Here’s my bad fuzzy photo of the many:

It was pretty overwhelming to be on the bill with such popular writers, especially Suzanne Collins. For those who don’t know, her two most recent novels, Hunger Games and Catching Fire are currently, and have been for some time, numbers one and two on The New York Times bestsellers list, selling bajillions of copies a week. The Books of Wonder appearance was organised around Suzanne because it was her only signing for Catching Fire. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that Peter Glassman (the owner of BoW) thought to ask me to take part. Here’s Suzanne in action (with Libba Bray listening carefully):

I’d never met Suzanne before. She’s lovely, smart and gently funny. She, me and Libba had a fun conversation about the joys (meeting wonderful teens, booksellers, librarians) and travails (food poisoning) of touring. She’s also extraordinarily generous, giving up a big chunk of her presentation to talk in detail about how much she’d loved Liar, Fire,¹ Leviathan and Going Bovine. Thank you, Suzanne.

I’d never met Kristin either and she also turned out to be lovely. I don’t know what it is about the YA world but almost all the authors I’ve met have been fabulous.² It’s such a wonderful community to be part of.

It was only overwhelming at first then it quickly became relaxing. For most of my tour, I’ve done solo events with all the attention on me, but last night I could sit back and watch how other YA authors answer questions about how they come up with names, where they get their ideas, and which characters they like best.

Suzanne and Kristin were both so thoughtful and smart, providing little glimpses into how they work. They both have detailed maps of the imaginary worlds they’ve created. It sounds like Kristin’s world encompasses gazillions of countries and large swathes of time. Very Tolkienesque. Libba Bray remains one of the funniest people on the planet and I don’t just say that because she’s a dear friend of mine. As does Scott.³ Last night’s event made me want to stick to doing events with other people. Not just because it’s more fun for me, but also because it felt like the audience gets more out of it too.

What do you think?

One event I’m dying to do is me and Libba talking about unreliable narrators. For those of you who haven’t read Going Bovine you really should. We wrote Liar and Going Bovine at the same time and commented on each other’s early drafts. I can’t tell you how deeply eerie it was to discover we were both writing unreliable narrators and how many resemblances there were between our books even while they were also extremely different. Going Bovine is hysterically funny; Liar not so much. I think our two books work amazingly well side by side. Turns out I am not the only one to notice this.

Maybe some time next year we’ll be able to talk about our books, their unreliability, and how hard they were to write side by side. Fingers crossed!

1. As Kristin said, “Look! Our books rhyme!”
2. Another contributing factor to why I never want to write for the grown ups: I’d have to hang out with the cranky adult literature authors. Ewww.
3. Yes, I know he’s my husband but he truly is hilarious.

Last night we watched Bong Joon-ho’s The Host again, which is probably my favourite giant monster movie ever. If you haven’t seen it do so immediately! It more than stood up to a second viewing. We then watched the Making of The Host documentary, which was way better than those things normally are. For starters, they barely talked to the actors at all—always a very good sign. Pretty much every aspect of film making was covered: from the initial idea to the storyboards to sound design. Q: How did they create the monster’s voice? A: Painstakingly.

A lot of time was spent on the logistics of filming on location in sewers. Every cast and crew member had to have preventative shots. On account of they’d be working in raw sewage infested with parasites and rats and hideous diseases. Yum! The smell was overwhelming. Many of the cast & crew were barely able to keep from vomiting. They had to deal with the non-mixability of electricity and water. Yet there they were filming in a great deal of (raw sewage) dampness. Summer shooting meant they had to be alert to flash flooding. In winter the ice had to be scraped up before every day’s filming. What larks, eh?

The doco left me extremely grateful that I write novels. I can create giant monsters living in sewers without having to spend weeks and weeks in an actual sewer. I can write about winter from the comfort of summer. I can create pretty much whatever I want without having to change out of my pyjamas or worry about how much it will cost or whether it should be a physical or post-production effect or if it’s possible to get that many extras. Luxury.

And that’s why I write novels and don’t work in the film industry.

Which is of course what all writers should do: focus on the book you’re writing, keep on plugging, don’t get too distracted by what may happen next year with the book you’ve already finished.

Except that hope is precious. Hoping that your book will do well, that it will find readers, is not a terrible thing. I’m sure all writers hope such things for all their books.¹

It’s only a problem when your hopes get in the way of your writing. When you’re so wrapped in how your book is going to do that you neglect to write the next one. Debut writers are particularly prone to this problem. Newsflash: one book does not a writing career make. If your first book isn’t the next Twilight, maybe the one after it will be, or the one after that. You’ve got time.²

But if you’re already writing the next book then hope away! Rehearse your interview with Oprah.³ Practice your Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I hoped that my very first book would be optioned by Hollywood.⁴ I have hoped that for each book I’ve written. And that once optioned the book would be made into a spectacularly brilliant movie that in no way buggered up the book I’d written.⁵ Yes, I have daydreamed about those movies and about what I’d wear to the premier. To date none of my books have been optioned. Doesn’t stop my hoping.

What? I like daydreaming. Sometimes that’s where my next novels come from.

Now, all of this may sound like I’m contradicting myself. For did I not say that I like to keep my goals realistic? Aiming to write in different genres rather than to be a bestseller. Yes, I did and I think you should to. It’s wise to have attainable goals that way you can, you know, attain them. But you can have goals and hopes.

In fact, I rather think that the two sustain each other.

1. Well, unless their evil ex has wangled a percentage of the royalties.
2. I guess the more relevant newsflash is that there may never be a next Twilight but the point of this post is not to take away hope.
3. Is it sad that I’ve never done that? Though in my mind I’ve been interviewed by Romana Koval.
4. It was my PhD thesis.
5. Oh, and that the casting was entirely without white washing.

I wonder if they ever get sick of talking about themselves.

I mean, I know that authors are frequently the world’s most self-obsessed human beings, but even so gabbing about yourself all day long gets really really old. I think that’s why I like the Q & A sections of my events best. Because I get to hear what other people are thinking.

I had a wonderful event at a middle school in Seattle today. Small and intimate with about 15 girls and I was able to ask them questions and hear about their writing processes. It was my favourite part of the whole day.²

So because I am sick of myself I’d like youse lot to tell me something cool about yourselves.

Thank you!

Sleep now for tomorrow I must be up at the crack of dawn.

1. You don’t wonder? Well, I’m going to tell you anyways. So there.
2. And today’s was a day when I got to meet Q, who is my favourite women’s basketball blogger. So it was a very good day.

