Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 7

Awards, the Engines of Anxiety

If you were trying to come up with a system specifically meant to drive a set of writers mad, you couldn’t do a hair better than to set up a major industry award and then tell them they’re eligible this year. Every step of the process is beautifully calculated to create misery and self-doubt. Every one.

We’ve apparently begun talking about what we’ll be nominating for various genre literary awards next year — the Hugos and the Nebulas, most notably. Best of Year lists are going around, and never mind that we have several weeks of new releases to come. Starts earlier every year, doesn’t it? Just like Christmas.

I say to you with no exaggeration that I want to hide under a warm blanket and not come out again until it’s all decided.  I know from experience: no good can come of participating in this conversation, as someone who, in theory, has skin in the game.* Not for me, and not for many of my colleagues — maybe even most of them. 

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that writers are not the most emotionally stable and healthy group of human beings around! A lot of that is because of the nature of the work itself. The process of writing is incredibly personal and isolating, and the link between the work and any recognition is so small and tenuous that it may as well not even exist. Criticism of your creative output can feel like criticism of your deepest heart. It is the worst. It’s no wonder so many of us have various degrees of depression and anxiety.

Awards are, in theory, one of the ways to make up for it. We offer glory to those works we feel have extra merit, in order to encourage writers and honor their achievements.

The casualties, though, are not low. 

How Much Do They Love You? 

The emotional turmoil that awards cause begins early, as soon as the lists begin circulating. (Or, honestly, even earlier — since there are running reading lists kept up all year.) Let’s say that you, dear reader, have written a story this year, or perhaps a novel. Perhaps it was well-received. Perhaps one or two people have even said the A-word in talking to you about it.

Well, it’s only human to wonder if your work has made it onto any of those lists after all, and so perhaps you peek at a wiki or a spreadsheet or a reading list to see if your name is there on any of them.

Writer friends, never do this. Never. No good can come of it. There is no outcome from this action that leads to excellent mental health in the months this process takes.

But you look anyway (and by you, I of course mean me). Maybe your name is on one or more of the lists, and a seed of hope begins somewhere in you, that this could be your year. This hope is small and bright and hot, and you’re afraid of it, because you know that the more you hope, the greater your disappointment will be if it doesn’t come to pass. So you try as hard as you can to snuff it out and persuade yourself that really, truly, you don’t deserve it. You’re not worthy. It will never happen.

If your name isn’t there, that disappointment starts right away — because your brain lies to you in a hundred different ways at once, and somehow this omission becomes a proxy for your work not mattering, and how nobody loves you, everybody hates you, obviously your output is amateurish and weak, and my goodness, wasn’t it arrogant of you to even dream for a second that you might have produced a real contender? How dare you hope. How dare you look.

Then, when nominations come out, the same cycle repeats. The hope gets brighter and hotter and more frightening if you’re actually nominated; the disappointment is fiercer, here, if you were on those lists, and if you did think you had a fair shot at being recognized, but your name is nonetheless missing from any ballot. 

Winning and Losing

Let me tell you a secret. I’ve won a fair share of professional awards for my non-publishing work — more than fair. And yes, losing when you were so close is a grave disappointment.

Winning, though? That can really mess you up. (Especially if you’re very early in your career, and not yet accustomed to losing.) Because those lies your brain tells you when your name isn’t on a list are a faint shadow of the ones that happen after you win.

Suddenly the award means that from now on, people will expect a certain benchmark from you, and any future work that does not win as many awards is a step down — a grave disappointment. Never mind that it’s impossible to win every award for every work you write. Or perhaps you convince yourself that it was just a fluke — and again, people will be disappointed with you moving forward, when they find out what your work is really like ordinarily. Or perhaps it means that your best work is now behind you, and all you can look forward to is a sad decline into obscurity, no matter how hard you work.

I know this from hard experience. Many years ago, I worked on a non-publishing project that won buckets of awards. It was thrilling! ...Until I tried to start something new, and was buried under a false sense that it had to mean something.

This is a difficult problem to talk about, because it can sound like ingratitude for your recognition; a weird sort of complaining about a problem that other people wished they had. So you can’t really talk about it, or bring in your usual support networks to help you cope with it.

But. It was at least a year before I was able to work again without intense anxiety.  A year.

