alexandraerin

If you think about it, it’s kind of weird that speculative fiction even exists as a genre. In a way, all fiction is speculative. If we weren’t imagining a world that is other than the one we know in some fashion, it wouldn’t be fiction.

But it goes beyond that, because once upon a time, there wasn’t a special word for fiction that was fanciful, fiction that included monsters and magic or even mechanical marvels. Those were all just part and parcel of the storyteller’s palette. The people who spun myths into tales were both entertainers and historians. There was no sharp, bright line. It took a long time for the idea of telling stories grounded in mundane reality to catch on to the point that we need a special word for stories that deal with glittering fantasticality.

This is perhaps even more true when it comes to poetry. So many poets throughout even recent history have worked in mythic realms, trafficking in fantastic or spiritual symbolism, incorporating folklore and legend into their verses. Poetry often deals heavily in metaphor, of course, so the argument about whether a given poem is really a work of fantasy or merely using fantasy to make a point while not actually telling a story could go on forever in some cases, if anybody felt it was worth their time to make it.

So we might ask ourselves: is there any need to label speculative poetry, genre poetry, SF/F poetry, or whatever you might want to call it?

Despite the case I just laid out, I would say that yes, it is a useful distinction to make… just not an absolute one. People tend to want to read things that speak to their interests, after all. We like what we like. If what you like is robots and artificial intelligences or mermaids and dragons—or robot dragons and artificially intelligent mermaids—then it might well be that speculative poetry would be right up your alley, even if most of the poetry you’ve encountered has done nothing for you.

I wouldn’t know how big and rich the world of speculative poetry is if not for the friendship of Elizabeth R. McClellan, who introduced me to it first through her participation in its fandom and then, increasingly, through her own career as a poet. I spent years watching from the fringes, convinced that this was all that I could do, that I didn’t have the right skills or anything to say.

That changed when I wrote “Institutional Memory“, a poem that started out as a short story that just wouldn’t come together. The time scale I wanted to capture was too grand, the point of view too diffuse. I couldn’t make it work as a story, so basically on a lark I tried it as a poem.

It worked, and I caught the bug. I’ve written easily a dozen solid poems since then, and sold four of them so far. The first sale was “Institutional Memory”. It was bought by the magazine arm of the SFPA, the Speculative Fiction Poetry Association. The fee wasn’t large in any objective sense, but it paid most of a year’s dues to the SFPA, which struck me as a fitting way to spend it.

Now, the SFPA isn’t like the similarly named SFWA, the Science Fiction& Fantasy Writer’s Association. Note that it’s the Poetry Association, not the Poet’s Association. This is not an organization for professionals but one for appreciators. In practice I suspect that most people who join the organization are or hope to be poets, and I also suspect the benefits of joining such an organization are more immediately clear if you are or hope to be a poet, but you don’t have to prove your right to be there. I had my first pro sale when I joined the SFPA, but that is not a requirement. There is no requirement. Nothing is required, everything is permitted.

Earlier in the year, I announced plans to promote speculative poetry through a website called The Every World Poetry Digest. My goal would be twofold: to let readers know what’s out there to read, and help poets learn what’s out there for them to sell to. I had planned on launching the project in earnest in May. That has been pushed back until I’m done with Angels of the Meanwhile, an unplanned and unexpected labor of love on behalf of Elizabeth R. McClellan, though it’s still coming.

In the meantime, I’m still going to do two things to promote my chosen field of poetry.

The first is to highlight the fact that the SFPA exists, it has open membership, and for as little as $15 a year you can be a member, get a quarterly PDF zine with poems from both career writers and rank neophytes and a chance to nominate for and vote on the Rhysling Awards (the equivalent of the SFWA’s Nebulas). The SFPA can be found online at http://www.sfpoetry.com/

The second is to mention that if you want to know some names you should be paying attention to in the genre poetry scene, you should seriously check out Angels of the Meanwhile. There are some serious big name, big time poets in there, along with some people I think will be well worth watching in the years to come. It’s by no means an exhaustive list; I’m not saying “Anyone who is anyone is in this collection.” But if you’re looking for a place to start, it should be a good one.

