Fighting The Last-Book Hangover, Or: An Overly-Revealing Look Into The Writing Process
So as y’all should know by now, I’ve been live-writing my latest book The Song That Shapes The World to raise funds for the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop.
I’m now going to trash three weeks’ worth of work.
It’s not because what I’ve written over the last few weeks is bad. It’s typical first-draft stuff that needs cleaning, but it’s a strong start: a musician fleeing an abusive marriage stumbles into the mystical world of Backstage, where once every decade they have a Battle of the Bands that determines the song that shapes the multiverse. I like the lead character. She’s got depth I could explore in a different manuscript.
But she’s the wrong character for the book I want to write.
The book I initially described was “Pitch Perfect with magic.” I want something that is, if not light, at least full of weirdness and humor and bizarre situations. I want friendship. I want oddball.
And what I wrote was mundane, everyday angst.
Now, I know why I wrote angst: it’s a last-book hangover. See, the manuscript I finished before this one is the as-yet-unsold Savor Station – which is, hands-down, the best thing I have written. And that novel is mournful and elegaic, because, well it’s the story of a prince who’s been starved of everything good in life (including food and dignity) and regains strength by finding the finest restaurant in all the stars.
And I hit that book so out of the park that when I started writing The Song That Shapes The World I was like, “The last time I wrote a very sad person in a dire situation, I wrote a great novel, soooooo…. let’s do that again!” I even, I am shamed to admit, went back and reread the opening to Savor Station to go, “Okay, how can I duplicate that?”
But rehashing what I did well last time is not delivering what got me excited about this. I could make a good book about this, but that book wouldn’t be “Pitch Perfect with magic,” it’d be “Savor Station with music.” And while it’d be nice if my muse decided to write tonally-consistent books, apparently I write novels like I write short stories – continually switching valences.
(Rich Horton, noted short story reviewer, met me at a party and said that I was notable for the way no two of my short stories sounded alike. He did not make this sound like this was actually a strength.)
I could continue and write a book I’m capable of writing, or I could set everything on fire to write the book I am thrilled to write.
Yet! This is a fantastically interesting situation! Because what I’m going to do is swap out the lead character and write the exact same story, and show you how the story needs to change when the protagonist changes!
Gone is Gwendolyn of old, who’s practiced in her husband’s recording studio for three years but has never been certain of her talent before live audiences.
Arrived is Gwendolyn the new, the samurai musician, who sees fame as a virus. She hitchhikes from obscure bar to obscure bar, waiting months between performances, playing for people who don’t even know she’s supposed to be there.
In both cases, the Gwendolyns stumble into a bar, hoping to play.
In both cases, the Gwendolyns flee the bar and head to the mystical world of Backstage.
In both cases, the Gwendolyns meet the dragon-riding, cello-playing nemesis who escorts them into this bold new world.
But what you get to see – at least if you donate and get your membership for the Clarion Echo blog I’m doing – is how a book’s plot is tailored to its protagonist’s weaknesses and strengths. This isn’t a matter of swapping out personalities – a story’s elements are about showcasing what the protagonist can do and jabbing at their weak spots, and so the bar that Gwendolyn the old walked into would be no challenge at all for Gwendolyn the new.
The bar changes. The people changes. The attitude changes.
And if you donate $10, you get to see how mutable a world is when a writer’s starting out. You can read the old chapters, then see the new chapters as I write ’em, weigh in, maybe help me refine the magic system a bit. And you do that by donating the cost of a couple of coffees to the Clarion Foundation, which is a good cause that helps writers.
Anyway. I’m starting that tonight. You can come watch.
I’m kinda excited about this.
So as always, here’s the steps to do this:
Step #1: Donate at least $10 to the Clarion Foundation. More is good if you can spare it. You don’t have to donate in my name or anything, because honestly, their Write-a-Thon webpage forms are dreadful.
Step #2: If you don’t already have one, create a LiveJournal account. Rejoice in this feeling of web page time-travel, as one suspects there’s not a lot of new LJ accounts created!
