Entitled, Or Not

Any aspiring writer searching for literary agents to query knows that you have to narrow down the querying pool to agents who will actually represent your genre. It can extend beyond a simple genre-match, however. Some agent bios will explicitly state that they are only looking for works about marginalized characters/topics, or even only by marginalized writers. No doubt many a frustrated querier has made the assumption that the publishing industry is unfairly biased against white people and men, and that they’re being denied a writing career in favor of some lucky minority. This assumption, however, is founded on two faulty premises.

First off, any quick search of publishing statistics — check out this page, for example — will reveal that white writers still dominate American publishing, by a vast percentage. The male/female split is roughly equal, though men are more likely to earn more money at it. Thus far, any demographic preference among literary agents or other publishing professionals has only led to the percentages being a closer representation of the wider population percentage, not a vast over-representation. Panic over a marginalized group “taking over” the publishing world is grossly exaggerated, if not entirely unfounded.

The second false notion is what I want to explore in more depth. That is, that one’s manuscript/writing career deserves representation, and they’ve only been denied it because of some form of reverse discrimination. I would like to gently remind aspiring writers, as I remind myself quite frequently, that no one owes you or your book anything. There could be a hundred reasons why you got a rejection letter. It might be that a particular element of your story didn’t sit well with that particular agent. Maybe they just signed a client whose manuscript has a very similar premise. Or the elements of your query letter came off a bit muddled. Alas, it could be that your writing just isn’t very good.

These are hard possibilities to sit with. I understand, believe me, I understand this desire to pinpoint some external unfairness as the reason for being rejected. But the fact is, an agent has no obligation to tell you why. Reading through query letters is unpaid work, time spent on potential clients rather than the current ones who actually bring in money. Taking the time for an individual response to each rejected query would be vastly impractical — not to mention opening a can of worms for those queriers who figure they can change the agent’s mind if they just argue their point well enough. The bitterness of rejection can bring out the very worse in people. It’s best to close off the possibility of a dialogue right at the very start.

And if the agent really doesn’t want any white male writers? Hey, there’s hundreds of other agents out there. Believe me, you will not lack for options in your particular demographic…as long as your writing itself resonates with the agent. You’re simply not owed an agenting or publishing contract, even if you’ve labored over your book for years, even if you’ve been querying for decades. Even if you feel your ideas are brilliant and unique and worthy of worldwide attention. I’m sorry. It’s not a universal right.

There is a significant distinction between the right to free speech and the privilege of a platform. I’ve seen people call it “censorship” when getting kicked off of social media or cancelled by their venues. That is a misuse of the term. You can still say whatever you want without being arrested, imprisoned or executed. Under true dictatorial regimes, this is not the case. Speech can be monitored and controlled by the government to terrifying extremes. In America and other free countries, we needn’t fear such dire consequences (as long as the rule of law is followed, but corruption and abuse of power is a whole other topic).

Losing a platform to disseminate your opinions, however, is completely different. It usually has to do with a private entity like the owner of a social media company or a TV executive or what-have-you. They have the liberty to include or dis-include whatever they want, the same way you have the right to ask someone to leave your property. They’re not censoring you or violating their free speech; they’re just exercising their personal preferences in curating content. Sometimes it’s a moral decision; often it’s the sheer practicality of what is expected to make the most money. It’s depressing to be on the side of the rejected voice, but the only way to move on is to accept that it wasn’t the right platform for you.

Granted, in the publishing world this concept has significantly shifted since self-publishing became more feasible for the average writer. It used to require such an expense on the part of the writer that only someone with loads of disposable income could pay a “vanity publisher” to get their book printed, and to blazes with all those snooty gatekeepers! Nowadays, with print-on-demand and e-books drastically lowering the costs, the field of self-published writers has broadened into a vibrant option for many. Getting an agent or a deal is only one of many avenues to having that platform. I’d like to imagine this has weeded out the angry entitled queriers…but angry and entitled people show up everywhere.

So do kind and generous people. I’m trying to choose to be the latter kind, by assuming the best of those so-called gatekeepers and expressing gratitude for any time and attention they offer. I don’t deserve to get my books published more or less than any writer, but if I ever do get that traditional publishing deal, I intend to never, ever take my platform for granted.

Opportunities

As an aspiring writer, I’ve had to creep out of my comfort zone now and then. First I had to share my writing with other people. That’s terrifying. Even the kindest readers, who are most inclined to praise your work, are still people outside of your own head where the writing first took shape. Who knows whether the words will even make sense to anyone else? Some of my hardest critiques have come from family members, not because they were particularly eviscerating, but simply because they were my first encounters with a perspective other than my own.

I was extremely fortunate to marry a fellow writer, who provides emotional and practical support in so many ways. He was the one who encouraged me to take a creative writing class in college. That was doubly terrifying. I would have readers who were themselves writers, and who had no particular motivation to be kind to me. And what about the teacher? What if she disliked “genre” fiction and was therefore already disinclined to see value in anything I wrote? And what if my writing style was completely torn to shreds during the workshopping sessions? What I had nothing useful to contribute to other writers? I gulped down all these what-ifs and took the class anyway. Once again I was lucky. The teacher was open to any and all genres, and all my classmates were thoughtful but kind with their critiques. It was a much-valued experience.