Actually, I’m going to do a third thing. I’m going to ask people to comment with the poem or two (or if you really can’t decide, three, but let’s keep things reasonable) that they would most recommend to others as a starting point if they’re interested in exploring the topic but not 100% sure where to look. It can be a classic work like Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” or one of Poe’s grim fancies, or something that came out more recently, but ideally it should be something that folks can find and read online for free, because I’m going to take them and collect them into a Speculative Poetry primer post of sorts.

There is a surprising (and growing) wealth of genre poetry on the internet, but one thing I am absolutely convinced of is that there are far more people who would read it than who, at current time, do. What I want to do—with this post, and with the Every World Poetry Digest—is give the world a signpost for finding it.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

So, one of the things that’s motivated me to start a proper blog is that I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter, tackling some subjects that are much bigger than 140 characters. Because of this, some of what I’m saying here is going to be a rehash of stuff I’ve already said. But for people who don’t follow me on Twitter, or haven’t otherwise followed what’s going on enough to make sense of things, this post should stand as a primer on what we might (laughingly) call #puppygate.

If you want to know more about it, I recommend checking the tag on George R.R. Martin’s blog, where he has written about it with his customary brevity and the restrained, almost laconic turn of phrase he is so often known for (as the pot said to the kettle). There has been some interesting and insightful analysis of specific Puppy claims elseweb, but he tends to link to most of it.

The Basic Terms: Hugos, Worldcon, and Sad Puppies

The Hugos are an award regarded as one of the top two prizes in the field of science fiction and fantasy. Which of the big two is more prestigious depends on who you ask, and the general consensus (if such a creature is not itself a matter of speculation) has flip-flopped a few times. They are, nonetheless, credibly A Big Deal.

The Hugos are awarded by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon. Worldcon is a bit like the Olympics in that it is an international thing and people bid to host it. This is why you see references to “LonCon” and “Sasquan” and other conventions in this: these are the local cons that host Worldcon.

Being a convention, membership in Worldcon (and thus, participation in the Hugo voting process) is open to anyone who pays the price of admission. Like many long-running cons, Worldcon offers a lower priced supporting membership, mostly intended to allow people who know they can’t afford the room and travel and other expenses of going this year to still keep their stake in things. Supporting members have full voting rights.

While Worldcon is pretty firmly in the big deal category, the percentage of members who vote to nominate works for the Hugo or vote on the final ballot has historically been pretty low, which is part of how a relatively small group of people coming in from the outside were able to effect a pretty substantial swing in the nomination process this year. These people are the Sad Puppies.

(Well, that’s a simplification, as there are actually two very closely related groups, one piggybacking off the other, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll keep it simple.)

The Sad Puppies are a group ran this year by writer Brad Torgersen but first founded by writer Larry Correia, who came to the conclusion that the Hugos were unfairly stacked against him and others because of their perceived politics. The evidence of this primarily consists of the fact that sometimes a book is nominated, praised, or awarded that they don’t understand the appeal of, from which they intuit the existence of a shadowy cabal that props up unworthy books and keeps deserving ones down.

In short, the Puppies exist because a handful of people decided that the wrong people were winning recognition for the wrong reasons. This is important, insofar as they demand that people ignore their actual origin and focus on what they’ve been doing, which, they say, is to bring fresh voices to the table. You could say that’s what they’re doing, but if we ignore that they’re bringing in these fresh voices specifically in the hopes of crowding out the voices they disapprove of, then we’re missing an important point.

My Stake In This

…is basically nothing. I of course grew up seeing “Hugo award-winning” labels slapped on various things, and recognized that it was an achievement. I of course am excited when an author whose work I know or whom I consider a friend receives this or any other honor.

I didn’t grow up dreaming of winning a Hugo, though. At the point where I began my career by self-publishing stories on the internet, it was not clear that this counted as publication for purposes of Hugo eligibility, and there was little reason at the time to think it ever would be so counted. Times have changed, of course, and the award has changed with it, but the point is the same: if ever I dreamed of silver rockets, they were vehicles, not trophies.

