Cat Hellisen's Blog, page 20

And now for more general targets for 2014

I’ve set out my writing-related goals for 2014, so here’s a more general list for the year:

 

~ Get the flatlet built and ready to let by December.

~ Be better with school this year.

~ Rehome battery chickens

~ Do at least three short courses on things that interest me.

~ Be nicer to myself. (hard, because i hate myself so much, but really, this is getting tiring)

~ Prepare week menus in advance so I can shop more carefully/frugally.

~ Set up my studio/office and give myself the space to be creative – make art, get together with Terri and my sister for crafting.

~ Stop buying books to not-read; ie: read what I have/use library.

~ Read more short stories. – I will do this buy buying subscriptions to at least 2 mags. (I have a fairly good idea of which 2)

Writing Goals for 2014

There’s no point in recording goals that are out of my control, but for now, the writing is still mine, and that’s what matters.

1: Turn in Beastkeeper before the end of January.

2: Send in the 3rd Oreyn book to my editor.

3: Write one short story a month (and sub the good ones – that part is quite important since I tend to convince myself not to.)

4: Finish the rewrites on That Angel Poly Book by end May.

6: Finish the first draft of The Ghost Book By end August.

7: Write 100 words every day on The Shadow Book.

8: Look into smaller markets for The Book That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

RAWR

Girl Work vs Boy Work

Do we default to teaching girls to be helpful, instead of working to earn a living?

Caveat: I have no sons, I was not born nor raised a boy; my experience is based on having brothers and brothers-in-law.

I’m packing up my house to move, so I offered the girls R100 each if they would help me. Elder Spawn naturally threw herself into packing up the stuff in the garage, while Younger Spawn did sweet F.A. When I gave Elder Spawn her money, she said to me, “I did it because I wanted to help you, not so much for the money.”

And yeah, my first instinct is to go, “Aw …. that’s sweet.” But I didn’t, because it’s not exactly true.

It’s just that somewhere along the line she’s learned that it makes her look better if it’s not about the money. Being helpful is great, I want to encourage my kids to help others, but at the same time, this was above and beyond her regular chores, and a fair amount of work..

Why am I encouraging her to justify earning money by using some “I’m just being kind” excuse?

So instead I told her that it’s NEVER wrong to work hard to earn money, and that anyone who tells her differently is lying to her. Because if she grows up with the attitude that her work is only valid if she does it because she’s being helpful and kind, and the money she gets is incidental, wtf am I teaching her about her value to society?

Shut up, smile, serve up dinner, wash the dishes and SMILE SMILE SMILE because that’s your worth: serving people. And you better enjoy it.

We don’t teach sons that. We teach them to work for what they want. We teach them to value themselves, their efforts, and to earn what they deserve. We teach them to ask for raises because they worked for them, not to play this game where they pretend it’s ok to earn less because their work is somehow less important.

But what do we say to our daughters?

You girls, you be helpful.

And maybe we’ll reward you.

Get Back in Your Sandbox

I hate laying down rules for writers, but I think there is one thing that a decent writer needs to pay attention to and encourage.

 

Imagination.

 

I sometimes piss people off a little when I say anyone can be a writer. (Usually the elitist types who believe that they are Specialty-Special and any infringement on their Specialty-Specialness needs to be shot down before people stop worshipping their genius. But I digress.) When I say anyone can be taught to be a writer, I’m talking about the twin horns of Technique and Imagination.

 

Even the worst of writers, with stale prose and weak, clichéd metaphors, can be pushed out of their comfort zone and begin to examine their work more critically, and eventually start pushing themselves to do better, to improve not just the basics, but to hone their style and voice into something pointed and precise. It takes firstly, an acceptance that their work does actually need improving, and secondly, a willingness to work hard.

 

The other horn, left dull and neglected thanks to a bizarre pervasive belief in OMG NATURALLY GIFTED PEOPLE ARE THE BESTEST, is the one I think we are too frightened to sharpen.

 

Yes, there are naturally talented writers who spin out prose so effortless that it hurts to read. Whose imaginations swoop and soar and go places that leave us bruised. Those people are in an extreme minority. The rest of us have to work at out tools and techniques, and take a massive step backwards.

 

Backwards?

 

Because the people with those amazing imaginations? They’re the ones who never left the sand-pit. When the rest of us got clogged up with memorising formulas and getting passing grades and working our nine-to-five, those people took a part of the sand-pit with them, and they never. Stop. Playing.

