alexandraerin

So the party I threw at WisCon started out purely as a retrospective celebration of Tales of MU. By the time it came around, though, I was thinking more of the future than the past, and it coincided with the time where I was ready to launch my new project, Secret Sisterhood of Superheroes.

I set the first part of the prologue to go live during the party, and then I read it aloud. It’s now available to read, along with the other three parts of the short “Issue 0” prologue that ran through the end of May. The first part deals with the divergence points of history in this universe, where a star fell and changed the shape of the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States, creating new land that became the cities of Star Harbor and Calvary Crossing, in the state of Hamilton.

When I was writing stories in this universe before, I always said that Star Harbor was in the great state of *cough*mumble*cough*. I kept its exact location vague for two reasons. One was the DC comic book trope of adding imaginary cities in unspecified locations. The other was that, as a Midwesterner, I didn’t really know the eastern seaboard well enough to locate the story in a particular place.

I’ve been living in the mid-Atlantic region full time for a few years now, following even more years of splitting my time between them, though, and I have a much better feel for the geography and political psychology of the region… good enough that I felt confident anchoring the story in (or at least adjacent to) a real place.

After my reading, someone told me I had done a great job of capturing the region in my description, which was really validating as I am a fairly recent transplant.

I also received high marks for the references to Alexander Hamilton. It might seem a little like a slow take on the popular zeitgeist, but Alexander Hamilton and (to a lesser extent, Aaron Burr) have always loomed large in the secret history of the Star Harbor superhero universe. I think the closest I ever came to referencing it was a mention of a portrait of Hamilton in the lobby of a certain shadowy government agency. The rise of Hamilton as a pop culture phenomenon is part of what convinced me it’s time to go back to this story verse, and also to bring the alternate history element out into the forefront.

The other thing about the reading is: it went really well. I have never given a reading before that went well, at least from my point of view. I’ve always had severe stage fright-like anxiety when I try: shaky legs, shaky voice, desperately trying to control my pace from a panicky gallop, etc. The fear even tends to creep in when I try to record myself reading something.

This time? Nothing. None of that. I’m sure it’s no one thing but a confluence of reasons that reached a critical tipping point, but I just… hit my stride. Found my voice. Was in my element. It went well. It went so well that I’m planning on doing an actual official programmed reading next year.

Anyway. Issue 0, short as it is, is now live. The first chapter of Issue 1 goes up later tonight, and Issue 1 will continue to run throughout the month with new updates about every other day.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

I am feeling a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about my writing this week. I’m going to digress here to say: this is not me fishing for external reassurance, nor do I want any. The odds of anyone reading this coming up with something that is helpful that I haven’t already considered are very low; the odds of saying something that aggravates the situation is considerably higher. So please respect the fact that I’m writing this out to 1) process what I’m feeling and 2) let anyone interested know where I am at, and sit on your hands until the urge to say something about it passes.

Back at the start of January—the start of the year, it now feels like it was months ago—I started a new approach to writing that balances my desire to Make All The Things at once with my need to hyperfocus on a single thing to get anything done: Make All The Things, but one at a time, about a week at a time.

My first week test case was extremely successful, and I talked about having a sort of rotating semi-regular roster of projects I would work on one week at a time, getting material to publish over the course of a month or more each time. I got three months’ worth of material out of my first week, and two months’ out of my second one.  The idea is that if, with a week of focused production I tend to produce more than a month’s worth of material, I could easily have 3 or more ongoing serial projects with room for side projects (like standalone short stories, game stuff, etc.) and interruptions in the work schedule.

I was coy at the time about what projects I was going to try the experiment with after my test, because I didn’t want to either disappoint people when their favorite long-simmering story wasn’t on the initial short list or get their hopes up by mentioning something that might not pan out. This was, after all, an experiment.

The most concrete example of this is Tales of MU, which I knew back at the start of January would either be the story I worked on during the last week of the month, or it wouldn’t be.

My feelings about Tales of MU are complicated. From the start, I thought of it as a freshman story… a story about people making a lot of mistakes and learning from some of them. At the same time, it was (unintentionally and, at first, unwittingly), my freshman story… a story where I made a lot of mistakes, and one hopes, learned from them.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of when I started writing it. It’s a weird thing to be tethered to a story from ten years ago. I was a very different person ten years ago. I thought I knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t, and I didn’t know a lot of stuff that I think I do now. I was working through some pretty heady issues at the time, and it shows in the writing which includes themes I would have avoided if I’d started it now. But, of course, if I hadn’t worked through them in my writing, I probably wouldn’t be able to say that. Certainly I would have made the campus’s human majority population less homogeneously white if I’d started writing it today, and not been as cavalier about applying stereotypical racial tropes to fantasy creatures. I really didn’t know the difference between “saying something about a thing” and “having something to say about a thing” back then.

