Three Things I Learned After Viable Paradise

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'after the rain i' by suttonhoo on Flickr (CC 2.0 by-nc-sa)

A short, informal note to the graduates of Viable Paradise 17.

It’s been a month since you stepped off the ferry from the island.  (Or off the plane.  Or out of the car, if you live on Martha’s Vineyard.  It can happen.)  You crossed the threshold of your home or your apartment, and you weren’t the same person who had crossed the other way a week and change before.  Now you crossed it a fresh-faced and eager graduate of Viable Paradise — the seventeenth Viable Paradise, to be specific — inheritors of a long tradition, ready to go out and write and publish and change the world.

A month on, I bet that has faded some.  The demands of your job, your partner(s), the kids, the pets, laundry and bills and video games…  A lot of the leaf-litter out of which lives are made is still there.  And that leaf-litter makes good and necessary soil, so don’t mind it too much.  It feeds lives and stabilizes them, and when the rains come it stops them from washing everything away.

In the same way that in book series we look for our characters to learn and grow between volumes as well as during them, so the learning of Viable Paradise doesn’t end at the Oath.  Here are three things I learned after Viable Paradise:

  1. The Oath says, “I will submit to paying markets only.”  But how do you find paying markets?  It turns out that SFWA maintains a list of paying markets which it considers “pro” markets in its membership requirements.  This is especially useful for short fiction, as almost all of the markets listed accept unsolicited submissions and have a link to their guidelines.  This doesn’t cover semipro markets, but Asimov’s can’t ever accept your Thursday story if you don’t submit it, and you may as well start at the top.  Following the SFWA list, you can keep your story productively tied up for months.
  2. If and when you run out of pro markets, there are a few sites that can help you find semipro markets.  Ralan is one.  The Grinder is another, and the one I use.  Both are free and donation-supported.  The Grinder is also a story-submission tracker.  It can be an unfortunately attractive avenue for cat-waxing, and it can feel a bit like playing Progress Quest to watch my little purple dot advance through the forest of red rejections (it provides graphs of the past 12 months of recorded submissions to each market), but I find it a useful tool.  (Okay, let’s be honest: it’s exactly like playing Progress Quest, if Progress Quest had random character death.)
  3. I’d strongly encourage you to join the Codex Writers’ Group, which you’re all eligible for now that you’ve graduated from VP.  It’s an incredible community of writers sharing critiques, experiences with markets, acceptances, rejections, laughter, and tears.  The way I actually find semipro markets to submit to is by watching where other people on Codex are submitting.  Even if you just lurk, there’s so much knowledge in the discussions available just to read, I’ve found it extremely valuable. It will also show you that even big-name, Hugo- and Nebula-nominated writers get rejected out of the slush pile.

And that’s the secret fourth thing I learned after Viable Paradise.  I still write stories one word at a time.  Many doors are closed yet, and maybe they’ll open later once I’ve learned more, or maybe that means they’re not the right doors, and I need to go find the right doors first.  The embarrassment of opportunities my life has provided me means I’m writing standalone prose fiction more slowly than I would like, which is not the same thing as not writing at all.

And so I put my head down and do the work, trying to nurture and grow the seeds that were planted on the island.

Toes in the soil, hands reaching upwards towards the sky.

While of course I hope for wild and quick success for all of you, Viable Paradise 17 grads, in the event that that doesn’t happen, I still hope that, whatever else is the case, a year from now you can say that too.

Toes in the soil, hands reaching upwards towards the sky.

The post image is ‘after the rain i’ by suttonhoo on Flickr, used under the terms of its Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  The photo has a short accompanying microstory — go check it out!

What I (Was) Reading: Jagannath, by Karin Tidbeck

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I promised I would blog about Jagannath, by Karin Tidbeck.

I read it a while ago — May, I guess. Other people have written about the individual stories, and well. Go seek out those reviews if you’re interested.

I’ve forgotten many of the details, although only a quick skim and I’m nearly sucked under the surface into the sense-memory and mood of the stories. As all the reviews say, they are authentically weird.