When I finished my first novel, I had to take the biggest step of all: out of comfortable hypotheticals and into the reality of querying. I could imagine being published all I liked, but until I started submitting, nothing would actually happen. The downside: as long as I didn’t submit, I wouldn’t get any rejections. From my very first submission, the rejections came fast and furious. I’m quite aware now that my early manuscripts were not good enough to get published, so I can regard the disappointment with a little more equanimity, but at the time it was devastating. I would go through periods of timid but hopeful submissions, then longer periods of gloom and despair and “oh, why even bother?”

It appears slightly horrifying in spreadsheet format

Why did I bother, after all? Sharing my work with friendly readers and supportive classmates turned out to be largely positive experiences, well worth that initial fear and discomfort of stretching myself. Submitting manuscripts, on the other hand, did not produce any sort of net positive at first. Except…experience. Opportunity. Hah. That term sometimes serves as a sort of euphemism for something that makes us miserable, but at least we can learn from it. And I have absolutely learned from my misery. Mostly, how to be thick-skinned, dust myself off and start over with undiminished optimism. It’s taken a long time to learn that, let me tell you. I sent out my very first submission in 2008. That’s practically before social media existed. To add to my elderly status — are you old enough to remember when blogs were omnipresent? My first two requests for manuscripts came through contests on a writers’ blog that I participated in.

And oh, how I needed that encouragement! Even though the agents ultimately passed on those books, I considered it significant progress in my journey. Someone liked my first pages; they saw potential in them. I wasn’t a complete fraud as a writer. I took that tiny particle of hope and clung to it fervently. And kept trying, and improving my craft, and trying again. In the intervening years I would get, maybe, one request out of twenty queries sent. That’s not a bad statistic, all things considered. And recently that percentage has risen ever so slightly. It’s only taken me 16 years and 20+ books…

Still, it’s all experience. Opportunity. That’s why, when I came across an ad for a writer’s conference that was actually affordable for our family’s limited budget, with online options so I wouldn’t need to travel, I decided to attempt another leap out of my comfort zone. I signed up for pitch sessions with two agents. One-on-one, face-to-face (screen-to-screen anyway), with a chance to learn what works with my novel. And what doesn’t. Am I anxious and imagining all sorts of worst-case scenarios? Absolutely. I’m going ahead anyway. Maybe my pitch will dazzle someone. Maybe it won’t. Either way, I’ll get valuable feedback and make actual connections with people in the industry. I’ve even put in my first page for an anonymous “writers’ got talent” contest, which could very well end up with my beloved book figuratively torn into shreds. And yet. Experience. Opportunity.

Here we go.

Occupation

For the past few years I’ve been considering whether to find a job. And yes, years is a long time to be mulling over such a decision, particularly when most people don’t have the luxury of waiting that long. The truth is, we could certainly use the additional income. Paying the bills with a schoolteacher’s salary is a challenge rather like treading water in a storm at sea. A number of factors limit our options. The primary issue, our son’s special needs, is both the reason we live in a high-cost state — we’ve never had to directly pay for any of his services; he attends an excellent specialized school that’s tied to public school funding — and the reason I can’t just apply for a full-time 9-5 job. My care for him isn’t necessarily constant so much as on-call. If he needs me, I have to drop everything and go.

Other factors include my lack of work experience, having spent these past twenty years on the rigors of mothering him and his two younger siblings (who are currently 16 and 18, still working their way toward independent adulthood). And our cars have a tendency of being unreliable thanks to the horrid spiraling factors of poverty (if I had a better car I would have more job options and more money to buy a better car, etc etc etc). I’ve looked into remote work and felt both over- and under-qualified for everything. It’s exhausting. Why is job searching more intensive work than any actual job? And then we come to another factor: I don’t want any of this.

You see, I already know my ideal job. It’s my husband’s ideal job too, and probably our daughter’s as well. Professional novelist. Work from home, travel to book signings and conferences and other paid events, do what I already love and want to do and get paid for it. A lovely dream. I’ve even already figured out the “writing novels” part of it. It’s the “getting paid” that remains elusive. Alas.

While I continue to trudge through job options, well-aware that even professional novelists are rarely rich enough to forgo any other income sources, I’ve attempted to create a sort of framework of responsibilities associated with my as-yet hypothetical writing career. To be “my own boss,” as those cringeworthy MLMs might claim. Obviously the most important task is the writing itself. Every weekday I aim for at least a thousand words. If I’m not working on a new novel, then I edit at least two chapters in a revised draft. I give myself a little leeway on this, because creativity can’t be entirely forced, but it can be rigorously fostered and encouraged. If I sit down and make myself write, something useful will almost always come out eventually.

Then there’s the research. Some writers are really big on researching for their books; that necessity comes up now and then for me, during the process of writing. But my main research is twofold — what sort of books are in my preferred genres, and what agents are most likely to represent my kind of books? I read as much sci-fi and fantasy as I can, study what works in their writing choices, peruse their acknowledgement pages for names of literary agents and other resources and — perhaps most importantly — enjoy myself. I don’t want to make reading such a part of my writerly duties that it becomes a chore for me. Immersing myself in someone’s imaginary realms has always been a joy for me, and creating my own imaginary realms brings me joy as well. I want to increase that joy, not diminish it.