Tales of MU grew out of my nostalgic memories of Basic D&D and 2nd Edition AD&D at a time when I wasn’t playing then-current 3rd Edition D&D, and it has a lot of original stuff I put in or changed to make things better or more interesting than the distant source material. Since I started writing it, I got really into 4th and 5th Edition D&D, which makes the nostalgia base of TOMU a lot less emotionally resonant to me.

These things might weigh on me a little less if this were a conventional book series. A long running series of books still has each book as a self-contained volume with their own beginning and end. It’s easier to see the “now” of such a series as being self-contained compared to what came before.

Tales of MU is not like that; the “books” are more divisions of convenience and one of my goals when writing it was to tell a story for people who prefer to live in the middle part of a story rather than the beginning or end.

I’ve done that, and I don’t regret doing that, but the problem is, such a story has no natural ending point.

(This is the part where people want to jump in to tell me what they think the natural ending point is. Restrain yourself. That impulse is not your friend.)

Financially, it’s also complicated. I can make more money writing Tales of MU than not writing it, but there was only a very brief window when I first broke out in the crowdfunded writing scene where it was enough to justify the work it takes to make that money. At the same time, the fact that I didn’t write or publish any Tales of MU during my “fiction drought” around the election hurt my finances more than anything else about that period. The financial benefit is not likely to increase meaningfully, as new material is tied to ten years of previously written material of widely varying tone and quality.

Ultimately, whether I want to and am able to continue writing it is not going to be a financial decision so much as a creative and personal one.

And then we get to the fanbase, which is also complicated. The thing is, I know even as I write this that I’m going to see commentary to the effect of “I knew her heart was in it.” or “It was obvious she’d given up and moved on.” I see those messages all the time. Part of the vicious cycle of trying to keep up an update schedule is that any time it slips—even by an hour, literally an hour—I start hearing “SO I GUESS YOU’VE GIVEN UP WRITING TALES OF MU MIGHT HAVE SAID SOMETHING INSTEAD OF GHOSTING” or “please Ms. Erin tell us what we did wrong”… and honestly, it’s hard for me to explain why both of those messages are so disheartening, but they are.

It’s especially hurtful to have people bruiting about their commentary on my “decision” when I’m wrestling with a story, struggling to overcome difficulties in writing. Imagine you’re buried in an avalanche and you’re trying to dig your way out, and people are standing in earshot debating about whether you’re selfish for deciding to be buried, or if your decision to be buried is valid and must be respected. Even the people defending you are calmly talking about how you decided to be trapped under tons of earth, and blithely assuming that at the very moment you decide to, you will effortlessly shift it away.

The thing is, I do better at things—at any thing—when I can document my process and process my feelings here, butI I long ago gave up writing anything about writing Tales of MU and where I am, because every process post attracts these comments. At one point I made a post saying that conditions were untenable in the home office so I was taking my laptop to a coffee shop to finish the day’s chapter and I received a tweet saying “So I guess you’re saying there’s no chapter today.” Not even exaggerating. I made a blog post about my plans to finish the chapter and someone took it as confirmation that there wasn’t going to be one.

This isn’t even getting into the people who don’t understand that writing is not mechanical labor, that it is not a simple matter of sitting in front of a keyboard and pressing the Make Story Button fifteen thousand times in a row. But that’s relevant, because the cumulative effect of the weight of expectations and entitlement and misguided/errant advice is that it makes the creative aspect of the work harder. It pulls me out of my creative brainspace.

Call me a precious special snowflake with delicate feelings (out loud, preferably, where I don’t have to hear it), but this is the quantum interference aspect of direct author/audience interaction – the act of observing an author at work has ways of affecting an author at work. This is a big part of why I’ve been increasingly distant from my fanbase and hard to reach over time. It’s not even about abusive or obviously over-entitled fans. It’s getting the same advice, having people make the same assumptions about what’s going on in my head, hearing my circumstances or outcomes dissected as decisions, over and over again. I’ve been working on toughening myself up and shifting into a mindset of “If they don’t know me, it doesn’t matter what they think.”, but the catch-22 of it is that it’s really hard to do this kind of self-improvement work while you’re still being peppered with it.

To use a metaphor: it’s a lot easier to repair the shields on the starship Enterprise when it’s not actively taking fire.

Anyway. People have assumed that Tales of MU is over or that I’m “on the bubble” for canceling it many times, often while I was trying to gear up to breathe new life into it. There have been maybe two times I have seriously considered canceling it. One of them was last summer, just before my most recent revitalization attempt.

That attempt fizzled out not just because of the election stuff, but because I got right up to the end of the current storyline and found I had no idea what to write next. Perversely, this made it impossible for me to write the last installment of the current story. I know exactly what happens. I could tell someone the nutshell version of it. It’s not very exciting or important as everything about the problem at hand was more or less wrapped up in the currently-last chapter. The last chapter of the storyline was meant to just be a coda.

It’s just that the weight of not knowing what comes next and the need to continue the story makes it hard to tie off the current one with a bow.

