Mary Sisson's Blog, page 123

Self-knowledge: Good for real people, bad for fictional people

I am of the generation that discovered the television show Beverly Hills 90210: No, Not the New One--Shut Up and Get Off My Lawn. This was back when TV shows were all basically produced by the big networks, and as a result they tended to be very bland and predictable, because they were geared toward not offending anybody.

As a result, the first season of 90210 was delightfully shocking. For example, you had a character named Kelly, who was super-duper popular. Why was she popular? Because she lost her virginity at the age of 14, when she was a freshman, and the guy she lost it to was a senior. She wielded this fact like a cudgel--you're telling her what to do? Well, honey, are you so hot that you lost your virginity at age 14 to a senior? Guess not!

Trust me, at that time, nooooooobody was suggesting in a teen-oriented show that having sex could make you popular in high school, especially if the guys you were having sex with were a lot older. Of course, out in real life, it certainly could, and everyone knew it, but they weren't supposed to admit that on television.

90210 became very popular, at which point they toned it way down and I stopped watching it.

The episode that made me realize that this show was no longer worth my time was one with Emily Valentine. She was Brendan's psycho stalker ex-girlfriend, who started out as bad news and spiraled down into more and more insane behavior. Finally she doused a homecoming float with gasoline and sat on it with a lighter. Dun-dun-duuuhhh!

And then not only did she decide not to make Emily Flambé, but she proceeded to launch into this lengthy analysis of why she was so unstable. (Her family moved a lot.)

OK. Say, you're emotionally unstable. You've been unstable for quite a while. Your instability is making you screw things up, and which is making you even crazier. Finally you get ready to commit suicide by setting yourself on fire.

You are not in a position to analyze why you are acting this way, OK? You are too unwell. You might understand intellectually that what you are doing is harmful, but you don't understand the forces that drive you to harm yourself, at least not in a helpful way. Maybe after therapy and perhaps medication, and once you get some distance on events, maybe then you can sort out all the whys and wherefores--but not in the red-hot moment.

It's contrivance. In 90210 it was that safe, pedagogical approach to teen fare--you can't have someone do harmful things without turning it into a "The More You Know" moment, otherwise all the parents' groups will accuse you of glorifying bad behavior. I recently read a novel where, despite the fact that it was set in the 19th century, all the characters exposit (constantly) about their family and their interactions exactly the way people who have been through a lot of therapy in the 21st century do. That's also contrivance--historically-inaccurate contrivance.

These kinds of contrivances suck away all the drama. It's not just that having all your characters prattle on about how their father and their brother and their mother and their sister and their cousin and their brother-in-law and their dog all interact now and have interacted at every point in the past is dull--although it's certainly that. It's that Emily Valentine was all better. She was 100% fine--no need to worry about her any more! She's never going to do anything bad again! Please don't care! It's very, very difficult to relate to someone who has a mental-health hotline in their head that will magically call them at any stressful moment in their life and make sure they never, ever do the wrong thing.

Which is not the same as saying a character can't grow and become more stable--but it's a process, and circumstances have to be right. In Lois McMasters Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Mark Vorkosigan does this pretty convincingly: He is given a very robust support network, it takes a lot of time, and he's never without his hang-ups. The very fragility and imperfection of his recovery is emotionally engaging. He isn't just bonked on the head by the Contrivance Fairy's wand and magically made all better the way Emily Valentine was.

Me too! MEEEE TOOOOO!!!!!

This is something random that cracks me up. In case you are wondering, I am definitely a member of the Illuminati.

Normalizing book publishing

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has another insightful blog post on the immensity of the changes in publishing. She notes that publishing used to be taking place in an environment of scarcity--only X amount of self space existed, meaning that you had to guess which books among the gazillions of unpublished books out there would sell the most if it were allowed to take up one of those precious spaces.

Now publishing is in an environment of abundance: Shelf space is infinite, so you can publish everything and see what flies!

In abundance, you can toss anything into the mix, quantify its sales, and pick winners based on sheer numbers. In scarcity, you have to go with the best of what's available, and hoping (praying) that you don't lose too much money on everything else.

She thinks that the change is just amazing. I think the change explains why traditional publishing is so much more like playing the lottery than self-publishing.

The other night, I was explaining my history of trying to get my books traditionally published to some people, and I realized that I was still upset about it. Being the analytical sort, I was trying to sort out why, after all this time (and after it not really mattering anyway), it still bothered me so.

And I think part of it is that the whole "You're great! Nuts to you!" thing just didn't jibe with my experience working in publishing. Publishing in New York City (not anywhere else, I know) is, or at least was, a normal sort of industry.

People from out of town would ask me, "How did you ever get a job in publishing!?! Did you know someone? Who were your connections? The Rockefellers? The Forbes?" I realize that I went to Harvard, and I had a fairly comfortable childhood--out in the fucking sticks, at terrible schools. Harvard was a serious adjustment for me.

