beehammer | Entries tagged with writing

So I've spent the past six weeks doing little but writing Good Omens fic, as you do, when it's too hot to do anything and it's raining every day anyway and your ISP takes one week of that to get you back online when your box gives out.

So, without further ado:

Back Room
T-rated, 5.6k Aziraphale/Crowley

Aziraphale actually does have quite an extensive collection of pornography in the bookshop. Like most of the questionable things in Aziraphale’s life, it’s Crowley’s fault.

Ink Stains
M-rated, 6.1k Aziraphale/Crowley

Angels can sense love. Too bad they can also sense when there’s a decided lack of it. Crowley’s motives behind putting in an appearance are, as always, somewhat questionable.

Downpour
T-rated, 8.8k Aziraphale/Crowley

Crowley and the cold make for one hell of a combination, and Aziraphale could have gone another six thousand years without knowing it.

“You show up after hours, out of the blue and frozen half-solid, drip a gallon of rain water all over my kitchenette, and all I get by way of explanation is a half-hearted ngh,” Aziraphale sighed.

“‘s what I get for--” Crowley shuddered, and Aziraphale reached up and tugged the blankets back into place. “--taking public transport.”

Cry for Absolution
T-rated, 20k Aziraphale/Crowley

After spending six thousand years in Aziraphale’s company, the only thing Crowley’s sure of is that he can’t touch the angel without hurting him. Too bad he never bothered asking Aziraphale about it.

If Crowley could still feel the soft give of rich cloth under his clenched fists, surely Aziraphale could still feel the scorching heat of a demon’s hands on his skin.

If they made it out of this alive, Crowley decided, if there was anything left of the world afterwards, he’d be damned a second time if he ever put his hands on the angel again.

Come in from the Cold
E-rated, 7.5k Aziraphale/Crowley

Crowley’s little demonic miracle with the books lets Aziraphale stop worrying about whether or not Crowley loves him back and just get on with it for once.

Any other night, Aziraphale might have let Crowley go, circled back to him in a bit, tried to mend things without being too forward about it. But it was tonight, and Aziraphale had come perilously close to being discorporated for God only knew how long, and Crowley had still, after all this time, thought to save his books--and Crowley was still, after all this time, thinking about holy water.

They've all got their pining and angst and getting together, and there's more where that came from because it's still too hot and rainy to do much of anything.

So, my sideline in original fiction is one of those almost but not quite things where I get just enough success to keep gamely plowing along with it but never enough to feel like I'm exactly making progress. Which is fine, because that's, I mean, not precisely what you'd expect from a personal decision to write whatever the fuck you want and try to sell it after the fact instead of trying to cater to the current market, but pretty fucking close to what you'd expect from that philosophy.

But it also means I get a lot of emails back from editors that boil down to "Your writing is tits but I asked myself 'what the fuuuuuuuuuuck' three separate times while reading this, so just, you know, keep us in mind if you ever feel like writing something another human being could relate to without being high on something."

All of which is a really long-winded way of saying that Jo Walton's writing feels like this personally-tailored punishment for all the times I've looked at a piece and said, "Fuck it, the slush readers've seen worse."

Walton writes really well, and the craft is there, and the structure is there, and then everything about the characters and the plot leaves me going "Surely something has to happen soon, right?"

Almost 200 pages into Lent. That's when something finally fucking happens. I keep getting sucked in with the prose and the promise of more and then it's like, "Nope! This is a 340-page treatise about obscure Platonic philosophy, which you loathe with a passion, roughly disguised as a novel!" and I fall for it every. fucking. time.

So basically I regret every minute I spent reading Lent and also recognize that it's some spitefully profound commentary on both my entire relationship to Walton's body of work as well as my entire relationship with the genre-lit world, which manages to bump the regret into active resentment. It's like the novel as performance art piece, and I don't know what to do with it except yell "What the fuuuuuuuuuuck?" at the heavens.

At what point can you pry an interesting setting and a reasonable plot out of hackey, thudding prose? I keep running into this problem with science fiction, even stuff that's fairly modern and highly recommended, where it's like a goddamned laundry list of activity with no connective tissue or life to it.

