Great authors are not to blame for your lack of education., June 17, 1999 By A Customer:

For God’s sake— why do so many people write these idiotic reviews, these reviews that are nothing so much as confessions of stupidity? Why do people believe that the primary aim of all art, even that of fictive prose, is absolute simplistic clarity? These are the same chuckleheads who fail to understand impressionism and cubism; they are the people who fail to recognize that distortions of photographic reality (or the use of abstract, metaphor-laden prose with poetic, rather than simple reportorial, qualities) are attempts to reveal a hidden truth or an occult sensation, something intangible lurking beneath the surface of the hubbub that constitutes our everyday lives. “Guernica” strives to convey the absolute chaos and horror of war, something of the mental distortion endured by those unlucky enough to fight; “The Scream” tries to convey the sense of terror that resides the very nature of being, a sense only perceived by the introspective and the sensitive; and “The Crying of Lot 49″ dissects the effects of sixties culture, and its cultural precedents, on the bare skeleton of America. It uses metaphor to make sense of the welter of confused action that is American life (read: it does not strive to obfuscate it). None of these masterworks fail simply because they refuse to be obvious. There is a place for the realism of Michelangelo and the journalistic minimalism of Hemingway, but artistic expression should not, is not, and cannot be confined to those styles that lend themselves to easiest comprehension. Some art reaches for wispier, more difficult ideas, and demands that we, the readers and viewers, make the effort required to understand.

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I’ll have a post next week setting out book tour info, including more information on other gigs in Seattle, but for now I wanted to point out that registration is now open for my Booklife Masterclass November 8th at the Hugo House in Seattle.

The description reads:

In this new age of social media, award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer, the author of “Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for 21st Century Writers”, shows you how to achieve a sustainable career and sustainable creativity. From dealing with white noise and “open channels” to multi-tasking your creativity, distinguishing process from habit and rediscovering passion in your writing, this workshop is all about balance and working smarter. The workshop addresses questions such as “How can thinking strategically about your career actually enhance your private writing time?” and “What types of promotion or networking enhance your life?” For beginning and intermediate writers.

…which might be a little misleading, even though I wrote it, in that we’re going to do plenty of things on the creativity side, but the point is: there are certain kinds of bleeds between creativity and career that are energizing and useful to both.

One goal of the workshop is to show you ways to enhance your creativity by establishing more control over not just your career but your idea of what a career might be…as well as exploring what things you simply will never be able to control, and why that’s okay.

This masterclass is suitable for both beginning and intermediate writers. (For example, if you’ve had a first or second novel out and are still reeling from the experience, saying to yourself, “What truck just ran me over?”, you’re well within the range of writers that will benefit from the class.)

The class will also be small enough that I should have more than enough time to deal with any individual questions about any aspect of writing or the writing life. I will be there to be of use to you, drawing on 25 years of having seen the writing life from every possible angle, as well as having written all kinds of fiction and nonfiction.

As time allows, I will be contacting all students beforehand via email with five or six questions so I have all of the context about your level of experience and what you personally hope to get out of the workshop. On the back-end, once I’ve returned from the book tour, as per usual, students can contact me with follow-up questions.

This is a full-service operation, from beginning to end. If you’re interested and have questions now, feel free to comment on this post and I’ll reply.

(A screen capture from my profile photo album on Facebook; I love how the juxtapositions form a kinda cool collage.)

I’ve got a complicated relationship with Facebook. When Matt Staggs first set up an account for me, I kind of scoffed at Facebook. Me? Wanting to interact with people using status messages on a daily basis? Not this curmudgeon.

Then I started using Facebook and became an addict. On a basic level, yes, the appeal was that I could keep up with my friends despite being frantically busy. I could actually remember their birthdays using this great external brain called “Facebook”. I started using Facebook while doing projects that didn’t require all of my brain—like editing, writing reviews, etc., so I found it a nice way of feeling connected and also of having some fun while getting stuff done.

