Theodora Goss's Blog, page 44

Cleaning the Mess

This is going to be a completely personal post. I've been writing about things like literature and art lately, but today the most important thing I did was vacuum the rug. No, I'm serious. My room has a hardwood floor, and on top of that is a cream-colored rug, and I don't remember when it had last been vacuumed. But too long ago.

So today I vacuumed it and started thinking about all the other messes I have to clean up.

There's the mess around me: piles of paper on the tops of shelves that need to be gone through. I don't even remember what some of them are anymore, but I know that at least a few of the notebooks contain unfinished stories. At least all the poetry is in one place, so I can start working on putting together the poetry collection. There's a special shelf for that. But I have manuscripts in piles, notebooks, some envelopes (what is in them? I knew once). Books in the wrong places.

And then there is the mess that is email. I have so many things I need to follow up on – some contracts I need to get out, interview questions I need to answer, and just plain responses to send. Oh, and facebook messages I haven't answered either. Ugh.

And then there is the mess that is my life in general – people I've promised to meet for coffee that I seem to keep putting off, friends to catch up with. Seriously, I don't know why my friends put up with me. I've been so awful at keeping in touch. They have the patience of saints.

And then, finally, there is the mess that is me, and that's the biggest mess of all. I'm so used to staying up half the night working that I can't seem to go to sleep before 3 a.m., I don't remember the last time I stretched or exercised (other than running up and down flights of stairs in my normal routine), and it's time to once again face the fact that organic brownies and ice cream sandwiches only sound healthy. (Also, simply to stay awake, I've been drinking coffee, which I love but to which I'm exquisitely sensitive. That's probably why I've been able to stay up the way I have.)

You know I hate messes. I hate, most of all, being a mess.

So it's time to clean up. Yoga, pilades, ballet. Dinner is Manhattan clam chowder, vegan whole-wheat pizza, and probably steamed broccoli (one of my favorite vegetables). Tonight, I'm going to get to sleep by midnight (all right, I'll try). Tomorrow, dance class.

And then I'm going to keep cleaning (getting the books back in their proper places, doing laundry – yes, I'm even behind on laundry). Because when things are a mess, I can't think. And that's what it's been like recently – not being able to think, being both restless and bored at the same time, unable to settle down. That's not the way I work well.

Most people seem to work to live – that is, they work so they can have the lives they want, in a nice location, a nice house. So they can spend their leisure time doing other things. But that's not quite what the arts are like, is it? My work is not what I do in order to have something else – it is primary. Everything else I do is, in a sense, to support the work. So that I can create the things I want to. I don't write stories so I can go on a nice vacation. I arrange my vacations so I can write stories.

And that's what I want: a life that allows me to do the art as seamlessly, as easily, as effectively as possible. Which is why I need to clean up the messes, including the mess that is myself. I want to be and feel at my best, so I can think clearly, so the ideas and words can come out. So I can dream my dreams and turn them into realities.

(But I'm still going to have an organic ice cream sandwich for dessert.)

World Fantasy

Yesterday, I finished everything except the final grading for the semester: there are no more conferences, no more committee meetings, no more emails in the middle of the night to students who are having difficulty with their final portfolios. Today, I met with some of the wonderful people who will be involved in distributing and publicizing The Thorn and the Blossom. And I finally got some sleep.

Tonight, I wanted to write about a blog post that Nnedi Okorafor posted several days ago. In case you don't know, Nnedi is a wonderful writer, the author of books such as Zahrah the Windseeker, Who Fears Death, and Akata Witch. (I was fortunate enough to have her in my Clarion class.) The post was called "Lovecraft's Racism & the World Fantasy Award Statuette, with Comments from China Miéville." This year, Who Fears Death won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Nnedi is the first black writer to have won the award.  All of the World Fantasy Awards look like the head of H.P. Lovecraft. Like this (on the right, next to the poet Elah Gal and some other wonderful works of art that I need to frame, hang, or both):

The post is about her realization that Lovecraft was a racist, and her thoughts about having a statue of his head on her shelf. It's smart and thoughtful, and it includes some additional thoughts from China Miéville, last year's Best Novel winner for The City and the City, who has written on Lovecraft.

Nnedi writes,

"Anyway, a statuette of this racist man's head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man's head is one of my greatest honors as a writer. A statuette of this racist man's head sits beside my Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and my Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award (an award given to the best speculative fiction by a person of color). I'm conflicted."

Toward the end of the blog post, she asks,

"Do I want 'The Howard' (the nickname for the World Fantasy Award statuette. Lovecraft's full name is 'Howard Phillips Lovecraft') replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it's about that time. Maybe not. What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it. If this is how some of the great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let's deal with that . . . as opposed to never mention it or explain it away. If Lovecraft's likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award, I think there should be some discourse about what it means to honor a talented racist."

I think this is a wonderful conversation to have, and a wonderful time to have it, and I'll tell you where I stand: I think the award should be changed, although not because of Lovecraft's racism.