Like

Brian McAstronaut awoke in his space-bedroom to find that the ship's solar sails had become tangled in some space-debris while he slept. He would have thought 'overnight' instead of 'while he slept,' but of course he was in space and so there was no such thing as 'day' or 'night.' There was only sleeping in his space-bedroom and being awake in his spaceship. The year was 3030, and not being in space was something that people did in the Before Times, back when they lived on Earth and drank earth-liquor and believed in climate change.

Brian McAstronaut lived now, and in space, and he only believed in himself and his solar sails, because his exceptionally clear idea of what life was like in 2020 in spite of that having been a really long time ago gave him some really cool and cynical ideas about the nature of men. That was dangerously close to introspection, though, and he decided to stop doing it, because introspection was for people in other genres. Brian McAstronaut scrambled the semi-sentient space robots to go out into space and straighten the solar sails, which his spaceship needed to travel through space.

As he watched them work, he drank some space-liquor and listened to a piece of wildly anachronistic music that, presumably, the author likes very much or thinks will make the character sound cool or cultured to the readers, like if this was all happening here on Earth and now in the year of our lord 2019 and the character was listening to a troubadour's banging lute solo on his airpods. Which would be pretty great, wouldn't it, if we found some weird old-ass science fiction where the protagonist is listening to a rhapsody on their electric pianoforte and never mind, that's Jules Verne.

Anyway, as Brian McAstronaut drank his space-liquor and listened to the Rolling Stones, he looked out at the stars and waited while the author absolutely ransacked a fucking thesaurus to describe the panorama. It did not affect him emotionally in any way, because having emotions is for girls, or maybe for people who aren't in science fiction novels, which is basically the same thing. Brian McAstronaut had always lived in space. Living in space was what Brian McAstronaut did. Being impressed with space instead of alternating fighting for survival in space with treating space like it was his sofa in a twenty-first century living room was for people who weren't Brian McAstronaut.

And it's not that the writers are necessarily incapable of making it better. The book I'm reading now is fairly interesting when it dives into its self-contained stories and leaves the main narrative in the dust, but the second it crawls back out into the bitter blast of the main narrative, it's "Brian McAstronaut did this" and "Brian McAstronaut did that" and Brian McAstronaut better wind up being a badly-programmed android or some shit, because there's really no excuse for this.

Your protagonist is not a wooden puppet to carry your plot around--even the pulp detective guys churning out murder mysteries for a penny a page knew that. It's also like... I mean, not to tell science fiction authors how to do their jobs, but ideally your prose should do something other than give space fetishists something to jerk off to. There's the old razzle-dazzle, and then there's just whaling on the genre descriptor buttons like a drunk dude playing whack-a-mole.

Like don't

Brian McAstronaut ran his callused, manly hands over the glossy black hull of his new ship. It jutted proudly from the platform, its two heavy rockets hanging below it in an extra virile way. The extremely phallic, powerful spaceship excited him, but not in an overtly gay way, because the primary market for these books is straight men who are weirdly insecure in their own masculinity, and if they wind up conflicted about how a scene makes them feel in the pants department, they'll leave a bunch of one-star reviews on Amazon and spend all their free time calling the author a cuck on reddit.

Brian McAstronaut was super-secure in his own masculinity, because he had a spaceship kitted out with all the bells and whistles, which are of course named after twentieth- and twenty-first-century physicists--male physicists--because physics stopped being done after that and also because we're all running around right now hitting our Lanchester brakes in cars powered by Benz engines while our phones use a Haartsen connection to blast music over our de Forest speakers. Brian McAstronaut was glad he'd shelled out the extra credits for the optional ramjets, which made him feel a very straightforward and normal way in the pants department.

The entrance to his new spaceship was a vertical slit located between the two rockets--full to bursting with rocketfuel, just ready to spray it all over the stars--and Brian headed for it like a man on a mission, like a man's man who knew what he was doing and had never disappointed anyone with a rocket in his life. He grabbed the hefty entrance handle firmly and confidently, by the base, and pushed his way into the dark warmth of the vertical slit. It was keyed to his unique genetic imprint, and it telescoped open, welcoming him home.