I know that the title of this post is going to lead to some comments insisting that it’s not true that white writers have any advantages and that many white people are just as oppressed as people of colour. I don’t want to have that conversation. So I’m going to oppress the white people who make those comments by deleting them. I don’t do it with any malice. I do it because I want to have a conversation about white privilege in publishing. We can have the discussion about class privilege and regional privilege and other kinds of privilege some other time. Those other privileges are very real. But I don’t want this discussion to turn into some kind of oppression Olympics.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t, Redux

There were some wonderful responses to my post attempting to debunk the “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” canard. But I got the impression that some people understood me as saying that it’s fine for white people to write about non-white people and that any criticism for doing so is no big deal. Writers get criticised for all sorts of different things. Whatcha gunna do?

I did not mean that at all. I’m very sorry that my sloppy writing led to such a misunderstanding. I think the criticism a white writer receives for writing characters who are a different race or ethnicity, especially by people of that race or ethnicity, is a very big deal. We white writers have to listen extremely carefully. Neesha Meminger wrote a whole post about why in which she talks about how hard it is for many non-white writers to get published:

I know how tiring it is to hear over and over from editors or agents (who are, in almost all cases, white) that they “just didn’t connect with,” or “just didn’t fall in love with” the characters of a mostly-multicultural book. And, while I know these can be standard industry responses to manuscripts, the fact of the matter is that white authors are getting published. White authors writing about PoC are getting published—sometimes to great acclaim—while authors of colour are still not (in any significant numbers).

Mayra Lazara Dole makes a similar point:

Many POC feel you are stealing their souls. We’ve never, ever had your same opportunities. As an africanam friend would say, “the times of white people painting their faces black in hollywood are over.” Why don’t you sit back and allow us to get our work published while you keep writing what you know until we catch up? Shouldn’t it be about equal opportunity? If so, please consider giving us a chance to make our mark (about 90 percent of all books are written by white authors).

Now before you get your back up and start spouting about how you have a right to write whatever you want. Neesha agrees:

So, to my white brothers and sisters: certainly, write your story. Populate it with a true reflection of the world you live in. Bring to life strong and powerful characters of all colours. Do so with the ferocity of an ally and the tenderness of family. But please don’t be so cavalier as to shrug and say, “I did my best, and frock you if you don’t like it—plenty of your people thought I did a great job.” Take the criticism in as well. After the urge to defend yourself has passed, pick through the feedback and see if there’s some learning there. Because the reality is that masses upon masses of “our people” have absorbed toxic levels of self-hatred from the images and messages (and *inaccurate representations*) that surround us. Many of us have learned to believe that we are less than, not worthy, undeserving—and are simply grateful to be allowed to exist among you without fear.

So does Mayra Lazara Dole:

On the other hand, having been born in a communist country with censorship, please, write what you want, but just know that even though you have every right to write whatever you wish, you’ll hurt some of us. Many POC’s won’t be as forgiving, but some will. To some POC’s it will feel as if you are stealing from them . . . Don’t you want POC to write our own books?

So do I. Hey, all my books so far have had non-white protags (follow the link for my reasons why). Neither Neesha nor Mayra want to censor white writers, they want us to be very careful of what we do, and they want us to own it.

That’s what I’ve tried to do, but I haven’t always succeeded. Writing, thinking beyond my privilege, these are things I struggle with every single day of my life. I was not standing here from on high saying, “Here’s how to do it.”¹ I was saying, “Here’s what I’m wrestling with.”

What are the advantages that white writers writing about people of colour have that PoC writers don’t have?

First of all (assuming that you can actually write) your odds of getting published are better than theirs.² No, I don’t have statistics to back me up, but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence. Of friends and acquaintances who were rejected by editors and agents who already had their one African or Asian author. If you’re the only brown writer on a list than you have to be a lot better than all the other brown writers competing for that one slot. The hurdles that many non-white writers have to jump to get published in the USA are higher than they are for white writers.³

Here’s another big advantage: If you, as a white writer, produce an excellent book about people who aren’t like you odds are high that your ability to do so will be seen as a sign of your virtuosity and writerly chops, which it is. However, non-white writers rarely get the same response, even though it’s just as hard for them. I say that not just because I think all good writing is hard to achieve, but because every time you write a nuanced character who isn’t white you’re writing against a long, long tradition of stereotyped characters in Western literature. That’s hard to do no matter what your skin colour. And if you’re a writer working within in a different writing tradition and trying to make it succeed within the English-language novel tradition you’re doing something even harder.

I want to make it clear that I’m not saying that we white writers should feel guilty about any of this. Guilt is a pointless emotion. White writers who’ve written about people of colour and won acclaim and awards don’t have to hand their prizes back. That would change nothing.

What I am saying is that we need to be aware of our privilege and listen to criticism and act upon it. We need to do what we can to change things. The more novels with a diversity of characters that are published and succeed in the marketplace the more space there will be. The more people who can find themselves in books, the more readers we’ll all have, and the more opportunities there’ll be for writers from every background. Of course, it’s not just the writers who need to be more diverse, but everyone in publishing, from the interns to agents to the folks in sales, marketing, publicity, and editorial, to the distributors and booksellers.

There are many wonderful books by writers of colour. Read them, talk about them, buy them for your friends. Point them out to your editors and agents. Be part of changing the culture and making space for lots of different voices. The problem is not so much what white people write; it’s that so few other voices are heard. If the publishing industry were representative of the population at large we wouldn’t need to have this conversation.

1. And I’m very sorry if it came across that way.
2. Yes, it’s hard for all people to get published. I know. It took me twenty years to do so. But add to that the prevailing notion in the publishing industry that books about people of colour don’t sell and it becomes even harder.
3. The hurdles they have to jump to have the time and resources to write in the first place are typically also higher, but that’s a whole other story. Don’t get me started on the differences I’ve seen on tour in the USA between predominately black schools versus predominately white ones.

Damned if you do, they say, damned if you don’t.

To which I can only say, and I mean this nicely, “Please!”

What exactly are you risking? Who exactly is damning you? Which of your previously published novels have attracted no criticisms and no damnation? Cause that’s amazing. You wrote a book no one critcised? Awesome. Please teach me that trick!

Every single book I’ve published has displeased someone. I’ve been accused of promoting teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, and underage drinking. Every single one of my books has caused at least a few people to tell me that I stuffed various things up: my descriptions of Sydney, of NYC, of mathematics (absolutely true), my Oz characters don’t speak like proper Aussies, and my USians don’t talk like proper Yanquis. My teenagers sound too young or too old and are too smart or too stupid. I did my best, but some think that was not good enough.

That’s the risk you take when you write a book.

If you do not have the knowledge, resources, research, or writing skills to write people who are different from you, then don’t. People may well criticise you for that. They’ll also criticise you for having some of your characters speak their notion of ungrammatical English¹. And for not having enough vampires. Whatever.² Write what you’re good at. Lots and lots of writers pretty much only write about themselves and their friends. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a famous example. There are many many others. That’s fine. Own it. And do it as well as you can.

