Kelly McCullough – Page 68

Friday Cat Blogging

Why do we want to climb the thumb-monkey? Because the thumb-monkey is there!

You realize that makes no sense, right?

Tell it to the Meglet, she’s the one who thought it was clever.

I stole it from Mallory, sue me…hang on, is that my tail? Gotta go, bye.

Y’all are arguing about quotes when there’s sun to be had? Screw that.

Have you ever really tasted your thumb?

No, but I’ve tasted the iPad and it is DELICIOUS. It tastes of virtual fish.

Seriously? Virtual fish? Mallory? Because it’s there? Y’all are an embarrassment.

Guest cats courtesy of Kim and Jonny,

Well, and as always, Coconut courtesy of Neil Gaiman

Friday Cat Blogging

Awk, Polly wants a dead mousie, awk!

Sometimes the places the thumb-monkey’s brain goes worries me…

Sometimes?

Mmm, dead mousies…

Help, they turned off my gravity and now I’m floating away!

Building a Writing Career—The Real Secret Handshake

There is one thing you can do to build your career in this field that will help more than anything else, a secret handshake of the writing biz. You know what it is, though it may not occur to you immediately. Who wants to take a swing at it?

*a hand shoots up*

Write the best story you possibly can, every time?

*sighs*

Okay, two things. But really, writing the best story you can is the ante you need to pay just to get into the game. Without that you don’t even get to play. Anyone else want to guess?

*waits*

I see some hands up and I’m pretty sure some of you know the answer, but since this is a pre-canned essay, I’m going to have to type it myself anyway.

Be professional.

I’m letting that sit out there all alone because it’s really really important. Science fiction and fantasy publishing is a business, and it’s actually a very small one at the professional level. If you were to take every single SFWA eligible writer in the entire world and put them together in one place you’d have a group roughly the size of my wife’s high school student body. Admittedly, it was a large high school, 2,000 plus students, and the group gets bigger when you add in all of the agents and editors, but due to agent-writer and editor-writer ratios that still doesn’t take you outside the large high school range.

Think about that for a moment. A large high school. If you went to a big school think about how fast information moved through the student body. Think about the way that if you did something notable as a freshman it stayed with you for the next four years because everybody knew everybody at least a little. Even if you went to a smaller school (my graduating class was 17) you probably still have a feeling for the scale just from being immersed in pop culture.

So, in terms of community size and reputation building, professional science fiction and fantasy, is basically a large high school. The plus side of this is that everyone knows everyone else, and at its best the community functions like a tight-knit village with lots of mutual support. The minus side of this is that…everyone knows everyone. If you have a public hissy fit (and the internet counts as public) when you get a particularly brutal rejection letter it may hang there in the background of your reputation for the rest of your career.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for reputation management. Be professional. Remember that if you want to make writing your career, it’s just that—a career. Remember whenever you post something online about writing that you’re pretty much posting it on the wall labeled “my professional reputation.” Don’t punt deadlines unless you absolutely have to, and then manage the fallout in a professional manner. Tell your editor what’s coming as soon as you can see it. Apologize. If you’ve got a fan base that you interact with online, make sure to keep them as up to date as possible.

Above all, treat people with respect and kindness as much as possible. Personally, I’ve found that this is a good idea in general for managing my life. Your millage may vary there, but it’s really important for your professional interactions because those will have a huge effect on your career over time for a very simple reason. Editors are people, and they buy stories for a lot of reasons.

Primarily, editors buy stories because they believe they will sell, but after you get over that basic hurdle (see writing the best story you possibly can every time above) other factors start to come into play and right up at the top of the list is how they feel about the writer as a professional. Does the author produce a reliable product? Do they do so on time? Is the author easy to work with? Can they be trusted not to do anything that will alienate fans? Etc.

Now, I will admit that if you sell 100,000 hardcovers every time your name appears on a dust jacket you can get away with all kinds of crappy behavior—though many will think the worse of you. But if you’re underselling and so is captain-difficult-to-work-with, I can tell you who is going to be the first cut from the list and it’s not the writer who acts professionally.