I ran out of bookshelves and had to use the windowsill

This search for “writers who write what I want to write” has unsurprisingly led me to discover some new favorite authors in recent years, who had been published for decades but escaped my notice till now. Right in the midst of the COVID quarantine and all its related stress, I came across books by Martha Wells and then Lois McMaster Bujold and proceeded to devour just about everything they’d both written. Isn’t there something so comforting yet invigorating about a writer who clicks with you, like an old friend you’ve just met? I collect piles and piles of pretty books on Goodreads and purr over my shelves like a dragon with its hoard of treasure. And dream of seeing my own book covers there someday.

Just a sample from this year’s additions to my Goodreads hoard

In addition, my local library just happened to start up a sci-fi/fantasy book club last summer, and I’ve been happily attending each month. The book choices are dependent on a few factors: being short enough for even the slowest reader to complete in time, as well as having multiple copies available in the interlibrary system. I haven’t loved every choice, but it’s been quite engaging to pick up a few books I might not have otherwise tried, and then hear alternate perspectives from other readers. The library in general has been a great source for borrowing books so I don’t wear out our limited income (although a few books still sneak onto our shelves…and windowsills…)

The other research is not a joy for me. I doubt any writer delights in the process of agent-hunting. It is, however, an absolute necessity. There is an ocean of literary agencies out there, and you have to narrow it down to the applicable ones. One by one I search through manuscript wish lists, agent bios and long long databases of genre type. Agents are naturally just as motivated to find prospective clients in their areas of expertise, so they’ll usually provide a list of the genres they represent along with other guidelines for submission. Once I’ve compiled a decent collection of agents for one of my manuscripts, I start sending queries. I’ve created a spreadsheet to keep track of every query, and make sure to note when I get a response. After querying many many novels, I have quite a collection of rejections. A few requests as well, happily, though none have yet resulted in an offer of representation. I’m noticing a parallel between this and other job searches. Hours of labor, but no resulting paycheck.

Yet I have to believe that it’s worth it. Certainly I’ll never stop writing and reading, whether or not it becomes profitable. I won’t let my discouragement affect my joy. I’ll never consider it a waste of time. And the querying? Well, it’s a small sacrifice of time and effort, surely worth it if it ultimately lands me an agent. If it doesn’t…it’s still better than not trying at all. If I stopped trying, it would mean I had stopped believing. And how can you create stories if you’ve lost the ability to believe?

Beyond Measure

Lately I’ve been pontificating. Granted, I’m always pontificating about something. The current topic is the purpose of education and learning. This subject is particularly relevant to our family since my husband is a teacher and our daughter is just finishing up her first semester of college. Amid all the issues and questions swirling around how to makes schools better and provide students with the tools to navigate adulthood, I’ve been trying to articulate a sort of personal philosophy of education. Unsurprisingly, it shares much with my feelings about stories and art.

Simply put, education has two purposes. One of them is training. This is the practical, easily measurable side of things. Certain skills, expertise and experience are necessary in order to perform certain tasks. This can include everything from literacy and arithmetic to the more specialized areas of, for instance, computer programming, plumbing, or medical surgery. There are jobs that you just can’t safely and competently do until you’ve been taught how to do them, with the opportunity to practice in a controlled environment. These are generally what we think of as “marketable skills,” giving a direct through-line from school to career.

If you want to literally expand your horizons, just go someplace really flat

The other purpose is harder to describe or quantify, and therefore often overlooked. You could call it the acquisition of wisdom. The ability to think independently and creatively. The broadening of one’s mental horizons. The enrichment of one’s character. Lots of vague, rather cheesy descriptions that sound like the blurbs from a college recruitment pamphlet. Lacking a truly concrete way to measure it, this aspect of education is extremely undervalued. Its worth can’t be directly translated as “you will now be qualified for such-and-such job.” And let’s face it, when you’re looking at the astronomical costs of college nowadays, you really want assurance that it’s a clear-cut investment leading to astronomical paychecks. Not some nebulous feel-good promises about a student’s character.

It’s a terrible shame, and I could certainly go on a tangential rant about the bloated inflation of tuition and how treating education like a business has made a terrible mess of schooling from pre-school all the way up through the highest echelons of academia. My philosophy of education envisions an ideal scenario that certainly does not exist in our world. But I’d like to explore that ideal, just a little bit, rather than ranting about socioeconomic issues that admittedly go far beyond my (utter lack of) expertise. If you’d like an excellent exploration of the real-world role of humanities in academia, check out this history professor’s post. It’s a great blog for a number of reasons, including resources for more-believable worldbuilding.

So what is this elusive quality of wisdom or character, why is it important, and how can schools provide it? I would argue that aside from the essential skills of literacy and numeracy, the specific topics and details we’re taught in school are not nearly as important as how we are encouraged to engage with them. For example, science could encompass anything from life systems to cosmic physics, but all those subjects would be approached with the mindset of the scientific method. The ability to make observations, form suppositions, collect and analyze data and draw conclusions. Whether or not you become a scientist, that methodology is an incredibly useful way to assess situations without immediately making snap judgments with fallacies of correlation or confirmation bias.