Eventually, I began role-play using Facebook, as a lot of these profile photos should demonstrate. Role-playing is a form of storytelling, and since I had so many book projects on my plate but not much time for writing fiction, I think I used the role-playing in the guise of, say, a capybara or a giant bear or a komodo dragon as a way of fulfilling a creative urge on a micro level. This was also important because, well, after writing my novel Finch I didn’t really want to write any major fiction. It usually takes me awhile to recharge.

At one point, in the guise of an alien baby icon, I wrote the beginnings of a short story in first person—on Facebook. I know many of my friends didn’t know what the heck I was going on about, and others thought I was joking, but I found the process fascinating. As long as I stayed in character and answered the responses to my little posts of story fragments, I was advancing the narrative—and because many people didn’t realize I was telling a story, the narrative took twists and turns I wouldn’t have thought of without the prompts from my friends. In another case, I took on the persona of Mord, a giant Shardik-like bear who will figure in several future stories, and doing so gave me some idea of the parameters of the character.

Now, about eight months since I became serious about Facebook, I use it as a mini-blog as well as a source of creativity, and, still, to keep up with friends. I have almost 2,000 friends now, many of whom I don’t know, and so it really is more like a micro-blog platform than anything else. I post thoughts and content there that don’t overlap with Ecstatic Days, or I try to provide it in a different context. (If you’re not my friend on Facebook, feel free to add me—it’s a mix of close friends, colleagues, readers, fans, industry professionals at this point.) I’ve also thought about finding some graceful way to include a Facebook feed in the sidebar, since this blog and my Facebook activity are often linked in some ways (blog posts here have sometimes started as posts/responses on Facebook).

When I go on tour this fall, it’ll be interesting to see how it affects how I use Facebook. It might mean I’ll break from it and won’t come back for awhile. In part because there have been instances at which Facebook has felt cramped—as if it allows thousand of voices into a mind already crowded with information. And I’m also aware that I may simply be conditioned to the response, much as a rat in an experiment becomes conditioned to receiving a food pellet if it performs a certain function. It’s also led me to mistake it for a diary, in that I’ve posted status updates containing information I’d never divulge here on the blog, and in a couple of cases I’ve regretted it. (Other stuff is just perhaps too silly–like an updated status message at two in the morning about a flying cockroach.) And, finally, I’m sure Ann’s felt like a Facebook widow at times.

But I do know it has served a creative function for me this year as well, and three or four creative relationships that have led to projects have come about because of being on Facebook. So I may just have to accept the aspects of it that sometimes stress me to get the benefits from it . One thing’s for sure—as in all things, moderation is the key. Currently, I’m glutting myself on Facebook, but eventually I’ll have to pull back a bit.

(The writer Sir Tessa, in a contemplative moment, reciting Proust to a captive audience.)

The Emerging Writer interview I conducted for Clarkesworld had an unexpected side effect–putting writers in mind of how they emerged, or how they would like to emerge; similar in a way to the secret I revealed in this blog post, about how writers molt.

Sir Tessa instigated it, of course, with this interpretation of emerging: “I like the idea of ‘emerging’. It puts me in mind of the headhuggers in Alien. The egg peels open, I extend my creepy-arse legs over the lip, I emerge, and then I leap at you, shove my gonads in your face and ram my proboscis down your throat and lay eggs in your chest, and then those eggs hatch and a wee bebe alien emerges. From your chest. At velocity. I would like to one day write a story that has that sort of effect on the reader. It would probably put me in gaol. Oh well. Totally worth it. You suffer for my art!”

…which, after a chuckle between me and KJ Bishop led to Bishop’s observation that she “was more like something discovered under a rock–a colourful grub, perhaps, like one of those painting maggots.” (Although she added that now she’s done emerging, ‘I will be like a Japanese movie monster. I shall publish no more novels, in order to save Tokyo from destruction when I grow to be 100 feet tall with laser beams sizzling from my eyes.’” Don’t ask how we got to that point…)

When I think of how I “emerged,” I was a creature with a long gestation period, something that had a long juvenile stage or stages. Some slow-growing cephalopod, suddenly scooped out of the sea by Michael Moorcock and genetically altered to live on land. And then undergoing further mutations year after year. Steady evolution–or devolution, depending on your point of view.