So, yes, Virginia, there really is a secret handshake. It’s called professional behavior, or more simply, being polite and meeting your obligations.

(Originally published on SFNovelists June 11 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Not Writing = Vivid Dreaming = Need to Write

Sometimes people ask me where I get my ideas, or why I write. This is one part of the answer.

For a number of reasons I haven’t been writing the past month and a half. First there was the post-book lull compounded by Laura needing a ton of help to get her department moved. Then there was the spring gardening madness which has to get done while the weather and the season are right. Now that that’s all almost done, I’m starting to think about writing again, and boy do I need it.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t shut off the creative part of my brain. Whether I’m writing or not, there’s a never-ending spring of strange in the depths there. It works a bit like a reservoir behind a dam. If I’m writing, the sluice gates are open and the weird wells up and pours into the book. If I’m not writing, the levels just keep getting higher until they start to pour over the top.

The main places they go when they do that are my early morning pre-filters conversation and my dreams. Normally, when I’m writing, I either don’t remember my dreams, or (occasionally) I have dreams about the book. When I start to remember my dreams I know I need to direct the flow back into fiction. Generally I do this at the one remembered vivid dream a night stage. I’m up to three most nights.

For example, last night I had two which stayed with me well into today:

The first was a castle break-in dream in which Laura and I and two large brown bears were sneaking into a castle. For some reason we had decided to pretend that we were there for a bear-polka party—which was why we needed the bears. The rest of the details got written over by the second dream.

The second involved Laura and I sitting on stage chatting with Minnie Mouse as part of a Disney On Ice show. This Minnie did synchronized swimming kind of stuff at the midpoint and she and I got to talking about how the On Ice stars all practiced fencing. About midway through this, John McCain showed up and we got into a verbal tussle which led to arranging a duel—cavalry sabers to first blood. After Arlen Specter arranged the exchange of information for the duel Minnie invited me to train with the On Ice crew for the duel because John McCain was always making their life miserable.

Since I don’t want to spend my night polkaing with bears or fencing with Minnie and McCain, I really need to get back to writing.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 9 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

My First Audio Book

Available at the usual places.

Whee!

Friday Cat Blogging

Did you hear the #$*&! groundhog saw its shadow?

Does this answer your question? I hiding here until spring.

*facepaw*

I kill it with my mind!

I kill it old fashioned way. Groundhog, meet…teh Claw!

Six more weeks of falling through the snow crust. *dogsigh*

You’re not serious, are you?*

There will be snow? Will we get to play? Because that would be AWESOME!*

__________________________________________

*Pup Freyja: https://www.facebook.com/sleddoginthecity?fref=ts and Cat Casey

appearing today courtesy of the marvelous Jodi Thibeault

Friday Cat Blogging

Someone said that it’s snowing again…

Oh no they didn’t!

Only way to deal with snow is to hide out in the library and drink tea.

I vote for sunbeams!

I vote for thumb-monkey pillows and video games.

You go snowshoeing, I will take the dog bed to safety.

About That Good Art Article at NPR…

So, there’s an NPR article making the rounds right now. It purports to be about whether the quality of art is primarily responsible for the popularity of art. Leaving aside that I don’t think the methodology of the study addresses the question the article seems to be claiming it does, this is a subject that makes my bones itch.

That’s because I’m not at all sure we can have anything like an objective standard of “good” for something as subjective as art. I strongly suspect that we can draw a line between bad and competent, but once you’ve crossed over into competent, I think that things go very very fuzzy.

First off, what constitutes good? For example, in writing, is great prose ultimately the true measure of good? Or is it something else entirely. Good or great pacing is also a skill. So is good or great character, or world, or story, or simply the ability to evoke emotional response. I have read things with very meh prose that are still amazingly excellent works do to other aspects of art and craft and vice-versa.

Also, who gets to decide what constitutes good? That’s a huge question, both in terms of expertise and of culture. There are things that I as a professional writer might judge to be bad prose because of my own personal context when I read it, while an inexpert or early reader might find the very same prose amazing because the writer is doing important things with simple structure and words.