What about the humanities and the arts? What can they do for a student even if they’re not planning on becoming an artist? Plenty. History teaches us about humans in all their varieties, the recurring trends that indicate commonalities and the diverging traits that reveal how very different we can be. The records of the past help us better comprehend the present and the future. Theater (my husband’s primary subject) teaches collaboration, empathy, emotional awareness, physical coordination, appreciation for the ambiguities and possibilities of expressive language, and on and on. Literature can, like history, open our minds to other cultures and time periods, other mindsets and perspectives, while also offering flashes of recognition as we share something with the writer across an incredible gulf of time and place and circumstance. It encourages us to explore the universal questions of Why am I here? What is my role in the world? What does it all mean? Not by providing definitive answers, but by providing a venue to explore for ourselves.

Now many of these could be considered marketable skills. Collaboration, for one, is essential in pretty much any workplace environment. But learning how to get along with other people isn’t valuable only because it could help you become a more successful employee. That’s a painfully reductive way of measuring the worth of an education. If you’ll permit a little dig against capitalism: how very dismal to imagine that your schooling is only worthwhile if it provides a certain number of dollars in your paycheck. Again, if only college didn’t cost about as much as the GDP of a small country, it might be a little easier to justify investing in education for its own sake. When I happily assert that my college education was worthwhile even though I didn’t get a career from it, I admit that it’s partly because I had a full-tuition scholarship. Phew, I didn’t waste anyone’s money by not subsequently earning money via my bachelor’s degree. (And I fully acknowledge my privilege in having access to all the resources that ultimately supported me through college. This is not an experience that everyone can partake of. I really wish that was different.)

I gave birth three months before graduating, a very different learning experience

But I did, in fact, have a deeply valuable experience at college. Majoring in English, even! My horizons were vastly widened. I learned to see the world in a glorious myriad of different ways. After those four years I was a different person, a wiser person, more thoughtful and more capable. Of course I’m a different person 20 years later as well. But much of the growth and shifting mindsets that I’ve undergone were predicated on that foundation of how to learn. How to be openminded, how to view things critically (by that I don’t mean with an eye to criticize, but rather with deep, methodical reasoning). And how to love learning. To enjoy it for its own sake.

Having said all this, I don’t believe that the classroom is the only place to learn this, nor that everyone needs to or should go to college. Each individual has different resources that would serve them best, and we should put more value on other venues like apprenticeships and on-the-job training. Most of all, I wish that we could root out the truly pernicious metrics we’ve created to assess the quality of education — grades, standardized test scores, and marketable skills. To stop teaching kids from an appallingly early age that their grades are a measure of their intelligence or worth, and that if they don’t shape up they’ll never get into the best colleges and then the best careers, because that is of course the only point of school. To stop expecting teachers to formulate all their lessons around the almighty assessment tests, those tests that definitely prove whether the school is a Good School or a Bad School and is therefore worth the money that taxpayers are providing.

Most of all, to address that ever-present question from kids of “when are we ever going to use this in real life?” thusly: a teacher’s job should be more than to create a generation of well-programmed worker drones. They can give their students the key to becoming more complete human beings. Inquisitive, curious, empathetic, capable of tackling complexities, and believing in their own ability to think and learn. In that regard, calculating the worth of an education is quite similar to calculating the worth of art. It’s equivalent to the joy it brings, and how could you measure joy?

By Its Cover

The writing life is pretty good right now. I’m always more productive during the school year while my kids are occupied and schedules are more predictable. I’ve put up an entry for my space librarians book, now titled A Cosmic Labor, and I’m about a hundred pages into a new manuscript. This one is perhaps the most experimental story I’ve ever attempted, with an extremely voicey narrator and a lot of fourth-wall breaking. It’s also based on a dream I had with a mother trying to protect her daughter from a wicked sorceress, and if you’re wondering whether my subconscious is attempting to process the angst of having a daughter far away at college, yes, I’m pretty sure that’s a major factor. Ulllp. Life transitions are a thing, and they are not easy. What better way to cope than by writing through them?

I’ve decided to explore something more light-hearted here today with a bit of gushing about the joy of books. In particular, cover design. I feel like we’re in a golden age of book covers. If you’ve ever seen books from over a hundred years ago, you might have noticed that there’s…not much to get excited about. Most of them are nothing more than the title and the author. You might catch a glimpse of artistry in the choice of colors or fonts, but the material of the covers didn’t allow much opportunity for more than that. That changed in the 20th century, both with the advent of paperbacks and decorated dust jackets (though the jackets themselves first showed up in the 1830s, they remained plain and utilitarian until later). Nowadays, a stroll through the bookstore is as much a treat for the visual senses as the literary.

