Mary Sisson's Blog, page 64

HOUSE

Yes, it's what I've been doing all week. Probably next week too. It's unavoidable at this point....

Well, this explains why I don't listen to the radio anymore

I thought it was just because Seattle radio sucks donkey balls compared to NYC, but according to the Wall Street Journal, this is the wave of the future:

Faced with growing competition from digital alternatives, traditional broadcasters have managed to expand their listenership with an unlikely tactic: offering less variety than ever.

The strategy is based on a growing amount of research that shows in increasingly granular detail what radio programmers have long believed—listeners tend to stay tuned when they hear a familiar song, and tune out when they hear music they don't recognize. . . .

The top 10 songs last year were played close to twice as much on the radio than they were 10 years ago, according to Mediabase, a division of Clear Channel Communications Inc. that tracks radio spins for all broadcasters. . . .

"[T]aking risks is not rewarded, so we have to be more careful than ever before."

Aiiigggh! (And double-aiiigggh! because that last quote is from someone who works for an NYC radio station.)

Ok, now that that's out of my system: That seems to be another common effect of digitization, right? I mean, that's definitely what's happening to publishing--the traditional publishers are getting more and more risk-adverse.

I guess it's OK as long as there are ways for indies to make money--it's harder for musicians to get top-40 radio play nowadays, just like it's harder for writers to get tradpub contracts, but if they can make money selling on their own, who cares?

I just hope my iPod never breaks, you know? I actually wound up listening to the radio in my sister's car during the holidays, and I heard maybe one song I didn't already know--and it's been almost a year since I stopped.

This actually makes me feel better about myself

As I mentioned in the comments here, I've basically stopped reading posts by writers, because I just couldn't deal with all the chirpy little "I've written a billion words today!"-type posts.

Obviously, this is my issue--when I'm productive, I make those kinds of posts, and they're a major reason why this blog exists. But, you know, when you're not being productive, reading about other people being super-productive can be a recipe for misery. If you read that sort of post, and your very first thought is, "FUCK YOU!!" then it's time to do something else with your time.

But oddly enough, when I read this article in the Wall Street Journal about Russell Blake, I felt totally fine. According to the article, Blake "churns out 7,000 to 10,000 words a day and often works from eight in the morning until midnight."

You know, good for him, but that is a life I would never, ever want to have. Ever.

And that, I think, is the real problem with envy and getting into the habit of comparing yourself to other writers: In addition to fostering misery, it takes your focus away from figuring out what it is you actually want in life, and what you actually want from your writing. Maybe you don't want to write full time. Maybe someone else's work habits would render you entirely unproductive. Maybe your goals are not Russell Blake's goals.

There was a point in life (maybe when I was in my late 20s?) when I realized that if I wanted my life to be like Person X's, then that meant I had to accept the whole shebang--I couldn't just cherry pick the nice things. If Person X was glamorous but vapid, then to be more like them, I would have to be more vapid--and I'd rather not. If Person X was successful professionally because they didn't mind being a tiny, fairly-useless cog in an enormous, impersonal machine, well, guess what? I either was going to have to learn to love the rat race, or accept the fact that my career was going to have a more unusual trajectory.

Progress report

I managed to carve out a house-free day, and wrote 1,200 words. Yay!

*crunch*

That sound you heard was my word count running into the fact that I just bought a house.

I'm trying to make it so that my daily schedule does not read:

1. Get up

2. HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE

3. Go to sleep

Ironically, I think I'm going to be helped by the fact that the house was a foreclosure and is something of a mess--even the jobs that seem simple (the ivy needs to be taken out of the front yard) are on such a scale (THERE ARE MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF IVY SMOTHERING THE ENTIRE FRONT YARD) that I am simply going to have to hire people. (And I yanked out most of my front lawn myself, so trust me when I say that that ivy is not a one-person job!)

There's still some running around that I must do, but hopefully soon I will be in a place where I can get back to the book!

Progress report

Wrote 1,590 words of The World.

Progress report

Wrote 1,985 words of the YA fantasy book, very tentatively titled The World. Whoot!

The itch is returning

First off: Happy Holidays! Enjoy your movie and Chinese food, or whatever festivities you have planned!

(Is it OK for me to make that joke? I'm not actually Jewish. But the Church of Paranoid Christians has been putting up signs where I live saying that if you don't say "M---y C-------s" every single time, you are an Evil Satanic Communist, and I really want to join that group now that the Illuminati has vanished. (Or has it!?!))

Anyway, I've been increasingly having the itch to write lately--to just sort of write anything. I think that after the visiting relatives decamp next week, I'm going to start in on the young-adult fantasy novel I've had outlined for ages.

Without question, I will be getting back to the Trang series--Trials is partially written, both books are outlined, I even have covers!--but right now it's simply too hard. Basically there's a really unfortunate combination of where I was in writing the book (just where things got really depressing) and life circumstances. To seriously mix a metaphor, I can't pick up the thread of the one without touching the third rail of the other.

