Monthly Archives: December 2011

I recently followed a link to an article by JA Konrath about rejections (the writing kind, not the personal kind). Konrath wrote a thriller called The List, which was rejected by several major publishers. Frustrated, he went on to self-publish the book and is, he claims, earning about $9,000 a day from it at amazon.com. The post is a familiar sort of gloating “haha those stoopidheads at the major publishers don’t know what they missed out on/DOWN WITH TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING GATEKEEPERS!” deal.

Konrath published several of those rejection letters in the post, and I found them fascinating. While a few seemed overly concerned with the marketability of the book (plenty of published authors have told me, and I believe it, that a truly excellent book or story will always find its audience, and that a good editor/publisher will know how to sell it), for the most part, the personal ones pointed up very real issues with the book. Several referred to implausibilities in the plot, others to sitcom-like humor out of keeping that jarred the thriller atmosphere; a couple used variations on the phrase “too familiar”.

Most of the commenters followed Konrath’s “down with the gatekeepers!” line, but a couple said, in all honesty, that they’re fans of Konrath’s but find The Line to be a flawed book and, while they were happy to pay $2.99 for it as a Kindle download, they wouldn’t have paid full price for it as a paper book. A couple asked him about any changes he might have made between the last publisher rejection and the decision to self-publish. So far as I can see, he has yet to address these comments.

At a recent MinnSpec gathering, Hilary Moon Murphy told us about a study she conducted of stories from her year at Clarion. She said that the stories that fared the best in the world–sold to the most respected publications, brought their authors the most renown–were the ones the group had fought over, that some people hated. Someone asked her about changes the authors may have made in the interim, and she said no, most were fierce about “defending their vision”.

But Konrath’s experience makes me ponder: where’s the line between defending your vision and blinding yourself to your writing’s flaws? I’m not the Mozart of modern writing (and, trust me: neither are you, and I doubt Konrath is, either); nothing I write comes out perfect the first time. I have plot implausibilities. I write jokes that fall flat. I forget that my audience can’t read my mind. I take feedback from beta readers and editors very seriously. That’s not to say that I implement every change they suggest, or that I make changes that compromise my vision (and I’ve received a surprising number of suggestions that fall along those lines). But if multiple people say that the ending feels flat, or that this action is out of keeping with the character taking it, I listen. And I rewrite in a way that, if I’m doing it correctly, will make the story not only more readable, but also more reflective of my vision for it. That, after all, is my job as a writer: to manifest my vision on the page.

I admit: I haven’t read The List and probably won’t; thrillers aren’t my bag. And I respect that Konrath didn’t take the multiple rejections as an excuse to give up. He wasn’t happy with the way things were progressing for his novel, and he took steps to change that. But is predicting the demise of traditional publishing just because they didn’t like your book sailing bravely into new waters–or is it mocking the people climing into the Titanic’s lifeboats because you refuse to see the iceberg?

One year ago, a thoroughly delightful fellow named B.T. Newberg started the Humanistic Paganism website. Originally envisioned as a place for Newberg to share his own thoughts and feelings on the marriage of a humanistic worldview with a neo-Pagan practice, HP has blossomed into an amazing community of non-deistic Pagans of all stripes to share ideas and stories about how we perceive and act in the world. The conversations are sometimes contentious and challenge our growing edges, but they are always enlightening in one way or another, and I am honored to have been a contributor to the site on two occasions.

To celebrate the site’s first year, Newberg has collected the year’s postings–essays, interviews, polls, and community fora–into an ebook entitled Year One: A Year of Humanistic Paganism. I am proud to have my two essays included in this work. It is a lovely and thought-provoking work, essential for anyone interested in what Newberg calls “the marriage of science and myth”, spiritual seekers, or anyone looking for a new set of lenses for viewing the world.

Happy reading!

I thrive on deadlines. If I’m honest, they’re the only way I really get things done.

I’m told I’ve been this way most of my life: my kindergarten teacher used to complain to my parents that, when she gave us an assignment that was due at X time, I would figure out how long it was going to take me (Y) and then keep doing my own thing until exactly (X-Y) time. Without that end-point looming, I can dither and dawdle like nobody’s business.

And there’s no deadline like an extreme deadline. Like, say…co-writing a ten-minute play in eight hours. This January I will participate in my seventh Theatre Unbound 24:00:00 Xtreme Theatre Smackdown. I love this event, but I sometimes have trouble explaining to people why I enjoy it so much.

Turns out, all I needed was - you guessed it - a deadline. In this case, the deadline of a preview article by Aisle Say Twin Cities’s Sophie Kerman. I think I finally managed to articulate what makes this event so great for me. Please do tell me what you think.