This is the third time I’ve thought seriously about ending the series. I made the decision at the start of the month that I would, in fact, and I have to tell you: it felt liberating. I don’t think I could have written a NaNo worth of a single story in under eight days if I’d had “…but I need to be writing Tales of MU” running through my head.

During my family vacation, I thought about how I would end it, if I would do a “flash forward/montage” of the characters or reveal some of the things that have been lurking in the background, stuff like that. Which got me thinking about the things about the story that do still resonate with me, and made me start to vacillate a little bit.

And so I ultimately decided that this week would be Tales of MU week in my great experiment. I’d write the coda for the current storyline and then see if I could work out What Comes Next and how it goes, writing it out in advance. I could do regular updates if I could summon a week’s worth of enthusiasm for the story every month, month and a half, or so. And recent events have given me more stories I want to tell in the world.

Now that we’re here… I’m less sure I can commit to having a week’s worth of enthusiasm for the story every 4 to 6 weeks. I’m also less sure that I could walk away from it. To tell you the honest truth, when I started writing this post I had one idea about which of the two options I was going to pick, and it switched back and forth a few times as I’m writing this.

This is what I mean by “processing”, by the way, when I talk about how I process things on my blog.

And as this post approaches what I consider the minimum length for a decent chapter, I come to a decision, or rather a realization: when you’re faced with two choices and neither one is palatable, you should ask yourself if you’re really limited to those two.

Are my choices really to commit to an ongoing writing/publishing schedule or to wash my hands and walk away? No, no they are not.

So, to get to the meat of it: I am going to spend this week working on Tales of MU, finishing the current storyline and beginning the next one. I am not going to stop writing it, officially cancel it, etc. But from here on out, I will be writing stories in the Tales of MU universe and posting them to the Tales of MU site when I have something to say, not merely to perform the rote act of filling out a quota or hitting a schedule.

How many years have I been repeating the line about creativity not being a mechanical act? I’m finally starting to believe it myself.

Anyone trying to glean hints about the frequency of updates going forward from this is going to be shooting in the dark. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. It’s possible that the act of unburdening myself from expectations will turn me into a writing machine and re-ignite the spark of passion completely. It’s possible that it will just be a side thing, an occasional dalliance, going forward. Who can say?

I’ll avoid posting more than two chapters a week, for the benefit of the folks on the Tales of MU patreon who are pledged on a per-update basis (the only fair way to proceed, since I’m not guaranteeing production in a given month), though most of them seem to have sensible caps on their patronage based on their monthly budget anyway.

But that’s a best case scenario, not a baseline.

So here is where the post ends. I’ll tack on a caveat – everything I’m doing this month is experimental. This week’s experiment is Tales of MU. If it goes very well, I will tie off the current storyline with a bow and start the next one immediately. If it goes well, I will tie off the current storyline with a bow and begin prepping the next storyline, for when the next time Tales of MU comes up in my informal, shifting rota.

If it goes terribly? Well, that might be the end. I’m making no decisions in advance here.

Either way, a big thank you to everyone for reading… both this blog post, and anything else I’ve written that you’ve read.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days resting and recovering from travel and looking back at the tens of thousands of words I had written for Secret Sisterhood of Superheroes the week before, trying to get a better feel for the structure of the story, making some incidental improvements that occurred to me while I was in transit, and figuring out how I will serialize it.

I had been thinking of the whole 30,000+ word story as one “issue” of the series, and thinking it would collectively represent one month’s worth of publication. This would be a hard feat to match on a monthly basis, so I considered calling the first “issue” a “Giant-Sized” or “Double-Sized” issue, to continue the comic metaphor.

After reviewing it again, I have realized it divides pretty neatly into thirds, with each third focusing strongly on a character (J.J., Cassandra, Princess) who holds the viewpoint for most of the story. Each major viewpoint shift quite naturally comes at a pivotal/transitional point in the story, which makes for a decent issue break.

Each of the issues has about six major segments of similar lengths, so my first impulse here is to release them with a M-W-F schedule, with each issue then being two weeks. This would mean in a little over a week, I created six weeks of content. That seems like a lot of padding.

But on the other hand, part of the reason I’m doing this “weekly writing marathon” approach to different projects is I want to be able to do lots of different projects without worrying about falling behind. And I don’t expect to have quite as fruitful writing weeks every week, and most weeks I’m going to want to confine my major editing to the same week that I’m writing.

So I think I’m just going to follow the comic book metaphor whole hog and release each issue in multiple installments over the course of a month. Patrons will get the whole issue at the time the first installment goes live, on my Patreon.

I’ll follow a similar model for whatever else I wind up continuing on a serial basis: writing as much as I can in a week, dividing that up into monthly issues made up of smaller installments as makes sense for the material and project, and then releasing them in installments to the public and as entire issues to my patrons.

