Beginning

I'm about to embark on something new even as I'm halfway through the current project because new is a compulsion and feeding the new is the secret to seeing what's becoming old through to completion.

At the moment, I'm repeatedly watching this fantastic old video by Ze Frank and I wanted to share it with you while I go and do Other Things. And as a reminder to buy the poster he made it into at some point because this is something I should have hanging near my writing station.

SciFi Sister Suffragettes: You have got to be kidding me.

August 18th will be the 94th anniversary of an important landmark in American history. (I'm busy that day and I want to talk about this now, so you're getting this post today.) On that date, back in 1919, the 19th amendment passed the final hurdle between being an idea and being the Law of the Land [1]. What a lot of people don't know is that when it passed the US Senate and was turned over the states for ratification, the bill was already 41 years old.

Those 41 years on the road from the pens of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to ratification was a rocky one and not necessarily the gist of this essay, but it's worth remembering that it took longer than I have (at this point) been alive to get the bill from the pen to the people.

The message it sent was as simple as it was revolutionary: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

What a freaking concept.

It would be ratified by the states a year later when Tennessee cast the deciding vote and women's suffrage became the law of the land.

I didn't want to have to follow that with the not-at-all-shocking news that "Women and men should be equal" is somehow still shocking 93 years later. . . and somehow it's even more shocking among a group of men who bill themselves as "futurists".

This post, by the way, is about sex and gender. If you can't handle that, get out. I don't want to turn this blog into a place where I never get down from atop the soapbox, but people keep doing things that put me up here. Seriously, people, cut it out. Treat people the way you want to be treated because I'm getting tired of being up here so often.

We're going to start our conversation in the obvious place: penises and vaginae.

Yes, vaginae; I looked it up.[2]

Why do I want to talk about penises and vaginae? I honestly don't, but for the life of me, I've never been able to fathom why my penis and my Y chromosome would make me superior or inferior to someone who has a vagina and two X chromosomes. And I've spent my entire life trying to figure out why some people with Y chromosomes think that I'm wrong about that. I find it deeply embarrassing that we had to specifically write "Women are people too and shut up about it" into our constitution. It's probably the second most absurd thing we've ever had to do as a nation.[3]

What's worse, this summer it's become clear that there are some who believe that my ability to pee my name into the snow (in flawless Parker penmanship, thank you very much) makes me better qualified to write a science fiction novel[4] or just generally be a nerd. I can't personally vouch for Elizabeth Cady Stanton's views on literature or Science Fiction, but I'd wager she would disagree with that premise.

And so do I.

But it's pointless and condescending for me, as a man, to explain sexism to you. So I'm going to send you away for a bit to read someone else's blog from a few months back to find out what I'm talking about from someone who experienced one of the many forms of it.

Then please come back when you're done, because we're not finished here...

This week in SF

by Anne Aguirre

"So this week, two notable things happened. First, two dinosaurs went on a rampage. Granted, that didn’t happen this week, technically, but this is when the backlash occurred, first for the initial column that ran in the (Science Fiction Writers of America) bulletin, and then there was the rebuttal, bemoaning the spate of anonymous complaints..."

When does it ever end?

It's the "imitation nerd girl" thing all over again. And I find it deeply shameful that I keep having to repeat myself. And I think you should too.

By the way, while I like David Brin and generally think the world of the man's books and his intellect, I think she's wrong to give him a pass. I'm sorry, Dr Brin, but you're not off the hook. Guys who quietly come over later and apologize later are not part of the solution. Going along to get along and apologizing later when no one can hear you isn't a solution, it is the problem.

It's not a solution to sit quietly in the room and laugh uncomfortably while someone is being a bitter, racist, sexist, and/or misogynist asshole. Someone on one of the forums where I saw this posted said "Be David Brin". With respect, no. Don't be the guy who will walk up to your victim later and chuck her on the shoulder and say "Hey, we're not all like that."