If you, as a white writer, decide to write people of a different hue to yourself then you should do your damnedest to get it right. But know that no matter how well researched your book, no matter how well vetted by multiple knowledgeable readers it is, there will always be people who think you buggered it up and misrepresented them. All you can do is write the best, most thoroughly researched book you possibly can. After all, don’t you do that with every book you write? You don’t write your historicals with Wikipedia as your only source, do you? Right then.

What should you do when you are criticised?

Listen. Learn. Even if you think they’re insane and completely wrong.

Figure out how to avoid the same egregious mistakes in your next book. But remember that your next book will also be criticised. That’s how it goes.

Do not have a hissy fit and say you’ll never write about anyone who isn’t white again. Do not insult those criticising you.

Say you, as a white American, write a novel with many Thai-American characters and a Thai-American reader criticises you for getting something wrong yet another Thai-American reader praises you for getting the exact same thing right. Who do you believe?

What do you do when two white readers disagree about stuff in your books? Do you assume that all white people are the same? Perhaps it’s time to stop assuming that all Thai-Americans are the same and have the same opinions and experiences. Thailand’s a big country with a wide range of ethnicities, religions, cuisines and everything else. The experiences of the Thai diaspora in the USA is going to be just as varied. Some Thai Americans will think you got it right, some will think you got it wrong. That’s how it goes.

Keep in mind that Thai-Americans writing about Thai-Americans are also criticised and told they get it wrong. No one is immune from criticism. No one is immune from getting it wrong for at least some of their readers. We all do it.

Writing is hard. No matter what you write about. You will be damned no matter what you do. But that has nothing to do with you being white, that has to do with you having the arrogance to be a writer, and publish what you write for other people to read. Your readers get to judge you. That’s just how it goes. Your job is to be a grown up about what you do and how people respond to you. That’s really hard too. Trust me, I know.

Thus endeth the rant.

1. Trust me, I get that one all the time
2. I am SO over vampires. Except for the good ones.

Hmmm. I think that sentence demands a bit more context. I keep seeing comments like, “OMG, Buffy is amazing and Joss Whedon was only in his early 30s when he first created it.” Or Arthur Rimbaud was one of the most influential French poets ever and he quit writing when he was 19!”

There must be something wrong with me cause I think, “So what?”

Either the art is good or it isn’t. Who care how old the person was who created. Doesn’t make it any better.

Not to mention that there’s an argument that the only reason people are still talking about Arthur Rimbaud is because he wrote all his poetry before he was nineteen. According to this argument his work was amazing for a teenager and that’s the only reason we remember him today. Well, that, and his truly crazy life, which makes for astonishingly entertaining biographies.¹ And the fact that his lover, Paul Verlaine, was a one-man publicity campaign, who would not shut up about Rimbaud’s supposed genius.

*Heh hem* I digress. Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer amazing because Joss Whedon was only in his early thirties² when he started working on it or is it amazing because it’s amazing?³ I say it’s simply amazing and Whedon’s age is irrelevant.⁴

If a book or a poem or a movie or a computer game or a painting or whatever blows you away why does it matter how old the person was when they made it?⁵ If they were 62 does it stop being amazing? How about 72? If they were only 20 does that make it more amazing? Why? Explain to me cause I don’t get it.

Some people write their best work when they’re young. Some when they’re old. Some when they’re middle aged. Some are pretty consistent throughout their career. Some, like Georgette Heyer, have mixed careers, dotted with marvellous and indifferent work throughout. No matter how old you are you can only do the best you can at that momet in time. Not to mention that no matter how old you are, what you think is your best work, others may think is your worst.⁶

I think what bothers me about this constant, “OMG this book is amazing! And the author was only 12!” is that it undercuts the idea that those of us who make a living writing (or creating other art) work really hard at and strive to improve. It feed into the myth of genius, of someone just producing great work full blown out of no where, without an apprenticeship, without any hard yakka, or learning, or improving. I happen not to believe in genius. I don’t believe art comes out of nowhere.

I do, however, understand the feeling of panic when you realise that, say, Georgette Heyer’s first novel was published when she was a teenager. By the time she was fifty years old she’d published close to 40 novels. Many of my favourite writers have prodigious and enviable outputs. Patricia Highsmith for one. I still haven’t read all her novels and short stories. Diana Wynne Jones has also published an astonishing number of wonderful books and they keep coming. Yay! On the other hand, Octavia Butler, Jean Rhys and Angela Carter have a relatively small volume of work. All of which I treasure and clutch to my chest. My favourite Jean Rhys novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, was published when she was in her seventies. If I can write half so well when I’m in my seventies, well, I’ll be very happy indeed.

I do envy writers like Wynne Jones and Heyer. I’ve published five novels, but my odds of writing another thirty-five before I turn fifty are, well, forget about it. Or even before I’m seventy. I’m not a super fast writer. I was able to keep up the one-novel-a-year pace for five years and in those years I was trying to write two a year. But next year there’ll be no new novel from me. I doubt I’ll ever write as fast as one a year again. But I have just as many ideas as I ever did. Sometimes I freak out realising that I may not live to write them all.⁷

But never for very long. Because, honestly, there are other things I’m more worried about not doing before I die. Like spending enough time with the people I love. Doing as much good as I can. Watching my friends’ children grow up. Eating more mangosteens. Stuff like that.

1. I recommend the Edmund Wilson one. No, I haven’t read it. But, hey, Edmund Wilson.
2. And when did accomplishing something in your early thirties make you a prodigy? Please.
3. Except for those of who don’t think it was amazing.
4. Except for all of season seven, and too much of seasons four, five and six, which are the opposite of amazing.
5. For the purposes of this rant, I’m ignoring the fact that many works of art are not created by a single person—Whedon did not make Buffy alone—especially not movies or television or computer games.
6. I think the best novel I’ve written is the first novel I wrote. It’s unpublished.
7. You know when I’m not freaking out about this world I live in melting into the sea.

This book is bad. It sucked so much. Don’t read it.

Or even more frequently,

This book had golden retrievers in it. I really hate dogs. Also the mother washed her son’s mouth out with soap and the book was set in the 1980s. No parent has washed a child’s mouth out with soap since the 1950s. This book sucked. Don’t read it.

Not liking dogs does not make a book with dogs in it bad. And a belief that x didn’t happen in the 1980s does not make it so either. For the record: a boy I went to school with in the 1980s had his mouth washed out with soap by one of his parents. I hadn’t realised soap washing of mouths happened in real life until then. Why do so many people slide from their experience to “this is how the world is”?

Scalzi and me agreed that there’s a difference between personal opinion and whether a book is technically bad. Netherland is a well-writtten book that bored me into a coma.¹ I happen to enjoy some of V. C. Andrews’ books—they’re train wrecks of bad writing and insane plotting. They’re practically a manual of how not to write. I love them.