But this metamorphosis through strange creatures, for fun or for keeps, isn’t new. A member of Kafka’s writing group saw him, prior to his fame, as a somewhat timid “moon-blue mouse.”

So, if you’re emerging, how do you see yourself? And if you’ve already emerged, looking back, how did you emerge?

In addition to the usual great content, the latest Clarkesworld has run my round-robin interview with eight writers I think of as cool and “emerging,” since “new” doesn’t quite cover it: Jesse Bullington, N. K. Jemisin (also in this issue with fiction), Tessa Kum, Meghan McCarron, Shweta Narayan, Jeremy C. Shipp, Angela Slatter, and Genevieve Valentine. (A tip of the hat to the Emerging Writers Network, by the way–they don’t own the term “emerging writer,” but they’re why I thought of using it.)

Every once in awhile, it’s good for a fool like me, entering mid-career, to check the pulse of what’s going on among the emerging writers who will one day call you a curmudgeon. Keeping tabs on this unruly, diverse lot not only lets you see the end of the road coming from much farther away and softens the often abrupt transition from “young turk” to “old fart”—it also re-energizes you and helps ensure that your reading patterns don’t get too predictable. Usually, I keep up via blogs and online fiction, but I thought it would be interesting to interview a few emerging writers about subjects like their connection to the larger community, where they see themselves in five years, what they’ve been reading, and their take on mammals versus large reptiles. A kind of core sample, if you will.

Go check it out–and below the cut here, since the interview was already running long, and they couldn’t include photos, you’ll find–the photos! What a bunch these writers are, from their mugshots. Bullington was such a tough I couldn’t even get his photo to load into flickr. Heh.

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(Limited edition cover, art by Ben Templesmith and design by John Coulthart, and still available from Wyrm Publishing)

In cleaning up my computer and getting ready for all kinds of efforts for Finch, the last novel in the Ambergris Cycle, I came across my document of notes and research for Shriek: An Afterword, the previous Ambergris novel. I wrote these notes initially on scraps of paper and created the document to house each note in the appropriate section, as a bulletpoint item, so I wouldn’t lose any of them. At the time, I was on the road a lot for my day job and I didn’t have energy to write whole scenes or sections. All I could do is scribble down little inspirations as I had them. By that time, I had probably 150 pages of rough draft, so a lot of this constituted layering or material for the last two-thirds of the novel.

I’m posting it here just as a kind of public archiving. It contains massive spoilers, so if you haven’t read the novel and want to, you’ve been warned. I’m too lazy to change the hierarchy, which got a little scrambled in the cut-and-paste, but the squares are one level lower than the bulletpoints. To most of you, this will no doubt be boring as hell, but it’s a supplement to this previous post.

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(The cover of my nonfiction collection from Guide Dog Books, an imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press, art by Eric Orchard; the new subtitle, not reflected above, is “Explorations of the Fantastical, the Surreal, and the Weird”, but that too is subject to change.)

This weekend I started putting together my nonfiction collection Monstrous Creatures. I’d been capturing material in one document in the following categories:

Introductions & Afterwords
Features (Articles, etc.)
Reviews
Essays
Columns
Interviews
Miscellanea

I’ve been sifting through more than 450,000 words of material including blog entries, and I began to get dissatisfied with the organizing principle. For my last nonfiction collection, Why Should I Cut Your Throat?, I’d had the normal sorts of categories, like “Essays” and “Reviews”, but had included convention reports between the sections, trying to capture moments in time while also showing the evolution of my attitude toward such events. I’d also included more personal pieces about, for example, City of Saints, that had some intertextuality with the reviews and essays.