Step #3: Email theferrett@theferrett.com with your Clarion receipt and your LiveJournal handle, with a header of “HEY FERRETT LET ME IN.” I’ll do the mystical LJ gestures to get you access.
Step #4: Watch me figure out how to introduce you to the new Gwendolyn and her new challenges.
Step #5: Share this post if ya can!
A Different World. A Better World. A Noble World.
(NOTE: On Friday night, raw and exhausted, I posted this essay to my FetLife account through a faltering Internet connection. And I debated whether I wanted to publish this one here, on the open web, as it’s intensely personal to me. But I ultimately decided it was the second part of a longer essay I’d started with “Yes, Of Course” – and as such, am posting it exactly as I’d written it then with no edits.)
So last night, I drove out three hours and took a day off from work to hold my girlfriend’s hand for about an hour.
She was going in for surgery. She’s shit-scared of surgery. I’ve seen her beautiful eyes go wide as she says “No, no, no, I do NOT want any needles” and there were no needles around, just her memory of needles. So for her to be wheeled into a cold place where they were going to cut her open…
She would have made it without me. But it would have been worse. So I went.
And it was a weird day. I spent a lot of it in that liminal space between “sorta family” and “maybe not” – her dad was there, and so was her mom, and they know about me and they like me but I’m not, you know, her husband. Everyone was perfectly pleasant but there was always that weird hum of “Hi, I’m new here” even though we’ve been dating for over a year because yeah, hi, family emergency oh and look who’s here.
(And like many times of comfort, it’s hard to tell how effective you are. She tells me – and I believe her – that she only got through it as well as she did because I was there. Yet aside from a couple of tight “Don’t you fucking let go of me” moments, she looked fine. Some days, you really could use an alternate world where you peer through a window to a crying wreck and have them say, “See? That’s who I would have been this morning without you.”)
Anyway, the surgery went without a hitch, and a few hours later they rolled my love back in. And there was a brief pause because her husband went in to see her, and then her Mom and Dad went in, and there I was in the waiting room like a schmuck and eventually they brought me in and her husband and I got her back to her feet and out the hospital door and home.
Then I went to my hotel, because frankly, she was sleepy and needed rest, not “Time with Ferrett.”
And here I am. In a hotel room on the ass-end of Pennsylvania, alone, except.
Except.
She said something.
She said something magnificent.
When I saw her she was zonked out, like you are after they’ve put you down deep enough to cut you open without waking you. But eventually she told me, “Yeah. They kept asking me ‘Who’s waiting out there for you in the lobby?’ and I I told them ‘My husband and my boyfriend’ and they stammered and asked like six times and I kept saying, “My husband, and my boyfriend.’ And eventually I just told them, ‘Look, I lead an alternative lifestyle, all right?’ and they did the surgery.”
I keep thinking about that.
Because even for me, who’s pretty much as out as someone can be about polyamory, there’s still so much secrecy that it fucking burns.
“Ah, yes, this is my wife I’m checking into with this hotel room, sure.”
“Kids, this is Ferrett, he’s a… friend.”
“I met him at a – oh, well, a conference, I guess.”
And it’s never *meant* to be an erasure, it’s always with acquaintances or strangers or kids who don’t necessarily need to know who Mommy is fucking. It’s a thousand “Do I want to open this discussion with the clerk at the Holiday Inn?”s and “How much do my co-workers need to know?” and “My family’s got a couple of conservative fundamentalists, I don’t want this shit blowing up on Facebook.”
They’re not quite lies, but they’re not quite truths, either.
And they’re good reasons, you know? I want to be a value-added. I don’t want to stir up a fuss in anyone’s life. Hell, half the time I’m um-erring at someone I’ve just met, deciding whether I want to be someone’s educational experience today, and so how can I really blame someone for not wanting to blast my name out to everyone?
Yet my girlfriend did not give a fuck. She was exhausted, and tired, and when she was stripped raw the last thing she wanted to give up was to acknowledge the love that was sitting out there in that lobby for her and fuck, I’m crying now.