Inside, the spaceship was spartan but inviting, needing no furniture or decoration or anything other than the quiet of the red womb-chamber. He could spend years here, suspended in cryogenic sleep, one with the ship while they sped across the stars. It would just be the two of them, Brian McAstronaut and his ship--the ship which was all his, and which he would never have to share with another person. He was pretty sure the ship loved him, and that this was a perfectly ordinary conviction to have. It was certainly very normal to not have to care about the rest of society, or how much time was passing, or whether or not his friends missed him, so long as he was one with the ship. He was like twentieth-century actor John Wayne, when twentieth-century actor John Wayne was astride a horse.

Everything that wasn't the womb-chamber was full of computerbanks and monitors and blinking lights that he could control with his strong man hands. Nothing would happen without him inputting commands, which was just how it should be. He was the man who hit the space-buttons and charted the space-course and decided when to pull over for more rocketfuel.

Brian McAstronaut climbed into the womb-chamber and pushed the red button next to the emergency brake for the onboard Nixon recorder. A Schimmelbusch mask was extruded from the placental lining, and Brian McAstronaut took it gratefully, wrapping himself in the thin, flexible umbilicus that trailed from it to the ship's life support system.

"Mother," Brian McAstronaut said, breathing in the cryosleep space-gas. This was a normal thing to say, and he didn't feel at all weird about it. A nineteenth-century psychologist called Sigmund Freud had discovered that this was a perfectly healthy response that perfectly healthy men had to womb-chambers, and Brian McAstronaut didn't need space-therapy to deal with his space-issues.

On the launchpad, a space-dockhand pounded on the hull yelling about the ship being parked outside the lines and tying up the pad, but he couldn't get in because it wasn't his ship, and Brian McAstronaut's ship only loved Brian McAstronaut and, maybe, a special resupply ship or two that also loved Brian McAstronaut and so the ship would be willing to share him every so often.

Also, if you slam on the brakes every few pages for five paragraphs of salivating descriptors that are just a SkyMall catalog of shit coke-addled futurists and thought-leaders were giving tedtalks about the month you wrote it, it's pointless and annoying and dumb and also it dates the shit out of your story.

Like, most science fiction is going to feel dated after a bit no matter what. It's the nature of the beast. Ideally, you want to avoid everyone in your target audience picking up the book a mere three years down the road and a) feeling like they opened a time capsule and b) being able to tell precisely when you wrote a scene just by searching Cory Doctorow or Warren Ellis's twitter feeds for the relevant buzzwords.

In conclusion, I know we're not all out here writing fucking Shakespeare, but these really aren't that hard to avoid! At all! Just... hire an editor who's not high on their own supply or something.

The film festival rolled through town again this year, which of course meant the usual slate of promising indies that hit the mark and intriguing indies that turned out to be fucking terrible*.

The worst of the latter was a solid, frustrating waste of 85 minutes where everybody but the writer/director did their damn jobs. The actors were perfectly fine, for their ages and limitations. Costuming did what they were asked. Cinematography was good. Music was good. And yet, here we were, watching a thing that made no sense and went nowhere and seemed intent on punishing us for watching it.

The audience was small enough that you could hear everyone getting itchy as scenes dragged on, see the phones come out as people checked the time, see people leaning forward in their seats as something interesting was--finally!--happening. (It didn't pan out, which then had people whispering about how the movie just... wasn't going to explain that?)

Nothing connected. Nothing landed. The whole project was stillborn. I mean, I've seen worse movies, but they were at least actively trying.

And there's a quote from Jordan Peele about Us that came to mind about 80% of the way through, about how you don't necessarily have to show all of your own mythology, but you have to know it. If you're just pulling things out of your ass, the audience will know, and the audience will stop trusting you and tune out. This director absolutely did not have a cogent mythology for what he was trying to do. None of it cohered or came together at all.