Trust me, when I graduated, I didn't know a freaking soul in publishing. I had noooooo connections. I had no clue about careers--no clue. I went into publishing because one day when I was almost finished with my senior year (and hadn't gotten into the Ph.D. programs I'd applied to in a desperate attempt to stay in college forever) I realized that I enjoyed reading magazines and that somebody must make them.

And yet, I had a perfectly respectable career. I got jobs in publishing (and journalism) by answering "help wanted" ads, just like everyone else does in every other normal industry.

People say things like, "You're not entitled to have a book published." And on one level, that's true. You're not entitled to perform brain surgery--unless you go through the training and pass the boards and get the license, at which point you are, in fact, entitled to perform brain surgery.

The problem--and I guess the source of the frustration for me--with traditional publishing is that, because of this environment of scarcity, you never reach the point where you are entitled to be published, even if you've won stuff and been published before and worked really hard on something that everyone (including the people who reject it) thinks should be published. Nowadays everyone who wants to be published is entitled to be published. Fine, you're not entitled to have a monster best-seller, but I think that if you work at it, you can indeed find an audience to appreciate and support your work. And that is a real revolution.

Spine out!

Today I found myself near a shop that is part of a local chain. I saw big signs on the walls saying "LOCAL! LOCAL! LOCAL! OMG LOCAL!" so I went in. I don't live near any bookstore other than The World's Worst Barnes & Noble (seriously, the ones in NYC were fine, but this one is awful--they sell books that look like they have been mauled by bears), but there are a lot of local bookstores and chains in my area.

In general, and today was no exception, I walk in thinking, "Local bookstore! I bet they're interested in local writers! I should scope this out for when I have more books out!" And I look around and...gosh. Around here the grocery stores and the gift shops are hugely into letting you know that a product is local--they put up signs indicating that something is from the area and all that. The local bookstores, are, to put it mildly, not. There may be a section of local travel guides and maps, but local writers...? No. "Buy local" to them just means "buy here."

But as I was wandering through the sci-fic/fantasy section (yeah, unless George R. R. Martin is local...), I did notice something interesting and potentially useful. One big complaint about book retailers is the tendency to sell books "spine out"--i.e. sitting on the bookshelf so that you can see only the spine. That's probably how you keep your books on the shelf, but writers would prefer it if a book is "face out"--i.e. sitting so that you can see the front cover. Face out makes the book more noticeable; spine out takes up less space on the shelf.

So, publishers of science fiction have done something very interesting--they've made the front and the spine look the same. The cover art repeats on the spine. (If the book is a small, fat mass-market book--which Trang, alas, cannot be, because CreateSpace won't allow it--then the spine is also about the same width as the front cover. Which means the spine art and the cover art are identical, but honestly, those proportions can't make the book easy to read.)

I have not given Trang a fancy spine. The full cover looks like this:

The only actual art is on the front.

I didn't think that mattered, but now I'm changing that opinion. If I want bookstores to stock the book, it needs to have more...shall we say, spinal flair, if only because other sci-fi books do. I don't think it should be hard--I can basically extend Titan over the spine (it can't go onto the back cover down there because that's where the bar code goes) and then put another, smaller portal higher up so that it overlaps the spine and the back cover.

 

Your savior is...Barnes & Noble?

You know, much like I don't think Amazon is either the devil or your best friend, I am truly agnostic regarding Barnes & Noble. What, deep down inside, I hope happens to them is that they fix their Web site so that it's easier to find indie books, because then more indie writers would make more money!

But stuff like this post (via PV) just baffles me. It's entitled "Why You Should Consider Buying Your E-Books from Barnes and Noble," and it says thing like, "If we want to avoid having our digital reading lives shaped by Amazon and Amazon alone, we have to support someone who can serve as a check on it. And at this moment, that's Barnes and Noble."

You know something? When Scott Turow makes a lot of nonsensical statements about the competition Amazon faces, and when major publishers enter into nonsensical price-fixing arrangements because they are all desperately trying to preserve Barnes & Noble, I understand it. They fear the future, and Barnes & Noble represents the past, back when publishing was an industry they understood.

But when some regular Joe comes along and says, "Barnes & Noble is the only way!" I say, look around you. There are alternatives to either company. This is digital media--the field is wide open. (And I'm not the only one who has noticed--I mean, yeah, PayPal backed down, but that just means that you will have yet another way to accept payment for "Raped by Uncle Ostrich.")

And honest to God: If you are worried about what Amazon will do if it gains market share, well, why don't you try worrying about the things Barnes & Noble already did back when it had serious market share. This is a company that forced publishers to offer it special discounts on the wholesale price of books so that it could profitably underprice indie bookstores and drive them out of business. It was sued for this, and then it turned right around and tried to buy Ingram, which is a major distributor and pretty horrific at using its market power to quash other companies' competitors even when it's not owned by one of its clients. If you want a company that has consistently pushed the antitrust envelope and that firmly embraces the notion that publishing is an old boy's network, closed to the hoi polloi, then you really should be sure to buy your e-books at Barnes & Noble.