Stand up and call the bitter, racist, sexist, misogynist asshole to the carpet. The lack of a negative response from the audience is what perpetuates this kind of behavior.

And if it ends my career because you're too well connected to be touched by a nobody like me, that's how it goes. I would rather fail for the right reasons than succeed for the wrong ones. This industry, this country has had too many years of people doing the wrong thing because they're afraid to do the right one.

Aguirre's post is a bit old and an isolated case, you say? Sadly, no. I was reminded of this today by a friend linking me to Maureen Johnson's suggestion that the gender of the author is the primary concern of cover designers.[5]  Her fans responded to her challenge to re-imagine the covers of male authors' books as they would look if the author had been female. The results are distressingly accurate and generally speak for themselves.

It gets better?

Maybe a little. Honestly, I think it just gets more complicated.

During Comic Con last week, an internet-based music group called The Doubleclicks put out a video called "Nothing to prove" in defense of the geek girl (embedded at the bottom of this post) and they were greeted by the geeky Great and the Good with open arms. The geekiest geek guys of them all, John Scalzi, Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage were all in there, holding up signs saying "C'mon guys, join us in the future. You'll like it here, we have equality and jet packs... just kidding about the jetpacks."

As I said last time sexism in nerd culture reared its unsightly head: This shouldn't be necessary. This kind of thing is beneath us. It is beneath our intellect; it is unworthy of our ideals; it stands opposed to our own quasi-Utopian ideal that humanity can be better than it is.

The 21st century is shaping up to be a time when formerly nerdy/geeky enthusiasms are pursued with furious abandon. When science fiction rules the marketplace just as it rules the silver screen and it feels like anything is possible if we could just stop hating and turn our energies to accomplishing something. Together. And while we nerds haven't quite built Utopia, it is a world where - as predicted by Herbert Gerjouy - the illiterate is not the one who cannot read, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn, and re-learn.

It's time for us all to prove we're worthy of our reputation for literacy and our earnest wish to live in the future.  We supposedly had this figured out 93 years ago. So catch up, wouldya?

Now someone help me down from this soap box before I fall off and break a hip.

-----

[1] My home state of Missouri ratified it on what would someday be my birthday. It's long been one of my favorite trivia tidbits about that day.  
[2] I don't advise doing that, by the way. Certainly not in public. If you must search for "vaginae", use a dictionary, or a medical text book, anything but the internet. Just trust me on this one. 
[3] For those who slept through American history class back in grade school, it took several laws, a constitutional amendment, and a catastrophic war to convince certain people that they didn't get to own certain other people just because those people had darker skin.
[4] Not by peeing in the snow, for the record. Not even I drink that much coffee.
[5] For the record, you shouldn't necessarily hate on cover designers for that. They do what art directors and editors tell them to do at the big houses and at the small houses or for indie authors, we do what the author asks for. Graphic design is a service industry and we don't exercise a lot of personal volition about design content. 

Self Publish or Traditional Publish? Which is the right way?

Yesterday, my cousin, who is also an author, posted this on my Facebook wall and asked my feelings about it.

Self-publishing has become a cult@Salon.com

The writer has encountered something I've heard a million times: If you go with a big publisher, you're selling out. If you go indie it's because you're not good enough to catch a bigger fish. If you're at a small press, you're almost cool enough to sit at the table with the hip kids, but you have to wear a scarlet P and sit at the far end.

Every day at every writing conference, this plays out.

And it's all BS.

Trust me, I grew up in cow country and I know bull poo when I see it.

I think the idea that there is one path to print is behind us. In some ways, the self-publishing movement and small presses that have grown out of it are the AAA ball of publishing. Some resent being referred to as minor leagues because it hurts their feelings. I don't care about your feelings. If you wear your heart on your sleeve, keep your book in the drawer where it belongs.

Publishers are inevitable. If the Big Six fell tomorrow, a thousand small presses would fill the vacuum because most of us have no interest in doing everything ourselves. And when we do it all ourselves, for the most part, we turn out some pretty crappy, un-or-unevenly edited crap.