As for the big question of when I’m going to start publishing: that’s still to be determined and to be announced. I’m going to be consulting with some folks about the depiction of the Afro-Latina characters such as Princess. This will involve paid sensitivity readers, which will require me to do some crowdfunding before the story is live since I’m working with a starting budget of $0. It’s something I’m committed to doing right, though.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

The Meta Skinny

In my post on J.J. “Labrys” Masterson, I mentioned how the character that became her was originally meant to be the closest to “mere mortal”on the team, and how J.J. herself is sort of the heart of the team as it will exist in the new story. But J.J. is an actual superhuman, and as I developed her character, I felt it was important to have someone whose presence would help keep her in touch with her human side, someone who would be “more human than human” to her, and this turned out to be Princess.

Short version is that I went from the idea of J.J. exclusively having relationships with her superpowered team members to J.J.’s primary relationship being with someone whose concerns are closer to home for the average human being. Princess’s initial worries in the story are things like affording house payments and repairs, juggling jobs, and finding a way to go back and get her master’s.

An aside about the writing process: I didn’t sit down before I started and say “Need Someone To Humanize J.J.”, then create a character to check that off. It was something I discovered through the process of writing and re-writing.

Princess was there as a minor character on day one. Each time I gave another pass over what I’d written so far in the first three days, Princess’s part got bigger and her personality and identity got more developed, and I started to think about what she was bringing to the story, and then worked to make sure that was happening to best effect. I can talk about my goals for a character and what they bring, but it’s all very organic. No one’s there just to fill in a gap or check an item off a list. While I can talk about “what Princess does for J.J.” on a story level, in-story a lot of how she does this is by letting J.J. do things for her.

Princess’s part actually grew so much over revisions that yesterday I realized she was actually a viewpoint character in her own right, and today I re-wrote a couple of J.J. segments accordingly. Princess is now the focal/viewpoint character for the sections of the story that focus on her and J.J.’s relationship, in particular, which includes the one love scene in the story so far. What was the story of J.J.’s budding relationship with her is now the story of her budding relationship with J.J.

This makes the scenes work so much better, because let’s face it, J.J. is a bit of a weirdo (proudly so!) and the scenes work better when the audience can see what exactly J.J. does for Princess, in Princess’s eyes, and when the audience knows why Princess is taking a chance on her. J.J.’s agency in the scenes is obvious, but when you can’t see what’s behind Princess’s eyes, Princess reads as a lot more passive than she actually is.

Who Princess Is

Princess Elena Martinez is an Afro-Latina lesbian and a registered nurse, currently underemployed in a museum (it’s an insurance thing) because hospitals have too many migraine triggers. “Princess” is not a code name or a title, it’s what her mother named her, and she won’t stand for anyone to say anything about her name or her mother. Early on, she tells J.J. the reason that if she needs to hear that there’s nothing wrong with her name, it isn’t because she doesn’t know it, but that she needs to know that other people know it.

Obviously I’m going to have a lot of work to do in terms of developing the character properly through revisions, hopefully with beta readers with actual relevant lived experience, but I made the decision to cast this character in this direction because she was shaping up to be what J.J. refers to as her “important kissing friend”, and I wanted her to be a part of the answer (or at least not be more of the problem) to some of the troublesome tropes around women of color in general and Black women in particular getting love stories, and Black queer presentation being automatically coded by the White Gaze as “butch” or “masc”.

This is a big part of the meta reason why her name is Princess: I want the femme coding to be there on the page, every time she comes up. You can’t even say her name without reifying her feminity and her femme-ininity. Her name means she’s valued. Her name means she’s important. Her name means she’s femme. She knows it; she doesn’t need to be told because she already knows it; she just needs to know you know it, too.

Princess and J.J.

She’s not the love interest in the sense of being the prize the hero wins, but in the sense of the person the hero loves and is interested in. She is J.J.’s closest confidante, the first person she reveals her powers to deliberately (side-stepping the “hero forced to keep lying to and eventually straight-up gaslighting love interest to maintain secret identity” trope), and the person she comes to admire most in the world. She’s also the person whose troubles J.J. is always ready to hear, whose burdens J.J. always wants to take on.

In a world of gods and monsters, Princess is the person J.J. can most look at with wonder and awe in her eyes, while being fully human. J.J. doesn’t try to win Princess by saving her or saving the world or doing good deeds or favors; she gets to know her and invites Princess to know her in return, and tries to do things that honor her needs and desires as a person.

I shared this on the social mediums earlier today, but here’s a (rough) teaser of the scene where J.J. declares her intentions:

“And you clocked me as a lesbian the very first time we met?” Princess said.

“Well, yeah?” J.J. replied. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Princess said. “And you swear to God you are not messing with me, jerking me around? You’re talking to me because you like me?”

“Yeah? Kind of a lot, maybe? I mean, I don’t know you, but you’re nice and smart and you’re a nurse who works in a museum and I think you’re neat?”

“Why do you care that I’m a nurse who works in a museum?”

“You don’t know? It’s exactly like being a cupcake baker who works in a haunted house.”

“Exactly… how is it like that?”

“It’s a neat job in a neat place!”

“Neat,” Princess repeated. J.J. nodded. “So, you’re interested… what? Romantically? Sexually?”