That racism is real, and not excusable: the sort of instinctive and virulent racism you see in some of his writing was more accepted during the time period (I've seen plenty of examples in my research), but there were plenty of people then, as now, fighting those attitudes. I've seen evidence that Lovecraft may have changed his views later in life, but I think Miéville is right to point out that fear and hatred of a racial other was at the heart of many of Lovecraft's stories. So we need to talk about how we read Lovecraft.

But the award itself should be changed because it purports to be a "world" "fantasy" award, and Lovecraft does not represent either of those terms adequately. He is an important American writer who represents one particular strain in the long, rich history of fantasy. That history originates in myth and folklore, and its recent development includes other figures such as George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, C.S. Lewis, Hope Mirrlees, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien, who also influenced the development of the genre in important ways. The award should not be a bust of any one person. Tolkien talked about the soup of story, about the ways in which writers put something into the soup and take something out. We are all drawing out of the soup, and there have been many cooks involved.

I've heard some suggestions about what the award should be, so I'll add my own. I think the award should be different each year, and it should be designed by a contemporary fantasy artist. Imagine winning an award designed by Shaun Tan or Charles Vess or Omar Rayyan! That would also recognize the wonderful work being done in fantasy art, which is such an important part of book publication in this "genre" (a word I use for convenience, since I don't think fantasy is a genre).

Now, back to Lovecraft. How do you read a writer when some of his views are reprehensible? This is how I think about the issue. For me, literature has a life of its own. It is never reducible to its creators. I know that when I write a story, when it's good and it's vital and it lives, it contains more than I consciously put into it. And if that story truly is alive, it contains internal contradictions – just like a living person. (Noticing those internal contradictions is part of a critical stance that, in graduate school, I learned to identify as deconstruction. A classic example is the way in which Milton, attempting to justify the ways of God to man, inadvertently turned Satan into a tragic hero.)

So for example, the Narnia books contain an obvious Christian message, but as I have argued before, they also contain a less obvious longing for the glories of classical paganism. Even as a child, I could see and feel that. To the extent they inspired faith in me, it was a deep and abiding faith in the spirits of trees and waters, in the potential magic of the world. And of course, they inspired the great love that a girl can have only for a talking lion. (If they converted me to anything, it was to Aslan.)

So, how to think about Lovecraft? The reason he remains important is that his best stories do exactly this: they deconstruct themselves. That is, in fact, part of their vitality. My example here is a story called "The Rats in the Walls," in which Lovecraft gives us a protagonist who has a black cat with a racist name. If you want to read the story, go do it now without reading the next paragraph, because I'm about to describe the plot. But if you've decided, after what I've already written, that you never want to read Lovecraft again, that is of course your right.

The story focuses on an American who restores his family's ancestral house in England, only to discover a horrible secret: that for aeons, its members have maintained vast underground chambers filled with human beings that they have used for food. They are cannibals. That secret had been lost for generations, while the family had lived respectably in Virginia – as slave owners. When I teach the story, I highlight both its racist component (the cat's name) and the way in which the final gruesome discovery of cannibalism parallels the earlier account of life in Virginia. The story implies that the dénouement, which drives the protagonist mad, is the literalized, fantastical version of what the family was doing, respectably and openly, on its plantation. Slavery is cannibalism. Did Lovecraft intend that message? I seriously doubt it, and yet it's there. The story is not the writer. The story is always, if it's a living story, smarter than the writer. (So for example, did Lovecraft consciously intend to name the family's Virginia plantation Carfax, the same name that Bram Stoker uses for Dracula's house in England? I doubt it, and yet it implies that the family is metaphorically vampiric, which reinforces that message.)

That's how I, personally, read writers like Lovecraft. But you are, of course, free to disagree with me. This is and should be, as Nnedi suggests, a conversation.

Introversion: Part 2

I'm so tired! It's the end of the semester, and there's still so much to do. But my schedule will finally get better after Wednesday, I hope. I'm posting today simply because I missed a day, and I don't want to miss two days in a row. But realize that I'm very, very tired. I'm not entirely sure that what I write will be coherent.

I'm going to continue talking about introversion. Here are Carl King's other six myths:

Myth #6: Introverts always want to be alone.

Introverts are perfectly comfortable with their own thoughts. They think a lot. They daydream. They like to have problems to work on, puzzles to solve. But they can also get incredibly lonely if they don't have anyone to share their discoveries with. They crave an authentic and sincere connection with ONE PERSON at a time.

I think this is very, very important. Introverts like to spend time by themselves – in fact, they need that time to recharge. But it's dangerous for us to simply shut ourselves up in our rooms and dream. We need to get out, spend time with people. I know I do. What's difficult is that we want an authentic and sincere connection, as King says. And mostly, the world doesn't offer that, does it? It offers the inauthentic and insincere.

So what we need to do as introverts is go on a quest to find our true friends, the ones who will always be there, whom we will always feel a connection with, no matter how long it's been. (You know what I mean. If you're an introvert, I'm sure you have at least one of those.) And we need to never, ever let them go.

Myth #7: Introverts are weird.

Introverts are often individualists. They don't follow the crowd. They'd prefer to be valued for their novel ways of living. They think for themselves and because of that, they often challenge the norm. They don't make most decisions based on what is popular or trendy.

True and true and true. Which means we're weird. I like being weird.