But it’s a moment. It’s a moment where her don’t-give-a-fuck punched a hole through to another world where I saw what it might be like not to have really good reasons not to just be buried under a tide of assumptions, and in that moment our love felt realer than it ever had before, this thing where yeah, we don’t live together and we’re never going to get married and we’ll never have once-a-week dates and all the traditional pathways designated as “serious about each other” somehow didn’t fucking matter.
We don’t call each other, but I’ll drive out to hold her hand when she needs me.
We only get to see each other once every couple of months, but she’ll fucking face down a bunch of surgeons in the place of her to tell them, Give that man respect for what he is.
And I get shit sometimes because my relationships don’t look like the relationships traditionally considered “deep,” and sometimes I buy into that. Maybe I’m shallow. Maybe my girlfriends just function because they don’t ask too much.
Then moments like that happen and I remember what love is.
I’m alone in a hotel room. Ironically, I’m texting her. She’s still up, still talking to me, and with luck I’ll see her tomorrow and go to her parents’ house for breakfast.
I love her.
I love her.
I love her.
"Yes, Of Course."
So my sweetie C. is going in for surgery tomorrow. She’s shit-scared of hospitals, uncertain of what the surgery means, and terrified.
I’ll be driving down to hold her hand in the hospital.
And the sole pleasant thing about this ugly turn of events is that this is a twinned decision. My wife Gini and I had a weekend planned together at home after a bunch of visits and travel, the long slow weekend where we’d curl up and reconnect. We’d both been looking forward to that.
Yet when C. texted me with her medical results, and it was clear that surgery was the only option for removal, I shared them with Gini. And she said, “Yes, of course you have to be down there. She’ll be terrified.”
That’s because our partners aren’t partners, but our friends.
This is a consistent pattern. When one of my sweeties was – and is – experiencing legal trouble with their visa to America, Gini kept asking what she could do to help reduce F’s anxiety about possibly having to leave the country. “Yes, of course we must help them.” When another sweetie needed some emergency supplies sent to her, Gini authorized the expenditure without a second thought – “Yes, of course she needs that, send it to her now.”
I should note that Gini is not dating any of these people. They’re my partners alone. Yet Gini’s had dinner with them, hung out, heard me talk about them. She cares.
And that goes both ways. When Gini’s partner wound up in the hospital, I asked her whether she needed to go to him. As it turns out, she didn’t; every partner is different, and her boyfriend was suitably stoic that he neither needed nor wanted hand-holding.
(For the record, when I had my heart attack, I told Gini to stay at her boyfriend’s place that night and catch up with me in the morning, there was nothing she could do in the ER except sleep shittily in a crappy bucket seat and the nurses were taking care of me. I panic about many things, but hospitals are not one of them; we all have our individual times when we need someone to hug us.)
But when her partner was in trouble, I said, “Yes, of course.” Just that the “of course” was Gini slightly spent more time texting him.
What I’m grateful for in our relationships is that we don’t endure each others’ partners, we embrace them.
And part of that is me changing my dating habits. I used to have a lot of churn in my love life, having torrid two-month relationships with scores of partners. Those partners were of varying levels of compatibility with me, and I wasn’t good at filtering out the good people whose needs just didn’t mesh with mine, so Gini was pleasant but she didn’t get attached. How could she? If she really liked someone, the average time I spent dating was about four months!
But as I’ve honed the concept of my polyamorous Justice League, my partners are much better suited for me; everyone I’ve been dating now, I’ve been seeing for at least a year. And Gini’s had time to see how they’re good for me, and to know them well enough to understand why I love them (even if she doesn’t necessarily have the time or inclination to date them herself), and so when something bad comes up….
Her natural reaction is “Yes, of course.”
I’ll be driving tonight to see C. And Gini and I have already rescheduled our reconnection date for next weekend, when hopefully we’ll see movies and snuggle and catch up.