When I was in school, the English language seemed so easy. Girls were shes and boys were hes and that was all we needed to know.

Then I grew up and went out into the world and met people who consider themselves both she and he, neither she nor he, something else altogether, or out of/beyond a gender spectrum altogether. The simplicity of the language started to feel like a severe limitation. A host of alternative pronouns assailed me: ze and zir, fe and fem–none gaining universal traction, few even known outside the small community of genderqueer folks and their allies. A former teacher of mine said, “I’d prefer to call everyone ‘it’, but people can be so touchy.”

So you can, perhaps, imagine my frustration when trying to write a story whose protagonist isn’t human–or any sort of being we generally think of as having gender. I’ve actually wrestled with this in all of my “Restorying the Sacred” posts. For “Bee and Orchid”, I felt okay using “she” because that is how bee societies work: any bee out gathering “messages” from Orchid would be female. In “S and R Dance On”, you may have noted that I cleverly skirted the issue by avoiding pronouns entirely for S and R.

But now we come to “A Song for Dark”. And I found I simply couldn’t keep saying “Dark” over and over without feeling like I was stuck in a poorly-written soap opera. I was going to have to make a Decision.

“She” or “he” never crossed my mind. I tried “ze”, but that was quite distracting and threw me out of the story–even while I was writing it, which boded ill for people reading it. Plus, to speak of darkness having gender seemed to me to force a complex complex into a fairly limiting framework. So I took a page from my teacher’s book and said “it”, though I worried that that would take away the sense of Dark as a living entity. But, looking at the finished product, I think “it” works. It feels right. This story feels right. The English language lives to fight another day.

“A Song for Dark”, a heartwarming holiday tale about light pollution, at No Unsacred Place.

Yesterday I attended a MinnSpec event for which writers anonymously submitted the first thousand words of a story or novel for the privilege of having said excerpt ripped to pieces by current and former slush readers of respected spec publications. This was a fantastic education in the business of writing, and in thickening our collective skins so every rejection doesn’t reduce us to quivering puddles.

One of the slushers, author/editor Michael Merriam, gave us a fabulous pep talk about tenacity. He said something along the lines of, “I’ve known people who are better writers than I am. They just are. But I have eighty short story sales, plus a novel and a couple novellas, because I wanted it more.”

I’ll be the first to admit that I struggle in the tenacity department. My get-up-and-go often lacks both get-up and go. Call it innate lassitude; call it an upbringing that didn’t prioritize aggressively pursuing my dreams; I can’t say that I want it more. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve long thought.

But I looked around that room yesterday, and I realized that, of the 25 people attending, plus the dozen or so who’d filtered through the waiting list, I was one of only eleven who’d had the ovaries to submit an excerpt for critique. A chance at a free and comparatively painless (you should see some of the rejection letters floating around out there) honest assessment of our work, and only eleven of the 400+ official members of MinnSpec had the gumption–the tenacity, dare I say–to throw their hats in the ring.

I’m an inherently disorganized person. But that habit can be unlearned and better ones put in its place; it’s not a fatal flaw. Perhaps, ultimately, the key to being a tenacious person is believing that one is a tenacious person–or at least acting like one. Maybe, after all, I do want it more.

I really enjoy when writers open a story by throwing me into the middle of characters’ lives or the events of the plot and leave me to puzzle things out as I go, revealing bits and pieces of the back story as we progress. This feels, to me, more like real life; after all, I’ve been alive for 33 1/2 years, and only my parents have been around for all of them. If you were to meet me tomorrow, we’d be plunged into the middle of each other’s lives and would learn about each other as we go. I wouldn’t introduce myself by saying, “Hi, my name is Eli, and I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the eldest child of…” Any writer who opens a story in that fashion would have to work very hard to keep my attention for more than a few paragraphs.

And yet, I realize that that is exactly what I’d planned to do with “Restorying the Sacred”! “Bee and Orchid” was a guest post, and I’d intended my first “official” post as a staff writer to be a step-by-step explanation of what I planned to do with this new column. An infodump! My first time out!

Only then Tom Keith died, and I rediscovered the article about the Outcast Star, and a lot of other things seemed a lot more interesting to write about, right off the bat. The explanatory post kept getting pushed out–and that’s to the good (though of course I’d choose to have Tom Keith still be alive over a well-placed exposition in a heartbeat). Because I think, in the intervening weeks, that people got curious, got more involved in the story that’s been unfolding, wanted to know more. Wanted to know, if Tom Waits will forgive me, what I’m building in this small corner of the internet.

And now, all is revealed–complete with silly oaths (don’t worry; no falling on your sword required).

What’s She Building in There? at No Unsacred Place.