There are exceptions, but not many. Publishers play those roles. The middle man is not a freeloader, they provide a valuable service for reader and writer alike. There will be some who can only find a readership on their own. For others, they will never find an audience, certainly not a broad audience, without an army shouting their name until it is heard above the din.

Want to do it alone and hire professionals to edit your book and design a cover and typeset your pages? Congrats, you're a publisher. I know what I charge for covers and it means you're better financed than most and applying that level of hurdle for writers to leap before they can reach an audience leaves out a huge portion of the voices telling stories that need to be heard.

For every one truly indie author that rises from the unwashed ranks of free self-published, unedited e-books, there are tens of thousands lost in the tumult. This is the primary role of publishers. Is it always fair? No. Is it easy to get over the wall? No. Is it always good? Of course not. But it is a system that has curated our literary culture for a few centuries now and they've done more good than bad. Because while we lambast them for their Davinci Codes and their encouragement of the "Me Too" market that has turned the YA section into the "Hot Vampire" section, the dollars spent on that pap gives cover to books like The Bookthief and The Adventures of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. And Davinci Code allows books like The Corrections and The Yiddish Policeman's Union a bit of breathing room to flourish and find their audience.

And while the midlist is frequently eulogized, it lives on in the smaller imprints that have risen up to take the slack and live leaner on smaller profit margins than the Big Six can sell to their stockholders.

Publishers are not evil. We just like to make them seem remote and uncaring and evil because it suits our personal narrative for it to be so. They're not the bad guys and we're not the heroes. We're all just trying to do the best we can to get our art made and in front of the people who want to read it.

The path for most will fall somewhere between. If you get your books in the hands of the people you want to read them and are able to write the next one, you did it the right way. If that doesn't suit someone else's vision of "The Right Way" to hell with them.

Extreme views in either direction make me stop listening. I don't have time for zealots.

tl:dr?
Watch John Green's acceptance speech for the ABA's 2013 Indie Champion Award. He's pretty darned close to what I wanted to say here.

Dumbo's Feather Revisited: Of Rituals and Writers

This is going to be a bit long. I apologize in advance.

I noticed recently that my coffee ritual has become rather sloppy of late. Rather than carefully monitoring the temperature of the water and the exactitude of my scoops of ground coffee, I've been sort of winging it -- phoning it in. Thankfully, the quality of your beans will save you to a point, but only just.

I've essentially perfected the mediocre cup of great coffee.

For those who think I might've sold out with that coffee cup logo, fear not. My favorite cafe has long since closed its doors and faded into local memory.

And whither goes the coffee shop, thither followed my writing ritual...

There just aren't enough writer-friendly coffee shops in the world any more. Speak not to me of the sundrenched sterility of the Starbucks lobby. I seek a dim place of creaky chairs and enthusiastically nerdy conversations. A place of fair-to-middlin' coffee and poor lighting. Lots of places to plug in a laptop are nice, but not required. Sketchy wifi is a plus because I get more done when Facebook's siren song is muted and unreliable.

How did I get so reliant on rituals? When did I teach myself that I can only fly while clutching a feather in my trunk? And why is there a mouse wearing a drum major getup in my hat anyway?

You'll note that this is one of those posts where I laboriously link back to previous posts where I told all of you not to do the very things I'm complaining about. That's because I call out hypocrisy wherever I find it, especially in myself. And I have to remind myself that I should practice as I preach.

And no, for the record, it doesn't help. Not one bit.

Why is my coffee so pathetically mediocre and why am I not writing regularly?

It would be easy to blame my current Big Crazy Project™ which is quite a bit more physical than my usual projects. I'm supposed to be making neat things and writing about them. I've made a lot of sawdust this year, and even knitted a stocking cap, but not much with knitting together the words. I don't really know why.

Speaking of big crazy, I just built a kitchen full of cabinets from scratch. My home is in a bit of an uproar as only a kitchen remodel can make it. Blame that!