So of course the director was present for the screening, and of course there was a Q&A afterwards. The guy in the seat next to me actually muttered, "I've got a question--what the fuck?"

He did not, of course, actually ask the director what the fuck. He might have, I suppose, if the director hadn't been deeply flattered by the MC, whose terrible taste led him to really love the film, and then taken the microphone and proceeded to tell us all about how everything wrong with the film was a very deliberate choice he made.

His favorite part about making films is getting the pace right! By which he meant he'd fucking weaponized it. He wanted a natural rhythm and feel to the teenage actors' performances, so he only let them read as much of the script as they needed to do their own scenes. Possibly this was also because some of them would have asked awkward questions about why the script didn't make any sense. The entire weird little hook of the film started off as someone else's in-joke. He was pleased as punch that he'd managed to cast a bunch of former child-stars in nameless roles with no lines, serving as human easter eggs in case someone made it that far into the film and managed to recognize them. Even the story about how the director had discovered the band that did the heavy-lifting in the score was flattened out and dull, a story told by a friend and writing partner now related to us third-hand.

The man was utterly impervious to the audience disengagement which, by the time the credits rolled, was total. He was immune to the sulky glares and bewildered looks he was getting instead of questions. He was eager to start on his next, equally horrible, film. He was up there, having just made and confessed to delighting in a crime against film, and he was living his best goddamned life. A board whose job it was to pick out good independent film had accepted his entry! People came to see his thing! More people would probably bankroll his next project because the last one didn't devolve into a coke-fueled shoot-out! When he looks back on it in a week or two, it's going to be the time he went somewhere because he's a director and people asked him about the creative choices in a movie that he made and people paid to see!

So if that guy gets to do that, without even putting on shoes with laces or a shirt with buttons, there's no reason for you to sit there agonizing over whatever it is you want to make and show people in case it's not good enough.

It's good enough, I promise you. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's good enough.

*Unfortunately, this time around the indies that were terrible were largely not terrible because of their inexperienced crew or tiny budgets or all the other things that will buff out with time, if everyone keeps working.

I spent the vast majority of March feeling like I'd been kicked right in the brain by a donkey. No rain + incredibly high pollen counts = about three goddamned weeks of dropping just about every ball I had access to. We're talking extreme difficulty walking and chewing gum at the same time, letting things get really out of hand due to lack of emotional and cognitive bandwidth to keep anything tacked down, that sort of thing.

I didn't even break 8,500 words, and most of that was correspondence and various other writerly housekeeping stuff.

In spite of which, I did manage to complete one project, to finish the revisions a publisher had asked for, and to absolutely fucking nail an author interview I nabbed with a featured fiction slot. I even managed to post the fic from last month on AO3, though coming up with the title, tags, description, etc. was the fucking worst--just pulling teeth the whole damn way. So kind of really shitty, but not a total waste as far as things go.

I racked up 4 rejections for one incredibly enthusiastic acceptance, 1 completed revision request and zero new ones, 1 completed new project, and news that my chapbook sold out its first run and will be reprinted.

Could have been better, but all things considered, it was still pretty good.

In my continued quest to track my actual writing numbers for the year, I've discovered that it's also a good way to remind myself that my original fiction is never going to get accepted to someplace I've neglected to submit it to. In completely unrelated news, it turns out I sent out zero submissions in February, in spite of my best intentions.

I did get 4 rejections, though, so, uh, hooray?

On other fronts, I managed: 2 completed works of fiction and 35,935 words. I also had to write one submission off as to a defunct publication, as two successive queries went unanswered.

I'd feel better about one of the completed projects, but it was a fucking fight from start to finish and I'm still not sure I'm happy with it. So now it's in the second-drafts folder, waiting until I can look it over with a less jaundiced eye before cleaning up the formatting and putting it on AO3.

Yesterday I wound up with a case of literary whiplash so bad I'm still feeling it.

I was reading an Ask Polly column, as one does, and off on the little sidebar were a few links. Most-viewed stories. It looked like a mix of gossip, literary essay, longform journalism. The things you see in a normal digital clone of New Yorker. One of them was titled "The Mom Who Has Sex With Her Husband Every Night."