 

When I wrote House of Sand and Secrets and the other Hobverse books, I was playing in a mental world where fall-out from a magical war warped the creatures and the landscape and began to change the mundane into the bizarre and strange – lions became sphynxes, goats were unicorns, crocodiles were dragons. And I let my imagination run through this world, inventing people, politics, power-struggles. I became fascinated with the limitations and the lack thereof. That’s how you get there – you build yourself a sandbox world and you go WHAT IF…?.

 

Writers sometimes have to give themselves permission to go back to that sand-pit, to shove their fingers through the nothing and start building castles, to turn Barbie into Godzilla and stamp down cities. To dream, to imagine.

 

That is the biggest challenge facing so many of us who want to write – we’re terrified of getting lost in out own imaginations. of perhaps not writing something commercial enough (whatever that means on any given day). Or perhaps we’re scared to find out we don’t have that capacity to imagine and create any more. I don’t think you lose it, but I do think it becomes harder to chip away all the concrete of adulthood and get back to that place where we lose ourselves in what if. It takes practice, just like anything else.

 

The world around us is filled with fascination, we just need to break through and let our sandpit and our amazing world meet. Let everything run together, let it fester, if necessary. Dreams don’t have to be pretty. Go back to your childish terrors, your youngest hopes, and build something unexpected.

 

Offers are like otters with longer fur.

Are you a newish writer of speculative fiction (either YA or adult) who wants a second (or third or fourth) set of eyes to look over your work? Do you have the first three chapters or fifty pages (whichever is shorter) and a synopsis ready to go?

Leave your name and a one line hook in the comments,  and I’ll choose someone at random with my magic random chooser (a cat thrown at the keyboard) at the end of the week (Friday, to those people who work on weekends and think they count).

 

And, go!

 

 

 

Hobverse? Maybe stop being lazy, yeah?

So I actually tweeted this then I realised I am thickety-thick and I should just blog about it because 10+ tweets about the Hobverse is asking to get twitter-punched.

I noticed on goodreads that someone has changed the title of When the Sea is Rising Red to include the words (Hobverse #1). Which is cool and awesome and also makes me feel like a tit for not actually bothering to stop calling them that. A long long time ago, I wrote a book called Hob an Lam. (Some people read it, they liked it, it made my agent at the time suggest I look for a new agent. LOLLERSKATES.) Then I wrote some other books set in the same world and I started calling them the Hobverse books. Because:  lazy.

Anyway, since the hobverse books are not an actual series in the traditional sense of the word, and more a collection of related stories set in the same world with some shared characters, I never really bothered to create a “series” name. (There is one now though:  The Books of Oreyn.)

But yes, Hob an Lam *will* be coming out (next year, I’m hazy on stuff) and it got renamed about two years ago so it’s now called Bones Like Bridges so if you have a vague memory of Jek and Sel and Calissa and Mal and Iliana and the great invading Mekekana ships…well um, yeah, it’s that one. The one that starts with a burning on Lander’s Common.

My precious. *pets book in an unhealthy way*

And there’s another that has been first drafted and revised and is ready to go on the editing merry-go-round, called Empty Monsters and yeah I kinda love it. Sorry.

*gets inappropriate with some words*

And as you can see, none of the books have Hob in the title anymore so…. yeah. Hey. Hobverse works for me.

Someone has a pretty cover

And yay, that person is me!

 

Over on The Book Fairy’s Haven, the lovely Tammy February is doing a cover reveal for House of Sand and Secrets, the next instalment in the Hobverse books.

 

Check it, yo.

 

 

And add it on goodreads or something because authors are like neurotic kittens when it comes to that crap and it makes them feel safe and stuff.

A When the Sea is Rising Red doodle

Sometimes on twitter I have this excellent work-avoidance strategy where I take #twitterdoodle requests.

I’m sticking this one here because I got asked for a doodle from When the Sea is Rising Red, so I drew a unicorn.

 

US vs THEM

Writers vs Reviewers. If you spend any time on social media following authors and book bloggers, you see this cropping up. The most recent in a long string of us vs them is here at Booksmugglers but it’s certainly not the first and will more than likely not be the last.

I have problems with all of it, but most specifically the divide. We’ve set up an online narrative where book bloggers and reviewers are in one corner, and the authors are in the other, both of them ready to duke it out at the slightest hint of provocation.

See. I don’t think the divide is that simple. We are all of us at the end readers (and if you’re a writer who doesn’t read than please consider a new career). More importantly, we are all of us at the beginning, readers. This is why we are here – we love words and stories and characters and language. We immerse ourselves in fictional worlds and lives. We have a common ground.

