The business of words

Lost at Uni & Sad News about Clarion South

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

Yesterday I taught my first tutorial at the University of Queensland. Quite fortunately, no-one threw things, and I started to remember all the things I actually quite like about teaching and talking to aspiring writers.

I’d never really been to UQ before this. I visited once or twice about fifteen years ago, back when I was trying to work out where I was going to go to university and UQ was my more-or-less second choice due to the lack of an actual undergraduate writing program and my parents informing me that I’d spend my first year living in an all-boys Christian college. I went back once again for a friend’s art show, but that only required me to find a building very close to the car park, right on the outskirts on the campus. Apart from that, it was unfamiliar territory.

Turns out it’s quite big, and they’re very fond of stonework. Also, when printed, the campus maps have very titchy numbers that are hard to read after dark.

I made it to the initial meeting okay, whereupon I met with the other tutors and lecturers, and I got to follow them to the lecture theater, and then I could more or less follow a cloud of students to the class. It wasn’t until after the first class, when I said man, I’ve only got an hour between the end of the dayjob and tomorrow’s tute, I should probably figure out where it is now to save time that things became a problem.

I checked my map. I figured out where I was. I traced the path with my finger, using those landmarks I knew to figure out where to turn. It all looked very simple, so I set out full of confidence and  energy.

An our later I was lost and taking wrong turns, keeping a wary eye out for roaming minotaurs, while the skies merrily opened up and dumped rain on the campus.

Eventually I found my way out, drove home, ate take-out food, and wrote five hundred words before crashing into a comatose slumber.

I have to find the same tutorial room again today. If you don’t hear from me over the weekend, assume I’m wandering the campus , subsisting on vending machine chocolate. Or that the minotaur finally caught up with me, ’cause I’m pretty sure they’ve got one.

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Today the word went out that Clarion South was on indefinite hold, largely due to the loss of an affordable venue that could hold a motley crew of seventeen aspiring SF writers for six straight weeks. The full story has been posted on the Clarion South website and the vast majority of the Australian speculative fiction email lists, should you be interested in the details.

To say this is a loss to Australian SF is something of an understatement.

I count Clarion South as one of the single most useful things I ever did as a writer, largely because it’s relatively easy to find resources that will tell you how to write better, but significantly harder to find places that will give you good advice on how to be a writer.

Which is not to say that Clarion South won’t make you better at writing – it will – but for me the true value of the experience came from being exposed to six writers, all of them either neo-pro or pro, and finding out how they approached their careers.

And it came from being around seventeen other writers who were determined to move their career forwards, writing every day and cheering each other on, many of whom I’m still chatting with every week and cheering on as best I can in my own grumpy way.

For someone who’d been tucked away in the academic system up to that point, working in creative programs, it was the kind of revelation I needed to get me working and moving forwards.

Chris Lynch has recently posted a list of publications and other achievements my Clarion South year has achieved in the last four years, and it includes over 170 short stories, plays, poems, novellas, award nominations, and other entries. Which, when you consider that 3 of the seventeen attendees don’t have entries for various reasons, averages out at a whole bunch of work being put together and submitted.

The Great Bookshelf Reorganising of 2011

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Reorganised Bookshelf

On Saturday night, around 4 am, I started reorganising bookshelves. It seemed like the thing to do, since I’d been studiously not-sleeping for five hours after going to bed.

Bookcases are one of the places where mess accumulates in my flat, largely because there’s so many of the damn things and I’ve developed a bad habit of taking things down, reading a couple of paragraphs, then putting them back somewhere else. What starts as a workable system quickly devolves over time, and every couple of years I have to start from scratch and reorganize the entire system.

The whole process tends to start around 4 AM, ’cause insomnia is my response to doing to much and thinking too much and generally feeling like things are out of control. Reordering shelves is my way of figuring out what is and isn’t important in my life, and everything goes on from there. It’s a mental reset, fighting back against my natural tendency towards entropy.

So far I’ve got two shelves down. There are many, many more to go.

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I mention this primarily because my friend Alan, and possibly my dad, were interested in knowing when the issue of Weird Tales with my story in it was available. And it now seems as though Weird Tales #357 is out in the world, and when all your friends are Lovecraft geeks this is about as cool as it gets.

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This has been doing the rounds of twitter and facebook recently, but for those behind the curve: a guy tries to sell “a story to topple Star Wars and Harry Potter” on ebay with a starting bid of $3,000,000.

There’s also a pretty good take-down of his sales pitch over at Bleeding Cool, but essentially what’s going on  is a new iteration of an old conversation that goes something along the lines of “oh, wow, you’re a writer? I’ve got a great idea, let me sell it to you and we can split the money it earns once you’ve written it.”

For those of you out there with a great idea: please don’t do this. It irritates writers and perpetuates the myth that ideas are somehow all it takes, rather than work and persistence and the occasional stroke of luck

Most writers will reply with something along the lines of “ah-huh, great, but I’m a little busy right now,” after which the writer walks away and mock you with their writer-friends, who understand that ideas are the cheap part of the equation and worth very little until someone builds a book/movie around them.

When you try to sell your idea on ebay for large sums of money, it just means you’ll be mocked in public. The internets are like that, sometimes. So are writers, really. I suspect we’re subconsciously bitter about the fact that our career is so frequently undervalued, both socially and monetarily, that the three million asking price is like a red cape to a bull.