Does this mean I am against awards and don’t want to win one ever again? HA HA HA no, I wish I was so evolved, but I’m not. I am absolutely a mercenary careerist, and awards genuinely help your visibility and marketability forever. That’s part of the whole pernicious problem. If awards truly were meaningless, it would be much easier to ignore them. But they do mean something. That sweet, addictive external validation matters to your future prospects. 

So I want it. I won’t lie. I want it a lot. And no, if I get a nomination, I’m certainly not going to decline, be it this year or another year. But in the meanwhile? The best thing to do, for me and probably for you, too, is to step away from the whole conversation. You can’t control it. All you can do is try to keep working. Better and healthier to focus on that.

 

 * As I write this, I’m in the position of having written an eligible work that, yes, I think could be a contender this year. Or at least it was widely read and very well received? But I’ve spent months trying to argue myself into believing it’s impossible. Even saying “yes, I hope,” feels like unforgivable arrogance. Awards, man. They really mess you up.

The Lie Every Social Network Tells

Let’s talk a little more about the problem of disentangling yourself from the possibly-democracy-destroying social networks that currently dominate public discourse.

Now that we’ve moved full-blast into a gig economy, one of the most frightening prospects of leaving social media is losing the network that keeps you afloat. Artists rely on their social graphs to spread the word when they have new work out, or when they need a new project. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills, to be sure, but a total lack of exposure means you’re definitely not selling any books (or games, or commissions, or...) Obcurity is the biggest problem early and even mid-career creators have to solve, because it doesn’t matter what heartbreaking works of genius you produce if nobody ever looks at them.

So sure, I could delete my Twitter account in a principled stand for what I believe in. But I’d be losing access to (as of this writing) 6,757 hypothetically human followers who have opted in to what I have to say. Gosh, that’s a lot of potential book sales to give up, isn’t it?

And yet.

Here’s the lie every social network is telling you: It’s your friend or follower counts. Your number of impressions and views. Your numbers of likes, faves, RTs, hearts.

We live in a world that wants to quantify everything, a kind of numeromancy meant to give us the feeling that we know and can control the future. Your resting heart rate and the amount of cholesterol in your bloodstream become the entrails we read to know if we will die soon. Calories consumed and burned become a scale of virtue, weighing our moral worth. Likes are a way to scry the hearts of others, to know how much they love you.

Did I say yet that this is a lie? Because it’s a lie.

This is a problem advertisers have grappled with for decades. There is no way to measure the hearts of humankind, so we measure what we can and pretend it’s the same thing. We have a whole arcane set of practices arisen solely from trying to derive truths about what we can’t measure from the things we can: conversion rates, A/B testing, sentiment analysis.

These numbers we can see and know feel like money in the bank. But the dirty truth is that I can’t count on all 6,757 of those people to buy a book. To the contrary, I can count on the fact that they won’t — and if I sell that many of anything, most of those people won’t know a hoot about where to find me online.

On Twitter, I can’t even count on all of my followers to even see my promotional efforts, no matter how hard I dance. Honestly, I can’t count on all of them to even be human beings, or to still be active on Twitter anymore if they are. So the loss of value to me in leaving is far less than 6,757 book sales, multiplied by however many books over however many years Twitter is the place to be.

How much less? Who can say?

This is an even more complicated problem when it’s not a career issue, but a personal one. It is nonetheless the same problem. You can have five hundred friends on Facebook but nobody to call to feed your pets because you have to make an emergency trip out of town. You can have five thousand Twitter followers and nobody who checks up on you at the right moment because they know you’ve been having a tough time these days, and they just want to see if you’re okay.

It’s possible that the 51 people who have subscribed to get my blog posts in email (and perhaps also the couple-hundred who read me in RSS)  are all the people on Twitter I could count on in the first place, as audience members, or as colleagues, or as friends.

We have a lot of ways to say this same thing. The map is not the territory. Quantity isn’t quality. And you know the alleged Mark Twain quote, that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.   

Numbers can be real, and yet not true. Let’s not fool ourselves. And let’s not allow ourselves to be fooled. 

You Don’t Have To

I’m exhausted and on a course of antibiotics. Sometimes you get a sign from your body, and this is one for me. It’s definitely time for me to engage in a little self-care: refilling the well that good work comes from, and maintaining this frail meat shell without which I can do nothing at all. I’m enjoying the thought of wrapping up some fairly small pieces of work and then spending some time reading books, playing video games, napping, swimming.

