...shit being passed off as good books.  In addition to the byzantine maze of idiocy folks have to pass through to publish traditionally, this kind of puke-inducing nonsense is another reason why traditional book stores are dying.  Yes, that may be harsh, but it doesn't make it less true.

Bad Ideas Made Good?

I've often mentioned my first completed novel, On Freedom's Wings.  It was a fun space opera that was grandiose, epic...and very, very bad.  It was too Star Treky, and it used far too many clichés that one could easily figure out if only one watched Saturday morning cartoons.

However, I was recently daydreaming, and I came across a few ways to possibly re-create that universe.  For starters, the novel began at...well...the beginning.  What if I started it during the climax?  Moreover, the characters were participating in some stuff that, while adding moral complexity to the story, could not be justified in the end.  But what if the characters still participated in such a thing because they were fed misinformation and thought they were on the right side?  Stuff started spinning in my tiny little brain, and I think I may have the stirrings of a new book.

I hadn't thought about On Freedom's Wings in forever.  The possible new direction got me thinking - how can we make previously bad ideas good.  I'm a better writer than I was 20 years ago when I began to write for real, and I can take garbage and maybe spin gold out if it(or at least plastic).  What other ideas have I abandoned because they weren't initially handled very well?  What ideas have you abandoned for similar reasons.  I think this should give us pause to go back and re-examine our old work to try and find nuggets we can not only salvage, but ones we can make into a great story.

Trolling For Ideas

I like to keep this blog updated as often as I can so that people will rely on there being fresh content to read.  That said, it can be challenging always coming up with new topics.  Yes, sometimes there is something I really want to talk about, but often times I'll find myself staring at the computer wondering what to talk about.  You know...right before I start to daydream about being a swashbuckling space pirate.

I like to pretend I have a great memory, and I do for stuff that happened more than two decades ago, but I can't usually remember that great blogging idea I had in the car yesterday.  Therefore, I'll usually jot ideas down as soon as I have them in the notes section of my phone.  That doesn't mean it's always full; I've had many times where I am staring at the screen feeling like a fraud.

Other blogs can give great ideas, as can other books and movies.  No, not to flat out steal, but reading other writers often provides inspiration on other stuff.  I'll let those ideas play out in my head.  Sometimes they yield an observation worth blogging about, and sometimes they don't.  When I hit a time deadline, I can't be as picky as I otherwise would, but I do try to sift through the ideas for something unique.

Where do your blogging ideas come from?  For that matter, where do your books ideas come from?

Does Blogging Consistently Help?

Looking at my last post, I started to wonder just how much blogging does for a writers.  For example, look at the right side of my page.  Some of the folks on there post several times a day, some post several times a week...and some barely post at all.  There are those who post once or twice a month, and still others who may do it once or twice over the course of several months.  So what's the point?

I think the most generally accepted reasoning is that blogging draws people to our site, and, hopefully, to our books.  But does it?  To me, the biggest reason is to try and reach some sort of "critical mass" that will become self-sustaining.  It certainly isn't to boost our writing skills, as what I post is all too often just a stream of consciousness.  I rarely write new stories on here; not because I don't want to, but because I take pride in the craft and this format, as well as the time requirements involved in putting out fresh material so often, don't align themselves with being like that.

I'd be curious what any of you think.

Missing Posts

Sorry I skipped the last couple of posts.  Life is getting hectic(again), as the Meyer's will soon move to Tennessee.  That...and...well...I can be a bit lazy sometimes.  :-P

The Pursuit Of Happiness

Real life can sometimes suck.  Loved ones die, people lose their homes, and natural disasters wipe out whole towns.  This kind of suckage is one of the reasons we long to escape into stories.  Unfortunately, stories have increasingly become darker and darker, with endings that out-do real life.

Take The Mist, for example.  In this tale, an Army experiment goes awry and unleashes a torrent of extra-dimensional creatures into our world.  A few characters try to escape, but their vehicle runs out of gas and it looks like the whole world is engulfed in the mist that brought the nightmarish beasts.  To spare loved ones and friends the terror of having to deal with the mist, the main character shoots them, but there are not enough bullets to take him out too, so he leaves the car to confront the monsters.  Then, less than a minute later, the mist clears and the Army is coming through killing the creatures.  When he realizes that if he'd held out a few minutes longer, his son and all his friends would be alive, he screams.  A fucked up ending to be sure.