Myth #8: Introverts are aloof nerds.

Introverts are people who primarily look inward, paying close attention to their thoughts and emotions. It's not that they are incapable of paying attention to what is going on around them, it's just that their inner world is much more stimulating and rewarding to them.

My inner world is awesome! Sometimes I wish I could live there.

I've been mistaken for aloof before, or even arrogant. It's because sometimes I'm not sure how to talk to people. So I don't approach them. I'm much better at this than I used to be, because I've been teaching for so long now that I'm used to talking in all sorts of situations, to all sorts of people. But when I meet someone I deeply respect, I still have no idea what to say to them and end up staying silent. Concrete examples: Samuel R. Delaney, John Crowley, John Clute (but only the first time I met him, before I discovered what a sweet, sweet person he is). (Yes, I have just publicly referred to the preeminent critic of science fiction and fantasy as a sweet, sweet person. I hope he keeps talking to me . . .)

Myth #9: Introverts don't know how to relax and have fun.

Introverts typically relax at home or in nature, not in busy public places. Introverts are not thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies. If there is too much talking and noise going on, they shut down. Their brains are too sensitive to the neurotransmitter called Dopamine. Introverts and Extroverts have different dominant neuro-pathways. Just look it up.

I think this is mostly true, but there is one sort of public space I love: the city when no one is paying attention to me, when people are simply going about their business and I can watch them while I'm walking down a street or sitting in a coffee shop. At times like those, the noise of the city is a soothing background noise, like the sound of waves. I feel anonymous.

What I can't stand are situations where I'm supposed to be having fun with a bunch of other people whether or not I'm actually having fun. Sports games. Cocktail parties. I can't imagine going on a cruise, or doing anything that involves a tour group, for "fun."



Myth #10: Introverts can fix themselves and become Extroverts.

A world without Introverts would be a world with few scientists, musicians, artists, poets, filmmakers, doctors, mathematicians, writers, and philosophers. That being said, there are still plenty of techniques an Extrovert can learn in order to interact with Introverts. (Yes, I reversed these two terms on purpose to show you how biased our society is.) Introverts cannot "fix themselves" and deserve respect for their natural temperament and contributions to the human race. In fact, one study (Silverman, 1986) showed that the percentage of Introverts increases with IQ.

Yeah, not going to happen. No way am I ever going to become extroverted, any more than I'm going to become an albino elephant.

Now, I'm very tired, so I'm going to finish my dinner (beef stew) and watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica, which I'm slowly making my way through (I'm on episode 3). And then, I'll get back to work. I hope I make it to Wednesday . . .

Introversion: Part 1

Recently I found a wonderful blog post about being an introvert: "10 Myths About Introverts" by Carl King. I want to write about it here, but I think it's going to take me two blog posts. This is the first one.

King talks about having found a book that helped him understand his own introversion. And he discusses, briefly, the scientific basis of introversion: "Introverts are people who are over-sensitive to Dopamine, so too much external stimulation overdoses and exhausts them. Conversely, Extroverts can't get enough Dopamine, and they require Adrenaline for their brains to create it."

This is exactly what too much external stimulation does to me. When there's too much going on in my life, when it gets overwhelming, I have a tendency to shut down. And when I can't, like this semester, when I just had to keep going and going, I get angry. I feel trapped, and all I want to do is get away.

King says, "Unfortunately, according to the book, only about 25% of people are Introverts." Meaning that society is not set up for introverts. They often find themselves having to adjust to the expectations of other people. (I could never understand amusement parks. What was amusing about them? They were like the roller coasters that featured as their main attractions: both frightening and boring at the same time. If I want to be frightened, I'll do something more productive than go around in circles, thank you.)

In this blog post, I'm going to take King's first five myths and discuss them as they apply to my own life. Partly in order to understand myself, and partly because I suspect many of you are introverts as well, and may find some of it useful.

Myth #1: Introverts don't like to talk.

This is not true. Introverts just don't talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won't shut up for days.

That's certainly true for me. Part of the problem with being a lawyer, for me, was that I could never fake interest in things like sports or who was admitted into the country club. (I'm not joking, the latter was an actual topic of conversation at a cocktail party I attended.) I just didn't see the point in talking about things that were completely unimportant and uninteresting to me. After all, there's so much going on in the world that is important and interesting. Always, everywhere, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. I want to live fully and intensely, spending my time on the things that matter. On art, on literature, on the things that affect the fate of the world and humanity. You think I'm exaggerating, but I've been teaching Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and we've been discussing the ways in which Wilde's writing and trials mattered. The ways in which the aesthetic movement ushered in modernity. I don't have time to stand around at a cocktail party, eating shrimp and talking about golf. I have poems and stories to write.

Myth #2: Introverts are shy.

Shyness has nothing to do with being an Introvert. Introverts are not necessarily afraid of people. What they need is a reason to interact. They don't interact for the sake of interacting. If you want to talk to an Introvert, just start talking. Don't worry about being polite.