Let me put it simply: I don’t care that much about the Hugos.

I wouldn’t like to guess how much I’d feel like I belonged at Worldcon, but I’m not terribly interested in spending the time or money necessary to settle the question. I have nothing against Worldcon. I have nothing for Worldcon.

As a self-published author who is more than a bit abrasive herself and incidentally terrible at networking, I don’t really stand to gain much professionally by poking at the Puppies. If anyone’s handing out or redeeming “PC Cred Points” (PCCP?), I somehow missed out on getting my swipe card for it.

I certainly don’t care about winning the approval of any of the people that the Puppies tend to identify as the all-powerful kingmakers and puppetmasters of the ruling clique. Part of the ideology that undergirds the Puppies’ approach to things is the idea that everybody a certain distance to the left of them is an “Social Justice Warrior” who is marching in lockstep with every other “SJW”, following the same agenda and answering to the same leaders. You couldn’t call me a fan of the Nielsen Haydens on any level and while I acknowledge they have some influence, I find the idea that they could command a unified army of “SJWs” laughable. I’ve admired some of John Scalzi’s blog posts, but I couldn’t say I’m that invested in him. I’m not a member of the SFWA or Worldcon, et cetera.

From the beginning, I’ve made my own path when it comes to writing and publishing, and I’m in no hurry to change that now. There’s no job offer waiting for me, no book deal, no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

I’m just one person, speaking her conscience.

So, Why Do I Care?

Simply put, when I see people making claims based on the most tenuous of intuitions and calling it hard evidence, that bothers me. When I see people trying to police what other people are allowed to write, read, and like while pretending that this is being done to them, that bothers me. I am disturbed at the idea that someone can take such exception to the fact that other people like other things for other reasons that they would reject that in favor of a conspiracy theory and then take drastic action to overturn the supposed cabal.

Basically, I don’t want to read and write in a world when a man who equates the existence of books he doesn’t approve of to false advertising is able to set himself up as some sort of tastemaker-in-chief because he throws a big enough tantrum whenever a book or author he disdains gets too popular for him to make sense of.

The original Sad Puppies initiative predates Gamergate by a couple years, but they’re both powered by the same sense of aggrieved entitlement cloaking itself in phony virtue. Some people, rather than acknowledging that an entire medium/genre will not always reflect their own personal tastes, decide that the relative success of anything they don’t like is a kind of cheat, and by golly, they’re going to do something about it!

So the stakes here are, we either label this nonsense as what it is and find a way to work around the tantrum-throwers, or we just sort of give up and give in. If we give in, then for the remainder of our days we all must tiptoe very carefully and very quietly around the known pet peeves of Messrs. Correia, Torgersen, Day, et al. We can write books from diverse perspectives only as long as we coddle them sufficiently, as long as we pander to their delicate sensibilities, and as long as we realize that only a certain amount of these things will be tolerated, as needed to provide them with a shield against charges of bigoted homogeneity.

…well, that actually makes the stakes sound a lot more dire than they really are.

Because “not giving in” isn’t actually that hard? As much as the Puppies and their good friends the Gators like to cast this as a war, using war imagery and honest-to-goodness wartime propaganda… it’s really not? There’s no win condition. There’s no lose condition. People being forcibly removed from the field is the rare exception rather than the order of the day.

This is not a great struggle. This is one small subset of a larger group of people, clamoring for attention and making things difficult for everyone else.

When I finish writing this post, I’m going to start writing material for a novella I meant to publish myself, then write a chapter of my serial story that I will also self-publish. The Puppies aren’t going to seize control of the means of production and distribution, so nothing they can do is going to affect this. As I write this, numerous authors they would identify as “SJWs” are working on their own projects, for publication through numerous channels.

The Puppies were able to turn the Hugo nomations in their favor because of the relatively low participation rate in the voting and because of the utter lack of any kind of organized slate or bloc voting or clique or cabal. When everybody else is voting based on their own taste and judgment, it’s easy for the guys who decided to band together to turn the tables on everyone.