That might be something to say "whoa!" about if it was one-off, but more and more stories are going for this kind of edgy ending, where life sucks even worse and no one is happy.  To tell you the truth, it has started to piss me off.  I don't know about you, but I get invested in these characters, and I want to see them do well.  When things turn out shitty for them, I feel a sense of betrayal.

Readers yearn for happy endings.  Yes, some arteests and fancy-farts may think all-the-time edgy is great, but it drags us down in a world that is already shitty.  Do our escapes have to be equally shitty.

Some writers seem to have caught on to this and have changed.  Robert Kirkman(SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF THE WALKING DEAD COMIC AHEAD...TURN BACK NOW!!!) just ended his long running comic.  His original idea was to have the zombies win the world.  There'd be a statue of Rick Grimes, savior of what was left of humanity, only the pullback would reveal it was overgrown with vines.  Then there'd be a scene of the walkers striding past.  The dead had won.  Thankfully, Kirkman came to his senses, admitting that ending was dumb and rendered the entire story pointless.  His new ending, while not unicorn farts and rainbows, is at least hopeful and optimistic.

The point is that we should try all we can to make the story end on a happy note, or at least a hopeful one.  No, we shouldn't be Pollyanna, but readers will get pissed off if they came to get away from the real world and we force feed them a pile of dog turds.  Don't do that to your readers.  Give them a way to feel good about life for a few seconds.  Sometimes it's all they have.

Moral Judgment

We live in an age where people are supposedly loathe to morally judge others.  Or maybe we live in an age where folks feel others shouldn't morally judge, but they themselves will have no problem with it.  As a result, we are seeing stories that are more and more bland in terms of moral conflict, or go off on wild tangents and then say that anyone who judges them is a bad person.  This is eating at the writing world.

Stories are supposed to be moral tales that provide a judgment on the state of the world, or at least the characters that inhabit it.  Tales throughout history, from A Christmas Carol to The Three Musketeers to Harry Potter, all offer a clean moral judgment on what is going on.  Readers see that there is a wrong happening, and they root for characters to figure it out and solve it.  This is at the heart of the reading and storytelling experience.

It seems we've come into an age where writing a tale based on traditionally held moral values has become taboo.  This is nonsense.  These things are traditional precisely because they've stood the test of time.  Loyalty, honesty, courage...these are things we see so rarely in the real world that we pay for people to tell us stories that include them.  To me, the only reason to say that we shouldn't tell stories with moral components is because we're worried about our own morals, or about others saying our moral tales aren't up to snuff.  This has got to stop.

Putting our work out there will get us judged.  That's what happens in the public sphere, whether we want it to or not.  It's a natural reaction when folks encounter something, and it really doesn't matter what that something is.  As Jean Luc Picard once said, if we're going to be damned, then let's be damned for who we really are.

Desire

Writers must have a desire to write.  They must feel it in their bones.  A good writer will write regardless of if he or she is being paid or not.  The writer must seek out spare time to jot down a page, a paragraph, or even just a sentence.  Like any good marriage, desire will sometimes wane, but it should always return.  Moreover, a good writer will seek out ways to rekindle that desire so that the "marriage" of writer to writing is never forgotten.

Stream Of Consciousness

My novels are thoroughly thought out.  I think about what I want to write about, outline the ideas into something I can use, and take an enormous amount of time crafting that story.  They're fun and show the effort necessary for someone to want to buy and read them.

Blogging, on the other hand, is different because it's usually little more than a stream of consciousness.  Yes, as mentioned in my last post, I come up with the ideas regarding what I want to talk about, but that's where the similarities to my novels end.  I don't outline my blog posts; I just write them.  I sit down, look at my topic, and start blogging away.  In fact, I'm doing that right now.

The stream of consciousness is easier in the way that I'm just plowing ahead into the great unknown.  However, that can also lead to a blog post that spins wildly out of control and loses focus.  I will go off onto various tangents, only to have to go back and erase large sections because it wasn't related to the topic at hand.

So is there benefit to stream of consciousness blogging?  I'd say yes, but mostly to me.  Yes, the audience gets to see me at my most raw, so perhaps they can have better insight into what makes me tick and how my stories are crafted, but it's mostly about my vomiting all of my thoughts onto the page.  I don't have to think too deeply and can write usually just what comes randomly traipsing into my brain.

It can meander(like now), but it helps me understand my own thoughts.  I can go back later and figure out patterns that can be useful in novel writing down the road.  It also helps keep the audience engaged(both of you) and knowing I haven't forgotten about them.  They see me at my most pure, which can be sometimes good and sometimes bad.  Whatever it is, they see me, not some façade.

