Speculative Reminiscences: Weekly Recap for 2/2/2014

Yesterday I spent a pleasant chunk of time talking to the Clarion West 2013 students, along with Django Wexler. Django and I were the “mystery muses,” a Friday feature for the CW students where people come in to chat about a specific aspect of the writerly life. Django spoke well to the experience of having one’s first major book come out, since his book (which I have read and heartily recommend) The Thousand Names just came out. He let us all know (to mass disappointment) that it doesn’t lead to being booked on the Leno or Daily Show or lavish book tours, though he did get to go to ComicCon.

I decided to talk about self-promotion and career building, since that’s advice I didn’t get a lot of while at Clarion West myself. And I came up with nine maxims, but lost that index card so I have an incomplete list. Maybe the students can chime in to tell me what I’ve forgotten.

1. Writing always comes first. Self-promotion can become a form of procrastination, particularly if you’re playing on Facebook or Twitter while pretending it’s all in the name of self-promotion. Having the biggest Twitter following in the world won’t help you unless you’ve actually got something to promote.
2. Be discoverable. One of the questions that always comes up in my Building an Online Presence for Writers class is whether it’s mandatory for a writer to have a social media presence and blog and all that. The answer is no, (though it’s helpful in these days, when the burden of promotion falls increasingly on the writer him or herself.) But you do need a way for someone to find you if they liked a story and want to contact you. That may be a simple static webpage where you maintain a list of your publications. It may be a full blown blog. Or it might be a social media presence (although I think this approach is not the best, because people may not be on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or whatever network you’ve chosen).
3. Don’t oversell. We’ve all unfriended or stopped following people because of the unrelenting way they push their books. Out of five Tweets (or blog posts, or FB posts, or whatever), only one should be about selling stuff. The others can be kitten pictures, advice, funny sayings, whatever (one easy way to fill this quota is to promote other people), but make it something that people are interested in.
4. Don’t be a jackass. It’s a small world and word gets around when you behave badly. Search on “authors behaving badly” if you want some examples. Professionality is important, although sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of in our charming, silly, opinionated genre. Don’t make arguing on the Internet another form of procrastination.
5. Jealousy is okay. We all experience it. Use it as motivation for writing. Don’t put it on the Internet. Find one person you can trust and use them as your sounding board when you absolutely have to say those snarky things about an award or kudos bestowed unjustly.
6. Say thanks. When someone does something kind like getting you invited to an anthology, blurbing your book, whatever, don’t assume it’s your due because you’re a genius. We all think we’re geniuses. SF is full of people paying it forward, but they’re more likely to do so for gracious people.
7. Be kind to yourself. Writers are so good at beating ourselves up, at feeling guilty for not doing X or achieving Y. Don’t do that. Set goals but rather than punishing yourself for not meeting them, reward yourself when you do hit that word count. You are the person with the most to gain from being kind to you, so do at least one nice thing for yourself each day, whether it’s taking time for some activity you enjoy or giving yourself some small present.
8. Don’t be a jackass. It’s a point worth repeating.

Some other things that got mentioned:

• Find someone who is where you want to be a few years down the line and look to see what they’re doing, using their example to guide your actions.
• Early on, you don’t need to go to conventions unless they’re something you enjoy for their own sake. If you do go, participate. If you can’t be on panels, try volunteering, which is a great way to meet people and network.
• Writing process differs from person to person. Try different strategies and when you find something that works for you, do it, do it, do it.
• For most of us, it’s easier to write if you get at least a few words in each day.
• It is often skill in rewriting that differentiates the professional-level writer from the almost-but-not-quite-there.

And here’s something I didn’t mention, but which has come up a lot recently, as to what to blog about, both in terms of finding something interesting and not spending too much time on it: excerpts of what you’re working on both fulfills those terms and encourages you to get some words out.

Enjoy this advice for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

When I first began to fall through the floor, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The kitchen seemed oddly distorted. The stripes of the wallpaper slanted a little to the left; the orange light of sunset lay over them like a flare of panic. My parents noticed nothing.