I'm not sure this is always true. I think meeting new people can be overwhelming, for an introvert. New people are unknown quantities: you never know how they will act. Whether they will be authentic or kind. I think I always approach people warily. And sometimes I don't approach them at all, but if you approach me, and you are authentic and kind, then I will feel comfortable. Then I will talk to you. But yes, I tend not to talk simply for the sake of talking. I want both of us to have something to say.

Myth #3: Introverts are rude.

Introverts often don't see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

Please just be real and honest. I'm always so relieved when anyone is honest with me. When I can tell that they are being their real selves.

Myth #4: Introverts don't like people.

On the contrary, Introverts intensely value the few friends they have. They can count their close friends on one hand. If you are lucky enough for an introvert to consider you a friend, you probably have a loyal ally for life. Once you have earned their respect as being a person of substance, you're in.

And once you have lost their respect, which is difficult to do – you really have to prove that you are not worthy, not a friend – then it tends to be truly lost. But I think of my friends as infinitely precious. They are the people that, even when we haven't talked for a while, I still connect with. That I still want to be there for.

But this is one of the difficulties of being an introvert: that you don't have a large circle of acquaintances. You have a small circle of friends, and what you want from them is connection on a deeper level. If you don't have that connection, you tend not to let people in. Which means you can be lonelier than extroverts.

Myth #5: Introverts don't like to go out in public.

Nonsense. Introverts just don't like to go out in public FOR AS LONG. They also like to avoid the complications that are involved in public activities. They take in data and experiences very quickly, and as a result, don't need to be there for long to "get it." They're ready to go home, recharge, and process it all. In fact, recharging is absolutely crucial for Introverts.

Let's repeat that, shall we? Recharging is absolutely crucial for introverts. That's something I've had no chance to do all semester. I think that, after the semester is over, I'll need to simply sleep for a while. Starting next week . . .

Authorial Fears

This morning, I was too tired to go to a ballet class. Instead, I slept very late. When I finally got dressed (jeans, black t-shirt), I had to take a trip to the very last place I wanted to go, which was the mall. Because, as I may have mentioned before, I hate shopping. I came back with two cardigans, because in Boston, in winter, I live in turtlenecks and cardigans. There were plastic Christmas trees and Christmas shoppers, and incessant music.

The blog post on being an introvert comes sometime next week.

(I realized, a while back, that I have a uniform: jeans and a black t-shirt. When you have those, and a cardigan, and a pair of black ballet flats, what else do you need? For winter, substitute boots, a black turtleneck. Add pearls and a pair of marcasite earrings. And that's pretty much it. Well, maybe a black skirt for going to the ballet in the evenings. But you don't really need anything else.)

Then I had to recover from going to the mall, which involved sleeping for another couple of hours. And now I'm awake but still tired, and writing this. Which is not, I promise, a rant on how much I hate shopping, or malls. Or on how you can spend the rest of your life in jeans and black t-shirts, although I may write that blog post yet.

This, by the way, is the uniform:

I must have taken this picture several months ago? I think I was having a conversation with someone about what to wear when you're teaching college classes, and I said that I wear jeans (although not all the time of course), and then I think I took a picture to prove it (in the mirror of the bathroom next to my office, on my way to class). So it's silly posting it here. But there you go.

No, this post is about authorial fears. Remember the blog post I wrote a couple of days ago about writers and authors? Several comments mentioned that some people want to be authors without being writers, and I thought, why ever would they want to? Because writing is the fun part. You get to sit in a nice, quiet room, perhaps with classical music playing in the background, and make stuff up. Being an author is scary.

The Thorn and the Blossom comes out in January, which means that people are starting to talk about it, and of course they're talking about the format. Recently I saw a blog post at a website called Novel Chatter that said the following: "Not sure what this book's story will be like, but the concept is pretty quirky. Watch the video, see what you think. The Thorn and The Blossom, by Theodora Goss, is out in January, 2012, and I hope it's not all 'quirk.'" And you know what? I hope so too.

In other words, I hope people actually like the story. When you're a writer, you're responsible for the story. Of course, you didn't write the story entirely by yourself. There's an editor involved, but no reader is going to say, "Wow, I think the editor totally messed this up." No, the responsibility rests with the writer. (For the record, my editor was the utterly lovely Stephen Segal, who did a great deal to improve the story. The flaws in it are entirely mine.)

So the book is coming out, and I'm going to have to be, not just a writer, but also an author. Meaning that I'm going to have to do readings, interviews, all those sorts of things. Which sound so glamorous, but are actually difficult, at least if you're an introvert (blog post definitely coming next week). I think my first reading will be at the Boston University Barnes and Noble in early February. I'll let you know when! And what if you schedule a reading but no one shows up? At various points in my writing career so far, I've read to one person and I've read to more than a hundred people. But you know what I find even scarier than readings? Signings. Because at least at a reading I'm giving the reader something, some value for attendance. But seriously, why would anyone want my signature on a book? Once a reader buys the book, I don't matter anymore. It's no longer my story. The reader writes it in his or her head. (And now I have discouraged anyone from attending one of my signings, ever.)

These are all things you have to do, because you can't just sit in a dark room writing, much as you may prefer to. You have to let people know the book is out there. But it can be difficult, and it takes time, and even the most successful event drains your energy. Even tonight, trying to write a post through the tiredness, trying to connect in this way, I feel drained.