“Whatever you want? I’ll be your friend who holds your hand if you want a hand-holding friend. I’ll kiss you if you want a kissing friend. And I’ll just hang out with you if you want a just hanging out friend. If there was like an app where you could swipe in all kinds of different directions for, you know, all whatever different kinds of things you might be up for or down for, I would swipe in all directions for you just to see which one you swiped.”

“I’m… going to need some time alone with that sentence and a dry erase board, but I think that might be the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me. I mean, it’d sound desperate if it wasn’t so damned earnest.”

“Oh, no! It’s totally both? I’m totally both,” J.J. said. “Earnestly desperate. Desperately earnest. I mean, I just think you’re swell? That’s all.”

What wins Princess over is that J.J. really does have no expectations or demands of her. She just wants to be available, for hanging out or whatever, and isn’t sure how to signal this to people who might be interested. At the time of the story, Princess is a few months out from the end of a really bad long-term relationship with a partner who did nothing to take care of her while being very demanding of her time and energy, and given that she’s a nurse all day long, what Princess is looking for when she meets J.J. is someone who will take care of her.

She’s not looking for another U-Haul experience because she doesn’t want to be tied down herself after devoting years of her life to someone who never gave back, she’s not looking for someone who needs a commitment from her or someone who needs to be babied and taken care of (she’s initially apprehensive of J.J. because of J.J.’s pointedly youthful modes of self-expression, but when she realizes the extent to which J.J. is, as she puts it, “weirdly self-sufficient”, it’s another point for her.)

At the same time, she’s a very compassionate person. Her first interactions with J.J. are urging her to go to the hospital because she was knocked unconscious (which, by the way, is seriously a big deal, even if you wake up minutes later; turns out J.J. has superpowers, but most people don’t). She makes it clear to J.J. that wanting someone to treat her for a change doesn’t mean she’s looking for anyone to be a martyr, and that it’s important for J.J. to stay connected to human things like eating and sleeping, even if her body doesn’t seem to need them the same ways.

Power(ed) Princess?

Now, I anticipate a question regarding her as representation. This is a superhero fantasy story, so: is Princess going to have powers of her own?

As of this writing, Princess does not have any and I don’t specifically plan for her to have any. That’s not “no”, it’s “I don’t know. Maybe? Let’s find out together!”As I said: no one is in this story just to be something to someone else. She’s not ever going to be there just to keep J.J. grounded or to patch up wounds.

When the story is set at ground level, Princess is helping keep things grounded. Once the story really gets off the ground (literally and figuratively, it will eventually soar to great heights), Princess is going to take off with it. I just do not yet have a clear idea what that will entail for her or the story, but I’m committed to doing it in a way that maintains her status as The Human Element in the story. This doesn’t mean no powers or other fantasy elements! It’s about her perspective as much as anything else.

It’s like I said: Princess is a very recent, very organic addition to the story, and so naturally the long-term plans for her are very loose and open-ended. I’m juggling some options, none of them very firm. Who knows? She could even turn out to be an actual princess. It’s a fantasy story! Why not? Let’s see where it goes.

My Pledge As A Writer

I can tell you some things that won’t happen with Princess.

She’s not going to die or suffer trauma to give J.J. tragic motivation. She’s not going to sacrifice herself. She’s not going to be pushed aside by J.J. for someone else. If her relationship with J.J. ends, it’s going to be because she herself is moving on (there are some “rebound” elements to the relationship for her, after all) and it’s not going to be a drama bomb, maybe some sadness but no recrimination.

Sorry if these seem like spoilers, but back in the day when I was writing Star Harbor Nights and also when I started Tales of MU, my mantra was “wish fulfillment is boring and overdone”. As I’ve matured as a writer, I’ve come to realize that not everybody gets to see their wishes fulfilled with equal frequency in fiction, and that stories that have been done to death with straight white cis guys and conventionally attractive thin white cis female leads still have plenty of room to break ground for everybody else. The character of Princess as she’s emerging is based on specific under-fulfilled wishes that I’ve heard friends express.

And again, I’m not putting all the representation eggs in a single basket. There will be Black and Latina heroines as main characters in the story with powers, no matter what happens with Princess. Again, the first chunk of story is concerned with introducing a small sub-section of the ensemble, but I have a whole team roster planned, and subsequent installments will shift the focus to the other characters who need introducing.

Now, the key word I want to emphasize again is “emerging”. She is an emerging character with an emerging story. The story as it exists now was written at a gallop pace (~30,000 words in one week), with the revisions that were made being substantial enough that they themselves are still basically first drafts. There’s a lot of room to grow and develop and change. I’m committed to this character, but I’m committed to doing her as well as I can. I won’t say “right” because there is no level of getting it right that’s 100%. Taking a risk with a character means taking responsibility for the character.