I think the stories I like best, though, are the ones which are mostly about Sweden and family (“Some Letters for Ove Lindström,” “Reindeer Mountain,” “Brita’s Holiday Village”). Somewhat because Scandinavian — Swedish or Norwegian, I guess — is the closest I came to growing up with an ethnic identity, while living among people who had other, strongly-held ethnic identities, and some of the iconography resonates. (My piano teacher had a book about the secret lives of gnomes — yes, the little red-capped guys you see in garden statuary — which I reread obsessively.)

I like that, while the stories are in many ways fantastic, they’re still about a recognizable version of everyday life, and the people in them are recognizably people I might know. A lot of the fiction I aspire to write is like that.

I don’t know if anyone who didn’t grow up in the Midwest would have the same experience, reading it, and I worry, when I’m trying to write along similar lines, that they’re not universal enough. Then again there are certain themes which are if not universal then at least very common, and although I’m not Japanese, the family stories in The Love We Share Without Knowing (#10 on that list) were really identifiable. Even then, those are very tied to small-town life — if you grew up in a liberal family in a big city, do they even make sense? I don’t know.

Reflections on Viable Paradise

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Summer’s holding the door for autumn, and this time last year I was looking forward to Martha’s Vineyard and my first ever writing workshop, Viable Paradise.

Now, one year later I’ve been thinking a lot about VP and my class. I’ve been thinking about it because I feel a little like I’ve let the side down – no professional-level publications to date – but also because it’s getting cool and it’s about the time of year I started to think how am I actually going to get over to the east coast? and because I learned far more than I realized when I was there, and those lessons have taken some time to percolate through the limestone of my skull, but they’ve made it at last, almost twelve months on, and I think they’re worth sharing.

Everything Tam says is true.

I had had four jobs in a year, if you counted my stint as a freelance blogger, and had collected the trifecta — quit, laid off, fired. I was unemployed at the time. Like Tam, I planned to walk from the ferry to the Island Inn. I wonder how many of us were in that same place, standing on the dock at Falmouth. Alone. Vulnerable. Receptive.

It’s easy to descend into hyperbole about these things. Like Tam, I haven’t had anything professionally published. I’m holding down a job not related to fiction writing, but I’m happy there. I don’t know that I can say that Viable Paradise changed my life, in the rapturous way that’s usually meant. But in that moment, it made all the difference in the world. And it’s still making a difference. And that’s enough.

What I’m Reading, Sleeplessness Edition

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Been a while since I did one of these. I haven’t read much to write about here. (Did I write about Jagannath? I should write about Jagannath.)

I know Maya as someone who is on Codex, an online writing workshop I’m a member of, though I don’t know her well through that, so you should take my recommendation of this book with as much salt as you feel you need. Codex was how I found out about Creature of Dreams — she posted about it there — and the cover and (mostly) the blurb got me to buy it, and then, well, I finished it in two big gulps, two evenings running. (I say evenings. This is evening for me, right now, 4 AM. I said the blurb grabbed me, didn’t I?) That was all the writing.

I identified with the characters, and Durham felt well-realized. I felt like the details were all well-chosen. This is a tightly-constructed book. Several of the sex scenes are serious I’ll-be-in-my-bunk material (and several are serious nightmare fuel). The characters are all wrestling with their histories, and that’s deftly handled. Nothing is too easy, not all the loose ends are tied up, but at the same time there’s a real sense of growth that I found… heartening, for lack of a better word.

The book’s got a deep understanding of the characters — what and how people who have had those experiences think, what responses they have ingrained, how they defend themselves. We defend ourselves.

Twelve Tones, or, finding shapes in the noise

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794&w=560&h=315]

This is the most… beautiful? existentialist? and therefore beautiful? thing I’ve seen about creating art in recent memory. (Thanks to my boyfriend, who pointed it out to me.)

It’s a nice reminder what the more abstract purpose is, when I’m busy being frustrated at perfectly normal annoyances in the life of a writer. It’s good for my fragile little writer ego that I get pulled out of the minutia to look at the stars once in a while, and maybe it is for yours too.