The young-adult fantasy novel is not nearly so focused on grief and loss, so hopefully it will be more doable (and hopefully I'm not killing the urge by making this post). I want it to be fun and cute (while also being deep and meaningful, of course! I iz broody artiste!), and something I will really enjoy writing.

ETA: Oh, and according to my last Amazon statement, I've sold copies of Trust in France, Germany, and Japan!

The telenovela thing, some more

I was just going to respond to Jim Self's comment here, but then the reply just got longer and longer, and I figured I might as well make another post out of it. We were talking about how, now that Netflix lets people watch television shows however they want, they seem to want to watch them pretty much the way you read a novel.

Jim wrote:

What I find interesting about this is that people are now consuming other kinds of media in the way they always read books. When you discover a new series of books and love the first one, you immediately go out and get the next, and next, and so on. Now we do it with TV shows.

You know, come to think of it, that doesn't just apply to TV shows themselves: If I really like a show, I'll look for other shows by the same author. Obviously that's been a thing with movies for a while (and certain television producers, like Norman Lear, have always had name recognition), but Netflix makes it so you can click on a name and get the person's other work, just like you can with Amazon or a library catalog. So I wonder if authorship is going to become more important in branding shows--it seems likely that it would, especially as television becomes less focused on mass-market ratings.

So, at least anecdotally, it seems that people prefer to consume lengthy stories all at once. That can cause people to put off a show they'd otherwise watch weekly, though. I keep meaning to continue Breaking Bad now that it's complete, but I never do.

Yeah, I feel the novel form has been around for some time now, and now that they can people are kind of molding television-watching into a video novel, so maybe the format just appeals to our psyches in a way that episodic media does not.

It's definitely a challenge to the industry. One thing I've noticed as I've shifted to Netflix is that, in the past, I might watch an episode of a show and not like it. And then a year or so later, assuming the show was still on, I'd check it out again, sometimes to find that it had improved considerably. Then I'd start watching it regularly.

With Netflix, though, there's no way--a bad first episode or a weak first few episodes, and I'm gone. If it takes a show a season or two to hit its stride, I'll never know, because not only am I not going to sit through all the bad episodes, I'm also not willing to skip the first 20-odd or 40-odd episodes to get to the good part--which is new. Before I didn't feel a need to start at the beginning and watch every single episode, but now, interestingly enough, I do.

So I think that as television shows are consumed more like novels, first episodes will become extremely important, the way the first chapter of a novel (or really, the first chapter of the first novel in a series) is.

Shouldn't the cure match the disease?

I'm a hard sell with romance, I know, and I think a big part of the problem is that I can't get behind a relationship if I don't think it's actually benefiting the people involved--I just don't think relationships are automatically good things.

Likewise--and this probably doesn't come as a shock--I don't buy into the notion that a woman's problems can all be solved by having some kids. In recent years, my sister had a couple of kids, and it's remarkable how much her life and career continued unabated--she did take time off when they were very young, but she also worked part-time, went back to school, and is now working only slightly less than full time in her new field. Children, while quite demanding especially when small, are not the eternal time-sink that people sometimes make them out to be, and having them is no substitute for figuring out what you want to do. Indeed, I would argue that if you are having children in order to avoid getting your shit together, you're probably going to be a lousy parent.

It's interesting because in older books and movies, characters do sometimes basically prescribe having children as a cure for a woman's problems--but some of the time, it's really obvious from the way the story is written that those characters are full of shit, so it's not like people in the past were all blind to the complexities of human nature or anything.

But I recently saw a movie--made well past the time where anyone would seriously recommend relationships and children as a panacea for women--where the characters themselves seem to think the whole have-a-relationship-and-have-kids thing is a solution. The female character is stifled in a dead-end job because she is afraid to move out into the world and figure out what she wants to do. The male character realizes the situation she's in, and his solution is to have her quit her job, move into his place, and . . . just kind of hang out all day. Doing nothing. Except having sex with him sometimes because she's got nothing else to do. And maybe someday all that sex will lead to kids, who will of course will fix everything.

It's very bizarre because the guy knows what the problem is--he's explicitly aware of it! He talks about her need to go out into the world! He just doesn't seem to see how this should apply to their actual life! It's like watching a movie about a brilliant doctor who correctly diagnoses a patient who has a particularly sneaky form of lupus . . . and then tries to cure the lupus by applying leeches. I don't get it.

Not shockingly, the relationship has! a! big! crisis! and the woman moves out of the guy's house and into the world to, you guessed it, try to figure out what she wants to do. It's a real blow to the guy, but it's hard to have sympathy for him, you know? Like, how did he not see that one coming?

More to the point, it was hard for me to be invested in the relationship itself when it was obviously precisely not what the woman needed. They did get back together in the end, but they never explicitly hashed out how they were going to accommodate the woman's ambitions to be an adult, so it was hard for me to care. I guess I was supposed to take it on faith that the guy finally made a trip down to the Clue Shop and got one, but who really knows?