Time to go back to sleep, or perhaps just sit in a quiet room, reading a book.

The Poet Betrays

I can't write a blog post tonight. I need to finish some work for the end of the semester, and I'm completely exhausted. So instead, I'm going to post a poem I wrote recently. I don't know if it's any good. I have the sense that it's fine in terms of technique, but that it lacks something – whatever makes a poem mine – a certain individuality. It feels too structured, not rough enough. As though there isn't enough struggle in it. Unlike a poem such as "The Witch," which is obviously and completely mine, the sort of thing I write. But it does express a thought I've had recently – that writers betray the people who are closest to them by putting them into the writing. And we always do that, and that's something the people closest to us should know. That should be our standard caveat: I will betray you by writing about you, or some imaginary version of you. Inattentive parents, bad love affairs? Grist for the mill, material for the art. And we're not going to apologize for it, either.

So here you go, a poem that may or may not be any good, I honestly have no idea.

The Poet Betrays Her Lover

He betrayed her first.

With a woman whose skin was the color of piano keys,

whose black hair reminded him of a painting by Manet,

who had crooked teeth and spoke French.

Who laughed while picking up, with one spit-dampened finger,

the last crumbs of a chocolate croissant

in the café where they met every morning

before going to her apartment and making love.

Or

He betrayed her with a city,

Budapest perhaps. With its crooked streets

and back alleys that led to parks

from the eighteenth century.

Perhaps he said, I am going to be with my love,

and you are not welcome.

If you were there, it would become

too crowded.

Or

Perhaps he betrayed her with a musical instrument,

a cello he loved as though it were a woman,

caressing her hips, allowing his fingers to play

over her strings before picking up the bow

and bringing her to ecstatic resolution.

There are a hundred different ways

he could have betrayed her.

Should he blame her then, if she betrays him in lines

and stanzas? If she says,

he was my love until he found a woman

that he could play like a piano,

or until he saw a city on a river

and wanted to enter her, and having entered,

to stay? Or that he put an instrument

between his legs?

Can we blame her then, if he becomes the basis

for a hundred poems, if his betrayals

are immortalized? She is a poet.

She will inevitably betray her lover:

the sound he makes while sleeping, the feel of his hands

on her body, how light falls on his face in the morning.

All these she will betray, whether or not

he betrays her first. For a line

or a stanza.

In about two weeks, I will be completely done with the semester, and I will have time to start working on the poetry collection.  I'll need to think about what to include, and I'll come up again the same question – what is mine? It's always a difficult question to answer. I suppose I'll just have to go by instinct.

Writer and Author

Writer. From the Old English writere, Middle English writer. A person who can write; one who practices or performs writing. More specifically, one who writes, compiles, or produces a literary composition; the composer of a book or treatise; a literary man or author. In English, the word goes back to at least the 800s.

Author. From the Latin auctor, Anglo-Norman autour or auteur. The person who originates or gives existence to anything. One who gives rise to or causes an action, event, circumstance, state, or condition of things. An inventor, constructor, or founder. In a more specific sense, one who sets forth written statements; the composer or writer of a treatise or book. (In this specialized sense, the word goes back to the 1300s.) The Creator.

It's a much grander thing to be an author, isn't it?

The definitions above come from the Oxford English Dictionary. For me, the writer is the craftsman, the one who does the work. Who sits down in front of the computer every day and puts words on the screen. (Or in my case, words on paper, since I still write most of my first drafts out longhand.) The author is the one who goes to conventions and gives readings, who is a public presence. The one who is given credit for being the originator, the inventor, the constructor of worlds. There's a reason God is identified as the author of our being.

I suspect the words also reflect the old distinction between the Anglo-Saxon and therefore low, and the Latinate and therefore elevated, like pig and pork, cow and beef. When it's running around the farm, it's pig and cow. When it's served at the Lord's table, it's porc and beouf.

I was talking to a friend of mine about the proper behavior for a writer, when readers comment on a book. And we agreed that the proper behavior was to remain silent. Here's what I mean: most writers track what is being said about a book. They check Amazon reviews, they check Goodreads, they Google. They just do. And when they do, they sometimes come across reviews they disagree with, opinions they might want to contest. What should they do? Remain silent. Here's why.

Once you write the book and it's published, it's no longer yours. It belongs to the reader. The reader creates the book in his or her head, based on what's on the page. He or she enters into a relationship with the book. And in that relationship, you have no place. Yes, you can certainly thank someone for a nice comment. But you must never respond to criticism. It's like interrupting someone else's date.

Because you see, once the book has been published, you as the writer no longer exist. Instead, what exists is the author, and you are not the author. (What? you say. Don't I get to be God? And the answer is, no, you don't.) The author is constructed by the reader based on the book itself. The author exists in the reader's imagination, as the creator of the book he or she has read. The author is not you. Is, in fact, someone a lot cooler than you.

(I know, I'm using these terms in a slightly different way than the OED. But I get to do that, because I'm the writer.)

The writer is the craftsman, and by the time the book is published, the writer has already gone on to the next book. What remains is the author, who is a shadow that the book itself casts.