I’m going to be spending the next week with family, but when I get back, I will be looking into arrangements for getting sensitivity feedback on the story as it exists now, specifically with regards to this character, her presentation and treatment within the story.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

The long-awaited follow-up to my first adult web serial Star Harbor Nights, the Secret Sisterhood of Superheroes is a story about mostly women, mostly with superpowers.

Initially set in the fictional city of Calvary Crossing (a city of approximately two million souls, bedeviled by poor urban planning and geographical barriers, exacerbated when it was badly divided by a boondoggle of a crosstown expressway dubbed the Artery), S3 will explore queer identity, female friendship, romance, and contemporary politics while also delivering first-rate superhero world-building and some comic book-style action.

The main characters are a group of heroes operating outside the law and government authority under the name the Sisterhood.

When I started this post, I had planned on doing a bullet pointed “cast of characters” thing, but I think it might be more interesting to do some more in-depth character profiles. I’ll put the first one up later tonight or tomorrow.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Well, Ligature Works was all set to lunch after launch… wait, strike that. Reverse it. I just had a few last minute adjustments to make and then I could shove the whole thing out the door and do some writing of my own.

Then, disaster.

I had been playing with a magazine issue management plug-in since I set up the LW website, you see, and I had done everything in it except publish an issue. I had the issue set up. I had formatted all of the poems and stories for it. I had configured all the settings. I got to the point of launching it when I realized: all the posts I’d written were not connected to the magazine. It had its parallel infrastructure for issues. I wondered how I’d missed that, but no big deal. Copying them over would add some work, but not much.

Then I realized how I’d missed it: there was no link, no menu, no option or button anywhere, for adding articles to the magazine. Something was broken or missing. I tried for a while to figure it out, look for a companion plugin I was supposed to have installed, a setting that had to be turned on. Nothing. Checked the help guide, website, etc. Nothing.

So at the last minute, I had to find a whole new plugin, learn how to use it, and get everything set up again. It took up quite a bit of time this afternoon. I had blocked out an hour for finishing the Ligature Works launch; it took six.

But! The deed is done. The die is cast. The issue is out. It’s live. It lives.

http://www.ligatureworks.com

My plans for the rest of the afternoon and evening were shot by this, which means my plans for wrapping up the month of September are also kind of shot. I’ve got a lot of stuff of my own I was going to polish and publish today, but the only thing that made it out the door is the latest installment of Making Out Like Bandits. I’m kind of thinking to myself, “So much for finishing the month on a high note”, but… I did just publish a zine?

I’m mentally, emotionally, and even slightly physically exhausted now. There’s still more to do. Promotion. Figuring out the next issue’s submission window, revising our guidelines both to incorporate the lessons we learned and make them more approachable, and of course, sending out payments. I hope our contributors won’t mind if that waits until morning, though. Right now I really need to get away from the computer and out of the house for a bit.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Well! I’m at WorldCon finally, after both travels and travails. On the first day of the con, we realized a logistical snag: I had new business cards made up early in the summer, before our new literary sf/f venture Ligature Works was more than a vague idea for the future. So we don’t have any kind of hand-out to give people re: that. In lieu of that, I’ll leave this post at the top of my main blog (which is referenced on the business cards).

So: Ligature Works is seeking original, never-before-published works of science fiction, fantasy, and otherwise speculative poetry and prose. We pay a flat rate of $25 for anything we publish. It’s a nominal fee, we realize. We are just starting out, but it’s important that we don’t ask other artists to create for nothing. Since we do not offer pro rates, we don’t require pro terms: our period of exclusivity lasts only until the end of the month following publication. So with our first issue set for the last day in September, the rights revert back on November 1, following the end of October.

Our submissions window for the first issue runs through all of August. There will be one for the next issue either last quarter of 2016 or first quarter of 2017, depending on how our post-mortem on our first issue goes. We’ll also need to talk with each other about whether we want a long window or a short window with a long reading period, or just take rolling submissions. So I can’t tell you when they’ll re-open or for how long, just that they will. This is all an experiment so far.

Detailed submission guidelines along with as good an idea of what we’re looking for as we can convey without a previous canon to reference may be found at http://www.ligatureworks.com/submissions. I know they’re long; Jack has promised to help me bullet point them for the next issue, but they are detailed for a reason. We seek to take the guesswork or element of “…am I doing this right?” away from new and easily startled authors by providing reasonably precise instructions.

We have not used the more fiddly bits as a scalpel to trim away the slush, but things having to do with the element of anonymity within your submission are ironclad. Apart from helping ensure we can screen against our own implicit biases, the world of speculative poetry is not a large one, so it’s good to be able to consider a poem without knowledge of the poet. If something in your experience is relevant to the work, feel free to tell us about it, as described in the submission guide.

One final caveat: The window is more than half over now and we have received enough works that gave us the immediate editorial grabby hands. It is very likely that we’ll close the month with more pieces than we have the budget to buy, especially as our first issue is entirely self-funded. If anyone wants to help fund more pieces, you can throw some money at me via PayPal. Just put in a note that it’s for Ligature Works. We’ll work out something more formal for future issues.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Back at the start of the weekend, I was considering raising the rates for poetry on Ligature Works from $5 to $15. After looking at both my budget for the zine and the marketplace, and giving some thought to game theory, unintended consequences, and being the change I want to see in the world, I have decided that Ligature Works will simply offer $25 for all accepted submissions, poetry and prose.