Lots of what I like and don’t like is because of my personal tastes—I have a strong love of narrative:² Netherland is almost entirely lacking narrative drive—and my political views often make it hard for me to like books that are egregiously racist or sexist no matter how superbly crafted.

So me and Scalzi decided that more reviewers need to separate their tastes from their personal judgements. So that they could upfront admit that the book was well-crafted and did everything it set out to achieve and then go to to talk about their personal reactions. Because personal reactions are fascinating. I’m constantly amazed by the variety of ways in which books can unintentionally turn readers off (or on). From the very common “I hate books where an animal is killed” through to the less common “I don’t like books set in spring”.

I’ve already been told by several people that they won’t be reading Liar because they hate unreliable narrators and/or they hate people who lie and don’t want to read about them. All of which is fair enough.³ I have zero interest in books about middle aged college professors having affairs with their students so I don’t read them. To be honest, I kind of hate all novels set on university campuses.⁴

So from now on, reviewers, can we have more separation of your little quirks and kinks from whether or not the book is good?

Thank you. I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up.

Of course, there’s a teeny tiny problem with this straight forward separation. Just a small one:

Very few people can agree on what good writing is.

I could give you a long list of all the writers I think are total rubbish and then give you a bunch of links to rave reviews and people saying what wonderful writers they are. Most of them are living though and their fans would kill me. So instead I’ll say that I think Patrick White is dreadful. He overwrites like you would not believe. A Fringe of Leaves is one of the most overwritten piles of dreck I’ve ever slogged my way through. It’s supposed to be written as if it were 19th century prose. It’s turgid and unreadable.⁵ Lots of people love A Fringe of Leaves and it’s considered a classic. I also have a major hate for the writing of Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway. Both considered 20th Century masters. I don’t think either of them could write their way out of paper bags.

I have friends who say the same thing about Angela Carter and Jean Rhys.⁶

Could it be that notions of “good writing” also fall into the category of personal taste? I mean, yes, obviously, we’re taught to recognise good writing in school, university, at writing workshops, from parents, friends, critique partners, from the books we read. But we don’t all learn the same things or have the same teachers. I have heard people say that they don’t like books with too much description and that they consider that to be a sign of bad writing. I have ranted here previously about all the USians who are convinced that omniscient point of view is bad writing. Ditto using adverbs or verbs of utterance other than said.⁷

So what me and Scalzi are really saying is that we want you reviewers to separate out our notion of good writing (not your wrong version of good writing) from your personal tastes and start your reviews by admitting that our books are brilliantly written and that the only reason you don’t like them is cause of your personal quirks.

Hmmm, turns out we are being unreasonable.⁸ Not to mention that writers have no business telling reviewers how to review. Reviews are not for writers, they’re for readers.⁹

Um, never mind then. As you were.

Do me a favour though, the next time me and Scalzi are in total agreement about something, could you remind me that it’s a very bad sign and tell me not to blog about it? Much obliged.

1. Mad Men is an excellently written and acted show that I hate with a fiery burning passion.
2. My love of narrative aligns me with genre fiction (YA, fantasy, sf, crime, romance, historicals) far more often than it does with capital L Literary fiction. Though obviously it’s not that clear cut: my shelves have many books that are classified as Literarchure, such as works by Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, and Dawn Powell. Capital L Literature also keeps rediscovering narrative. There’s been less rejection of genre (and thus narrative) in universities over the last forty years than there used to be.
3. Though I’ve already come across some reviews of Liar that begin “I hated this book because I hate unreliable narrators.” To which I can only say: Why did you read it then? The book is called LIAR. On the very first page she says she’s a liar! What did you expect? /rant
4. Except Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society books, of course. And Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. And those Diana Wynne Jones magical university books. Update: And Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. Really it’s only realist university novels I hate.
5. Which I guess does make it like the worst of 19th century writing.
6. Obviously they’re totally insane.
7. I’ve had people accuse me of being a bad writer for writing things like “Scalzi and me” instead of “Scalzi and I” because they consider it bad grammar and do not recognise that I am going for an echo of how people actually talk and not how grammarians wish we did. It’s a battle I also have with copyeditors.
8. What a shock!
9. Yes, we’re both writers and readers but we’re attempting to tell reviewers what to do in our writerly capacity.

During my events at the Melbourne Writers Festival I wasn’t asked any wrong questions. My audiences were smart and full of excellent questions. The encounter I blogged about was with an adult aspiring writer who button holed me after one of my events, not during, which makes me think they were aware of just how wrong their questions were.

That was my lowlight of the Festival, the highlight also happened after one of my events.

Isobelle Carmody invited me to have a coffee¹ with her and some of her fans. They were a lovely group² some of whom had been reading Isobel’s work for more than 20 years and know it better than she does. They run a couple of Carmody fan sites. At least two of them were aspiring writers. They were full of the right questions. Smart, technical, writing questions. Questions about rewriting, about juggling characters, about how Isobelle and I manage our writing schedules, about Isobelle’s books, about how we’re all fans, about publishing madnesses (of which there are so many). It was fun and intense and I came away deeply impressed by both Isobelle and her fans and feeling joyous about what we YA writers do and the effects it can have on our readers, including turning them into us.³ I was very sorry when I had to leave.

1. Or in my case, water, because coffee tastes like death.
2. Whose names I have forgotten because I have the memory of a crushed gnat. Sorry!
3. One of us! One of us! One of us!

For instance, after yesterday’s event an adult came up to me and explained that they are an aspiring writer working on their first novel. They said they wanted my advice but the questions they asked really confused me:

What’s the best way to get started writing fan fiction?

How do you build up a following?

Should I be using wordpress, livejournal or blogger?

It took me awhile to realise what was going on. They wanted to know what to do to get a publisher’s attention. And they had decided the best way to do that was to reverse engineer other writers’ successes. Two of their favourite writers had started out as fan fiction writers and developed big followings. Another of their favourites was a blogger who had sold a novel they had first posted on their website.

The problem with that plan¹ is that there only a handful of writers in the entire world who got published that way. You’d be better off buying lottery tickets.

Besides which, none of those writers did it on purpose. They wrote fanfic because they loved it. They blogged for the same reason.² Because they loved it and were good at it they developed a following. None of them blogged and wrote fanfic in order to develop a following.³

I stood there, mouth agape, trying to figure out how to respond to these wrong questions. Should I tell this aspiring writer that they had the cart so far in front of the horse that the two were never going to meet?

Instead I asked AW a question:

Justine: “How many novels have you written?”

Aspiring Writer: Silence.

Justine: “Have you written one novel?”

AW: “Well, um, I’m halfway into my first one.”

Justine: “You don’t have a finished draft?”

AW: “No.”

I told the AW about how I started at least twenty novels before I finally finished one. I did not sell the first novel I completed. Or my second. I sold my third novel. I know many, many writers who sold their fifth, eight, or twentieth novel first. The majority of published writers did not sell the first novels they wrote.