But what they cannot do is turn back the tide of history, and what they cannot do is turn the world upside down. People have predicted the end of the Hugos. Others have predicted a renaissance of sorts for the venerable award, as it’s getting more attention (and participation!) than ever. Still others have predicted that they’ll continue on a slow downward spiral, as each year’s award becomes a mess of competing alliances and bloc voting, so the whole thing looms larger and larger as part of the landscape while being less exciting or relevant or joyous or meaningful.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to the Hugos. I hope it’s something good, in the way that I hope for good things for people generally. But they’re not my award. It’s not my con. A lot of pixels have been filled trying to suss out whether an award given by one organization and meant to represent the best of all science fiction and fantasy “belongs to Worldcon” or “belongs to everyone”, but this is a glass half-full, glass half-empty sort of thing. And by that I don’t really mean “it all depends on how you look at it” so much as “both answers are obviously correct, why are we wasting time talking about this?” I don’t care.

I have vague good wishes for the Hugos and everyone involved, including the Puppies whom I hope are able to accept one day that their tastes are not universal, that the commercial success they enjoy is a function of their ability to appeal to under-served niches by writing about things that they themselves are passionate about and not a reflection of some sort of universal appeal that is being stymied by the shadowy hand of the Social Justice Clique, and that I’m not trying to put them in their place by pointing out that their tastes aren’t universal and their appeal isn’t either because this is true of us all. This is how it works! This is especially how it works in the age of the internet and the long tail. If they can figure out that this is how it works, they’ll be happier and honestly more successful, because they’ll have a better idea of why what they’re doing works as well as it does.

And we’ll be happier, too, because once they figure that out, they won’t flip the table every time they notice people gathering to praise a book they don’t see the appeal of.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

I'm having an actual conversation on the io9 article I linked to the other day. I wasn't sure that would happen, since I found the article a couple of days after it went up. I'm having a polite disagreement (no, seriously) with another author about the meaning and implications of "neo-patronage", and he linked me to an interesting page that I actually find to be more in support of my feelings than his, but anyway, I want to share it.

It's from Another Sky Press:

Neo-patronage is an (r)evolution of patronage enabled by the connectivity between artist and audience offered by today’s technologies. At its core, neo-patronage is an honor/trust based system of financial support for an artist that comes from the artist’s collective audience, rather than a single individual or organization. The sum of all patron contributions becomes the means and incentive for the artist to continue his or her work.

This multitude of patrons is responsible for the two most important differences between patronage and neo-patronage:

1. The sense of ‘ownership’ the patron wielded over the artist is completely diffused. The artist is free to continue creating as he or she sees fit, and isn’t beholden to the vision of his or her supporters.
2. Spreading the cost of patronage over many patrons means anyone can become a patron simply by contributing to an artist based on their interest in the artist and their own financial ability.

In practice, the money the artist receives via neo-patronage serves two purposes:

1. It is payment and ‘thank you’ for work already completed.
2. It is the funding that allows the artist to continue to produce new works.

It is essential to understand that there is no line between these two purposes - if, for example, the artist decides to retire and pursue other activities, all future contributions would fall firmly into the first category by default. That said, if an artist is receiving contributions they have a strong incentive (both financially and artistically) to continue to create.

This duality of purposes for a contribution is a significant improvement over traditional patronage where the patron essentially became lord over the artist. Under neo-patronage, there is no longer a power dynamic between artist and patron since everything is voluntary on both sides of the equation. Patrons simply support artists they like and artists simply continue to create in hopes of further support from both old and newfound patrons.

Everybody wins.

That really says it.

I'm also a big fan of their stated beliefs, which, in brief, go:

1. It makes sense [to embrace technology and the free flow of information instead of raging against it]
   
2. The audience is the sole arbitrator of value.
   
3. Art for all.
   
4. Support the artist.
   
5. Dreams come true.
   

Or, as my father put it on the last one: "If you spend your time making it possible for the best things to happen, sometimes they do."

(Naturally, having found someone doing something on the internet, I'm off to offer them advice on how they should be doing it.)