My mother was eating a fish sandwich, the McDonald’s wrapper neatly folded in front of her as she dabbed on mayonnaise. My father scraped the pickles and onions off his hamburger with his forefinger, which was streaked with the thick red of ketchup. Only my brother saw and looked at me as the chair’s back legs pierced the linoleum beneath my swinging feet and I tilted back with agonizing slowness.

I didn’t want to say anything at first. We usually didn’t talk much at the dinner table. Most of the time we didn’t eat at the table at all. My father brought home paper bags of food and set them on the counter so we could each take our share and vanish. Sometimes I sat on the grille of the heating vent. Warm air blew around my body. My brother crouched near me, both of us reading.

My father would take a glass of wine and his food and sit in front of the television. We could hear him twisting the dial back and forth to avoid the commercials. My mother sat in the living room near us, reading one of the romances which she devoured like french fries. We read science fiction and fantasy.

“Catherine’s falling,” my brother said.

My mother looked up. The chair angled more abruptly and I was on the floor. The chair was sprawled in front of me. Its back legs had nearly disappeared. I could see the ragged edges of the holes, like mouths forced open by stiff wooden rods.

My mother picked me up. I was crying now. My father pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. He continued to chew.

“That linoleum’s rotten,” he said. “I’ll have to fix it some time this weekend.”

Perhaps that makes him sound like a handyman, a fixer, someone who put things together. He wasn’t. Our house was broken hinges, stuck doors, worn carpets. Rather than take out a broken basement window, he piled dirt on the outside. To insulate it, he said. It made the basement a little darker, but that added to the mystery.

I liked to play there. Behind the furnace, there was a little space like a room. It smelled of house dust, dry air, and whiskey. I found a marble in a corner, amber colored glass. It was scratched in places where it had rolled across the cement floor. It would have been beautiful when it was new. When you held it up to your eye and looked through, everything was different, everything curved and bled together.

I took a half burned white candle from our dining room table down there. It was this which led to the basement being declared off-limits. My mother found the candle and thought I had been lighting it.

I liked having the candle there, in case there was a disaster, a tornado, an explosion, a nuclear bomb. Sometimes it was frightening in the basement. There were holes in the walls that led out in little tunnels and you couldn’t be sure something wasn’t watching you when your back was turned. I stuck the candle in a bottle. There were a lot of bottles down there, piled behind the furnace.

I could see the holes in the ceiling, between two smoke black beams, where the chair legs had gone through. The light from the kitchen came into the basement.

A month went by before the holes were repaired. We avoided the dent in the floor with its two accusing circles. Sometimes I imagined I felt the floor soften beneath my feet elsewhere in the kitchen and quickly stepped sideways. My brother and I watched each other when we were in the same room, as though afraid one might disappear and leave the other here alone.

Finally my father called a man in a blue hat, who came and tapped mysteriously in the basement. My brother and I sat up above, crosslegged on the floor, and watched the linoleum smooth itself out as he replaced the boards. The holes remained.

In the other room, my father watched a golf tournament. We could hear his breathing and sharp grunts whenever a putt rolled smoothly across the grass, heading into the hole like a ball with a purpose. When the man came up, my father offered him a beer and had my mother write out a check.

We went out to Happytime Pizza that night. The restaurant was clean; there were no holes in the floor. The windows were diamonds of colored glass, lead running like angry veins between them. The sunlight came through them and painted my father’s face with red and dark blue.

I reached my hand into a patch of green lying on the table’s surface and then took it out. No one was watching me. My mother and father held the menu between them. There was a wet ring on the wood of the table from my father’s beer glass. I put my hand into the color again and moved it back and forth, letting the light paint my hand as though smoothing it with color.

My brother kicked me gently under the table and moved his hand into the green too. We held our hands on either side of it, letting the very edge of the color bleed onto our hands, not daring to move in.

(originally appeared in The Cream City Review, selected by guest editor Frances Sherwood)