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I tweeted this a little earlier this morning, largely ’cause I suspect there’s more gamers following my twitter/facebook feeds than there are following this blog, but just in case I’m wrong: RPGnow is raising funds for the NZ Earthquake victims. Folks who donate $20 get a bundle of over $320 RPG/gaming  ebooks donated by gaming publishers.

This is, as they say, a good cause worth supporting and the RPG ebook community has been very successful with such things in the past (and a tip of the hat to Melinda, who comments here occasionally, for giving me the heads up).

Writing, Budgeting, and Shame

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life , ,

My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the moment of parity between the Australian dollar and the US*. In fact, I’m not really leaving the house much for anything, really.

All of this takes considerable mental energy on my part, because the impulse is there to do all of them and in some cases (say, Locus) I can even partially justify why I should do them. Such are the realities of paying off credit card debt in my current circumstances – I’ve trimmed my budget to focus as much as possible on paying off the accumulated debt of the last year, and even then the realities of credit interest meant I’m only dropping the debt by $5-$20 a month. Eventually that will change – the payments will knock down the debt, the not-using-the-credit-card will keep new debt from accumulating, and thus there will be less interest as the months go by – but that day is a ways off . At the moment the best option available to me is getting used to not doing things, even if it’s hard and depressing and largely un-fun.

So the question becomes: why am I blogging about this? Well, call it a lesson in the psychology of being a writer (or, at least, this writer).

Like most people, I’m not actually terrible with money. I’m not great with it, but my bills get paid and my rent goes in on time and I’m rarely without food. Between post-graduate studies, a tendency towards casual employment, and a focus on writing as a long-term career, I’ve gotten used to living on not a lot of money. Most days I’m okay with the trade-off between earning much less in order to do the one thing that I’m really good at doing in the hopes it’ll pay off in the long run. And until about five years ago, I either avoided my credit card like the goddamn plague or kept it paid off when it was seeing regular use.

But, like most people, there were gaps in my budget that leaked cash like a sieve, and when I stopped doing sessional lecturing gigs a few years back the outlet for those became the credit card.

My first budgeting blind-spot largely came down to purchases justified under the aegis that I “needed them for writing.” Stuff like printer ink cartridges would get charged to the card on the weeks that I didn’t have the ready cash for them, or I’d look at a magazine like Locus and rationalise the subscription. Or I’d celebrate a story sale by hitting the bookstore, working off the theory that I’d pay things back when the cheque came in, and somehow never did. Yes, this is thoroughly stupid, but I suspect many people are stupid with their credit cards in much the same way.

And, honestly, it’s far less stupid than my second blind-spot. ‘Cause my second blind-spot is largely summed up as “shame.”

There are hundreds of small purchases on my credit cards that were primarily driven by shame:  petrol for the car so I could make it to social events without saying “sorry, I’m broke;
last-minute grocery shopping for when people where coming around so they weren’t exposed to my regular diet of hot-dogs and baked beans; pizza on those nights when the writing seemed hopeless and my life wasted and the only defense against the lingering spectre of shame was spending money on the simplest of luxuries. Birthday presents I wouldn’t have been able to afford under ordinary circumstances. Christmas. Meeting people for coffee. Simple things, ordinary things, that I just couldn’t bring myself to admit weren’t in the budget. It was rarely a lot of money, only ten dollars here and twenty dollars there, but it quickly added up.

And to be fair, this probably wasn’t needed – my friends and family have always been pretty good about understanding when I say “the money’s not there.”  The problem largely came down to me. Doing those things were a way of bolstering my self-esteem rather than taking the hit of saying “I don’t have the cash”, and it was a way of warding off the sinking feeling that maybe I just wasn’t good enough to do better. For years I warded off that feeling with the excuse of “post-graduate study”, but when I left the degree behind a few years back I no longer had that defense, and thus the credit card stepped in to pick up the slack.

I may well be alone in this, but I suspect this is the real danger when budgeting as an aspiring writer without a full-time day job: it’s hard to keep your eyes on the future and accept that you’re doing without now, especially if you’ve been doing without for a while . Writing is one of those careers that doesn’t have immediate payoffs, may never have a payoff at all, and doesn’t get a hell of a lot of respect in ordinary society. When you pick writing and you aren’t making a success of it, odds are there’s going to be a moment of shame somewhere in your future – the culture virtually demands it. You’ll feel it in your gut the first time you tell someone “I’m a writer” and they respond with the handful of usual response that statement gets. It’s one of the best reasons I can think of to listen to writing books when they say stuff like “don’t give up your day job.”  Hell, it’s the reason why I was much more productive when I had a damn day job and I really miss having one. It’s much easier to be proud of your work when you’re not wishing it’d earned you the discretionary cash to buy a new book, meet a friend for coffee, or afford a McDonald’s burger.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I was so interested in blogging this budgeting/credit card process, and it largely came down to the idea of writing without a net (ie, putting my process out there, warts and all) and a desire to just admit to the shame so I could stop worrying about it so much (cause, honestly, I don’t see it going away). A writer far smarter and more successful than I (probably John Scalzi) once blogged that writing is a career for people who enjoy being in a constant state of panic. I think that’s probably true, but it’s a mistake to think that all the panic is going to come from deadlines and late cheques and wondering how you’re going to pay your rent next week. Slowly, inevitably, some of that panic’s going to come from not moving as fast as you want to be, and some of it’s going to come from fear of failure, and some of it’s going to come from the thought that “maybe this is as good as I’m ever going to be.”

And based on my conversations with people who are further along the food chain than I am, I’m not sure that ever goes away. Somehow you have to figure out how to handle it and keep writing anyway.