The writer can conspire to create the author, can create an image of himself or herself. Many writers do. But I suspect that effort only works if the image fits the writing, fits the book. That's what we call branding, nowadays. I'll show you an example from a hundred years ago.

Here is the writer Christina Rossetti (second from left):

And here is the author Christina Rossetti:

Can you see the different? The portrait (by her brother Dante Gabriel) is the pre-Raphaelite equivalent of a publicity photo.

So, the writer can participate in creating the author, but in the end, the author is created by the reader, based on the book. Because it's the relationship between the reader and the book that matters. The author can, in fact, change the writer – turn him or her into a reflection of the reader's expectations. But in this process, the writer, the real writer who gets up in the morning and has cereal for breakfast, and needs to get a haircut, and forgot to pay rent – that person should remain silent. His or her job is to write the next book.

It's an intensely consoling thought, actually. I'm a writer, which means that I can sit in front of the computer in my pajamas, writing a mess of a first draft. The writer is the one who loves the craft, loves putting words on paper or screen. Every once in a while it's nice to dress up and be the author, but I would rather let her wander around the internet, existing in people's imaginations and on their blogs – when they talk about Theodora Goss. In the meantime, Dora can sit cross-legged in her chair, in pjs and warm socks, writing.

Girl Monsters

Do you remember a story of mine called "The Mad Scientist's Daughter"? It was originally published on Strange Horizons, and will be reprinted in The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. I've been thinking, for a long time now, of turning it into – not a play exactly, but what is sometimes called a "read-aloud play." To be read by seven participants (since there are seven characters). I've been thinking that if I can turn it into a play of that sort, I could present it instead of doing a reading at Readercon. The story is already mostly a series of conversations – my characters talking and telling stories to one another.

I think I could get it down to an hour. It would be interesting to see it come to life. If if works, if it's any good, I could publish the script and make it available for anyone to put on. I think there are groups out there who might be interested, who might identify with my girl monsters. I've even thought (because I tend to think this way) of doing some sort of YouTube video. That would probably take a Kickstarter campaign, and already I'm thinking, what am I getting myself into? Because I have more than enough going on in my life right now. But wouldn't it be fun?

And then I need to get back to working on the novel version, and figure out a way to get to London next summer so I can do the research for it. (This is why I don't think I'm going to regret, on my deathbed, having worked too much. Because all of my work is so incredibly cool.)

So, I'm going to give you a sense of what I'm thinking. First, the characters. This is what they should look like, more or less. Of course what they actually look like will depend on the participants, but this is how I imagine them.

Catherine Moreau: Catherine was created from a puma and worked for years as a sideshow freak. She has dark skin, dark hair. She should look vaguely feline. Most importantly, she should have visible scars on her face from the surgery.

Justine Frankenstein: Justine should be tall, as tall as possible. She should look Swiss. I imagine her rather droopy, with pale, lank hair. She can speak ordinary English because although she was created from a Swiss girl, she grew up in England.

Beatrice Rappaccini: Beatrice is Italian. She should speak with an Italian accent, and she should be very, very beautiful. The poisons in her system have made her particularly alluring.

Mary Jekyll: Mary should look like a stereotypical English girl. She is logical, rational. I might give her glasses. Of my girl monsters, she's the one who seems most normal.

Diana Hyde: Diana is wild, uncontrollable. She needs to be played by someone who can curse, laugh raucously. I imagine her looking like a stereotypical gypsy. Whereas Mary is all logic, Diana is all emotion.

Helen Vaughan: Helen is older than the others. She has a daughter. Wait, maybe I should include the daughter in some way? Mother and daughter both look Greek.

Mrs. Poole: All of the others should be dressed as Victorian ladies, although I would recommend aesthetic dress. They are radical, after all. Mrs. Poole is the housekeeper. She should look like a nice, ordinary older woman.

And now I'm going to give you some dialog, scarcely altered from the original. Which may mean that it won't make a very good play, perhaps. But when I read it, I always seem to get a good response. So here you go, just a bit of "The Mad Scientist's Daughter":

Catherine: Sometimes we talk about our fathers.

Justine: My father loved me. He made me from the corpse of a girl who had been a servant of the Frankenstein family. She had been hanged for a crime she did not commit, and he had preserved her body, anticipating that some day he might be able to once again give her life. He even gave me her name, to commemorate her innocence. I can't begin to tell you what a wonderful childhood I had! My father guided me gently through the various stages of knowledge. He taught me the words to describe the world around me: the birds, the plants, the phenomena of nature. He taught me to read, and in the evenings we would read together: Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Werther, Plutarch's Lives. But he was always haunted by the memory of the creature he had created, and eventually that creature came for him. At his death, I lost my father and my only friend. Until – until I found you." (Justine blows her nose into a handkerchief.)

Beatrice: For so many years I was angry at my father. I thought, he had no right to make me poisonous, to make my only playmates the plants of his garden.

Helen: He had no right. Seriously, Beatrice, you're too forgiving. You need to learn to stand up for yourself.

Mary: For goodness' sake, let her finish. You're always interrupting.

Helen: That's because I can't stand to see any of you justifying them. I mean, seriously. They were abusive bastards, and that's all there is to it.