Oh, I thought. A short story.

It was odd. The tone was perfect--very The Arrangements--as it explored the narrow confines of an alienated upper-class housewife, but none of the points it was making panned out, or if they did the critique was oblique at best.

I had, of course, missed the tastefully small "Sex Diaries" series breadcrumb at the top of the post. It didn't drop until the end of the--unsatisfying! lacking in denouement! thematically muddied!--entry that this was an actual person's anonymously submitted account of their actual life.

A person had written this about themselves and then sent it in as nonfiction. I'm still seesawing back and forth between "This person submitted a work of fiction in the hopes of getting it published and just lied about it." and "This person. Exists? At least one of them might have genuinely done this?". My brain has fallen into a hole and can't get itself out.

I decided to give tracking my actual writing numbers a whirl for the year.

It's especially easy when you're going the traditional publishing route to get very discouraged and feel like you're not accomplishing anything, because publishers seem to really like just... not responding in a timely fashion, about anything, ever. So you'll spend all week submitting things and feeling great, and then three months later you've barely got anything more than receipt confirmation emails to show for it, and it sometimes translates into this sensation of having done nothing all summer.

So for January, I managed: 2 completed works of fiction and 30,492 words. I submitted to 6 different places, received 5 rejections and 1 rewrite request from projects sent out last year, and sent out 2 as-yet unanswered queries.

Not a bad month's work.

(archived from tumblr)

There’s this feeling you get when a story gives you exactly the sort of satisfaction you’ve been hoping for but not quite expecting out of it. Kind of like sliding from cold tiles into a warm bath, or flipping the pillow over to the cool side when it’s ninety out and all the sheets are sticking to you.

Edward Wilson tells, in Letters to a Young Scientist, of an experiment performed to figure out how ants tell when another ant has shuffed off its mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. He starts with the hypothesis that the ants are reacting to the smell of decay coming from their dead sisters, because ants can hardly see when they’re down in the dark of their mounds, and for all they know that unmoving ant they’re crawling over is just being very lazy. It also takes a day or two postmortem for the removal process to kick in, so Wilson seemed reasonably sure that testing this mechanism would bear fruit.

He did some research, got a bunch of the chemicals typically present in decaying insects together, and started dabbing them on paper ant-substitutes to see which ones were treated more or less the same way a real dead ant would be. Some provoked no reaction, some threw the entire colony into an alarmed frenzy, and eventually one proved to have the exact correct response.

Thus it was that he found that once an ant has decomposed to the point that oleic acid is present in detectable quantities, the other ants will pick it up and remove it from the nest like the garbage it’s become. Ants are not, by nature, terribly sentimental creatures. They are, in fact, mostly just terrible.

So, mystery solved, right?

Except.

(It may have occurred to you as I was relating this. It may not have, too, and that’s fine. Let’s agree not to judge each other.)

What happens when you dab a little bit of that same acid on an ant that’s perfectly fine? What will her sisters do then?

Raise the sort of ant-ruckus rarely seen without the presence of a magnifying glass, because it’s the zombiepocalypse and why didn’t they listen to the old queen when she tried to warn them? Ignore her, because she’s behaving like a live thing and working away at colony business? Ignore her, because she’s moving and it’s only stationary objects that get this sort of treatment? Ignore her while she tries to wriggle away from them and go back to work as they carry her out to the ant graveyard?

(There are ants that live in plant-provided nests which sacrifice their dead to feed the god-thing that sustains them. There are spiders that war with them.)

These are the sort of things you think of, when a scientist tells a story about making ant-corpses out of paper.

But then sometimes the scientist goes on to say, “And of course, we wondered, what would happen if...?” and you get your answer.

Because this person, this person doing this thing across the gulf of decades reaches out, and says “I did this. This thing you wanted to do, this thing you wondered about, of course I did it, of course I wondered too.”