And yet. Today, it seems, is the first day of NaNoWriMo.  As always happens, this is the point in the year where I panic, because though I’ve written six novelettes, two alternate reality games, and at least a half-dozen other projects, somehow none of that counts. Not to the part of my brain that wants to, you know, write novels.

It’s not too late to fix that, hisses a voice in my ear. You can do NaNoWriMo. You can start today.  

This voice is toxic. This is the voice of the American Work Ethic, for which no amount of work is ever enough, and to whom any rest at all is inexcusable idleness. And it’s all lies.

Friends, this has been a difficult year for many of us. We’ve dealt with the regular stresses of life: loved ones passing, jobs lost and found, heartbreaks large and small. And this has been a landmark year for stressors we aren’t accustomed to: hurricanes and fires, terrifying politics, the quiet possibility of nuclear war.

Be kind to yourself, whatever that should mean to you. If it means that NaNoWriMo is not for you this year,  then I congratulate you on your self-knowledge, and I hope you can spend the dusk of the year on something else, something that nurtures you so you can bloom brighter when the time is right.

You’re enough already. Believe it, and act accordingly.

Miss Congeniality (After A Word From Our Sponsor)

OK first two quick promotional items: one, Season 1 of ReMade is on sale for $4.99! Look, they made a gif and everything!

And two, on Halloween I’m going to randomly give away Season 1 of a Bookburners to ten lucky subscribers to my blog/newsletter hybrid, in a transparent effort to boost my numbers. Mmmm, marketing!

But I can’t just market at you, because this is not what friends do. So instead I’d like to talk about Miss Congeniality, which I saw this weekend for the first time since it came out in theaters.  (Yes, I saw it in a theater.)

 

Movie Thoughts With Andrea

Miss Congeniality is very, very much an artifact of its time. It’s trying hard to do the same things that Legally Blonde did in terms of Grrl Power and social justice, but it has the same muddled stance on it that, frankly, I remember having at the time my own self, and that’s where a lot of its humor is meant to come from. 

I mean, the core conflict is the tension over being a strong-with-the-punching and empowered woman, or living up to an arbitrary beauty ideal. The movie tries to suggest you can do both without giving up the core of who you are. And it tries to show that the society of women can be special, but it doesn’t really earn that. I’d have liked to see the pageant contestants step up into a strong-with-the-punching role as well. Hey, maybe that’s what happens in the sequel? Maybe I’ll have to watch it.

We also have brief mentions of gay and lesbian relationships! Yay, representation! But with a particularly Year 2000 sensibility: a nervous laugh, ha ha this is a thing! Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s not unlike how we see a lot of trans representation done right now in mainstream media. The same nervous laugh, the acknowledgement that this is a way that some people are, and it makes some other people very nervous. But we’re pretty far past that for gay people now, which gives me hope that we’ll get that way for trans rights as well. The window is shifting.

The one thing that surprised me on a rewatch is that the cast is fairly diverse... but there’s no mention of racism at all. Since race is the elephant in the room in the year 2017, that was a little weird and jarring. Maybe that shows we’ve come a long way, too, since there is at least a public conversation about that now?

All that said, Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens is a much more interesting riff on beauty pageant culture, since it’s more from the POV of the actual contestants, and therefore has much less “ha ha can you believe it?! BUTT GLUE!” So maybe read that one instead.

Annnnnnnnnd that’s it for right now. Getting ready to head out to Switzerland. You’ll hear from me soon! 

Switzerland Bound

I’m going to Zurich next week! I’ll be delivering a keynote and a workshop about transmedia storytelling* to the film educators of CILECT, a consortium of film and television schools.  If any of you will be there, please come and say hello! I’m not sure if I’ll know anyone at this particular conference, and I’m always a bit nervous going into rooms full of strangers.

My hosts tell me there will be a river cruise on the first night, serving fondue. Twice now they have asked me, anxiously, “Do you eat cheese?” 

Friends, I am going to eat all the cheese in Switzerland. And then purchase a cuckoo clock? Isn’t that what you do in Switzerland? Is there something amazing in Zurich I should be doing that I might not know about? Besides the cheese?

And I’ll likely take a million photos while I’m there, then share only the good ones with you here. It’s going to be great! 

 

* This may seem at odds with my declaration that I’m giving up the punditing business; but in this case, I’m talking about very specific, practical elements of craft, which continues to delight me.  No snake oil here, folks!