But tomorrow, there’s someone who is terrified of doctors who’ll be in a cold hospital bed. And she’ll have her family there, and she’ll have her friends there.
She’ll also have me.
Of course.
If You Feel Like Buying Fan Art of Valentine….
My friend Bill is now selling prints of his fantastic Valentine fan art. Which, if you’ll recall, looks like this:
I told him I didn’t think he’d sell that many prints, but he was free to do so. (I don’t get a dime; that’s beautiful art, so I told him he could keep the profits.) So there it is, gorgeous as always! Check it out if you wanna.
So What's A Post With 24,000 Facebook "Likes" Get You?
On Monday, I posted my essay “Oh, For Fuck’s Sake: A Gentle Talk With My Republican, Democrat, And Undecided Friends.” By this morning, it’s up to 24,000 Facebook “likes” in a viral politigasm.
Which is weird. I’ve gone viral before, most notably for my essays “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex” and “Can I Buy You A Coffee?” And I’ve found that those who haven’t gone viral have the wrong impressions about how this works, so let’s bust a few impressions:
1) You Don’t Get Famous. The Essay Does.
The next day, I wrote a followup to the “For Fuck’s Sake” essay called “Why Your Presidential Protest Vote Is A Wretched Idea,” and as of now that essay’s got 170 likes on Facebook total.
That demonstrates that when you go viral, 99.9% of the people show up for that essay, read, and leave. Hardly anyone goes, “Oh, I’ll read what else this fellow had to say!” and proceeds to trawl your blog. You’re a one-stop entertainment, worthy because someone’s friends linked them there, and then you go.
It’s nice to have that level of attention for a while, but people tend to think, “Oh, you’re famous!” No. That essay has been widely read. I doubt most of its readers could pick me out of a lineup.
2) A Viral Post Doesn’t Sell Your Books.
You may note I have my three books for sale, and I didn’t notice any significant bump in sales on the Amazon sales rankings. (Well, okay, I saw a bump, but that’s because my book Flex is on sale for $2.99 this week.) Again, people liked what I had to say, but most of them ghosted afterwards. Which is normal. (And fine with me. I don’t write essays to sell books, as a rule.)
Now, sometimes, if a post blows up huge, you’ll get offers related to that post. When “Dear Daughter” passed half a million likes – still my high-water mark! – on the Good Men Project and the Huffington post, I got an agent asking me if I wanted to turn that essay into a book, because they had a publisher who’d expressed interest. I told them “No, but I have this novel” and they went, “Nah” and disappeared.
3) …But It Kinda Does.
If you’re looking to sell books, blogging is the long con.
See, when I published my webcomic “Home on the Strange,” I noticed a weird pattern: I’d have a huge hit, with 10,000 people linking to our Doctor-Who-As-Jesus strip or our alternate ending to Harry Potter, and then the next comic would be bare-bones normal in terms of traffic.
But the overall numbers kept creeping up.
Eventually, I came up with my “Pepsi machine” theory – which is to say that a fan is like a big, cumbersome Pepsi machine that you’re looking to tip over. Hardly anyone tips over a Pepsi machine in one muscular push. No, you gotta rock them, a little at a time, until eventually they sorta wobble over.
Likewise, most people – me included! – have established habits. I hit the same six webcomics every morning. Adding a new webcomic to my list? For no apparent reason, that seems like an effort. But if a webcomic keeps getting linked to by my friends, with each visit I’ll think, “Oh, I should come here more often!” and then I don’t.
Eventually, I accrete enough good will that all right, I’ll add this to my regular trawl, and suddenly I’m a fan.
Likewise, I have a lot of fans (comparative to the normal person, not at all comparative to a true celebrity), but they’ve all arrived in dribs and drabs; some liked Home on the Strange, others liked my essays, others liked my books. Most of them had to see me around a lot before they eventually started reading me regularly, for whatever definition of “regularly” counts.
I’m not going to have 24,000 fans tomorrow. But I’ll probably walk away from this with maybe fifty people who now read me regularly. Maybe five will read my book, maybe two will like it enough to recommend it to other people.