Take the Weakest Thing in You

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaRQV9vcIRs&w=560&h=315]

Apologies for going dark — I’ve been having significant problems with my wrists, and I dropped off the Internet as much as I could to try to keep them from getting worse. I’ve made some changes which seem to be working, and I’m slowly coming back, but don’t have much to say yet. May this tide you over.

“‘You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more, or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown.'”

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She had enough here—had that not been the purpose of this house,
these hives, this place so near to her moss-blanketed father? To have
enough, to grow precisely large enough for this place and no larger?

[…]

She has grown too big for herself, that is all. Terrible things
occur when you outgrow the space allotted to you. You cannot really
circumnavigate Fairyland like September did, not really. It’s too big
for you.

[…]

“Living alone,” November whispered, “is a skill, like running long
distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters,
protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a
language: to have music always so that the silence doesn’t overwhelm
you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is
filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact
size of the place you live, no more, or else you get restless. No
less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and
not being. This sort of thing,” she gestured imprecisely at the room,
the bed, him, “is forbidden. It expands or contracts me, I’m not sure
which, beyond the … set limitts. I’m not good at that, either.
Expanding, contracting.”

—Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente

What I’m Reading: “The Finite Canvas” by Brit Mandelo

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On Tor.com:

“You recognize these?” the woman asked.

Designs snaked over her torso, down into the temp-reg pants, up to her neck. The left side of her rib cage was a silvery mass of letters and symbols, all jumbled; there was a stylized sun around her navel with waving lines of light. A crane, its legs hidden by the waistband of her pants, spread its wings over her right side and torso. There were smaller signs hidden around the larger; three simple slashes crossed the space between her collarbones. Her skin was as readable as a novel, her flesh a malleable masterpiece made with knives. Some of the scars were still pink, and a spiral design on her left breast was an angry, fresh red.

Murder scars, Molly thought. Syndicate badge. The sheer number of them made her throat constrict. She took a step backward, as if one step would make any difference to a skilled killer.

“I need a new set,” the woman said, sticking out her bare, untouched arm. “Here.”

Just go read it.

“What’s a gay guy doing editing a bisexual anthology, anyway?”

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I ran into this on Kickstarter and it really struck a chord with me. From the Anything That Loves: Comics Beyond Gay and Straight Kickstarter page:

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

While I was on the phone with Matt, talking about the gay and straight people that had such a problem believing he was a bisexual man, I had something of an epiphany.

Some of the people in this study I read about in the Times, it occurred to me, could well be gay, but wasn’t it more likely that most were bisexual? Think about it; why would someone cling to the myth of “it’s a choice” unless they really felt, deep down, that they had to make one?

Could the refusal to accept the existence of bisexuality be the major obstacle to ending homophobia altogether?

I’d always felt really removed from the concept of bisexuality; I’d been supportive of them and their challenges, but they felt like another letter in the list, another smaller category, banding together with us in the battle, out of necessity.

Now I was faced with the prospect that our failures as a gay community and as a broader culture to more fully embrace bisexual people could be actively hurting all of us.

With that realization, I knew I had to change my thinking about the binary nature of sexuality, and rethink the oppositional nature of my gay identity. I had to find a way to welcome everyone who would embrace queer people as sisters and brothers, and tear down the divisions that hurt us and the people we care about.

Why does it say “I’m just this queer guy who occasionally writes science fiction, y’know?” instead of “I’m just this bisexual guy who occasionally writes science fiction, y’know?” in the “About Me” section in the sidebar on the right? Because I feel like there’s a queer identity where there’s not really a bisexual identity, and if I’m trying to explain myself to people it’s a hell of a lot easier if I frame it the first way. There are yet more complicated ways to say it — “I’m a bisexual guy who’s in a monogamous relationship with a guy,” “I’m a bisexual guy who’s been in a monogamous relationship with another guy for about a year, but dated girls before that,” etc. I don’t know which of those identities is the “true” me, so I smash it all up and stick the label “queer” on it and that mostly works. I really wish that there were something more like a bisexual identity — it was something I went in search of which I still haven’t found. In the mean time, eh, “queer” works, but I’m excited to see other people exploring the same space.

The comics look awesome, and I’ve backed at the level to get the T-shirt too, because that’s pretty much how I feel about it.