Catherine: I have to agree with Helen. Abusive bastards seems, you know, fairly accurate. I mean, look at my father.

Beatrice: I don't think you can compare my father to yours, Cat. No offense, but your father was a butcher. Mine brought me up himself, in a beautiful garden –

Mary: I agree that there are relative degrees of – well, although I don't like to say it, abusive bastardhood. But Bea, he never taught you anything. All that time on his hands, and he never took any of it to sit you down, teach you about your own biology. So you ended up poisoning the man you loved, basically by accident –

Beatrice: I should have known.

Diana: Why in the world would you blame yourself? I'm with Helen. They were bastards, the lot of them, even Justine's sainted Papa Frankenstein. Look at me, born in a brothel. My mother died of syphilis.

Mary: You can't generalize your story to all of us.

Diana: Oh, right, now you're taking the other side. My story is our story, or have you forgotten, sister?

Justine: For goodness' sake, why are we arguing? I know perfectly well that my father wasn't perfect. But why should I remember all his faults? Why can't I remember the good times we had together, how kind he could be?

Helen: Because that's like lying to yourself. We've all been lied to. Do we really want to lie to ourselves as well? My father was a scientist, like yours. He took my mother from the gutters, where she was starving, fed her, educated her, seduced her, and then experimented on her. She had a vision. She saw something she could not, or perhaps did not have the guts to, understand – the god Pan, source of all order and disorder, Alpha and Omega, to whom all things in the end will come. Nine months later I was born, daughter of the respectable Dr. Raymond and of Pan. It's not hard to understand why, as a teenager, I tried to destroy the world. Sometimes I wish I had. I mean, look at it. The other day, a man tried to steal my pocketbook. He was drunk, red-eyed and reeking of gin, and I turned and started hitting him with my umbrella. I thought, I could have destroyed you all – the beggars, the bankers, the filthy streets of London.

Catherine: So, why didn't you?

Helen: Well, I married Arthur around that time, and then Leda was born. I would have had to destroy Regent's Park, and ice cream, and prams. It just didn't seem practical. Besides, I didn't want to give my father the satisfaction.

Mrs. Poole (enters): Would any of you ladies like some tea?

Having No Regrets

First, I'm sorry that I haven't commented on posts for the last few days. This is the last week of the semester, and I'm so tired! I promise that I'll catch up. (It's the sort of deep tiredness you have when all you've been doing is working. No museums, no going to antiques stores. Barely reading, although I left Shadow hanging on the tree, and I don't know whether he'll live or die. Quantum Gaiman.)

Second, I have one final item listed in the auction for Terri Windling:

Offered: Signed Copy Of The Thorn And The Blossom, With Bonus Manuscript, By Theodora Goss

Offered: A signed copy of The Thorn and the Blossom, by Theodora Goss, with cover art and illustrations by Scott McKowen. This book is coming out early next year, so you will be among the first people to have a copy. It's a wonderful book to give as a gift, to someone else or yourself! And because one of the main characters, Evelyn, is a poet, Theodora will also include a signed manuscript of a poem she might have written.

One enchanting romance. Two lovers keeping secrets. And a uniquely crafted book that binds their stories forever.

When Evelyn Morgan walked into the village bookstore, she didn't know she would meet the love of her life. When Brendan Thorne handed her a medieval romance, he didn't know it would change the course of his future. It was almost as if they were the cursed lovers in the old book itself . . .

The Thorn and the Blossom is a remarkable literary artifact: You can open the book in either direction to decide whether you'll first read Brendan's, or Evelyn's account of the mysterious love affair. Choose a side, read it like a regular novel,and when you get to the end, you'll find yourself at a whole new beginning.

Here is the cover of the book (actually the slipcase):

And here is a video showing how it works:

Opening bid: $15

Auction ends at 5 p.m. Pacific Time, December 15th 2011

The publisher has just told me that there will also be bookmarks, so I will of course include some of those as well.

Today I'm too tired to write about literature or art. So instead I'm going to write about life. I came across a blog post called "Regrets of the Dying" by Bronnie Ware. Here is what she says:

"For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

"People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

"When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again."

She lists the five most common, which I'm going to list here, without the accompanying explanations. You can read those in her post. Instead, I want to think about my life, and whether I'm going to have those particular regrets as I'm dying. (I know, this is a bit grim. But it's a way of checking myself. You can check yourself as well.)

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

I think I'm doing pretty well at this. The life others expected of me was the life of a corporate lawyer in Manhattan. That's what I was trained for. (After all, I went to law school with the President. And here I am teaching writing to undergraduates.) But it wasn't my life, so I left it. I went back to school for the training I wanted, to be both a teacher and a writer. I could have taken an easier route and worked toward an MFA, but I felt that a PhD in literature would be the best training for the sort of writing I want to do. And for my particular temperament. Although the PhD has, at times, caused my much anguish and some boredom, I think I was right. I think this was the degree I was supposed to get.