Idea Generation

How do we come up with the ideas we write about?  For me, this falls into two categories for my business - novel ideas and blogging ideas.

Novel ideas are fairly easy for me.  Is it because it's easy to come up with an obscure take on a topic or discover how nuanced a new character can be?  No...those things still take both time and effort.  However, I love to play around with those things.  Sometimes a day-dreaming idea generation session can last all day and yield nothing.  And that's okay.  Ideas are malleable and can be reshaped into whatever we want them to be.  It's the sheer spontaneity of raw ideas that makes them attractive, and the biggest part of their "ease" is the flexibility I'm allowed.  Since I don't have an editor on my ass about finishing up so they can make some artificial deadline, I can take my time writing my ideas down.  I can mold them, rework them, and store them until I'm ready to play with them again.

Blogging, on the other hand, is something different altogether(I know, I know...let's forestall the eyerolling about Russ writing yet another post about blogging being harder than he thought).  Some writers post only occasionally and erratically.  Those that follow this pattern have no worries.  Sure, they might like to post more, but they're worried more about their other writings and usually view blogging as something nice that will get done when it gets done.  Others, like me, post much more frequently and on some kind of schedule.  This gives their audience a sense of predictability that they can find fresh content.

But getting fresh content can be challenging.  Some of those I know fill that content with politics, something I swore, mostly successfully, to not get into on my blog.  Others fill that schedule by mostly posting links to other sites, sometimes with a brief commentary.  I like to visit these blogs, but usually as a gateway to other blogs rather than as something independent.  Just not my style for my own posting.  Therefore, most of my ideas have to be original ideas about writing and books.  That kind of subject concentration is hard.

So how do I come up with ideas?  Usually, something will strike me as interesting and what I want to talk about.  However, I also have a horrible memory, so I need to write down these ideas so I don't lose them(I typically put them in the Notes section of my phone).  I cannot tell you how many ideas I've lost because I didn't write down an idea within a short period of time after having it.

Trying to keep track of my ideas and then getting them written on a predictable schedule is the next step, and the one where I fail the most.  I'll look up and suddenly discover I'm supposed to have a new post up tomorrow and haven't started it yet.  I try to get ahead, but I still let time slip by and get near the end of the period, after having up a lot of posts ready to go, and then find out I've got to play catch up again.  Frustrating sometimes, but totally worth it when I get feedback from what I've presented.

Rethinking Strategy

The publishing world is changing.  It has gone from hand-copied manuscripts to the printing press, and now it is going to the internet.  Going...I should say "has gone."  E-readers are the hottest item for folks looking for a good story.  Sure, some folks don't have one, but the vast majority of voracious readers do.  And while most, like me, favor physical books, most can't afford to buy lots of physical books or have the space to clutter up their homes with them.

That's why I'm strongly considering getting away from physical books at all and going solely to ebooks.  This is a tough pill to even think about swallowing, because I grew up with physical books.  To me, that's what represents success in the publishing world.  However, what I need to do to try and stay(gain?) relevance is recognize when the market changes, and change along with it.

I can reduce expenses by going solely to ebooks.  There's a cost to converting my work into something someone can read, and doing both ebooks and physical books is more expensive, which cuts into my profit margin,  There are also imprint fees and proof copy fees, but those are miniscule compared to the cost of converting my work into something that a printing press can print.

Something I've thought through is whether or not I'll be limiting my audience by going to ebooks alone.  However, most casual readers that still pick up physical books on a whim are looking at more established authors like Stephen King or JK Rowling.  They're not prone to just pick up my book in print form off Amazon.  Most casual readers, in fact, buy their books at Barnes & Noble or WalMart, and my books aren't on those shelves because I can't afford the buy-back clause of the contract(it'd bankrupt me).  Therefore, most of what I sell is on Amazon, and on Amazon, people looking to sample an unknown writer aren't going to pay $15 for something they can't say if they'll like.  That's where ebooks come in.

Ebooks are perfect to try and capture an audience, especially in the indie publishing world.  The biggest draw is that they're cheap(my books are $3.99...less than a cup of coffee from most coffee shops).  They also don't take up any space except on an e-reader, so readers don't have to worry about my displacing a favorite author of theirs.

I will likely go this route soon, although I can't say if that'll be with my next novel, Schism, or the one after that(Homecoming).  This is a hard break and is taking me a while to accept as a mindset change, but I think it'll be a better decision in the long run.  Once I've gotten more established, maybe I can re-release them as hardcovers.  We'll see.