I explained how bad it is for you to start thinking about marketing and promotion before you’ve even learned whether you can finish a novel. It will do your head in. It’s bad enough angsting about all that stuff when you do have published novels.

I think I got through to AW. I think I finally know how to get other wrong question asking aspiring writers back on to right questions. From now on I am going to ask them how many novels they’ve written.

1. Okay, there are MANY problems with that plan. Starting with it being insane.
2. Many of them still do both.
3. How do I know? The writers in question are friends of mine. Yes, I know everyone.

I don’t remember deciding that Reason, the protagonist of the Magic or Madness trilogy, would have a white Australian mother and an Indigenous Australian father. I don’t remember deciding that Tom would be white Australian or Jay-Tee Hispanic USian. But I made a conscious decision that none of the characters in How To Ditch Your Fairy would be white and that Liar would have a mixed race cast. Why?

Because a young Hispanic girl I met at a signing thanked me for writing an Hispanic character. Because when I did an appearance in Queens the entirely black and Hispanic teenage audience responded so warmly to my book with two non-white main characters. Because teens, both here and in Australia, have written thanking me for writing characters they could relate to. “Most books are so white,” one girl wrote me.

Because no white teen has ever complained about their lack of representation in those books. Or asked me why Reason and Jay-Tee aren’t white. They read and enjoyed the trilogy anyway. Despite the acres and acres of white books available to them.

Because I don’t live in an all-white world. Why on earth would I write books that are?

I’m not saying my books are perfect. They’re not. If I could go back and rewrite them I would be much more specific about Tom and Jay-Tee’s backgrounds. Tom is just white. I’m specific about his bit of Sydney and about his parents’ occupations, but not about their or his ethnicity. White is not just one flavour. Nor do I go into any kind of detail about what kind of Hispanic Jay-tee is. Is her family from Puerto Rico? Mexico? Venezuela? Dominican Republic? All/none of the above? I say she’s from the Bronx but not where in the Bronx. It’s a big place. (Please forgive me, all my Bronx friends! Especially you, Coe.) As a result I was much more specific about Micah’s background in Liar. All mistakes and oversights in that book will be worked out in the books I’m writing now. The things I get wrong in those books will be fixed in the books I write after them. And so it goes . . . (I hope.)

Questions of representation were not foremost in my mind when I was writing the Magic or Madness trilogy. I’m a white girl who grew up in a predominately white country. Thinking about race and representation is something I have to make myself do because my life is not governed negatively by it as others’ lives are, like, say Prof Henry Louis Gates Jr.

It was the response of my readers that got me thinking hard about representation. Now those questions are foremost when I write.

Thus when I sat down to write How To Ditch Your Fairy I already knew none of the characters would be white. I also knew that I was writing a somewhat utopian world¹ in which race and gender were not the axes of oppression that they are in our world. Female athletes having as strong a prospect of making a living at their sport as a boy is clearly not true in our world, but it is in the world of HTDYF. Nor is there any discrimination on the basis of race. But there is on the basis of class and geography. (I was not writing a perfect world.)

Not many people noticed, or if they did, they didn’t mention it to me, but I was dead chuffed by those who did. Thank you.

1. In some ways it’s very dystopian.

“Look, people thought I was going to be a huge failure, but then I got kind of lucky and made it. And I had and have lots of amazing friends, and we’ve seen each other’s careers go up and down. Take my advice: don’t go comparing yourself to other people. You will go insane. It’s pointless. Your fortunes may rise and fall, depending on all kinds of things you have no control over. Keep your friends. Never compare all the outward markers of success. Do what you love, because that’s all you really get and that’s all that matters and that’s all that will ever really work. And don’t be an as$h&^e.”

It’s doesn’t matter what game you’re in, judging yourself solely by external measures will do your head in. You are not a good writer because you get good reviews or because you’re a bestseller or a prize winner.

You can continue to work hard and write your best and yet stop getting good reviews¹ and prizes and spots on bestseller lists. If you depend on those measures to determine your worth you are in for a world of pain.

As Mr Murray and Maureen say you have no control over that external stuff.² Forget about it. You are not a better person cause you sell more than your friends. You are not a worse person because you’re never short listed for prizes. Concentrate on doing the absolute best you can in whatever field you’re in. Because if your eyes are only on the prize, all the joy and pleasure in writing (or whatever) will disappear.

If you do get lucky and your work is recognised, make sure you thank the people who gave you the time and space and support in order to do your absolute best: your family, your friends, your colleagues etc. etc.

Thus endeth the sermon.

1. Or any reviews at all, which is much worse.
2. And if you did have control and could give yourself prizes and good reviews and huge sales, what would be the point?

Many people in that thread talked about how writing fanfic was a learning experience that prepared them for becoming a professional writer. And there’s no doubt that that’s how fanfic has worked for many pros. However, the vast majority of writers of fanfic not only don’t become pros, they have no desire to do so. They write fanfic for a variety of reasons: fun, community, because writing is something they can’t not do and so on—they don’t do it as some kind of apprenticeship for becoming a “real” writer.

I know professional writers who also write fanfiction. So clearly it’s fulfilling a need that their paid writing isn’t. I also do a lot of unpaid writing. You’re reading some of it right now. Often I enjoy writing posts here more than writing novels.

Or, rather, I have a much less stressful relationship to this writing than I do to my novel writing because there’s not much riding on this blog, whereas my ability to pay my rent, buy food, stay in the profession that I love is tied up in the novels I write. Sometimes it takes awhile to push that stuff aside and just write. For me blogging is a relaxation; writing novels is an economic necessity.

Which is not to say that it can’t be fun. It can. I wouldn’t swap my job for any other job in the world. I love it. But it’s still my job and comes with all the stresses that any job has, including anxiety about losing said job.

Not everyone who spends a lot of time writing wants to be a professional writer. Frankly, I think that’s sensible. It’s very hard to make a living as a professional writer. Even if you do manage it’s just as hard to make it a sustainable career. I know lots of writers who’ve been able to support themselves for a year or two or four or ten but then demand for their work dwindle, fashion in the publishing world changes. In the 80s horror was huge, now not so much. YA’s big right now but who knows were it will be in ten years. Romance is pretty much always the biggest selling genre and yet it has the lowest advances. I know of romance writers with multiple bestselling books who only get around 20k per book.

The majority of pro novelists, who are making a living, write a book a year. Many write two or three or four a year. For many writers that’s an impossible pace to sustain and it can suck the fun right out of the writing. There are lots of reasons for not making writing your main profession. Most of the published writers I know are not full-time. Many of them claim to be happier that way.