On another axis, there are things that I may find deeply moving or fun because I’m a middle-aged, cis-gendered, white, straight, liberal, atheist guy from the midwest. Those same thing could be frankly appalling to someone who doesn’t share my cultural biases.

Audience matters, and good for me is almost certainly not good for everyone. While I absolutely want experts deciding whether a bridge design is sound, experts deciding on esthetics is a dicier proposition. Posit for a moment that “good” is actually a democratic proposition, in which case it may be that good for the many who are not experts is better than good for the few who are.

Mind you, I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but every time I see someone trying to make objective decisions about something as subjective as whether art is good I get a little bit itchy. I’m not at all sure these questions have answers that aren’t entirely situational, and I’m skeptical of arguments that say that they do.

Editors Are Not Supervillains

Contrary to the opinion of any number of beginning writers, editors are not supervillains hunched over their desks scheming fresh ways to crush the souls of unpublished writers.

In point of fact, they are deeply invested in your success. The only person in the world who is anywhere as close to as invested in that story of yours being a work of undiscovered genius as you and your most supportive friends and family are is the editor who is about to read it. Trust me on this.

First off, the editor is dying for something new and good to read. They have just read bits of several stories that are so bad they want to claw their eyeballs out, and have done so knowing that, that which has been seen can never be unseen. They have read any number of stories that are meh at great cost in time, and they have read a few that were so close that they were holding their breaths and rooting for this author to make it across the line, only to have it go flat at the end. This is no fun. Successful stories are.

Second, they make what little money they make in this industry by publishing successful stories. If you send them an awesome story, you are helping them buy lunch. This is a very good thing when you’re a starving editor and not trivial.

Third, the discoverer of new talent gets some of the credit for that talent. The bigger the talent the more reflected glory there is. Discovering the next Nnedi Okorafor or Jim Hines gives you major editorial bragging rights. And if you find the next Neil Gaiman, well: Wiktory!

Fourth, and most important, editors edit because they love the field. The slush pile is not a fun place to dig, and finding a gem there is cause for major celebration. I know a lot of editors, and watching their faces light up when they talk about helping to launch the career of some new writer whose work they can love is a truly joyful experience. They know exactly how hard it is to make it in this world, and how much it will mean to that undiscovered writer to have the validation of that first acceptance letter. They know they are going to make a writer’s day, or maybe even their whole year, and they absolutely love that they get to do that. It is one of the things that keeps editors going on the bad days.

The editor is not your enemy. They want you to succeed, desperately and sincerely.

A Message From Our Spouser…

Handing the keys over to my brilliant, lovely, and very tolerant wife for a moment:

“Is Kelly McCullough really as strange and silly as his posts make him appear?

No. He is much more strange. This is a friendly note from the writer’s spouse. What Kelly puts on the internet has been processed through his multiple filters. What you don’t see is the variety of oddness that comes out (a) before his filters are in place in the morning, or (b) occasionally makes it past a few filters to be stopped by the “is this for public consumption?” filter.

Imagine waking up on a weekend morning to have your bed partner roll over and start telling you about Princess Mooina and the Connecticut Buffalo in King Heifer’s Court. Or having your dearly beloved jump out of a room shouting “They can take our lives but they canna take our guitars! Long live Robert the Bruce Springsteen!”

He has little personal dignity, a strong set of morals, and no fear of looking “silly”. Given the slightest prodding, he will stand half naked in the snow wearing goat pants, or be videotaped in slow motion being hit with a snowball. And those are the ones that get posted in public. At home he will practice muppet ballet wearing bicycle shorts. He will pose, superhero-style, wearing nothing but slippers and a woolly cow hat. His brain goes from camouflage to camel-flage to llamaflage. And then he starts positing what llamaflauge looks like. And all you see, dear readers, is that he posts the “Llama song” video on his feed.

This is my life. And I love it. He is far sillier and much stranger than what he posts online. He brings much joy and laughter to the world, and this world needs it. Many kisses and hugs to my wonderful love, and many thanks to his family, friends and fans who keep him happy and silly.”

Kelly here again. And now I’m all verklempt.