The old adage about not judging a book by its cover is worth considering. It’s really referring more to metaphorical situations, isn’t it? Don’t judge anything, particularly people, by superficial standards like external appearance. When it comes to actual books, though, I would say it’s perfectly reasonable to include the cover in an initial assessment. Not to decide whether the book is good or not, but to provide some guidance on whether it’s the sort of book you want to read. Because, try as you might, you’ll never be able to read All The Books. That’s where the field of cover design has really evolved in modern publishing. It’s very useful tool for indicating genre, audience and flavor. Of course there are a number of factors alongside the cover that you can also take into account, including the title, the description on the back, maybe glowing praise from a well-known author, and the section of the bookstore where it’s shelved. Still the cover is one of the most visceral elements, something that can elicit an immediate sensory, emotional response.

It’s clear how important covers have become when you consider that even e-books are presented with a thumbnail of the cover. They’re like the packaging of a food product, designed to convey optimum appetizing-ness. A well-designed cover can immediately tell you whether it’s serious or frothy, science fiction or fantasy, children’s or adult fiction, literary or commercial. Certain trends tend to proliferate in imagery and design just like any other publishing trends. Back when I was young (the ancient times of the late 1900s) covers tended to be more literal, portraying a specific scene or collection of characters. Lately it leans more toward aesthetic, evocative art intended to evoke a feeling rather than a particular detail.

Sometimes a single book or series creates a massive trend. Even nearly two decades after the original stark symbolic image on black was used for the Twilight covers, variations of that pattern show up all across the YA paranormal romance genre. (Giving me the hint that, well, it’s probably not my kind of book). Classics have been released with modern covers in the hopes of drawing in fans of books with similar marketing design, with mixed and sometimes hilarious results. And there are terrible covers, poorly-matched or just odd choices, which can be entertaining in their own way. As much as I appreciate a good cover, I’ve enjoyed many a book without letting its lousy design throw me off.

We have bookshelves in nearly every room of our house, and sometimes I just walk around and admire the covers on display. We can’t afford to buy fancy-schmancy editions of everything, but I love the worn-out paperbacks just as much as the shiny leather bindings. I can look at a cover and immediately relive the experience of reading that book, all the emotions of excitement and anticipation and joy. I love having a Goodreads account as well so I can scroll through all the pretty covers of all the books I’ve recorded there. I feel a bit like a dragon hoarding treasure. It’s delightful.

Naturally I’ve fantasized about my own books getting published with pretty covers bearing my own name. My husband was well-aware of this (he’s seeking publication too, after all) when he arranged my birthday present last July and asked a number of friends to design covers for me. It was a marvelous surprise and very gratifying. Here’s just a handful of them. It’s awfully nice to dream.

Art by Rebecca Grawe

Art by Sarah Goodsell

Art by Simeen Brown

Serious Fun

I’ve been on a writing break recently, for a number of reasons. I finished my latest novel a few months back and I’m trying to focus on revisions and querying rather than diving into another new manuscript. This resolve also coincides with a month-long road trip to visit family and take our daughter to college (eeep!) so it wouldn’t be the best time for daily writing sessions anyway. But good gracious, I really miss writing when I’m not doing it regularly. When the idea for a new blog post occurred to me, I figured it would be a nice chance to keep my writerly-muscles from descending into total atrophy.

What I realized is that my general philosophy about stories can be summarized in two quotes. The first is from Harry Potter (which is a highly problematic source nowadays; I honestly find it hard to believe that the same woman currently spewing hateful rhetoric is the same one who wrote these insightful words). “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” This quotation can be applied to a wide range of situations (including, ahem, a sensitivity toward a person’s internal experience and identity, even if you don’t share their views) but for this post I’m relating it to how I feel about stories in fiction — books, movies, TV, plays, whatever. They are not “real” in the sense that the events didn’t happen as portrayed; the characters and plot are fabricated and so forth. But as we enter the world of the story, we create its reality within our own minds. We interact with it; we experience feelings and lines of thought that are quite real. Within fiction, we find truth. Those who dismiss something as “just a story” are missing the very real power that comes from narrative imagination.

Some of my thoughts here are heavily influenced by what I’ve been learning in therapy. The mind and the body are not separate entities engaged in an uneasy alliance to achieve functionality. The mind is part of the body. Coping mechanisms are best understand as the body’s reaction to stress or trauma, and can be managed by listening to the body and guiding it gently toward healthier mechanisms rather than trying to actively fight against its instincts. Further, trauma is not actually something that happens to you. It’s something that happens inside you. So whether or not it was a “big deal” by any objective standards, if your body feels threatened by it, you will respond accordingly. And you can only work through trauma by acknowledging the story that your body has created and taking it seriously. It’s real, even if it’s entirely inside your head. I could even go to philosophical extremes and argue that the individual, internal reality that each of us constructs is the only true reality, because we can’t really access anything other than that, right? In terms of stories, this means that none of us are reading or watching the same version of a book or show. Each of us fabricates our own perception of it within our minds, and each fabrication is equally valid for each individual.