When writing becomes your full time job it completely changes your relationship to writing. It becomes a business. You can’t wait for your muse to show up. You have to force it when you’re not in the mood. You have to meet deadlines. You have to think about whether there’s a market for what you want to write. You can’t just write whatever you feel like unless you happen to be lucky enough to have a market for what you feel like writing.

In which case you’re probably Nora Roberts. Lucky duck!

I suspect the people best positioned to answer the question are not the writers but the readers. I’m dreadful at spotting my influences.

SPOILER WARNING: The rest of this post is going behind a cut because I discuss literary influences on Liar and I happen to know that some of you are as nutty about spoilers as I am and don’t want to know even the tiniest bit about the book before you read it. Though I think identifying specific literary influences is way more that just a tiny bit spoilery. And one of the ones I’m going to talk about below this cut is MASSIVELY spoilery. (Well, in JustineLand. I have a much broader definition of spoiler than most people, which makes conversations with Sarah Rees Brennan and Diana Peterfreund difficult sometimes as neither seems to understand the concept of the spoiler at all. Bless them!)

You has been warned.

But a friend who’s read a lot of my work just pointed out to me that Patricia Highsmith is clearly a big influence on Liar. Which made me realise that, yes, she is. And so are Walter Mosley and Jim Thompson. All three of them are writers I’ve read obsessively for a good many years. When I set out to write a crime/psychological thriller (in the broadest sense) it’s not unsurprising that my three favourite writers of same would seep into the novel. I’d be hard pressed to tell you how or where their influences are closest to the surface in Liar you’d have to ask my friend.

Another big influence is We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. A novel I have been unable to get out of my head since I first read it a few years ago. The book is both sticky and disturbing and brilliant. As unreliable narrators go, Eva Khatchadourian,¹ is one of the most disturbing, though definitely not one of the most unreliable. Some days I think that without realising it I rewrote We Need to Talk About Kevin from the pov of Kevin and the result is Liar.

Or perhaps not.

One of the reasons I’m so uncomfortable with talking about my influences is that these four writers are all brilliant. It’s extraordinarily boastful to mention my work in the same breath as theirs. I feel the need to point out that I’m not comparing Liar to their novels. I’m saying that if I hadn’t read their books I may never have written Liar. I’m saying not that their genius has seeped into it rendering Liar genius. Tragically, it doesn’t work like that. Highsmith, Mosley, Thompson, Shriver taught me a vast deal about psychological thrillers, and skads about writing, but what I did with their teachings is my own lookout. Genius is not transmitted through the eyeballs. Pity that.

Do any of you find the literary influence question as tricky as I do?

1. It was just announced that Tilda Swinton will be playing her in the movie. Genius casting!

• I don’t care whether you spell it “okay” or “ok”.
• In fact, I’m an indifferent speller and am not particularly bothered by that fact. That’s what spell checkers, editors and proof readers are for.
• I don’t care either way about serial commas. It’s all fine by me.
• I would much rather read a finished book than an ARC.
• I can touch type. None of this two-finger nonsense.
• Stationery shops bore me. I find hardware shops more interesting. Honestly, I’d rather watch paint dry than oooh and ahh over stationery. I don’t like paper. I don’t like pens.
• I have zero interest in fonts. I only learnt the difference between san serif and serif very recently and I kind of don’t care. I think Helvetica is the most boring documentary ever made.
• I hate coffee and thus can write without it quite easily thank you. Ditto for Coke or Pepsi or any of their equivalents. Caffeine does nothing for me and the stuff it’s in tastes bad. Yup, even chocolate.
• One glass of wine and any ability I have to write is gone entirely. For me alcohol and writing do not mix. I am definitely no Dylan Thomas or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But, hey, there are many upsides to not being an alcoholic.

Go ahead, try and take my writer card away from me. You can’t have it!

I happen to know writers who don’t write in their pyjamas. Who don’t blog, who, in fact, hate blogs. There are “writers” who have zero interest in publishing gossip. There are even “writers,” and I hesitate to say this, who don’t use a computer to write.

They’re way worse writers than I am.

Just sayin’ . . .

I’m actually a reviewer for Publishers Weekly and while I’ve read some things that were kind of poorly constructed, I’ve never had even an urge to be even half this harsh, not even secretly if I strongly disliked the book. Too much work goes into a book for anything to warrant this kind of nastiness and seriously nothing is so bad it deserves to be called “a candy-coated turd.”

I have condemned books in stronger language than that. When I hate a book, I really hate a book. I totally get writing such vicious reviews. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I don’t write reviews and only discuss books on this blog if I love them: the knowledge that were I to write an honest review of a book I hate I would most definitely hurt other writers’ feelings, alienate their fans, and lose friends. Also the YA world is small and writing a bad review of another YA writer’s book leaves you open to charges of sour grapes. Life’s too short.

I say that as someone who has received very mean reviews. I know exactly how much it hurts. Reviews have made me cry and scream and kick my (thankfully imaginary) dog (poor Elvis, he knows I love him). But I believe people are moved to write such nasty reviews because of the intensity of their relationship with books. That’s awesome!

I feel that too. When I read a book I was expecting to love and it sucks I feel betrayed. When I read a book in a beloved series and the characters are suddenly transformed beyond recognition and there seems to have been no editing at all and the writing has gone to hell, I am OUTRAGED. I want to kick the editor and the author. On the scale of things, I think writing a mean review about the book is way better than assault.

Passionate reviews, good or bad, are fabulous. It’s great that people care enough to rant or rave about a book. I don’t think it’s unprofessional to vent your spleen at a book. Some eviscerations of books are wonderfully well written and a total pleasure to read. And some passionate raves about books are appallingly badly constructed. One of the reviews of my books that embarrasses me the most was a rave. An extraordinarily badly written rave in a professional location¹ which so mischaracterised my book that it was unrecognisable. The reviewer clearly loved the book. They also clearly didn’t understand it. No review has annoyed me as much as that one.

On the other hand, my favourite review ever remains the one written by a punter on the B&N site which said Magic or Madness was like a bad Australian episode of Charmed. Makes me laugh every time I think of it.

An unprofessional review is one that attacks the author directly. But the problem is that most writers conflate themselves with their books so that many consider an attack on their work to be an attack on them. It’s really hard for us writers to be clear that the reviewer is calling our book “a candy-coated turd” not us. But learn it we must! Part of this job is having your work assessed by people who are not going to be kind. No one owes you a good review.

A site like the Worst Review Ever is an excellent place for authors with bruised egos to vent, but I really hope it doesn’t have a dampening effect on online YA reviewers. If you hate a book, say so. Figure out exactly what it was that bugged you about it and let rip. You’re doing all of us readers a service. Even if we totally disagree with you. One of the most useful parts about Twilight’s success has been the vigorous debate all over the intramawebs about the book’s worth and effect on its readers. I’ve learned a lot from it. I’d really hate for reviewers worried about an author’s feelings to dilute their passion. Bugger the author’s feelings. You’re not writing reviews for them, you’re writing your reviews for us readers.

