The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Writer’s Life

  • Writers’ Support Structures (Week Ending October 6)

    As the old saying goes, “Behind every great man, there’s a woman.” (Okay, it’s an old, somewhat sexist saying. But it’s more applicable than “Sometimes monkeys die.”) The thing is, writers have known for generations that they are at the mercy of someone else, often their patrons. These days, however, it’s difficult to find a Medici family member willing to upfront the cash while you write your next play or book of sonnets.

    So, how does a 21st century writer survive? On the one hand, there’s the starving artist who lives hand-to-mouth while trying to get published. On the other, there’s the part-time scribbler who burns the midnight oil because he or she has to spend each day at a “real” job. And there are those lucky few who have family and friends who enable them to write at their leisure. (No pressure there. Am I right?)

    This week, we’re asking the writers at the Cafe about their families and the support they receive. We want to know how our writers cope with the pressures of daily living and writing, and what their friends, families, spouses, and/or significant others do to help or hinder the writing process.

    Be sure to leave your comments and questions for our writers. They love interacting with our readers. And if you have a moment, be sure to follow the Confabulator Cafe on Twitter and Facebook.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • With Friends Like These, Who Has Energy for Shame?

    This is probably one thing that doesn’t bother me about writing — there is at not point where I’ve been ashamed to admit what I write.

    Okay, that’s actually a little bit of a lie, but I didn’t want to talk about fanfiction for, what, the sixth week in a row? I can’t help it; the bulk of my experience in writing fanfiction. It’s just what I did do.

    I’ve never been, precisely, ashamed or worried about what I’ve written. I went through a phase in college where I deleted accounts that hosted the most pornographic of the stuff I’d written, worried that it would hurt my chances of becoming a “real” writer. (If only I could have known that 2012 would make a fad out of porn written by emotionally-immature women, I’d’ve kept it up!) And I sometimes sort of hedge around the topic of fandom, though less and less as I realize that I don’t want to fragment my experiences like that.

    But when I was 17? Oh man, I was mortified of the very thought of people finding out what I was writing during classes. I used to hedge around it with phrases like “alternative fiction” and “character-building stuff.”

    I think this might have even continued, if I hadn’t moved to Madison right out of high school to live/work with a good friend of mine. She’s a poet and very bohemian and all that stuff, so filters were things for other people. She knew I was shy and horrible around new people, and thus introduced me to her friends (and people we had just met) with, “Hi, this is Ashes — she writes gay anime porn!” And I mean ALL THE TIME. A friend of hers from her hometown (who is now published, so, hooray for him!) brought her his manuscript one afternoon, and she’s like, “Ashes wants to be a writer too — she’s writing anime porn right now!” And he’s like, “Cool, fan fiction is pretty rad.”

    Or something like that. I was 18 and literally terrified.

    But you know what? I realized quickly that no one gave a shit what I was writing. (And in the right hippie circles, it was actually interesting.)
    (more…)

  • College Dictionaries and Slow Death Comix

    Jaxon’s great cover over great underground comix including Richard Corben. Had to have it. Image attribution.

    When I sit down to write I really only consider one audience: me.

    I know that’s probably audacious considering I’m in a field where everyone is concerned with What Sells and What Doesn’t Sell. I don’t really care.

    See, the thing is if I worry about or research What Sells I’m going to be behind the curve. I can’t afford to be behind the curve because I’m not anywhere near the road that curves one way or the other. I pay more attention to What Doesn’t Sell than anything else but only to know if I’m going to have trouble selling a story if I get brave enough again to send it out.

    Like Modern Day SF. I like to write stories that aren’t necessarily set in today’s world, but maybe they’re only a few years ahead of us. I grew up a couple of favorite stories that were obviously set on Earth, just a few years ahead of the time I was reading them. They still hold up as being a few years ahead of Now though they were written in the 50s and 60s. So that’s the model I sometimes go for. Trouble is, I’ve run into a couple of publishers who don’t even want to look at that stuff and those had been places I’d wanted to send stuff. I suppose I should have sent it anyway, but I’m digressing from my topic. (more…)

  • I Have Nothing To Fear From Maternal Attention

    My mom taught me to be a technical writer.

    It was my first job out of college. Her company needed to hire an hourly “contract” worker (temp, no benefits) to read 20,000 lines of Fortran code and describe them in English. My degree was in the sciences, and I had taken exactly one programming course and no writing courses whatsoever. I had no idea what I was getting into.

    The pay was just OK and it was an hour commute each way, and despite the fact that our workspace was five people crammed into a 30 by 40 foot offsite “office” I was still expected to wear pantyhose. It was the early 1990s and we were working on, I think, two Macintosh LCs [0] with these nifty 8.5 by 11 inch monitors that you could rotate on the fly to either portrait or landscape orientation. Adobe was the undisputed king of desktop publishing in those days and we produced seven books in Pagemaker, ginning up flowcharts and other line-drawings in Freehand. I thought our setup was the neatest thing in the world, going as I was from typing term papers in WordPerfect 5.1 [1] and sneaking into an unused lab in the biology building to run off free printouts on a University dot matrix printer [2] to WYSIWYG layout design and laser printing. (more…)

  • Judgment Day

    “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” ~ Bill Cosby

    The Stand and Left Behind
    Two very different books about the Apocalypse. My mom read one of them. I’ll let you guess which.

    More than a decade ago, I thought I had what it takes to be a writer. I had studied English, with an emphasis on creative writing, at a liberal arts university in the Heartland. I went on to hone my craft for several years, writing — but never publishing — several short stories. And after starting and stopping a couple of novel-length manuscripts, I decided it was time to take the plunge.

    If you’re a frequent visitor to the Confabulator Cafe or my blog, The Creativity Well, you’ve probably heard me mention my not-so-great first novel, and how I never found someone to publish it. Today, you’re going to understand why it remains unpublished.

    You see, back in 1997 — when I decided to write my magnum opus — I fancied myself to be the next Stephen King. And the novel I wanted to write was not dissimilar to King’s great doorstop-of-a-novel, The Stand. My manuscript, tentatively titled Devotion, had a huge cast of characters from all walks of life, coming together to confront a great evil in a small town in rural Kansas. (more…)

  • Write Like Your Mom’s Not Watching

    John Stewart can’t believe you just wrote that.

    Let’s be clear from the outset. My mom is the last person I fear judgment from in my work.

    But I think every writer second guesses their decisions about how far to go in sex scenes. In Monster in My Closet, I wrestled a great deal with writing the incubus plotline. Not because it was filled with sex, but because it was, essentially, rape—even if, in some cases, all he did was brush his hand against his victim’s arm.

    I expected some backlash over it. I worried I’d chosen a sensitive subject. And I did choose something difficult. But in my head, I had imagined the ickiest, scariest scenario I could, and that’s what came out. It felt right. I wrote it. And I waited for people to yell at me.

    It hasn’t come. A few reviews have said they didn’t feel the nastiness of the incubus fit with the quirky, lighter feel of the rest of the book. But many more said they liked the mix of light and dark.

    (more…)

  • My Parents are Reading What??

    My mom is typically one of the first people I send my stories to for feedback. She received a draft of my novel even before I went back and did the first pass of editing. She’ll continue to receive each draft after I’ve finished editing them. But let me let you in on a little secret; most of what I write is geared toward young adults, and the things that aren’t are usually short vignettes that don’t have the page length to develop into something racy or never see the light of day. I’m not going to put anything into my young adult novel that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with my mom reading, because then it wouldn’t be appropriate for the intended audience.

    I think part of my decision to write young adult literature stems from the sheer terror of writing about adult topics and letting other people read what I’ve written. Sharing it with a few friends is one thing, but I’m not comfortable enough with some topics to share them with the whole world… especially not when that world contains my parents… and my grandparents. I freely admit to anyone who asks that my ultimate goal is to be a published author, which invariably leads them to question if I’ve written anything they might have read. I don’t think I could admit to a stranger that I wrote erotica without turning crimson, and I definitely don’t want to have that conversation with my parents. So I’ve fallen into the comfortable safety net of writing young adult literature. (more…)

  • Write for Yourself; Edit for Others

    I never worried about judgment of my writing before I started to submit my work. As I continue to put myself out there, and now that I have my first short story published, I find myself suddenly paranoid about what people are going to think when they read my stuff.

    I don’t think it ever really crossed my mind before, though, to worry what the people I know would think of the subject matter of my stories. Well, in the sense that they’d be offended, anyway. My main concerns about judgment were more about whether they’d think my writing was horrible.

    I don’t fear the horrible writing criticism much anymore, mostly because I know that I’ve grown a great deal as a writer over the years and most of what I write isn’t horrible. Also because I know I write better than a lot of bestsellers these days, so obviously there is no accounting for good writing anymore.

    Alas, I digress. (more…)

  • Care Enough Not to Care

    For the first couple years I was in college, I spent the summers working at my hometown newspaper. It was a small weekly publication, and it introduced me to deadlines, editing, and how much I didn’t know about writing.

    It was a great experience, and I seriously considered not going back to college after that first summer. I was addicted to being in the know, even if my sphere of knowledge was largely limited to the county around me. I also loved feeling like the words I wrote mattered to someone, and I held the belief that I was part of some larger fraternity of journalists, with whom I shared a code of ethics and a responsibility to the community I represented.

    I was nothing if not an idealist.

    During that first summer, I remember my mom asking me what I’d do if I had to report on something that involved a member of our family. Her question went something like this: If it was bad, you wouldn’t write about it would you? I think she was hoping for a different answer than the one I gave.

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  • Let the Peasants Have Their Pitchforks

    No one can write with another person looking over their shoulder, especially one that isn’t really there. If you constantly ask yourself what other people are going to think, your writing is going to be crap.

    Art is about letting go and not worrying about anything, even your own judgement. Conscience? Morality? Leave that baggage at the door. That isn’t to say that every passage should read like a Dear Abby column out of Soddom and Gomorrah, but if it heads there, for the love of salt pillars, don’t stop it.

    There will be plenty of people willing to censor you. Don’t do it to yourself. Not during that first draft. What if your mom reads it? So what if she does? Your boss? Let him. Your friends? They aren’t friends if they don’t.

    (more…)