Whew. Getting pretty heavy here. Time to bring in the second quote, which might seem to outright contradict the first. It’s from the theme song for Mystery Science Theater 3000: “Repeat to yourself, ‘It’s just a show, I should really just relax.'” How can I hold to both of these concepts? Easy. What I hear in this quote is a reminder to enjoy the forest and stop fussing over the trees. In the original song it’s referring to how the main character “eats and sleeps and other science facts.” These things are not definitively explained in the show’s premise, and if anything comes up from episode to episode it tends to be inconsistent or even contradictory. But it would be absurd to obsess over such issues, when the point of the show is not a meticulous exploration of how to send a man into space and perform bizarre, cinema-based experiments upon him while keeping all his life support running. Heavens no. The point is to enjoy a guy and his two robots making fun of lousy movies.

No, the eagles couldn’t have taken them all the way to Mordor. More importantly, you’re missing the point of the story.

So what is the point of stories, in a general sense? To create a meaningful landscape within one’s imagination. Sometimes it’s a serious landscape. Sometimes it has educational components. Sometimes it’s just wacky fun. The degree of “realism” (however you may define that concept) is going to differ depending on the particular type of story, but all fiction is going to be creative, transportive, a journey you take without even leaving your seat.

Do we need the science facts? Maybe. Maybe not. But let’s not get all worked up over the wrong things. Those critiques about “plot holes” or the real-world accuracy of certain details are not the most effective way to assess the value of art. That’s not what we need. We need the story. We need the journey. We need that exquisite experience of constructing an entire world inside our minds and knowing that it is deeply, fundamentally real.

Who’s Counting?

I finished the initial draft of my space librarians book, a cause for celebration and — because it’s me –massive overthinking. At the start of writing I was determined to resist the usual temptation to rush the pacing. So I took my time establishing the setting and the premise, introducing characters and the places they were traveling in a nice, leisurely fashion (at least by my measures). It wasn’t till the end of the second chapter that I introduced the true inciting incident. I was feeling quite optimistic that this would be a nice hefty novel, as is the norm for a lot of sci-fi nowadays.

Then I found the main conflict winding up around 73,000 words. That is not long. That is short for YA sci-fi, let alone adult. I pressed on and wrote another few chapters to wrap up all the plotlines, finishing at 85,000. Better, but still short compared to the average SFF novel.

So? Why does word count matter? Well, in an ideal world there’s only question that matters. What is the length that serves this particular story the best? If it’s well-paced, complete and satisfying at 85,000, that should be fine. Forcing it to be longer would only detract from its quality. Similarly, if a story needs 200,000 words to be properly told, let it be 200,000 words.

Alas, here we are in a less-than-ideal world. The first problem is that I don’t know whether my books are the right length, and seeing the average length of books of a similar genre makes me second guess every choice. That’s where beta readers come in handy, of course. I might be too close to my story to make an objective decision about what needs to stay, what’s missing, what needs to go. Let others read it and give their opinions. Read it again after some time has passed, and see if it still feels the right length or not.

The second problem is more slippery. Who cares about word count? Readers count pages, not words, though they will often judge a book by its thickness, for better or worse. For technical purposes word count is a more accurate measurement because it doesn’t change from hardcover to paperback format or depend upon font size. Which brings us to the publishing industry. They need to make a judgment call about whether to invest in a book or not, and how much to invest, and how successful they anticipate it will be. Its length is one feature of many that goes into that decision-making process. And naturally they would compare successfully-published books and all the pertinent trends to a new potential book. If it looks like a particular genre is having lots of success with shorter books, they’ll lean that way. If longer, then the opposite. The cost of paper isn’t the most prohibitive expense of publishing, but it does matter to a certain degree. And lengthier books do require more skilled labor, from many members of the team. This process trickles down from publishing houses to editors to literary agents. All of them want to know the word count before investing time or money into a book.

That said, it’s not completely rigid. A unusually massive word count might give an agent pause, but it doesn’t guarantee an automatic pass. There are plenty of successful exceptions in the publishing world that make a case for shorter books, even novellas. If the writing and premise are truly spectacular and unique, word count isn’t a dealbreaker. And if the writer’s already a bestseller, they can do pretty much whatever they want. (See: Brandon Sanderson).

When you’re crafting a query letter, though, every detail you include feels like it might be a dealbreaker. The title, the genre, the comp novels, the word count — any or all of those facts could make the difference between an agent requesting to read the manuscript or sending another form rejection. So I fret and worry and scrutinize my book for a way to expand it naturally. This isn’t the first time I’ve come up shorter than expected. It seems I’m inclined toward shorter novels, though I’ve written a few over 100,000 words. Other writers, like my husband, are inclined in the other direction and worry that their manuscripts are overlong. I try not to judge myself as less writerly because I have the opposite problem. At the end of the day all I can do is write the books I want to write, and make them the best they can be, long or short. And hope that their quality shines through for someone in the publishing world.

Politically Speaking

I am currently waist-deep in a new manuscript, my favorite place to be. It’s especially exciting because it’s a work of far-future science fiction set in space. I’ve dabbled in that field before, but nothing novel-length, certainly nothing with worldbuilding this extensive. When the glimmer of an idea for my next book first showed up (in the middle of finishing my last book, because creative inspiration seldom comes at a convenient time) I knew that I wanted to try something different, partly to challenge myself, so I decided on space travel. Then I brainstormed ideas for why someone might need to travel across the interplanetary expanse. Not military, I have nothing innovative to add to that sub-genre. Commercial trading and whatnot? Eh, maybe. But it wasn’t quite grabbing me. Then it came to me. Librarians. In space.