Readers, you (we) have the right to hate!

And also the right to change our minds at a later date when we read the book and discover it didn’t suck after all. Or vice versa.

Authors, you know what’s worse than a bad review? No reviews at all.

1. I’m not saying whether it was online or off.

For instance, I was once told I had crossed the line because my Livejournal icons were of the front covers of my books. I thought that was nuts. I like the covers of my books. Why can’t I make icons out of them? Too pushy, I was told. It’s like you’re only on Livejournal to get people to buy your books. Someone else told me I shouldn’t mention my books on my blog because it sounds like I just want people to buy them and that’s the only reason I blog. On the other hand someone wrote wanting to know why there are no links to buy my books on this site. When I told them it’s because I think that’s pushy they said I was weird. (A definite possibility.)

I find it icky when authors blog about what voting awards (Hugo, Locus etc) they’re eligible for. To me it reads like they’re asking you to vote from them, which I find tacky. I mentioned this to some friends and they told me I was being crazy. That it is remiss of an author not to do that since the people who vote for these kind of awards often have no clue what’s eligible and like to be reminded. That it’s not about being self-aggrandising; it’s about giving readers information.

All these different takes on what constitutes being too self-promotery has led me to the conclusion that the only way to handle it is to do what you’re comfortable with. I am comfortable with icons of my covers. I am not comfortable blogging about good reviews of my work. (Or bad reviews for that matter.) Or skiting about being shortlisted or winning awards. (Not that it happens very often.) Because I honestly don’t think any of that has much to do with me. Reviews and awards are for readers not authors. I think the most important thing they do is help people find books that might otherwise have been overlooked. For me to engage with them is beside the point. So I no longer do.

I am comfortable (actually I’m ecstatically happy) blogging about the process of researching and writing my books, about the different markets my books have been sold into, the different covers the books get. All that fascinates me. As this is my blog I gets to write about it even if others think that’s too self-promotery.

What’s your take on all of this? I’d love to hear from authors and readers. What do you find too much? Are their authors you wish promoted themselves a bit more?

But mostly I was weirded out because I couldn’t quote anything from any of my books even if you threatened to kill me if I didn’t start reciting stat. Who memorises their own books? I mean other than the writer I just met who does.

I put it to the test and asked a bunch of my writer friends if they could quote any of their work. Cassandra Clare and Robin Wasserman were easily able to rattle off opening lines of several of their books. Especially Robin who recited the whole opening paragraph of Skinned. Maureen came up with the opening of Scarlett Fever, which she happens to be working on right now.¹ But she was also able to quote some choice lines of dialogue from less recent books. Scott can quote the opening of Uglies but, honestly, who can’t? I mean even I know that one.

But me? I cannot recite a single line from my own work.

So what about you other writers? Can any of you quote your own work? Can any of you recite beyond the opening lines? Am I a freak with the crappest memory ever?² Do any of you think it’s kosher to quote yourself in a discussion?

Oh wait: “I have a parking fairy.” There. I quoted a line. Yay, me! Not sure what arguments I’ll win with it though.

1. No, I can’t quote the opening of my 1930s book. It keeps changing, okay?
2. It is true that I’ve been known to forget names of characters in my book. My fans know my books way better than I do.

They mostly boiled down to aspiring writers not understanding what it is that agents do. They seem to think an agent’s job is giving them feedback on their work and teaching them the ways of publishing. That isn’t any part of an agent’s job. Agents who provide that kind of feedback are doing it out of the goodness of their heart.

Even more aspiring authors seemed to be convinced that the main part of an agent’s job is finding new clients.

No, the main job of any agent is to look after their existing clients.

Which involves negotiating deals in multiple territories, for audio, media, electronic rights etc etc. That’s a LOT of contracts. Then they’re dealing with problems that come up between publisher and author. Bad edits. Bad covers. Late payments. Late manuscripts. Inaccurate royalty statements. Client’s editor being laid off. Their imprint dissolved. Book remaindered within less than a year. No paperback edition of hardcover. Author going crazy and turning in a book written in crayon on vellum. Editor going crazy and demanding all characters be changed into echidnas. Etc etc and so on.

My agent, Jill Grinberg, starts work early in the morning and keeps going till late at night. I’ve sent her emails at 10pm her time and she’s gotten back to me instantly. She’s had phone calls with me at all sorts of ungodly hours because I am in Sydney and she in New York City. Remember, I am just one of her many clients and no where near her most successful.

Yes, agents want to find the next big thing. But their pre-existing clients come first and take up the majority of their time. Trust me, when you have an agent you will be glad that’s how it works.

I get how much rejection hurts. It took me twenty years to get published. There was a lot of rejection on the way. It frequently made me furious. I was enraged by form letters. (I am not just a number!) I was enraged by personalised rejections that detailed what was wrong with my work. (Why are they so stupid and blind?!) I was enraged when the rejections took ages to come or didn’t come at all. (Why are they torturing me?) I was enraged by quick rejections. (What? It takes seconds to decide my work sucks? They can’t have actually read it!)

But really I was angry about not getting published. I saw lots of crap on the shelves. My book’s better than that! Why wouldn’t they publish me?!

It’s great that I believed in my writing even in the face of all that rejection. I encourage you, too, to believe. But I also know that many of the people rejecting me were right. My writing wasn’t ready. One of the rejections that hurt me the most was by an agent who said they thought I had talent and originality but they just weren’t enthusiastic enough.

Reader, I cried.

I know now that that agent was right to pass. I have writer friends who were signed by agents who weren’t enthusiastic enough about their work. In each case—after much unpleasantness—they wound up with a different agent. Ever been out with someone who wasn’t really into you? Not fun was it? It’s even worse when you’re with an agent who’s not that into you. Because they’ve got your dreams and hopes in their hands and they don’t really care.

An agent who passes cause they’re not sufficiently in love with your writing is DOING YOU A FAVOUR.

I know that’s hard to believe. But a good agent is going to be with you for the long haul. You want them to believe in your writing as much as you do. That’s what I have with my agent. It is a wonderful thing. When you find an agent that’s what I want you to have too.

A while back I solicited opinions on whether a friend of mine should go freelance or not.² One of the interesting things mentioned in the comments was how hard the transition from part-time to full-time writer can be. Hope said:

She might find, disaster of all disasters, that when she quits and has all the free time in the world, that she can’t get any work done. If she is writing successfully now, it might be because the structure of her life encourages it. Sometimes, we get more done in 15 minutes, when we know that that is all the time we have, then we would if we had all day.

Garth Nix chimed in to agree:

When I first became a full-time writer in 1998, I actually wrote less over the next year than I had when I’d been incredibly busy with my day job.