That’s actually a decent ratio.
Which is why I wouldn’t recommend this method if you don’t actually enjoy blogging. It works, but it’s like panning for gold; lots of time knee-deep in mud, a few flecks.
Better enjoy the outdoors.
4) Hardly Anyone Knows What Goes Viral.
There’s a couple of people who know how to go viral easily – I see Chuck Wendig churning out essays once a month that everyone seems to link to, and I go, “Man, even accounting for his larger audience, that guy knows how to connect.”
The rest of us have no idea what connects, or why.
Look. “Dear Daughter” was an angry essay I wrote in fifteen minutes on my lunch hour, and that writing will probably be referenced in my obituary. “For Fuck’s Sake” was a Sunday evening writing which I put a lot of thought into, but I’ve written a lot of thoughtful pieces and I still don’t quite know why that one took off.
I just write a lot, and about once every eighteen months, one catches fire. And I assure you, if I knew how to craft essays that consistently drew 24,000 Facebook “likes,” I would. Even now, I have no clue why that “For Fuck’s Sake” essay launched into the stratosphere versus my usual political rantings – it feels about the same to me, but it resonated with others.
Every so often on FetLife, some moe without an audience will get a wild hair up their ass, belligerently bumping chests with people who do have an audience to say, “Why don’tcha write an essay anonymously, HANH? Why don’tcha prove that it’s the WORDS that make you popular, but your AUDIENCE?”
Well, first off, why the fuck do you think my audience – such as it is – sticks around? Because I’m writing things they think are shitty? Come on.
But secondly, if you think “writing an essay” is “one shot, one kill,” then you’re wrong. I’ve written probably ten thousand essays. Of them, three have gone viral enough to spread across the Internet. The Venn diagram between “What I consider quality” and “What resonates with people” is a mystery indeed.
Oh, I’m confident that if I wrote a lot of essays under a pseudonym, I’d eventually regain my current levels of notoriety. But expecting one essay to be as popular as, say, “Dear Daughter”?
The only person who could say that is someone who doesn’t fucking write.
5) Your Reputation Sticks With You, Though.
As mentioned, maybe people couldn’t pick you out of a lineup, but they get a rough impression about who you are. There’s a lot of people who don’t read me who know that I’m loudly polyamorous and sex-positive, I’m left-of-center even though I’d like to be considered center, that I’m depressive and occasionally psychodramatic.
Lots of people really don’t like me for any of those.
So when I meet people at conventions, I sometimes have folks doing the stop-and-stare moment of “Do I want to talk to this asshole?” They have formed an opinion of me from my writings, and they do not like me. Sometimes they make excuses and GTFO.
Which is why I’m always baffled when people are like, “Oh, Ferrett just makes up shit to start controversy!” No, man. I get enough side-eye for the things I believe. There are real-world consequences to my writing, and as a dude with social anxiety I assure you I feel every one.
There are doubtlessly people who do start up controversies for “fun” – I’ve met them, scrappy assholes who want to start “a feud” to “get traffic” – and they’re usually people with small audiences. And I wonder whether they’re so enthused over these mock-fights because they’re never planning on going out in public where their rep is attached to their face. And after a couple of thoroughly faked essays, I wonder if they’ve lost any friends.
But me? I put my face and my books on these essays, because if one goes viral and I wind up getting shit on by a thousand people for some opinion I’ve opined, I want that shit to be from people I actually don’t like. I’ve got enthusiastic Trump supporters leaving insulting comments, but hey, I’m okay pissing off those people.
Like I said: most people can’t tell what’s going to be a hit or not. So pretending to be an asshole in the hopes that someone pays attention to you? Seems like small pay for idiotic work. You probably won’t go viral, but you’ll have real-life people who read you – if you have real-life people – believing you’re either a genuine asshole, or a manipulative fake asshole, and I’m not sure what’s worse.
You may think I’m an asshole, but at least it’s for things I believe.