More FetLife Posts
I’ve been quiet here as I’ve been slogging through the usual Seasonal Depression, but I did post two essays over at FetLife (TheFacebookforkinksters) that you may be curious about: “Depression. Fucking. Depression.”, which deals with how depression affects my sex life, and “Ropeweasels,” which deals with the issue of me being tied up. (There’s also “Fireplay and Me,” an oddly poetic musing on setting women aflame, which I don’t think I linked here but maybe I did.)
In addition, my humor essay “So I’m Going To Become A Dom” may be my most popular essay ever, with 612 comments and 965 loves. I guess it’s all about the specificity.
An Odd Change In A Dying System
Back in The Day, when I had infinite people reading me on LiveJournal, I’d post an entry and the comments exploded. I’d hit “post,” and five minutes later I’d have fifteen comments.
Now, I make a big ol’ important post and sometimes I don’t get a comment for half an hour. That used to unnerve me – is this a bad entry? Did I say something wrong? – until I realized what was happening. English LiveJournal is slowly dying.
What used to happen was that the LJ friends page was like Twitter or Facebook now – so constant a stream of data that you just refreshed your friends’ page and wham, new entries. Maybe you didn’t check it twenty times a day like I did, but the friends page was a ritual where my latest entry popped up in real time. I was a part of the info-stream.
As LJ use has declined, though, the traffic patterns have changed for me. People no longer read my blog as part of a daily pulse; it’s in their RSS feeds, or bookmarked separately, or they wait for me to post the interesting links to Twitter (since I don’t Tweet-spam every post). I still get roughly the same number of comments, but as opposed to arriving in one explosive comment-dump, they now arrive scattered over the course of two days, like late passengers departing a red-eye connection. I’m read at their convenience, not the convenience of LJ.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a little weird. Some days I post a SRS ENTRY and then wait until I get one comment just to ensure someone’s listening. By the time I get out of the tub, I have like three comments, which used to be the sign of an entry falling on its face. Now, I’m patient; the user feedback will arrive in due course.
If you write it, they will come.
Bill, I Believe This Is Killing Me
The Seasonal Affective Disorder is really fucking with me this year. I’m on medications, which helps, but not really.
See, the Paxil means that it’s not slamming me for ten days. I’m feeling okay for a day at a time, and then the SAD slips in and WHAM. The whole afternoon vanishes because I’m just sitting here crying and breaking down and I don’t know what to do.
With the old SAD, it sucked, but I got used to it. A constant suck was horrid, but I could adjust, keep working, get everything done. This is a horror show where I’m okay, I’m okay, then suddenly I’m through the trap door. And I can’t handle this.
I’m struggling harder now that it’s lessened. I honestly don’t know what to do. And I guess maybe that’s not what a blog is for, but I try to chronicle my existence and today I was about to get back to work and then I was all like, “I shouldn’t be trying to sell The Upterlife. I’m reading Saladin’s book, it’s so much better, I’m an awful writer, no agents are interested anyway and it’s just going to be a long slow haul to the inevitable stop of my talent, yes I lucked out once with the Nebulas but this book isn’t it and it sucks and I should just toss it away and hope the next one is better and oh God why am I bothering it takes so much fucking effort just to get anything halfway decent.”
How can I work like that? When I’m just assaulted by ghosts?
Blast It To Flinders, Come Back Stronger: On Exciting Failures And Deleting Two Months Of Work
So I’m 30,000 words into a new novel, and this weekend I realized that I have to throw out everything except for the first 600 words. The last two months of work? Completely erased. Hit “Delete” and kiss that effort goodbye.
Normally there’s something to be scavenged from a manuscript collapse, but this is a total implosion. My protagonist used to be a harried, frightened nerd, prone to punching when cornered; in this new novel she will become a nerd-king, the kind of super-popular high-school kid that has yet to realize that she’s peaking and that things have already begun to slope downwards. The villain in my old book was a charming, well-meaning rogue; now he’s a sneering killer who’s only masquerading as human. I’m reducing everything to such rubble that there’s nothing I can retain.
Such an exciting failure.
Failing is a good thing in writing; it means you’re taking risks. But furthermore, it indicates you’re skilled enough to recognize that you’re writing something flawed. Which is a sign of growth to be cherished.