Learned helplessness

I mentioned having to deal with a lot of tax idiocy this year, and by that I don't mean the normal filling out of the 1040-EZ. The thing that makes this (and many!) tax season so stressful is dealing with a certain individual who has absolutely no concept that processes matter. This person is an older woman, and she waits around for some big swinging dick to come along and tell her what to do, and then she obediently does it, whatever the hell it is. Seriously--the tax advice could be "dose your home in lighter fluid and set it on fire," and as long as a man told her to do it, she'd be sloshing the Kingsford about and trying to find a match without even thinking about it.

I am by no means the only person to find parallels between this kind of behavior that is both encouraged in most women and very much indulged by some, and the way authors often are encouraged to behave and sometimes actually do behave.

Here are some myths common to both:

Don't worry baby, I'll take care of you. Never true. No matter how fancy and powerful someone seems, it's not necessarily in their interest to take care of you--and so they won't. If you are being told not to worry your pretty little head about something because Big Daddy has taken care of everything, beware! You may be getting advice from a cat!

We inhabit separate spheres. Don't you love this one? Girls wear pink. Boys wear blue. Women love babies. Men love trucks. Women drink wine. Men drink beer. There is nothing that cannot be parceled off into separate gender spheres.

I notice this a lot because I am both handy and, you know, a dame, which is kind of mind-blowing for some people. I once was stopped at a KMart by a woman who saw that I was buying a replacement toilet seat, and she wanted to know...well, basically she wanted to know if it was possible for a woman to replace a toilet seat. I am not talking about an actual toilet (although I replace those, too), I am talking about a toilet seat--two screws and you're done. I'm pretty sure a monkey could replace a toilet seat. Blindfolded. A friend of mine was buying furniture at Ikea, and another woman told her that she couldn't buy furniture there because she didn't have a boyfriend. Dead serious--there was no connection between those two thoughts, just the automatic assumption that you can't use an Allen wrench if you don't have testicles. (Helpful hint: When assembling furniture, even men use their hands.)

So, yeah, without question I'm better at writing than at doing cover art, but you know something? I'm not afraid to try. I'm not afraid (or too good, or whatever) to poke around in that sphere. At some point I may hire people to do certain production tasks for me, but when I do that I'll have a decent idea of the amount of work required and whether it's worth the price.

You can't make it without me. Wow, seeing a lot of this lately. Change is always stressful, but when your only game plan has been to latch onto someone like a remora, it becomes devastating when that someone moves on. If you identify as a BigPub House author rather than as an author who happens to be published by BigPub House, then it becomes very easy to put BigPub House's interests before your own.

What does this all boil down to? Dependency. People get used to being dependent, and some people just love it to death! But when you turn yourself into a dependent, you aren't simply making yourself vulnerable--you are choosing not to grow. That relative I was talking about in the beginning of this post? She has been 15 years old her entire life--I use tactics gleaned from advice for negotiating with teenagers to deal with her, and she's a senior citizen. Be afraid, be very afraid.

How market dominance is different from anticompetitive behavior

You know, I'm just grateful that the antitrust thing didn't happen before I sent the Trust layout to the copy editor.

Anyway, the whole brouhaha has been kind of interesting, because it's brought out a lot of people who don't know much about self-publishing. So there's concerns that the end of agency pricing will force down book prices (not necessarily), that lower book prices mean less money for authors (only if you don't self-publish), and that it will result in a precipitous decline in quality (not necessarily, because writers can hire help). (And gosh, isn't this the sort of helpful reassurance and advice for writers that you might expect to hear from the president of the Author's Guild? Maybe he's too busying looking for Abba LPs and Toto 8-tracks.)

One thing I thought needed more clarification than can be provided by a simple link is the difference between market dominance and anticompetitive behavior. Obviously, it's easier to engage in anticompetitive behavior if you dominate a market, but the two things aren't the same.

Let's take an example from Scott Turow's amusing little diatribe: Amazon controlled 90% of the e-book market by the end of 2009. Now its share is 60% of the e-book market.

Unlike Turow, I try to not automatically regurgitate information that has been spoon-fed to me by large publishers. Therefore, I will note that nobody knows how big the e-book market is, which means that it is impossible to determine with any accuracy who controls how much of it. (I'm crossing my fingers that the discovery process will result in some good data.)

But for the sake of argument, let's say that those numbers have some basis in reality (perhaps by "the e-book market" he means "the market of e-books produced by large publishers who provide me with talking points"). Well, Amazon dominated that market for about five minutes. And then it lost a huge chunk of market share!