No, it’s not quite that evil

I am having so much fun with it. Strictly speaking, my characters are a sort of amalgam of librarians, museum curators, archeologists, historians, diplomats, couriers, and pretty much whatever role serves their purpose. The important thing is that they are providing a free service to make information and resources accessible and available to everyone, regardless of wealth, status or geography. Of course there are oodles of barriers to accomplishing this ideal, mostly related to funding. So the plot revolves around a planetary system with an oppressive government that strictly controls all information.

And here I am again, writing something political. This always seems to happen to me in spite of all my intentions. I’m really not a politically-minded person. Obviously I have opinions about politics, and I care what’s happening in our government, but it’s not the driving force behind my daily occupations and behaviors. And the last thing I wanted to study in college was law, economics or government. I have perhaps a ten-minute tolerance for reading anything about politics before I get too anxious and have to console myself with something far removed from the real world.

Fiction isn’t the real world. It is, however, a place where we can process it in a way that feels safer. So I guess I’m processing my thoughts and feelings about political issues by way of tyrants who wield god-like powers, towering cities where bigotry threatens the study of magical science and engineering, and planets where cosmic librarians have to campaign for free flow of information. It’s inevitable. If I care about anything, it’s going to show up in my writing, and if it’s happening on a grand scale, well, that tends to involve governments and politics.

Good thing I have access to a library

My concern isn’t so much that political content is off-putting or controversial; I’m not going to tone down my opinions to try to please anyone (though I do want to avoid being actively hurtful and offensive — that’s just common decency). No, my biggest concern is that all these details of government that keep creeping into my stories are hopelessly unrealistic. Which means I would need to, gulp, hunker down and study real-world government and politics in order to improve their plausibility. And darn it all, I like writing speculative fiction so I don’t have to worry about plausible details. Yet here I am, writing something that demands research. I have no one to blame but myself.

Don’t get the wrong idea — my novels are plenty mild in comparison to writers who deliberately set out to explore current political issues like climate change or class warfare or colonialism. Fans of those sort of books would probably criticize me as not politically-minded enough. And what does ‘politics’ even encompass? We could get into all sorts of semantical discussions over that. Well, my main purpose is to tell a story that I want to read. If I’m lucky, I’ll find others who also want to read it, with whatever degree of political thought ends up in it. And also magic, spaceships and libraries.

Let’s Chat, Shall We?

Chatbots have been in the public consciousness a lot lately, though they’ve been around for a while. It’s curious that they’re often given the term AI even though “intelligence” isn’t technically applicable. There’s no independent or creative thought at play here; they simply follow an algorithm by filtering existing data into the desired format. Whatever comes out the other end is nothing more than a distorted reflection of what real humans have already created. When an artificial intelligence shows up in a sci-fi story, gains sentience and runs amok, what the story is really exploring isn’t (most of the time) the literal person-hood of non-organic entities. It’s yet another story about humanity examined from a metaphorical viewpoint. Humans made the machines, so whatever we say about the machines, we’re actually saying about humans. It’s a fun thought exercise, but it’s not really about a fear of AI.

Not all bots are bad.

As far as real-world applications, there is a trend that I find interesting and somewhat disquieting. People think they’ve found a shortcut to writing. Submissions to science fiction magazine Clarkesworld have been flooded with chatbot-generated dreck. My father has to remind his college students that he can spot machine-written essays just as well as any kind of plagiarism. No, I’m not prophesying the inevitable downfall of society by way of chatbot, nor even the dearth of quality writing. Any teacher/editor/reader with the speck of experience can tell the difference between genuine writing and something that came out of an algorithm. My concern is more that this trend highlights an already-existing problem: the devaluing of an artist’s labor, both writers and otherwise.

There is a uniquely individualistic, quirky quality to art that is very difficult to quantify. That’s part of what makes it so powerful. You can measure the time they spend creating it, or the training/expertise that they bring to their work, but beyond that it’s very nebulous. We’re left with vague clichés like “it comes from the heart” or “you pour your soul into it.” Something almost indefinable, but we know it when we see it. And we know when it’s missing. Naturally it varies from artist to artist, and we could argue about original versus derivative, but the stuff that chatbots generate is the pure essence of derivative. It has to be. You can’t program creativity.

Good point, Fred.

I don’t mind if people find these programs a useful tool for brainstorming or jumpstarting their process. It’s not for me, but whatever works for you, that’s fine. And of course there’s the sheer entertainment value of inputting a particular collection of data and seeing what nonsense the chatbot spits back up. I only balk at the implication that if we can just tweak the parameters a little more, perhaps improve the grammatical details and the information processing, we’ll have a machine that can write just as competently as a person. Is it any surprise that I, a person trying desperately to earn validation as a writer, would take offense at the notion that my heartfelt labor could be replaced by a computer program? (As far as I’m concerned, the real writer in that situation would be the programmer, and that’s a whole other conversation.) It’s hard enough when I read a published book and find its quality somewhat lacking, then wonder why I can’t break into the industry. To read an artificially-created work and watch people praise it? No, thank you.