What happens, when a perfectly fine, perfectly live ant is doused with oleic acid, is that the ant is picked up, kicking and protesting, and carried to the graveyard, and left there. And when she gets up and, having no cause to believe herself dead, tries to go back home, some enterprising ant does the same thing. Again and again, with no sign of fatigue or alarm. She lives in the cemetery until a good cleaning miraculously resurrects her.

(archived from tumblr)

A friend recommended an article recently (here, if anyone’s interested), and it basically broke down why getting comfortable with feeling stupid is an absolute necessity for doing science.

But it hit me, as I was reading it, that most of what he was saying is absolutely true for writing, too.

You spend most of your formative years being rewarded for, let’s face it, fairly pedestrian, rule-following work. The smart money’s on not taking big risks; you might not get an A for your solid-but-forgettable short story or essay, but you definitely won’t fail the assignment. Most teachers and most professors, especially if you went to a large school with a high student to instructor ratio, are not out there encouraging students to go wild with graded assignments, and they don’t have the time to talk about what worked and what didn’t with all hundred and fifty of you even if they do encourage it. At best, you’re discussing it in peer groups full of young writers just as in the weeds about this stuff as you are.

In this environment, there’s a point at which you’re done with the piece, at which it’s no longer your problem, at which some authority will look at it and assign it a concrete score and tell you how well or how poorly you’ve done on it. These points are usually marked on a calendar, predictable and rational. There can be a certain amount of comfort in that at the same time that it can be suffocating or restricting. Even if you don’t like the outcome, you know where you stand. You can argue with a bad grade or resolve to do better next time.

When you’re writing for yourself and an actual audience--people who aren’t earning class-participation points for this--the rules are very different. Case in point, there aren’t really “rules.” There aren’t any directions. Nobody’s getting paid to read what you write from start to finish. You can do whatever the fuck you want, but nobody has to come up with a cogent reason for why they didn’t like it, or where you lost them. The only criteria is whether or not it works, which you’re only going to figure out by trying and succeeding or failing. And if you fail, you’re going to have to muddle through why that happened if you want to fix it.

Not to say that every writer’s an island, and we’re all in this alone. Of course we’re not. If you can get an audience, sometimes they’ll be kind enough to talk to you about how they felt about the piece in a coherent, helpful way. Critique groups and long-suffering friends and reading buddies are life-savers who can frequently tell you where your project stopped working, and sometimes even why. But the only person who can really fix your piece is you.

And, as with anything else worth doing, there’s never going to be a point where you can stop growing and go “I have reached the pinnacle of my potential and am now free to rest on my laurels forever.” You’ve figured out how to achieve various moods and communicate exactly what you want and do dialogue and nail plot structure and suck an audience in and subvert genre conventions satisfyingly instead of with great irritation? Great! There’s always going to be something else you want to try and some other thing that you always get hung up on. Always. You’re never going to look at your own work and just be happy.

Some of that’s because developing an eye for what’s good and what you want out of your own work is far, far easier and faster than developing the chops to put it into practice. It’s like building something: it’s simple to look at an off-kilter, unsound structure and go “Pretty sure that’s not supposed to be happening” but complicated to pick out on the blueprints exactly where the architect went wrong. We know our stories have gone off the rails before we develop the skills to keep it from happening, and that’s discouraging, to put it mildly.

But another big part of it is that you’re evolving as a person at the same time that you’re evolving as a writer. The questions you’re asking yourself at twenty aren’t the same questions you’re asking yourself at forty or seventy. The genres you’re working in or interested in or influenced by will be evolving, too. So will the world around you.

The sooner a writer can get comfortable with the idea that not everything has to be good, or great, or consistent, or effective, or any number of five million other things that our writing can frustratingly resist being, the sooner we can get comfortable with the process of working toward eventual success.

I'm doing some final work cleaning up a fic before asking if anyone wants to beta it, and part of my process for this stage is running a piece through a text analyzer just to catch any unusual repetitive vocabulary. This time around it, because it's a Christmas fic and revolves around holiday things, it looks like the little bot that runs it is having an aneurysm or trying to write a poem.