 

I’m Not Quitting Twitter. Yet.

Let’s talk personal social media strategy, and how I’m trying to protect democracy by setting up a way to get my blog posts by email. No, really.

Look, we all know the stark truth. In the year 2017, Twitter is a hot mess, a festering swamp of villainy, a miasmatic and oppressive empire of Nazis and the people who enable them. The company’s attempts to fix rampant abuse and harassment have been shallow and ineffective, often targeting victims more than perpetrators. Something has to be done. Nothing is being done.

I say this as someone who loves Twitter. I wouldn’t be enjoying the career I have now if it weren’t for Twitter.

But time and Trump have changed the world, and social media most of all. A lot of people are increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge that being on Twitter makes us complicit in an ecosystem of unrelenting evil. And there’s a certain vulnerability that comes from making commercial advertising networks your primary internet home. Not just the constant knowledge that at any time the eye of Sauron might fall upon you and evil will come your way; no, something subtler and more pernicious, even, than that.

Social media are a vector for propaganda, paid and otherwise. They’re sources of bad information and unsupported opinions. They are the domain of emotion over fact, and what you let into your brain shapes your very identity. Ordinarily a certain skeptical vigilance would armor us from this. But now we live in a world where anyone with a botnet or a troll farm can exploit the human urge to engage with our peers in good faith. This is a danger to democracy, and it is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

And yet. Twitter is where my friends and colleagues are. It’s where my readership and reviewers are. It’s a source for work and promotion that I don’t have a replacement for. Leaving Twitter and quitting writing are not the same, but it’s hard to see where the difference lies for me.

Which is a third kind of vulnerability: as goes my Twitter account, so goes my readership. And if Twitter falls, or if we do collectively decide to leave the platform en masse, then I could face a real struggle in keeping my head above the vast ocean of obscurity.

That’s doubly true on Facebook, where what you see and who sees you are heavily regulated by an invisible and ineffable algorithmic hand. When you speak up on Facebook, there’s no telling if anyone will ever hear it. And often the things it chooses to show are the least important things of all.

So it’s time to start looking for an escape plan. Time to execute a diversification strategy, as they say. This is risk mitigation, pure and simple. There are too many of my eggs in Twitter’s basket.

I have long maintained that the best platform is the one that you own. And this is the place that I own — if you can find it.

But blogs aren’t what they used to be, and for a lot of reasons. For one thing, search engine visibility relies a lot on social traffic, these days, for good and ill. When Google Reader went bust, a lot of people just gave up on their RSS feeds, preferring instead to just click links as they happen to see ‘em pop by in a social feed. You can post, but there’s still not any guarantee that anyone’s paying attention.

There is a third way, pioneered by outfits like Tinyletter. The good old-fashioned email newsletter.

I do have a newsletter already, and if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re subscribed already. But it’s a sporadic sort of thing where I mainly announce new ways for people to give me money. It’s got a lot of subscribers! But I don’t figure those people would be happy if I started mailing them every day, or even every week.

So I’m starting a new, higher-frequency list. This new Deus Ex Machinatio newsletter is going to send out my blog posts, no more than once a day, and probably less because ha ha ha ha ha who are we kidding if we think I’m going to be blogging every day. Though who knows? Maybe I will.

You can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/c75VPb (And if you subscribe before 4pm on Oct. 19, 2017, you’ll get this very email in your inbox! Neat!)

Going forward, I’m going to move a lot of my social media energy back over here again. No more threaded tweetstorms. Maybe I’ll post my daily sketches here, and talk about... you know... day-in-the-life social stuff. How my work is going, or how I like my haircut, or which conventions I’m going to this year and why. And as always, I’ll noodle over writing craft, game design, or post my hot takes. You know, what you expect from me.

That means I’ll be somewhat less visible online unless you’re opting in or following me here. Please consider opting in.

I’m really excited about this, I won’t lie. I miss the depth and substance of the blogging days. This might be a path back in. Dang, do I hope this works.

But to make it work, this is needs to be a two-way street. So I want to know where to find you in your space, too. Do you have a newsletter, too? Link it in comments. Got a blog? Hook us up so we can Feed.ly our hearts out. Tell us where you live on the internet and why you’ve picked those places.