The reasons for this are basically threefold.

First, having very different rates for the two forms places a material incentive on authors submitting prose works, and yet it motivates us to accept poetry over prose. If you’re mainly a poet and you see someone offering 5 times the rate for prose as poetry, mightn’t that lead you to deforming your work to hit the higher payday? It’s not entirely a hypothetical possibility. The submission guides as originally written even noted the often porous boundary between flash fiction and prose poetry.

As long as there’s economic tension between the prose market and the poetry market, all the creators out there who submit to us would be trying to steer their shorter submissions into the “prose” door while we’re encouraged to shift them into the “poetry” one, which creates an incentive for authors who have written shorter works to pad them out to a “safe” size, at which they can’t reasonably be construed as a prose poem, whether that suits the piece are not. This is contrary to our basic belief that all pieces should be the right length for themselves.

By removing the difference between how we pay for prose and how we pay for poetry, this frees up both sides to behave naturally and submit/receive each work as its own thing.

Second (and strongly related to the first), it seems hypocritical to pay one rate for prose pieces regardless of how long they are, and another rate for poetry pieces, as if the fact that poetry is often less substantial in word count and page space means that it’s inherently less valuable.

It isn’t.

I myself write tens of thousands of words of prose fiction a month many months, and hundreds even in most of my worst months, but it’s a good month if I write one poem. Some people spend a year or more getting everything just right in their poem, going through multiple drafts and making sure every word bears the weight of the work.

Third, if the point of the “paying people” portion of this exercise is to reinforce the idea that creative work has value, we need to be prepared to provide value in return. When I set the rates at $25 for short stories and $5 for a poem, I based it on what I’ve been prepared to accept myself. And that’s fair enough. But $5 isn’t a “tacit payment” in the same way that $25 is; it’s way more tacit, way less payment.

Don’t get me wrong; I would still submit my poems to a venue that pays in the $5 range, or one that cannot offer payment. But I find myself unwilling to create a venue that values one over the other.

I’m aware that this decision is likely to have unintended consequences of its own. While the prose rate of $25 is still below what is considered “pro rates”, $25 for poetry is fairly competitive. It’s below the big markets, but above most of the small zines.

One obvious consequence of this is that our first few issues, at least, will likely be smaller than I’d envisioned, in terms of table of contents. But! That’s okay. I’m looking at the 2016 issues as a sort of “soft launch” anyway.

http://www.ligatureworks.com/submissions

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Okay, so, one of the things I’ve been saying since I revitalized my writing career is that when my Patreon reaches $400 a month, I’ll start buying and publishing other people’s works on a budget of $25 a month, increasing $25 for every full $100 I’m getting above that. Call it a combination of sharing the wealth, networking with other creators, and continuing my experiments in blurring the line between self-publishing and traditional publishing.

Well, my personal Patreon is not at $400 yet, but I’ve had enough growth in that sector that last night I started thinking about my plans, and I realized it would be hard for a one or two person operation to be fielding submissions and putting together a publication every month in the first place, and with that in mind I could start putting my plan into effect on a more limited scale, like a one shot, or irregular, or quarterly publication.

So I thought about it some more, and decided to aim for quarterly, and if it doesn’t quite work out, it doesn’t quite work out. This is an experiment, so the potential failure is part of the process of creating. Anyway, if I put out one issue I’ll still have succeeded in my goals of shining a spotlight on some other creators and adding another item to my DIY resume.

One of the things that I argue against in my artist advocacy is what I call the STOP syndrome: Special Type Of Person, as in “it takes a Special Type Of Person to…” make a comic, write a novel, edit a zine, etc. Now! I do not mean to suggest that it does not take skill or effort or experience to do these things, because it does! It most certainly does! The STOP syndrome is when someone who has the talent stops short of doing some of the work (publishing, promoting, or even creating in the first place) because in their head there is some objective or external signifier that they lack.

I loved poetry as a teenager, but at some point in my early twenties I decided I “realized” I wasn’t a poet and I stopped. For more than a decade, I didn’t write any verse that wasn’t part of a story, and didn’t think that counted as real poetry. As soon as I got over that, I became a published poet and now I’ve placed in an SFPA poetry contest and been nominated for two Rhyslings.

The world is not divided into normal people and special types of people. There aren’t writers, poets, editors, and publishers on one hand and muggles and squibs on the other. There are simply people who do the work of writing, do the work of creating poetry, do the work of editing, and do the work of publishing.

My single big experience with editing and publishing so far taught me many things, including how hard this work is and how rewarding it is. I daresay it will be a bit easier for having had that experience. Not easy, but not a nightmare. Certainly something I can do. The real practical barriers to being a publisher—access to the means of production—are a lot easier to circumvent in the digital age.