There’s no doubt in my mind that we will always need and therefore always have a place for writers. Whether those writers will be properly appreciated is a different question. Financial compensation is only one component of that and will generally be at the mercy of the fluctuating whims of the reading public. I suppose what I’m really hoping for is a more enthusiastic celebration of creativity and the artists who create. Writing is more than putting words together into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. It’s not a mechanical generation of fungible content. It is an expression of human-ness, and as I’ve proven with many a checked box online, I am not a bot.

Frivolity, Or Not

December is one of my favorite months, and also one of the most chaotic. I always seem to be involved in at least two or three music events for the Christmas season, my husband and daughter both have dress rehearsals and performances for plays, and of course my youngest has a birthday right at the start of the month. In the midst of all this I’m still attempting to maintain a rigorous writing schedule, which means that I will definitely be completing a first draft by the end of the year, but it will almost certainly be a mess that requires a great deal of revising.

I’m old. There used to be three channels.

I’m also reading as many books as I can get my hands on, but the same is not true for new television shows. It’s such a vast landscape nowadays with about a hundred different platforms, leading me to feel overwhelmed and fall back on rewatching my comfort shows rather than investing in something new. I tend to find tv series more emotionally demanding than books, perhaps because there are so many factors outside the control of the storytellers (will an actor unexpectedly leave the show? will the show get cancelled before the story has reached a satisfying conclusion — or conversely, will it get stretched out long past its prime because it’s so darn popular?) and I guess I’ve been burned too many times. However, I will happily read commentary about shows that I’m not watching, much in the same way that I read plot summaries of horror movies because I want to know the twists without enduring the misery that horror inflicts upon my marshmallow-like constitution.

So I’ve found myself amused by the discussion around Andor, the latest Star Wars offering from Disney+; namely, the shock that something so intelligent and politically-thoughtful could appear in a franchise with silly aliens and wizards with laser swords. I have to assume this shock is coming from people who have had very little contact with fan fiction. The quality and/or tone of stories set in a particular universe is entirely dependent on the individual choices and skills of the individual storyteller, not the universe itself. Sure, most fan writers will adhere at least partly to the established rules of that universe, but nothing is binding them to that other than their own preferences. I explored the concept of authorship versus ownership of a franchise a few years back, coming to the conclusion that legal copyright offers only marginal validity. It also offers very little guarantee of quality, which is probably why Andor is the least watched of all SW shows — Disney’s multiple missteps with the franchise have seen viewership dropping more and more after each disappointment. Yet it’s also probably why the show offers a marked shift in tone and content that some are praising — Disney finally recognized that they’d better try something different, because shameless pandering was no longer sufficient to sustain the brand. I don’t find the change shocking in the slightest. That it seems to have produced something of decent quality; well, I’ve read fan fiction that’s better than officially merchandised novels. You can find quality everywhere. Alas, the same is true of schlock.

But enough specific grousing about Disney. I’d rather head into a more general discussion of this concept: that certain elements make a story Serious and Important, setting it apart from frivolous space fantasy. Obviously this assumption makes me, an unapologetic fangirl, particularly bristly when it disparages my favorite films. Still I think it’s worth deconstructing. It’s connected to that notion that realism is superior to sci-fi and fantasy, to the corollary that sci-fi is higher in respectability than fantasy because at least it’s semi-plausible, and that the stuff at the bottom is nothing but thoughtless escapism. Not everyone will discount sci-fi or fantasy quite that summarily, but they’ll still rank it higher if it deals with politics, social justice, economics; whatever they consider the real stuff. Anything that appeals to children is straight out.

As if there were a literary equivalent to kale. No thanks.

Sigh. I’m not one to begrudge anyone their personal preferences. If someone prefers non-fiction, or literary fiction, or historical or mystery or whatever, may they find as much joy in their reading as I do in mine! It’s when they cultivate an attitude of snobbery and seem to believe that their genre is objectively better, more enriching, of greater value to society as a whole. I find this particularly irksome because it seems to suck the joy straight out of the process, as if quality and entertainment value are mutually exclusive. That the more fun a story, the more worthless it must be on the whole. That’s nonsense. Why should fun of necessity be frivolous?

Of course there are fluffy, insubstantial books without deep meaning or value. There are also ponderous tomes without deep meaning or value. And there are fluffy, fun books with extraordinary themes and messages. Myself, I prefer to have my quality meanings delivered via something that’s fun as well. I’ve seen a lot of films with splashy spectacle and wildly imaginative visuals, but none of them have stuck with me quite like Star Wars, because that spectacle delivers a compelling message. Conversely, I’ve watched movies with compelling messages that left me rather cold because the mode of storytelling just wasn’t that fun or engaging. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, and most of the time I like both together.

Why do we even tell stories, rather than just relating straightforward observations about the human condition? The fabrication of a narrative, characters, scenes — it’s fun. It’s transportive. It’s more interesting and engaging. The fanciful nature of stories isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the process, it’s the whole point. We could have a generalized philosophical discussion about, for example, the struggle between altruism and selfishness, but that’s dry and abstract compared to the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. And darn it, I like wizards with laser swords.