A few years back, I would have looked at the scenes I’d written and said, “But those are good scenes!” And indeed, they are; some of them are touching and beautiful and honest in a way that I’d never been capable of before. There’s a scene where my protagonist faces down her reclusive, immature father to have to justify her expulsion from school – which was one of the subtlest and truest things I’ve ever written. There was a lot of good stuff in that 30k, personal high-water marks.
Yet the novel as a whole wasn’t up to snuff, with character largely revealed through interminable interior monologues and backstory instead of action. The fact that I recognized that was a sign of how far I’d come. And figuring out how to fix it involved a combination of using every tool I’d developed as a writer and having the boldness to go, “No, this can’t be massaged back into position.”
Now, I’m trying a new technique: I’ve never outlined a novel before. I’ve only written the scene that comes next, hoping my internal searchlight would find the correct path. But in outlining, I’m having to use all sorts of techniques stolen from the theater – the three-act structure, internal versus external challenges, ensuring that character is revealed through action, explicitly raising the stakes with every chapter – and that’s a sweaty workout.
I’m learning so many new things that I feel revitalized. This novel doesn’t feel like a slog any more, but a mountain to be climbed. It’s tough, but there’s a certain masochistic satisfaction I’m deriving, a brisk slap to the face.
To which I say to you, dear readers, is that there are mundane failures and exciting ones. The mundane failures you can’t learn from, you just did the same thing all over again. But the exciting ones are the ones where you can break yourself and then reforge your shattered forearms into adamantium claw-laden superpowers.
What I encourage you to do is to fail big. Write to the edge of your limits. And when you realize you can’t pull off this tricky story you’re halfway through, don’t get depressed; take it as a sign that you’re recognizing flaws even if you don’t know how to correct them yet. Writing’s full of invisible pitfalls where you think it’s brilliant, but your readers are unsatisfied. Just understanding that something doesn’t work is a major accomplishment, one you should congratulate yourself for.
What’s important is not this story. It’s your overall skill level. And a failed story can teach you far more than that easy sale.
Today, I’m taking the first step in spending at least a month outlining my novel chapter by chapter. Maybe it won’t work. But I’ll learn, and if this collapses then it’ll be such a glorious failure that I’ll be harvesting new talent from the ruins. Celebrate with me, people. Go blast a story of your own.
Pay My Wife To Be Crazy. Er. And Help People.
If you haven’t been paying attention, my wife Gini has committed herself to a mad project: riding 150 miles in two days to help fight Multiple Sclerosis. She’s doing this because of her grandfather – read her touching essay on the topic – and because a friend of ours in town, Patti, has MS.
I wish you all could meet Patti, and if you live in Cleveland, you probably have. Patti’s one of the sunniest, wittiest, cleverest women around, so much so that you occasionally have to remind yourself, “Oh, right, she has a disease that is stripping the motor functions from her body.” She has good days and bad days, but retains her sense of humor. Amazon.com once issued me an email that said, “People who liked [GINI JUDD] also liked [PATTI].”
As a way to fight this evil, Patti’s husband Mike has created the “Patti’s Paladins” biking group, which pedals out to a lighthouse once a year in a gruelling display of physical fitness. Well, it’s not that hard for Mike, who is so fit that they literally had to give him amphetamines before surgery because his resting heart rate is below what a normal human’s heart rate is while sedated. This, I believe, officially makes Mike a superhero.
Gini, however, was starting from scratch. She wants to do this. She’s been getting on her bike every day, pushing herself so hard she trembles the next day, reporting in: “Ten miles.” “Fifteen miles.” “Twenty, but I had to take a break.” She’s up to forty-one miles, a three-and-a-half-hour sweatfest that left her wrecked, but she is determined to make it to the lighthouse. For Patti. For herself. For all other sufferers of MS.
What she needs is sponsors. Many, many sponsors. As she says, “10 cents a mile is only $15 out of your pocket for 150 miles of my effort. Of course a dollar a mile would be quite lovely, but any pledge is money going straight to an important and worthy cause.” So I would strongly request, if you can, to give some cash to my wife, who is straining her healthy legs and lungs and heart for those whose legs and lungs and hearts are slowly deteriorating.
It’s a good cause. Help her, audience. You’re her only hope.