It's not the kitchen's fault. It's not because I can't really get in there to make a decent cuppa; done right, all you really need is a clean sock, a kettle and some patience.

Yes, a sock. Not that I regularly use a sock, but you can. (And many aficionados swear by it.)  But you don't find me at the bathroom sink with my socks in the coffee pot any more than you find me at the computer studiously applying words to pages.

I could blame work.

In January, after a lengthy stint of under-employment, I began working full time at the writing center, taking on additional duties of marketing and graphic design atop my usual stints of database management and other jack-of-all-trades job duties.

It's taken some getting used to, this working full-time thing. But I can't really blame that. I work a solid 40 hours a week and then I'm required by union rules and state law to knock it off. I wrote three novels working 50+ hours a week (at all hours of day or night) for Borders.

The truth is, I just haven't felt like it.  It's a stupid and simple as that.

I haven't been feeling like putting that much effort into perfect coffee or perfect prose. Hell, even mediocre prose has been a bit out of reach of late. It's not writer's block -- as you know, I don't actually believe in writer's block.

So what is it? Depression? Lack of ambition? Stress? Too much sleep? Uninspired?

Sometimes in the dark watches of the night as I lay staring at the ceiling I seriously ask myself: Am I out of ideas?  Then I get up and jot ten or eleven ideas in the notebook I keep next to my bed just to prove to myself that I can and go back to sleep.

At the end of the day, I'm stuck with the uncomfortable truth: I've just gotten sloppy. With my coffee, with my writing process. Sloppy. I allowed myself to become over-reliant on a space and defined period of time set aside to do it. Too reliant on ritual and not enough on the simple steps of getting stories from brain to page.

I've long been an advocate of approaching writing from the standpoint that amateurs wait for inspiration while the professional puts their butt in the chair and puts words on the page.

So I'm flipping my advice on rituals on its head a bit. I'm going to have to accept at some point that there's a certain amount of ritual that I require in my life. It starts with coffee this morning. And from there, I opened this blog and actually typed out a blog post. Something I've been regretfully neglecting this year.

This afternoon, over a cold sandwich, I will update the Renaissance Artisan project on my progress in that project.

Later tonight, (after the counter tops are installed and I've put up a few dozen linear feet of bead board) I will sit down to my novel-in- progress and begin the first-half rewrite. Wifi disabled, I will write until my fingers seize up and I realize it's time for bed.

And let that be my new feather and my new mouse-in-a-silly hat.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Readers make the best writers

She asked: How did you learn to write?

The simple answer was "In school, just like everyone else" but the simple answer is seldom true even when it is factual. Yes, I learned to write in school. But the real question I think this student wanted to ask was "How did you learn to be a writer?"

And between writing and being a writer is a difference with a definite distinction.

I didn't say "In school", what I said was "By reading a lot of terrible books."

I don't think she believed me, but it's true.

I think all writers learn essentially the same way; not by diagramming sentences, but by reading them. Want to be a writer? Read vigorously and voluminously. Read everything you can get your hands on.

We learn to write by reading what others have written. We see what others did and imitating the ones we like and not the ones we hate. Slowly and by fits and starts we discover how to make dialogue sound like speech. And most importantly, we learn how to make decisions by making guesses about what will happen next and getting as excited by being wrong as we are when we're right. Because if we are wrong about the outcome of the story, that means we've come up with a new story, an alternative decision.

My dad called that daydreaming, but in reality it's the first steps of storytelling.

Sure, Scott, but you said "Reading lots of terrible books."

Bad books are in many ways more informative than the good ones. I learned plenty reading books I loved and cherished. My shelves are full of those books, but the ones I learned the most from are the ones I didn't buy or got rid of as quickly as possible. In many ways, I learned to write by reading books I hated and then making a point of not doing what those authors did.