And I think this is where it becomes hard as a writer to separate that love of reading from ourselves as producers of art. We are no longer just consumers. The review becomes personal to us, even though it shouldn’t be. It’s hard not to see a negative review of your work as not being about *you* personally. I have often sat and torn books to pieces with my friends, both before and after taking up writing. I meant no malice to the authors themselves – in a sense, they didn’t exist. The author was an abstract. The book was the thing. If a plot was dumb, a character too stupid to live, the language dreadful, my friends and I would discuss these without thought to the person behind them.

Suddenly, I’m that abstract, that author, and you know what? It’s hard to pretend that the author doesn’t exist as a human when you know they do. I still love and hate books, but I’m a lot more comfortable discussing online the books I love, than harping on about the ones that annoyed me.

So what does this have to do with book blogging – am I saying that all reviews should be nice? That criticism must be couched in hearts and flowers? Not at all, but that we all need to remember that there are humans on the other side of the divide we’ve drawn. And sometimes you just hate a book because it pings every button on the OMG HATE THIS list, but there’s a way to say that which isn’t mean girl posturing.

The same goes for writers – this isn’t about YOU any more. If a book blogger lists every flaw they found in your book, they’re not making a comment on you as a person (although sometimes they might be – but then you have to ask why you’re being called a misogynist or a racist.)  They are critiquing your art. They are saying, I HATE THIS. And you know what, they’re totally entitled to it. It’s not as though because you’re a writer everyone has to love what you make.

As a writer, you get to deal with this in different ways – you can have a conversation, but going to a negative review and telling the reviewer they’re wrong wrong wrong and here’s why is probably not a good way to start a dialogue. You can pretend all reviews don’t exist and not read them at all (often the best and safest choice), or you can engage in a non-confrontational way, you can talk outside of the context of reviews, you can learn from what reviewers post and ignore them if they are nonsensical (and some really are )

However you choose to deal with the weirdness that is reading reviews of your own work, and even if you feel slighted and hurt by what is said, you still need to remember that reviewers are also humans. They have tastes, loves and hates, personal experiences that inform their reading – all of which are different to yours. Think of those times you’ve eviscerated a book you can’t believe actually got published, think about how many people love that book and what aspect of it is connecting with readers. And then think of the human faces behind this reviewer/writer divide.

We can still have critique, analysis, discussion, reviews. We just need to learn to navigate this online, where the temptation to lash out at a perceived insult is so easily enabled by the wonder of social media.

Anyway, I’m interested to see how you cope with the open conversation that’s come up with book blogging, tweeting and goodreads. As reviewers, as writers, and sometimes as both. Is there a way we should be behaving, or is all this prescriptive social guidelines thing just nonsense?

aargh aargh aargh is a valid human emotion

So.

Success, it’s this thing, right? I mean, most of us want it, in some form or another. Success has different meanings – it could be having more sales than the Holy Bible, or being a household name, or winning a prestigious lit award, or yanno, making enough money that you can write full time.

I think the closer you are to the start of your career, the smaller your vision of success might be. I remember when getting an agent felt like I’d freaking won the lottery, when selling my first book was finding oil in the back yard.

The thing with success is that it never stays in one place, it’s always relative. And there is ALWAYS someone more successful than you. Someone else is writing more popular novels, or seems to write fifty novels that all sell in the time-frame that you write one and your agent responds to it with “do you have some other projects you could focus on because well, this one…”

You can drive yourself insane playing the comparison game, and I will not pretend I’ve not done it, that I still don’t have moments of why them and not me? I’m human. In theory, if you’re reading this, so are you (unless you are a highly intelligent hamster) and those feelings of jealousy and self-pity and argh argh argh are human emotions. The trick is to let them go.

If you hang on to them they are going to control you. They’re going to control me if I spend the rest of my life not writing because nothing I write is good as that other person’s book.

I have limited control over my career. I can write to the best of my ability, I can edit the shit out of that work, I can be wise in my choice of business assosciates (agents, editors, writer friends) but I cannot trap an editor and keep them hostage until they buy my book. I cannot hold readers at gun point and tell them that actually they do like this damn book and they will give it five stars and tell all their friends. I cannot make B&N stock my books in huge piles at the front of the shop with big signs saying THIS IS ACTUALLY THE BEST BOOK YOU WILL EVER READ.

There are thousands of books coming out all the time, and quite a few of those are much better than mine.

It’s always going to be like that. I bet even Stephen King has days where he wakes up and cries into his Hello Kitty pillow and wishes he could write like someone else.

So

Success.

It has to become something only you can control, or else you will always be a failure to yourself. Set the goals for success to be the ones you have power over. And you have power over your words.

I will be a success if I finish this YA necromancer book and make it Cat-awesome and send it in to my agent and then get started on my next book.

The rest can deal with itself.