I think I am living a life true to myself. The next step in living that life is focusing on the writing.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

I'm not sure what to say about this one, because the work I do is work I love . There's the work I have to do, of course, because I have to keep myself in stockings and fans (that's a Cold Comfort Farm reference, in case you were wondering). But the honest truth is that I love teaching. And in addition to the teaching, there's writing, and doing publicity for my writing, and all the other projects connected to the writing that I seem to have so little time for.

I do think I need to keep in mind that I need more time to rest, more time to simply experience the world. Go to museums. So that's something to remember.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

Yeah, I'm terrible at this one. I was raised in a European family with distinctly old-fashioned expectations, in which one did not express inappropriate feelings. Let's just say I'm working on being more honest about what I want and need out of life.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

This one, I need to work on. There's so little time. But I need to make time to talk to friends. Or the only one coming to my funeral will be my therapist.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I don't think it's a matter of let, with me. I tend to take hold of any chance at happiness I get. I never refuse chocolate, or free tickets to anything. Preventing yourself from being happy is the stupidest thing you can possible do. Why would you do that to yourself?

I've been to the depths, to the shadowlands. Happiness is a glorious gift. I'll take it whenever and wherever I can find it.

How did I come out? Pretty well, I think. And I know what I need to do: connect more, express more. Those have always been my problems, and I'm going to work on them. Assuming I survive this week.

Telling the Truth

My Klout score is 58. This morning, I weighed 126 pounds. The advance for my first book was $0. The advance for my last book was $5,000.

Why am I telling you this?

About a week ago, I read a story in The New York Times about Klout.com, which claims to track and score your social influence. I had no idea what it was, so of course I checked it out. And now I know my Klout score. What I learned in the process is that, although everyone I asked about it told me how silly it was, how it made the internet seem like high school, many of the people I know and follow were on Klout. They were presumably checking their Klout scores as well. (I won't name names. You know who you are.) The higher their score, the more likely they were to be registered on the site.

And this got me thinking about all the things we don't talk about.

There are so many of them!

I think it's because we don't want to seem shallow, vain, narcissistic. We don't want to seem overly concerned with money. (When you're in a group of writers who are just starting out, they talk about craft. When you're in a group of professional writers, and all of you in that group are professional writers, you know what they talk about? Money. And sales. That's where you get the real information.) We know that we're supposed to focus not on our weight, but on our health. We know we're not supposed to compare ourselves to others (although we don't, don't we?). We're supposed to be inclusive rather than competitive. But the truth is that many of us are competitive and ambitious. We just politely disguise the fact that we are. And of course there are the things we're ashamed to talk about, because they might expose that we've failed.

The problem with not telling the truth is that we end up not telling each other things – withholding information. I spent years reading ridiculous and potentially harmful diet books before I realized that the people who actually maintained the shape I wanted to be in all monitored their weight carefully. So now I count calories, and I weigh myself every morning. If I weigh more than I would like to, I cut back on my calories. When I say that I need to lose five pounds, I always get "Oh no, you look fine," as though my statement were some sort of code for self-doubt or criticism. But what I actually mean is that in the next month, I intend to lose five pounds. I take ballet classes. If I don't understand and have control over my body, I could injure myself.

Similarly, we are often given the impression that people with writing careers got them in some mysterious way – by luck, by good fortune. That may sometimes happen, but it's rare. The people I know who have writing careers built them – they are ambitious, they kept track of their progress. They publicized in specific and targeted ways.

I'm always fascinated by stories of how people got where they are, like this article on how Imogen Heap makes and markets her music. How she has found her own way in the music industry, which is even harder to navigate than the publishing industry. And when I read stories like that, I think, is there a lesson in it for me? For what I do? Because I am ambitious, and silly as a Klout score genuinely is (what does it mean, anyway?), I'm going to keep track of it. And if it falls, I'm going to wonder why.

I'm always grateful to people who tell the truth, rather than practicing polite reticence or obfuscation. People like Catherynne Valente or Tobias Buckell (who once gathered and posted information on book advances – the first information some people had ever seen on what is standard in the industry). And I think that if you're a writer, telling the truth is important. That's the business we're in, after all: truth-telling, even if we tell it with elves or dragons. If you're a writer, you have no business maintaining polite fictions.

I think society expects us to make it look easy. Like ballet: a good ballerina will make it look as though anyone can jump that high. But it takes a lot of work. If I didn't watch calories, I would gain weight fairly quickly, because I like food. A lot. I want my next advance to be higher (if any publishers are listening). And I'm going to keep working on this writing career of mine, because it really, really matters to me.

Also, and this is the final thing I'll say, in our society there's a tremendous sense of shame associated with failure. I'm always so grateful when people talk about their failures (Imogen Heap was dropped from record labels twice), because it makes me feel as though my failures are not so bad, nothing to be ashamed of. Simply bumps on the road. So in the interest of truth-telling, I did not get into graduate school the first time I applied (my essay was not particularly good, and I wasn't mentally ready – it was a failure, but turned out to be good for me because I ended up in the program where I belonged). My hair color is Naturtint 7G Golden Blonde, and yes it's close to my natural hair color, but redder, brighter, because I like it that way. And I deal, on and off, with depression, which is not a mood but a recurring illness.  I've been dealing with it a lot this year.

If I can think of anything else to tell the truth about, I'll let you know.