Want to be a writer? Read. You want to try to recognize what the writer is doing, but before you do that, you have to read. Good books, bad books, fiction and non-fiction, blogs, newspapers, magazines, and comic books. In libraries and classrooms and secret reading nooks, under trees by the light of the sun and under the covers by the light of Mag. If it makes you want to throw it across the room in anger or frustration, fine.

But then go pick it up and try to figure out what it is that made you turn a book into a missile. Because that... that is a writer's homework in the only education we get. And a writer, as I always say, is someone who volunteered to keep doing homework everyday for the rest of our lives.

There aren't many rules to writing; don't let English teachers tell you different. But there's one that I abide by without fail: don't write them unless you read them.

The perils of non-fiction...

For some reason, I find that non-fiction is harder to write about than fiction.

At this point in my writing life, it's strange and exciting to be doing something entirely new. To slake my appetite for words with some new flavor and test my tools on new materials.

My apologies for not posting more often. If you are following my non-fiction project blog "School of the Renaissance Artisan" you'll know that I haven't died or gotten lost in the woods. It's just that I haven't as much experience writing nonfiction, so I don't feel authoritative enough to really give good tips or even talk about it much.

For one thing, the "characters" I'm writing about are real rather than figments of my imagination, so I must be more careful with them. And they certainly won't do as I tell them or go where I want them to go at the whim of making a good story. And I can't just write them out of the narrative if they're being recalcitrant.

I can see why memoirists have been so notoriously prone to making stuff up.

And then there's the constant distraction of my drug-of-choice: research.

I've written before, at length, about the dangers of too much research. Often it becomes an excuse for procrastinating the beginning of a project. One more book and I'll be ready. I must constantly fight the impulse to get so lost in the minutia of a project that I never actually get around to beginning it.

The internet is especially good at sucking me down the research rabbit hole, yet this project would be next to impossible without it. Though I honestly profess to a Luddite streak a mile wide and a preference for the thousands of physical printed books on the shelves around me, without my e-Reader and computer, I would not have access to many of the reserves of the great libraries of the world. The Internet Archive alone is a font of knowledge that just keeps flowing and refilling like the oil can in the Hanukkah story. The historical works of Roubo and Moxon would be out of reach without a lengthy trip to the libraries that still hold copies behind glass and subsequent negotiations with their caretakers for access.

Without this font of distraction that is the internet, I would not have access to the consistently generous of masters of their crafts Chris Schwartz and Peter Follansbee; I would never have met virtually with historical cordwainer Francis Classe; nor would I have had the unpublished pin research of Rachel Jardine drop unannounced into my email inbox.  The curator emeritus of the Museum of London's medieval collections would likely never have sent me a parcel of research books as he did electronically at the outset of this project.

Technology is, as ever, both angel and demon, giving with one hand as it takes with the other.

As strange as it sounds, the hardest part of this project has been to remember to write about it. As dangerous a drug as research can be, more perilous by far is the lure of Making Neat Things. And I did not anticipate the high I get from discussing Making Neat Things with other makers online and in person. It's akin to the feeling of stepping from the workaday world into a writer's conference and for the first time finding yourself surrounded by hundreds of people who live the best parts of their lives internally. The conversations are different, the kinship you feel with almost everyone you encounted is intoxicating... and if you're not careful you'll spend so much time talking you forget to do.

As I and other writers have often said: writers aren't writers unless they write something. The same can be said of makers and any other of hundreds of trades such as these.

So I have been making a concerted effort to do more than I talk, which is sort of against the blogging aesthetic. Hence my lengthy absences for which I apologize.

Now if you will kindly excuse me, the sun is out and I've some doing to do.

~ Scott

The School of the Renaissance Artisan is a yearlong project to unlock the histories of the renaissance craft guilds and reunite the author with his craftsmen heritage. One man, 54 Livery Companies, 111 trades, 52 weeks. Join the fun at http://renaissanceartisan.blogspot.com/

Designing Books with the Hilariously Legendary Chip Kidd