It’s not a solution. Not a bold or brave stance. This is just damage control. But listen, if we’re going to save democracy, we all have to start somewhere.

Patreon 2: Electric Bugaloo

I'm reposting some stuff here that I just sent to my Patreon backers. It's not all baked yet, but I am setting the wheels in motion. Ready?

First, some history. I stopped posting here because I had some qualms about limiting access to my work, and therefore limiting the number of people who would ever be exposed to it. Eventually I was posting stories to my blog, too, and nobody here minded... but nobody elsewhere read, either. And that's not a great way to get new readers.

Now, though, I'd like to do something a little different that I'm super excited about. Growing my audience is important, but there are a lot of kinds of projects I'd love to do that I don't because there's just no market for them anywhere. Stuff I used to do as a weekend project: a story in a Google Calendar, or My Super First Day, or quick little interactive twiddles with a voice mail and a couple of email autoresponders. 

I want to play.

Not full-fledged ARGs, though. Nothing episodic. Just me poking at the edges of form and story to see what I can find, and sometimes iterating to see if I can do a thing that's been done before in a different or better way.

These things will be short—minutes to go through them, and certainly never as much as an hour—and very unchallenging, since I'm interested in narrative dynamics way more than puzzles. I'll try to do monthly but we'll see where life and deadlines take me.

Updates to the Patreon coming soon. Gotta make a new video, gotta rewrite rewards and goals and so on. Happy to hear your ideas if you'll give them to me. And then... let's see what happens, OK? In the meanwhile, if you want a quick peek of what the Patreon used to look like (or you want to get in on this new thing right the heck now), you'd better click fast.

Thank you, as always, for believing in me. I hope we can have a lot more fun together going forward. <3

The Cultures 182: Yoga Pants, What Makes Things Cool, Nation-States

You guys, this one was a GREAT episode. In it I explain the connection between startup culture, perception of status, and our current epidemic of athleisure fashion; Adrian Hon discusses what actually perfectly effable things make something cool or not; and Naomi Alderman muses that perhaps we should abolish the nation-state altogether as a thing that exists.

As always, you can follow us on Twitter!  Listen to the episodes on Libsyn! You can even subscribe on iTunes! And once you do, please let us know what you think. Happy Monday!

Where to Find Me at Confusion 2017

I'm going to be at Confusion 2017 again this year, in Novi, Michigan from Jan. 19-22. And I'm gonna be on programming, too, so woooo!

I don't have a lot else set up yet beyond this, but I'd really love to put a couple of meetups for drinks or coffees on my calendar. So if you're going to be there and you might want to hang out, drop me a line?

And without further ado, here's my schedule so far:

All Your Data Are Belong To Us

Saturday, 4:00 PM. Room: Petoskey
What is "the internet of things?" How smart do we really want our devices to be? What will society look like when whole systems of objects talk to each other to shape our lives? And who controls the data our things collect?

Group Autograph Session (5 PM)

Saturday, 5:00 PM. Room: St. Clair
Come meet your favorite authors, artists and musicians and have them sign things! (Please limit your signing requests to 3 items per person.)

Reading: Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips

Saturday, 8:00 PM. Room: Saugatuck
Authors read from current or forthcoming works

Pantsers Rule! (Or So They Tell Me)

Sunday, 10:00 AM. Room: Interlochen
No plan! No safety net! Writing by the seat of your pants is the best, most effective writing strategy. Well... at least for some writers. What are the strengths and weaknesses, and what might be some alternatives, other than outlining?

Writing is Fundamental

Sunday, 11:00 AM. Room: Isle Royale
Some of the fundamentals of prose storytelling have evolved over time, and some vary wildly between genres. What has changed since the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres came to be as we know them, and how have genres like mystery, romance, and YA diverged?

The Cultures 181: $12 Coffee, Things That Make Us Happy, Resolutions

Another Monday, another episode of The Cultures! And I've been remiss in posting about them, but trust that they're out there every week whether I'm posting about it or not.

This is a very special New Year episode meant to be somewhat more uplifting than we've been lately because of the... you know... the politics. In this episode we talk about the Stabucks plan to make super-premium coffee because mere premium coffee like they offer now is a little too accessible; we talk about things that bring us happiness right now; and we share some resolutions for the New Year, though this year of all years resolutions are something of a moving target.

As always you can get this week's episode on LibSyn or on iTunes. Tune in and let us know what you think!