In the comments of that article I linked to in my last post, one would-be writer is bemoaning the fact that the existence of the internet has destroyed his dream of being a "career writer"; i.e., someone who writes for a living instead of having another job that pays the bills and doing writing at whatever odd moments are available and with whatever mental energy is left over.

Do I even need to point out the flaw in this thinking?

Writing is not a job you apply for with a base salary and set benefits. Accordingly, being a "career writer" has never been an option for most people, even the most talented. It happens to some people, for some people, but it's not something anybody has ever been able to count on as something that would most assuredly happen if they only worked hard enough and stuck at it long enough.

The internet hasn't brought this about. It also certainly hasn't ended the state of affairs.

What it has introduced is more of a gradation, a continuum of financial success. You don't have to convince anyone that your work will be wildly successful to get a shot at even being moderately successful. You can build from the ground up, and if you're not immediately profitable... which you probably won't be if you don't have a big name and an existing following... then you're not going to lose a book deal over it.

No one has to believe in you but you to keep it going.

Of course, you have to keep it going. You can't just put up a blog, solicit contributions, and then expect to cash in overnight. You still have to work to succeed, which includes not just writing, building a relationship with your audience ("crazy cat lady/frightened but oddly fascinated neighborhood children" has worked out pretty well for me), and the occasional reminders to your audience that you are performing a craft for their benefit and some compensation can help you keep doing it.

And even then maybe you'll never make it to the point of being a "career" writer. Certainly most people won't immediately, and it's an open question of whether or not you'll have the wherewithal to stick with it until you reach that level.

Setting small goals can help there. A lot of people who put up tip jars bemoan the fact that they got a single donation. That's not a very good approach. Celebrate it... you've reached the first milestone. Try for $10 in a month. Then $20. Then $50.

If your writing makes you $50 a month on the internet, that's $600 a year. Not enough to live on by any stretch of imagination, but you could make less than that selling your work through conventional channels and still qualify for some professional associations. If you make $100 a month, that might take care of one of your utility bills, depending on your household size, habits, and where you live. That might seem like a little thing, but at least you'll be able to say honestly that "writing pays your bills." If you make $200 a month... well, that's something, isn't it? Very few of us could fail to notice the difference an extra $200 a month would make to our lives, whether it means we can breathe easier around rent time or it means we have an extra $200 to sock away or spend on ourselves.

If you've got talent, this is within your reach. $50 is ten people tipping you five dollars or fifty people tipping you $1. (Well, I simplify. Your tipping service is going to take their bite, but that bite's much smaller than the share a publisher would take if you sell your work conventionally.)

And if you can make $200 a month, you can make more. It's just a matter of reaching an ever-increasing audience. Having your content be free helps there. Giving people gentle prods to tell their friends helps there.

Constantly bemoaning how many people read and pay nothing does not help there. A lot of people will already feel reluctant to tell their friends if they think their friends can't/won't pay. But you want their friends to read your work, because they will tell more friends, and they will tell more friends, and quicker than you can say "Kevin Bacon" (assuming you speak very slowly and are easily distracted), one of them will be friends with someone who loves what you're doing and thinks you're worth $5.

Or $10.

Or $20.

At 100 people to get $5, you might feel the urge to start dividing and go, "Great, I made five cents per person." No, you made five dollars. If you can do that twenty times, you've made a hundred dollars. If you do it two hundred times, you've got a thousand dollars. If you do it twenty times every month, you've got a hundred dollars a month. If you do it two hundred times a month, you've got a thousand dollars a month and you're much closer to making your living as a career writer than most people whose books are sitting on a shelf somewhere ever will come.

If that's your goal, then who cares how many people that's divided out over?

You don't want people to feel guilty about reading and not paying. You don't want them to feel guilty about "imposing" more "deadbeats" on you. You want the deadbeats. What does it cost you to have 99 people looking and not paying if it gets you 1 who does? In this day and age, bandwidth is practically unmetered at the transfer rates used up by text and small illustrations. I tell people all the time that if they can't afford any money, they can pay me by telling the world about me. The fact that my stories frequently involve things that many people would find a little perverse or uncomfortable to read about hinders me there. If you're not writing things that make people squirm so much, you should have an easy time doing this.

This is getting rambly, so I'm going to close with some numbered pieces of advice.

1. Don't discourage people from reading if they can't pay. Do the opposite. Make them feel welcome. Make them feel disposed towards spreading the word. If people gain enough enjoyment from what you're doing, a good portion of them will eventually pay, when they feel they can afford to. If they feel like they're not allowed to read or that your stories aren't meant for them, they won't stick around that long.

2. Don't discourage people who pay amounts out of balance with your sense of what your work is wort. Some writers tell people not to tip if they've only got a dollar because the transaction fees can add up to like more than a third of that. Or they even make snide remarks about "Is this what my work's worth to you?" Ask any street musician who plays a busy corner how much spare change and crumpled dollars can add up to. Ask them if they'd despise these contributions or willingly exclude anything smaller than a five. Money is numbers. Numbers add up.

3. Don't feel weird about people who, conversely, pay way more than what you'd expect someone to pay for an equivalent amount of printed text. They're supporting you. They're your patrons. We complain and complain and complain about the fact that the public doesn't support the arts, doesn't pay to read... why grumble about the person who gives you a dollar for your entire archive and then sputter about the person who gives you $25 because they liked your latest installment? I have a few people paying me $25 or more a month. I didn't ask them to. Some of them asked me if it was okay.

I see this weird contradiction at work in many writers who consider a patronage/voluntary payment model where they look at the "freeloaders" and the people who pay a dollar and they say, "Well, I want to be paid for my work." and then they look at the people who want to contribute to them every week or every month or give them one single big contribution and go, "What? I'm not looking for charity."

Essentially, they're turning up their noses at what could be a workable business model because it doesn't resemble what they think business should be.

But if it brings the money in... if it pays the bills... why despise it? Why sit there wailing and gnashing your teeth because the way you think it should work doesn't work? Especially when the analog equivalents to those ways have never been wildly profitable for most people, to begin with?

The question comes up sometimes of why I don't ever talk about the better parts of traditional publishing, which include things like advances, access to distribution networks, promotional campaigns, etc.

Well, the answer is twofold. The first is that I don't have nearly as much experience with those things. I just don't. The second is that approach already has its own advocates, whether it needs them or not. It's the default approach. A lot of people consider it to be the only viable way of doing things.

Anyway, while this should be taken with the grain of salt that I don't have direct experience, but I think it's possible to overestimate the value of those things for the average writer.

Let's talk about advances. I think everybody knows the basic idea: the advance is the money you get up front, sometimes split between a sum at signing and a sum at delivery. The key word in "advance" is advance... you're being given a chunk of the expected royalties up front. While a lot of people just starting out assume it's a given part of the business, smaller publishers can't always afford to give out advances... giving them requires that you've got a lot of money coming in from different sources and that you can make the modest assumption that the book you're buying will be profitable.

I've read that when new authors do get advances, it's generally a few thousand dollars. That's a mad amount of money to have dropped on you all at once, but think about how long you could really live on, say, five or six thousand dollars. I don't know anybody who would say no to it, but when you divide it out over time... well, it actually averages out to somewhere between two and three months' paychecks for a lot of folks out there. If you managed to get in the low five figures, that could effectively be a year's paycheck... so all you'd have to do is do that again every year and you'd be golden.

As I've said, I don't have a lot of direct experience, but I do recall this essay in the New York Times. It talks a lot about the subject, shining a light on how it can be a mixed blessing. It's an interesting look at a subject that's fairly arcane to most of us.

A quick Google on the subject also turned up this interesting and informative page written by somebody who does apparently have direct experience.

Basically... with the caveat that I'm not speaking from personal experience... I have to stand by my contention that the vast majority of potentially successful authors can get themselves a better deal by taking matters into their own hands than they can buy seeking out a traditional publishing deal.

I think a publisher working in partnership with a self-directed author might be an interesting middle route... we might see what that looks like when yuki_onna and tim_pratt finish their serials. But even then... well, if I were either of them, I'd crunch the numbers hard and poll their readership to try to get a picture of how much they could make if they stuck with self-publishing before accepting any deal, shiny advance or not.