For the new collection, I realized suddenly that I didn’t have much of an organizing principle at all, except to cram in as much of the quality material from the last five years as possible. I’d meant the title, Monstrous Creatures, as a kind of catch-all for a general nonfiction collection dealing with fantasy. The title would also tie in to my fiction collection, The Third Bear, especially since my essay of the same name would be included therein.

But, again feeling somewhat bored with the structure, I asked my good friend Matt Cheney, “Do you know of any examples of innovative organization for this kind of a compilation?” His answer:

That’s an interesting question–at first, I thought, “Of course there are!” but then I couldn’t think of any. Certainly, there are plenty of collections of miscellaneous nonfiction–Updike and Oates come immediately to mind, simply because they seem determined to collect every napkin they ever wrote on–but the organization for those books is mostly pretty dull. Donald Barthelme’s “Guilty Pleasures” is arranged in three sections, but they’re basically thematic. Same is true of the sections in Barry Lopez’s “About This Life” (one of my favorites). The range of forms in these books is not particularly wide; most writers seem to find a form of nonfiction that is comfortable for them, and they stick to it. I was working on putting together a ms. of a nonfiction collection that was arranged thematically to show the progression and development of the ideas without regard to the format (essay to review to blog entry, etc.)…I like collections that, through juxtaposition and sequence, show how a specific idea about X is also a general idea about Y that leads to the (previously seemingly unrelated) specific idea about Z. Because it’s what I know most vividly, Delany comes to mind, and each of his collections has been more radical than the last in terms of what is included (interviews, letters, etc.), but I still don’t think of those books as terribly radical, again because so much of what he does is limited to certain types of nonfiction. But they remain for me an ideal of showing the crossover of ideas.

Perhaps the most innovative form I know of is that used by Guy Davenport–who often de-emphasized the occasion that produced each item and so when reading his collections you often don’t know whether you’re reading a review, an introduction, an essay, a journal entry, or what. In his final collection of selected works (“The Death of Picasso”), he even mixed fiction and nonfiction without indicating in any way which is which, and I find it to be his most compelling book to read because of that.

So I slept on that, and this morning had one of those “the sky is blue” eureka moments that makes you wonder why your brain didn’t see it all clearly before, because it’s all there in the title: Monstrous Creatures. That thar, Sherlock, is my organizing principle–whether monstrous cities, people, books, or creatures, with “monstrous” used in the sense of the complete array of the meanings under “monster” in the OED:

From the Latin, Monstrum, meaning something marvelous; originally a divine portent or warning.

1. Something extraordinary or unnatural; a prodigy, a marvel.

2. An animal or plant deviating in one or more of its parts from the normal type.

3. An imaginary animal…having a form either part brute and part human, or compounded from elements of two or more animal forms.

4. A person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness.

5. An animal of huge size; hence anything of vast and unwieldy proportions.

I must also note how tickled I am to discover “monster” as a verb in the old OED, with the meaning of “to make a monster of,” “to exhibit as a monster; to point out something wonderful,” or “to play the monster, assume the appearance of greatness.”

Anyway, I now have a much clearer idea of an organizing principle. But, to winnow down you must first have more content than you can use, so I’m continuing to collect text under my boring old original headings, although now with more of an eye toward some initial exclusion of material. Once I’ve got a good 120,000 words in one document, I’ll then look at it all, cut out what seems weakest in the new context, and begin a path toward a new organization that seems thematically correct. I believe my editor said 80,000 tops, and that seems like a good length.

Monstrous. Marvels. Cruelties. Rodents of Unusual Size. Cities that behave like creatures. Essays that seem like behemoths. Bears that are not bears. This is going to get interesting…

Another amazingly excellent tell-all post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch, on time usage and what time means to a writer who lives off of their writing. Rusch has also added a donation button, and I hope if you visit you will donate something, because this is invaluable information.

A side benefit of such a post for writers who don’t live off of their writing to determine whether they’re the personality type who can exist and thrive within that paradigm. For me, too, I have to be working on projects I love and/or projects that challenge me from a technical perspective.