Diana Peterfreund agreed:

Oh, and tell your friend that if she *does* quit, expect it to take a year or more to get into a professional schedule. It’s been that way for me and for a lot of writers gone freelance I know.

The rhythms of writing full-time are entirely different from writing part-time. When I went freelance the same thing happened to me. Suddenly I had all the time in the world and my writing came to a grinding halt. Procrastinatory habits of a lifetime scaled up to unprecedented levels. To the point where all I did was faff about It was insane. I didn’t write a damn thing.

I did try. But I just couldn’t. I’m not sure what was stopping me. But it felt like fear. Here I was doing what I always wanted to do. But I was so completely terrified that I’d blow it that I . . . well, froze. Thus leading to the very strong possibility that I would fail at doing what I’d always wanted to do.

But then through pure luck I had a chance at a ghostwriting gig. Scott encouraged me to go for it, seeing as how I was doing nothing on my own projects. He thought it would be a good learning experience.

It was. But not in the way he was thinking.

Dear readers, I blew it.

I continued to faff. I missed deadlines. I wound up having to write the book in a matter of weeks. It was as good as a book can be that took two weeks to write. Hint: Not very.

I was given a kill fee, which was less than the advance. As in, I had to return part of the money I’d been paid.

My first professional writing gig and I blew it.

Not long afterwards I was given the opportunity to pitch my Magic or Madness idea. Miracle of miracles, Eloise Flood went ahead and bought it from the proposal. The ghostwriting debacle had left me ashamed and demoralised. This was my chance to prove to myself that I wasn’t a complete washout, that I could do this full-time thing. I had grave doubts.

I wrote the first draft of Magic or Madness in eight weeks and turned it in six months ahead of the deadline.³ It was a vastly better book than the ghostwritten one. At least partly because I’d written that poor broken shell of a book. I’d had a practice run at writing a YA. I told myself that the ghostwriting disaster was ultimately a good thing. Without it Magic or Madness probably wouldn’t have been as good.

That may be true but it doesn’t change the fact that I blew my first pro writing gig.

It’s taken me a lot longer than a year to learn how to write full-time. I think it wasn’t really until last year—2008—that I’ve exhibited anywhere near the kind of discipline necessary for this gig. I still faff but in a more controlled manner. I’ve not missed a deadline since Magic’s Child in 2006.

More importantly I’ve never again experienced the paralysing fear that almost nuked my career before it began. By the time I finished that first draft of Magic or Madness in January 2004 I knew I could do this full-time writing thing. I’d also learned it was a lot harder than I’d imagined.

I’m still learning. When I’m in writing mode very little can distract me. However, getting into writing mode remains a struggle. I seem to have lost the ability I had when I was a part-timer to write in between other things, to get a useful amount of writing done in short bursts. Now I need at least three clear hours and the first hour is often spent pushing past my resistance to writing. But it’s so much better than that first year. I’ll take it.

Happy sixth anniversary to me!

1. Wow, this is my sixth anniversary. How bizarre.
2. She didn’t.
3. Which tragically meant they just moved up the publication date.

Since college, I have lived mostly on the Upper West Side, and I’ve done a great deal of work in Riverside Park. By work, I mean not just the labor of making sentences; I mean the different sort of effort involved in reading or listening to music that I want to write about. I had the author photos for my first two books (“Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn” and “Positively 4th Street”) taken in Riverside Park, because the books were essentially made there. The park is where I did the musing that can be the most important part of writing.

Working in Riverside Park, one is reminded from time to time of the porous line between musing and daydreaming. My bench of choice faces the river, and I sometimes find the steady, endless rolling of the water lulling me to dreaminess. I like to think of this state as one conducive to epiphany, although it more often leads, in my case, to naps.

All so true. I can’t tell you how many times that wavering state where you’re not asleep but you’re not entirely in the here and now leads to insights and connections and ways to make the book I’m writing so much better.

It’s also very true that the same state can slide straight into sleep. As risks go that’s not a bad one. I quite like sleeping, me.

1. For the New Yorkers, who are scornful of that description, may I remind you that many of my readers have never been to NYC and have no idea where or what the Upper West Side is.

A long time ago there lived a group of dragons that were called the toughies.

Now the king of the country where the toughies lived had tried everything to get rid of them; he gave them maidens weekly, a million dollars (they put in that they couldn’t do much with it). At last he put forward a proclamation saying, whoever gets rid of the dragons will get a million dollars (they could do something with it).

Soon everybody was trying to get rid of them, but all in vain for no one succeeded, ‘till a girl named Zantorria set out to kill the dragon who had killed her father. When she reached Tatooklia ( the place where the dragons live) she crept into their cave and saw 12 heaps of straw where 12 dragons lay looking very ill.

Approaching them carefully she said “What’s the matter?”

The first dragon stared at her and said, “We’re sick from eating too many people, they taste horrid”

When the girl asked who killed her father they said he’d died naturally so she helped the dragons get better because they promised not to be bad and she lived with them for the rest of her life.

My plotting has improved somewhat since then . . .

So, not true. We’re all robots. Every single one of us.

Especially Maureen. She is one of the screaming author models.

Scalzi, himself, is one of the lazy author models. I know this because I am too. Once or twice we’ve gotten through cons by swapping out parts. (There’s not always time to get a tune up in the middle of a busy con.) It’s one of the bonuses of hanging out with same prototype robots.

I hope that’s cleared things up for everyone.

That’s a very good question with many answers.

For most of my years of being unpublished almost no one saw my work.¹ Thus I did not improve much. But in the five or so years before publication I started swapping my work with other unpublished writer friends.² What a difference having a few readers makes!

I was lucky enough to live in big enough cities that finding other beginning writers wasn’t too hard. (Sydney and NYC.) But I know many of you are more isolated than that. Or you’re too shy to admit that you want to be a published writer.³ For you I recommend online critique groups. Personally, I have never tried them because back when I was starting out they didn’t exist. But I know many people who’ve had great experiences with them. The Critters workshop for science fiction & fantasy is one I’ve heard good things about.

Anyone want to share their online critting experiences and/or recommend some good online worshops?

I also know many people whose writing lives have been dramatically changed by going to real life intensive workshops such as Clarion (also for sf & f) which operates in Australia and the US of A. Does anyone have other real life workshops to recommend?

Of course, something like Clarion lasts six weeks and isn’t free. Many people can’t afford that amount of time or money so it’s not going to be possible for everyone. Fortunately most online workshops are free.

And remember that crit groups and workshops don’t work for everyone and that they’re not all created equal. Just as some critique partners will work great for you and others won’t, and that may also vary from story to story.

Please chime in with any other suggestions and recommendations.

Thanks!

1. For those who don’t know it took me twenty years to get published.
2. Here’s the story of how I wrote my first novel thanks to my wonderful critique partner Johanne Knowles.
3. It took me years to admit it to any but my closest friends and family.