Turow looks at this and says, Yay! Price-fixing did the trick! David Gaughran looks at this and says, Um, hello? At the end of 2009 the Kindle was basically the only e-reader on the market. Now there's the Nook and the iPad.

Honestly, I think Gaughran's much closer to the truth, but even if you buy Turow's argument, the fact is that competitors came into a market that was almost completely dominated by Amazon, and they quickly reduced Amazon's market share by one-third. If you are wondering why, oh why, the Department of Justice doesn't investigate big bad Amazon for anticompetitive practices? It's because Amazon didn't try to exclude competitors. Instead, Amazon allowed competitors to enter the e-book market and take away market share. That is not anticompetitive behavior.

Now, you might argue (and I'm sure the large publishers will) that thanks to all those self-publishers out there, large publishers no longer dominate the supply of e-books. Maybe so, maybe not--the absence of data on e-book sales makes it impossible to know.

But one of the reasons the publishers decided to get together with Apple and fix prices is that they were afraid that Amazon would "pit authors against publishers" and make self-publishing attractive. So the fact that Amazon went ahead and did that and now there are all these self-published e-books out there happened in spite of traditional publishing's efforts to prevent it.

In other words, the fact that traditional publishers may no longer have a dominant e-book market share doesn't mean that they didn't engage in anticompetitive behavior. If an illegal scheme backfires--I try to rip off your granny, but she's too smart for me--that doesn't somehow make it legal. Likewise the fact that the price-fixing scheme they hit upon guaranteed lower margins for publishers and a 30% profit margin for Amazon doesn't mean that they didn't engage in anticompetitive behavior. It just means that, in addition to being unethical, they weren't very smart.

Borrowed from life vs. dominated by life

My sister bought me a membership to a local theater group that give me free admission to four shows a season. It's been a nice gift, although the problem with any local theater group when you do not live in a locality that draws talent from across the globe is that sometimes the local talent is talented, and sometimes it's...that other thing.

So I tend to avoid the shows that require large casts. Today I saw a two-man show that was excellent; a month ago I saw a one-man show that was so boring I managed to hit upon a solution for a home-improvement problem that had been bothering me.

The problem in the latter's case was not the actor; it was the script. Both shows were about real, historical people. But the excellent show was a story, and the boring show was just, you know, a story.

"Like, I met this guy once? And he was like, really interesting. He, like, grew up in Austria. And when the Nazis came, like, in 1939 or whenever they came to Austria, he was, like, 18, and he was like, NFW. I'm not sticking around here. He wasn't Jewish or anything, he just thought these people were appalling. So, he was a big hiker, right? So he walked from Austria to someplace in France where he got a boat ride to the UK! Then he moved here, to the US, and he's stayed here ever since."

Stretch that out for two hours, and you've got the boring play.

Now, I read the playbill, and the author of this play met the person the play is about in real life and blah-de-blah-blah and this really happened--it really happened--and the person was really real. And the author felt like he couldn't embellish or alter this person's story in the least, because they were a real real really real real person who most people didn't know about.

Well, you know something? The guy I was talking about three paragraphs up is a real person, too. What difference does that make? You don't want two freaking hours of me saying, Oh, yeah, this guy was cool.

Now, the excellent play was also about a real (really really real) person. It's also about a totally made-up person: Of the two characters in the play, one is a historical person and the other is an invention, who is something of a composite of some real people, plus a generous dash of I need to make this play work.

So guess what? The invented character has an arc: He learns from the real-life character and goes from being a Padawan to a Jedi. He's also a great foil to the real-life character: He's got a fantastic backstory, which is used to pull out revelations from the real-life character, as well as to illustrate the way the real-life character used and was affected by his own life experiences.

An arc and a foil--that is just too much to expect from someone in real life. And that's the point!

If you want to write about real life, do the research and write non-fiction. You will have to deal with stuff that doesn't work so well in a story (John Nash was a real dick, for example), but that's non-fiction--you have to be disciplined and tell the truth, even when it's unsavory or inconvenient.

When you cross the line into fiction (even "based on a true story" fiction), cross the line. Just go for it. I don't respect the truthfulness of the guy who wrote the boring play--I think he's a punk for not having the courage to write an interesting play. The discipline with fiction isn't the truth: It's the story. In fiction, the story comes before all.

Progress report

A teeny-tiny bit of progress to report: I revised the promo/jacket copy for Trust. Unfortunately my time and attention right now is mainly being taken up by some tax-related idiocy, which was really, really NOT what I was hoping for....

Different flavors of creativity

Oh my God! A non-rant! This is a very cool article about creativity (you have it, you can cultivate it) in the Wall Street Journal. Helpfully, it distinguishes between the situations that require insight--where you should relax and distract yourself and let your subconscious do its thing--and those that quite you to just keep plugging away.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling.