I have held many jobs in my time. My career path has been bizarre and wandering. I have never gotten less respect than I do as a writer, and since I'm feeling 'bemused' rather than 'angry' about that right now, I'mma gonna write about it.
When I say 'respect' I don't mean personally, like 'You're no good at this'. I mean professionally. I got more professional courtesy in my time working fast food than I have as a writer.
This comes to mind because recently I was approached for a writing job. A friend of mine and seven of his friends are making a game, and my friend (who I will call Tiny) asked me if I'd be interested in doing the writing. Hey, a relaxing side project. Sure, sounded like fun. Then a couple of weeks ago I found out that no, they're serious, and they offered me money. 500e is not huge in the scheme of things, but it means they're serious. So I got seriously to work, and after checking every step along the way if they liked the ideas, I was told to scrap everything because I had misunderstood the project. So I got into contact with the project lead, who seems to have not actually gotten any of my messages or had any of hers passed to me. I'm not sure, because when I ask her questions she lectures me about writing instead of answering them. And now she hasn't answered my email in a week. I'm hoping THAT is just the holidays, but damn.
That project still may work out, it may just be communications problems, but I'm less than hopeful because it's not exactly new.
See, early in the year I got contacted by an animation studio. Honest to Celestia animation studio in India, established and at least moderately successful - I checked. They wanted to produce a cartoon for the American market, and needed a writer. They professed to love every idea I gave them. Then they got slow answering my emails. I was told the marketing department wanted to develop a certain character idea. I thew a pitch at them. They told me they liked it and wanted more development. I threw a more developed version at them. It's been about six months, and they never answered my email. The person I know personally in the company told me that they weren't upset with me, but to forget about them until and unless they got back to me. Probably marketing canceled the whole project - that's really common in animation. But damn, the professional discourtesy in being unwilling to tell me, right?
Or I could go back to when I tried to submit for freelance to Klasky-Csupo, carefully following their submission instructions and providing the proper waivers, only to be told that they no longer accepted submissions. See, they'd changed their policy to only working with a set of preapproved agents, but they hadn't bothered to change the phone line that explained how to submit. PROFESSIONAL COURTESY.
And the 'Next issue!' magazine debacle...
Whew! That was fun to get off my chest. Am I just unlucky, or do all writers get treated like they're expendable?
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
The Skinny
I have been chastised for hardly ever writing anything in this blog. It is a good point. I've never been good at keeping a diary, I curl up and hide from the world when I get really stressed (Celestia damn, was I stressed these last few months), and how often do I have something deeply meaningful to say?
Apparently that last is the problem. I'm a deranged misanthrope, but I'm an entertaining deranged misanthrope. It seems I should just blog about whatever's on my mind. I don't know if I can keep up with even that, but we'll see.
Apparently that last is the problem. I'm a deranged misanthrope, but I'm an entertaining deranged misanthrope. It seems I should just blog about whatever's on my mind. I don't know if I can keep up with even that, but we'll see.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Flop Flop Flop
I finished writing Quite Contrary! Since then, I've spent my time lying around, gasping like a dying fish. I started out heavily emotionally invested in the book, and by the end it consumed me, all the more so because I was battling intensely stressful life circumstances that tried to stamp out my creativity entirely.
It will take awhile for me to recover enough to write anything new, although with me I have no idea if 'awhile' is 'a week' or 'a month'. Ideas are starting to pop in my head, so the process of recovery is processing. I threw myself so deeply into the book that I have to do other projects before I can proofread it. I've gotten some beta reviews, and I can barely look at the criticism. I'm just too wrapped up in the book, still!
I'm going to have to learn to shoulder it. Reactions to the book have told me that this is not going to be a universal pleaser. This is, finally, the 'pushing the edge of what people can handle' book. It needs trimming and strengthening, but I'm going to go ahead with it anyway. Unlike Wild Children, this looks like it will be a 'some people love it, some people hate it' book, and the most important factor is how each reader reacts to Mary herself differently.
Meanwhile, I have lots of detritus to clear up from a couple of months of steadily growing insanity. I have to update my blogs. I have to join Google+. I have to learn to use twitter to advertise without being an ass about it. I have to see friends and relatives I abandoned. And my current 'project', making a paperback version of Wild Children. That's actually going pretty well.
It will take awhile for me to recover enough to write anything new, although with me I have no idea if 'awhile' is 'a week' or 'a month'. Ideas are starting to pop in my head, so the process of recovery is processing. I threw myself so deeply into the book that I have to do other projects before I can proofread it. I've gotten some beta reviews, and I can barely look at the criticism. I'm just too wrapped up in the book, still!
I'm going to have to learn to shoulder it. Reactions to the book have told me that this is not going to be a universal pleaser. This is, finally, the 'pushing the edge of what people can handle' book. It needs trimming and strengthening, but I'm going to go ahead with it anyway. Unlike Wild Children, this looks like it will be a 'some people love it, some people hate it' book, and the most important factor is how each reader reacts to Mary herself differently.
Meanwhile, I have lots of detritus to clear up from a couple of months of steadily growing insanity. I have to update my blogs. I have to join Google+. I have to learn to use twitter to advertise without being an ass about it. I have to see friends and relatives I abandoned. And my current 'project', making a paperback version of Wild Children. That's actually going pretty well.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Wild Children Is Out!
And now for the OTHER half of my writing style. I published the goth stuff first, because it was easy and meant less to me emotionally.
What I care about is children's and YA literature. That's what moves me. And the first book I wrote, and my Masterpiece, is Wild Children. As of today it is published and purchasable on the Amazon Kindle Store and Smashwords. In a few weeks, Smashwords will finish reviewing and it'll be on other major online bookstores.
Wild Children was written in a rush of artistic inspiration after a five year writing drought. I could not be more proud of it. It is deeply philosophical, it is tragic and uplifting, and it's about children. Not just in general, but told from the perspective of five different children. It was my first real experiment in first person, deep point of view, voice intense writing. I could not be happier with the result.
Now to update my author pages everywhere, and maybe do a little advertising!
What I care about is children's and YA literature. That's what moves me. And the first book I wrote, and my Masterpiece, is Wild Children. As of today it is published and purchasable on the Amazon Kindle Store and Smashwords. In a few weeks, Smashwords will finish reviewing and it'll be on other major online bookstores.
Wild Children was written in a rush of artistic inspiration after a five year writing drought. I could not be more proud of it. It is deeply philosophical, it is tragic and uplifting, and it's about children. Not just in general, but told from the perspective of five different children. It was my first real experiment in first person, deep point of view, voice intense writing. I could not be happier with the result.
Now to update my author pages everywhere, and maybe do a little advertising!
Cupcakes
Today, my bad little children, we're going to talk about Cupcakes. Not the delicious frosted kind, the other Cupcakes. If you're a fan of the new My Little Pony cartoon and you have very dark tastes, you've certainly heard of Cupcakes by now. If you haven't... well, that was your warning. You may not want to read this.
I just read it today. I've been putting it off for weeks, which is dumb, but I honestly expected it to be terrible and disappointing. Now that I've read it, I think it's worth a blog post both as a writer and as a personal issue. Even though I'll push this post down almost immediately with one about Wild Children publishing.
I'll start with a review. If you don't know where this is going, Cupcakes is an infamous MLP fan-fiction story about Pinkie Pie brutally murdering Rainbow Dash because the secret ingredient in her delicious cupcakes is pony meat. Fan fiction almost never meets my standards of writing quality, but this does. The text and story could use some tightening to remove awkwardness and increase punch, but the characters are very well portrayed and the duality of perky pony cuteness and gory violence is sharply contrasted, which provides the horror. That right there is the core of Cupcakes. I was surprised to find that it's standard modern horror. Something cute turns violent. The emotions it produces are visceral and strong, and it's really a successful and fairly well written story.
Which brings us to where I become fascinated. Why write this at all? Why the buzz? Why did I want to read it? Why is there what I will refer to as a Cupcakes community, currently spearheaded (I'd say) by Crookedtrees and Ask Pinkamina? Isn't it an odd combination, liking My Little Pony but something as dark as serial killer horror? Why is this all important to me, personally?
The best way to sum it up is with the goth adage 'The brighter the light, the darker the shadow'. And that ties into the very basis of the horror style that Cupcakes uses. Artistically, contrasts make things powerful. They provide depth, and make stories and characters relatable. My Little Pony is a very good show and its fans love it dearly, and it is very sweet and very positive. That makes it perfect for combining with dark artistic elements. Then Party Of One happened, and MLP begged for it.
Cupcakes was written before the episode Party Of One, which changed the Cupcakes community radically and turned it from merely a quirky horror story into a phenomenon that connects with some of us emotionally. In the episode Cutie Mark Chronicles, Pinkie's childhood is revealed to have been very grim, so much so that she never smiled until she hit puberty. Too many grown up abused children looked at the miserable Hell of her childhood and the manic silliness of her adulthood, and we said 'I understand perfectly.' Two weeks later, Party Of One showed Pinkie mistakenly believing her friends had abandoned her and her fun life was over - and she devolved quickly into madness. A cute joke, except that when combined with the look at her childhood, we understood that, too. As the crowning touch, when Pinkie thinks her happy life is over, her hair goes back to being long and straight like it was when she was a child. Because her mother referred to her as 'Pinkamina Diane Pie' in that flashback, any time Pinkie is shown with straight hair she's assumed to be unhappy and the fans call her Pinkamina. It all tied together into a consistent and much deeper character concept than the character had ever shown before. A level of character depth the show has been giving us in general.
It also showed real signs of much darker themes lurking in this candy sweet show. Cupcakes is based on the idea that since Pinkie is weird and crazy and manic, it's a believable leap to base a story on her being so crazy she doesn't know it's wrong to kill people to make sweets. Current versions follow that if the happiness ends, Pinkie will break. It's a much smaller leap than Cupcakes to suggest that she'll break by committing murder, and once she starts she won't be able to stop. If your childhood is bad enough, you learn to function and survive when everything about your life is outside the bounds of sanity.
Put all that together, and the serial killer pink pony fascinates many people, myself included. And I just read Cupcakes today and saw where it started, and it got me thinking enough to want to write this down.
I just read it today. I've been putting it off for weeks, which is dumb, but I honestly expected it to be terrible and disappointing. Now that I've read it, I think it's worth a blog post both as a writer and as a personal issue. Even though I'll push this post down almost immediately with one about Wild Children publishing.
I'll start with a review. If you don't know where this is going, Cupcakes is an infamous MLP fan-fiction story about Pinkie Pie brutally murdering Rainbow Dash because the secret ingredient in her delicious cupcakes is pony meat. Fan fiction almost never meets my standards of writing quality, but this does. The text and story could use some tightening to remove awkwardness and increase punch, but the characters are very well portrayed and the duality of perky pony cuteness and gory violence is sharply contrasted, which provides the horror. That right there is the core of Cupcakes. I was surprised to find that it's standard modern horror. Something cute turns violent. The emotions it produces are visceral and strong, and it's really a successful and fairly well written story.
Which brings us to where I become fascinated. Why write this at all? Why the buzz? Why did I want to read it? Why is there what I will refer to as a Cupcakes community, currently spearheaded (I'd say) by Crookedtrees and Ask Pinkamina? Isn't it an odd combination, liking My Little Pony but something as dark as serial killer horror? Why is this all important to me, personally?
The best way to sum it up is with the goth adage 'The brighter the light, the darker the shadow'. And that ties into the very basis of the horror style that Cupcakes uses. Artistically, contrasts make things powerful. They provide depth, and make stories and characters relatable. My Little Pony is a very good show and its fans love it dearly, and it is very sweet and very positive. That makes it perfect for combining with dark artistic elements. Then Party Of One happened, and MLP begged for it.
Cupcakes was written before the episode Party Of One, which changed the Cupcakes community radically and turned it from merely a quirky horror story into a phenomenon that connects with some of us emotionally. In the episode Cutie Mark Chronicles, Pinkie's childhood is revealed to have been very grim, so much so that she never smiled until she hit puberty. Too many grown up abused children looked at the miserable Hell of her childhood and the manic silliness of her adulthood, and we said 'I understand perfectly.' Two weeks later, Party Of One showed Pinkie mistakenly believing her friends had abandoned her and her fun life was over - and she devolved quickly into madness. A cute joke, except that when combined with the look at her childhood, we understood that, too. As the crowning touch, when Pinkie thinks her happy life is over, her hair goes back to being long and straight like it was when she was a child. Because her mother referred to her as 'Pinkamina Diane Pie' in that flashback, any time Pinkie is shown with straight hair she's assumed to be unhappy and the fans call her Pinkamina. It all tied together into a consistent and much deeper character concept than the character had ever shown before. A level of character depth the show has been giving us in general.
It also showed real signs of much darker themes lurking in this candy sweet show. Cupcakes is based on the idea that since Pinkie is weird and crazy and manic, it's a believable leap to base a story on her being so crazy she doesn't know it's wrong to kill people to make sweets. Current versions follow that if the happiness ends, Pinkie will break. It's a much smaller leap than Cupcakes to suggest that she'll break by committing murder, and once she starts she won't be able to stop. If your childhood is bad enough, you learn to function and survive when everything about your life is outside the bounds of sanity.
Put all that together, and the serial killer pink pony fascinates many people, myself included. And I just read Cupcakes today and saw where it started, and it got me thinking enough to want to write this down.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
A Rough Tease
I'm sitting on at least half a dozen chapters of Quite Contrary. I love posting my roughs, and from a business perspective as long as I don't post the whole book, it's just a teaser. I'm over halfway through the book now, approaching what I think will be the three quarters mark, and I have to make the painful decision when to stop posting roughs. I don't get feedback anyway except from friends privately reading, but it makes me feel good that some people are reading. But it feels unwise to post the whole gol dang book. Now, as I write the last chapter of Part 3, I have to figure out what to do.
On the plus side, no amount of distractions have made me lose the thread. Mary demands my attention, and things are about to hit the crisis point - if a book about being chased by a wolf doesn't come pre-crisised.
On the plus side, no amount of distractions have made me lose the thread. Mary demands my attention, and things are about to hit the crisis point - if a book about being chased by a wolf doesn't come pre-crisised.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Kindle All Stars like me!
So, I'm here to make a very exciting announcement that everybody who will ever read this already knows about. I have been accepted for the Kindle All Stars anthology project thingy sorta ebook. The editor has a web page that I will TOTALLY READ SOMEDAY.
Here is the thing, as I understand it. I'm taking the epublishing route, as are a lot of new authors. Bluntly, the legacy publishing system is a mess and there's no guarantee anymore that you'll get published, ever, no matter how good you are. On the epublishing side you can at least keep writing, build up a library and followers, and create something from nothing. And you WILL start from nothing, which is where I'm at.
This used to be sort of true with legacy publishing, and sometimes you'd get successful people who would find New Talent and show off collections of their stories because... well, honestly, authors look at each other and go 'Dude, EVERYONE needs to read that story you wrote about the guy with the bees in his brain.' So now with the epublishing market the anthology thing is starting again. Harlan Ellison and Alan Dean Foster are both sponsoring this and putting in their own stories, and New Talent will get to have their own stories appear side by side with these big name legacy authors.
We don't get a penny off of this. No one does. We get people to learn we exist. All the money goes to the Center For Missing And Exploited Children, and they could NOT have chosen a charity I like more.
So this is all extremely awesome.
Now I just have to rename my entry. Seriously, it was a fairy tale and I was under no pressure to name it properly at the time. I've never been good at naming anyway, and I left it at 'A Rat Tale'. That just won't do.
Here is the thing, as I understand it. I'm taking the epublishing route, as are a lot of new authors. Bluntly, the legacy publishing system is a mess and there's no guarantee anymore that you'll get published, ever, no matter how good you are. On the epublishing side you can at least keep writing, build up a library and followers, and create something from nothing. And you WILL start from nothing, which is where I'm at.
This used to be sort of true with legacy publishing, and sometimes you'd get successful people who would find New Talent and show off collections of their stories because... well, honestly, authors look at each other and go 'Dude, EVERYONE needs to read that story you wrote about the guy with the bees in his brain.' So now with the epublishing market the anthology thing is starting again. Harlan Ellison and Alan Dean Foster are both sponsoring this and putting in their own stories, and New Talent will get to have their own stories appear side by side with these big name legacy authors.
We don't get a penny off of this. No one does. We get people to learn we exist. All the money goes to the Center For Missing And Exploited Children, and they could NOT have chosen a charity I like more.
So this is all extremely awesome.
Now I just have to rename my entry. Seriously, it was a fairy tale and I was under no pressure to name it properly at the time. I've never been good at naming anyway, and I left it at 'A Rat Tale'. That just won't do.
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