I used to have a day job and now live off of my fiction, nonfiction, and teaching gigs. I’ve seen both sides of this, and I prefer the full-time freelancing. It allows me to be most fully what I was always meant to be, a writer, without pretense of being anything else.

The real key for me is carving out the time for the most personal projects, and to understand that concentrated time can be as powerful as time spread out over years. A constant frustration in finishing my last novel, Shriek: An Afterword, was having to start and stop on it because the day job took up so much of my time. But, again, this is a personal decision for each writer–do I strive to eventually live off of the writing or do I use a day job as an anchor? Which kind of personality am I? Which approach is going to guarantee I reach my full potential in my personal creativity. In my case, I really felt like a spy or mimic for all those years I had a day job. I was undercover the whole time.

Here are a few snippets from Rusch’s post. Rusch indicates that her freelancing posts will eventually be collected in a book, maybe in a year or two. I hope so, because it’ll be possibly the most honest and detailed look at being a freelancer possible. Because it’s easy to make general pronouncements about being a freelancer, or about any aspect of writing. But if you are able to provide specific detail like Rusch does…that’s not just much harder to do, it’s also much more valuable.

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The marvelous Luis Rodrigues has just created the press kit pages for my two books coming out in the fall:

Finch

Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer

Are they purty? No, although Luis can do pretty. They’re simple and functional, because they’re not for readers–they’re for reviewers, review editors, interviewers, and other people associated with the various and sundry media outlets out there. These sites are also for the venues I’ll be appearing at as part of my book tour in the fall. (Some of this info will change in the next week, since the pages are up well in advance of when they’ll be needed.)

If you have a page like this, you and your publisher don’t have to continually email files and press releases and whatnot in response to queries or even in being proactive about approaching the press. Some places will require that, but most will be fine with the URL.

As a writer for the Amazon book blog, I can’t tell you how much time I waste because the writer or the publisher of a book hasn’t just put all of this information up on one simple page. It also helps me when I’m on tour, because usually I’m going to just have email through my phone. If someone queries needing information, it’s a lot easier to type a short URL and email that than to have to try to send attachments, or then have to email my publisher to send the person the required info.

Cory Doctorow has talked about this in the past, too, especially with regard to cover images. You wouldn’t believe the number of publishers that have only a tiny cover image of a book on their site. So when you go to snag it for a feature you’re doing…you’re out of luck, and then you’ve got to cast a wider net searching for a size-appropriate image. And time is money.

What should be in your press kit? Author photo (high-res and web-res), book cover (high-res and web-res), press release, author’s bio, blurbs about the book, etc. Be creative and inventive, but keep it simple, too.

The effort you put into having this information in one place will pay off by saving you time in the long run–and it will save other people time.

UPDATE:

Here’s a press kit integrated into a book website (Shriek)

Here’s a different look-and-feel for a press kit (City of Saints)

Some concise and useful thoughts, especially for writers with only a couple of books out. Here’re the last three on his list (below). The very last one is crucial. The second-to-last is influenced by how hard you work to position yourself for luck. The third-to-last depends on how many open channels and how much white noise you’re willing to carry around in your head. Me, less and less these days. I can see a time coming when I can tolerate none.

8. Following the debate on forums and blogs only makes you tired. Of course you want to monitor what people are saying; doesn’t mean you should. Scott Lynch’s summon author spell seems to work for the most part, thanks to Google alerts, but it’s hard to know when to stop.

9. Luck matters just as much as talent. Kind of speaks for itself, really.

10. I knew this anyway, but getting a writing contract doesn’t mean you can give up your day job. Not that I’d want to, since mine is fun, but the money (for 99% of new writers) isn’t enough when you sign a deal. The initial advance is broken into smaller payments, for signature, manuscript delivery, publication in hardcover, paperback etc. Then you need to earn that advance before you get royalties, which takes time to accrue.