So it’s my goal to help show this, and to provide one more venue where people can sell their fiction and poetry in order to hopefully help more people see themselves as poets and authors. I’m not saying that I’ll have a restriction for new talent, but I’ll certainly be looking for it.

A lot of details are still pending since I just committed to this at 2 in the morning last night on Twitter, but here’s the (tentative) skinny:

• The name of the venue will be Ligature Works. The title will make sense when I come out with my first issue of my personal patron zine later this month. The domain ligatureworks.com has been reserved, thought here’s nothing there yet. I almost went with Ligature Quarterly but decided against committing to a name that has an implicit schedule.
• The focus will be on material with a speculative or fantastical element, but it need not be any particular degree of “hard” SF or “high” fantasy; I’m fully open to magical realism, impossible hypotheticals (like Rachel Swirsky’s fantastic Hugo-nominated short “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love“), and poems that reference mythic elements, such as my own “Falling: A Part“.
• I’m a lot less prescriptivist about things like the structure of a story than many editors. I don’t look for an act structure. I don’t think a story needs to have conflict. I am dubious that it needs a beginning or a middle and I’m quite sure it doesn’t strictly require an end. It does need to have a point, and conflict/resolution models are certainly a reliable means of arriving at one. But I’m very fond of vignettes, slices of life, and enigmas. In terms of standards, mine mostly run towards readability. I’ll care much more if I can’t tell who is speaking or if there are great big walls of text for eyes to slide off of than I’ll care if the gun on the mantel ever did go off.
• Make your story as long as it needs to be. Figuring that out is part of the craft of writing. I think most short stories need to be around 3,000 words, but there are plenty that need to be around 6,000 or 9,000 or even 12,000. If you cut something, cut it because it doesn’t add anything, not because it makes the story longer.
• Because it’s me doing the judging, I expect there might be a slant in the material chosen towards the humorous, the clever, and the witty. Your work need not be funny to apply, but if you have something you love and you’re concerned it might be a bit silly for other venues, this would be a good place to apply.
• Ligature Works will have open submissions for poetry and fiction, and maybe occasionally solicited non-fiction pieces. It will be a paying venue. Initial rates will likely be $25 for short fiction and $5 for poetry. I will hope to improve on that as I go. For now, my criteria is the bare minimum I myself would accept (and have accepted) for work of which I am proud and willing to sell. But this is an experiment; if I can’t attract enough short fiction submissions at below the SFWA-approved professional rates, I may simply refocus on poetry until I can afford to offer more.
• Previously published material not accepted; previously shared with a personal subscriber list does not count as publication for this purpose. Exact details on the rights purchased will be hammered out exactly before I open for submissions officially. Everyone will know in advance what they’re getting into.
• All submissions will be accepted as email attachments with no identifying information in the document and the attachments forward to me separately, so I can make my decisions impartially. Any relevant information insufficient to identify the individual submitter may be included in the document (e.g., if you are writing about a character who shares your disability).
• While I don’t think anyone should settle for being paid in exposure, it can be nice if you know how to leverage it. Accordingly, I will also offer all featured authors and poets a brief consultation on how to best capitalize on the appearance of their work and promote their other endeavors around it, so that everybody involved gets the absolute most out of it.

Now!

The sensible thing to do here would be to take some time to get things in place, figure out what I’m doing, and plan an issue for the end of Q4 2016, if not some time in 2017. However, I follow the Moist von Lipwig school of thought in these things: no time to learn how to walk, must run, must fly! and move quickly, you never know what’s catching you up.

So! Submissions will officially open shortly after I return to Maryland (the week after next), with a window until September 1st, for publication at the end of September. If it is even a marginal success, we’ll repeat and improve upon the experiment for the fourth quarter.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

So, I have been rewriting my Patreon profile page to try to better reflect what I’m doing and what people will get, and I have also taken the time to add a new $5 reward. As long as I’m compiling what I do in a month into a zine for my patrons and as long as I’m planning on selling copies of that zine as an e-book, I thought I might as well offer something a little more exclusive for the patrons who exceed the bare minimum. The trick is, what? While I fully intend to be known once again as a highly prolific author, there’s a balancing acting in not over-promising.

So what I came up with is not more stories or poems but a bit of commentary added to the regular zine, sharing glimpses of inspiration and process. Something sort of in-between liner notes for an album and director’s commentary for a movie.

This is what I’m pledging to produce each month in exchange for your support:

• A minimum of one short story per month.
• A minimum of one poem or flash fiction story per month.
• A minimum of one humorous piece or work of satire or parody.
• Some volume of blogging, tweeting, opinion, and analysis.
• New material for at least one ongoing longer fiction project.

The current “ongoing longer fiction project” is called Making Out Like Bandits. I teased the concept on Twitter and then wrote 2,000 words of it, which I posted yesterday in an unlocked post on Patreon. I’m about to make a cross-post here.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.