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Finetuning Patreon

Photo of a clock shaped like a Neko Cat, altered with the Percolator app.
One of my favorites is the First Pages workshop – come find out where to take your novel!
As some of you know, I started a Patreon campaign about a year ago. It’s worked pretty well, although I still need to put together the first year’s worth in ebook form to send to people.

I’m going to stick with it, particularly given that I get new ideas for short stories all the time (and generate a lot in the course of teaching), but I’m thinking about making some changes.

  1. The most important is making it so paid content isn’t just restricted to patrons. I’m going back and forth about this. Right now it feels like a subscription model, but if I go to public content, it seems less so. But what paid patrons would get along with the public posts are sneak peeks at drafts for outside markets, which would be free but accessible only to people supporting the paid stories. The drafts would be early ones, rather than late, and they also wouldn’t be getting paid for, which seems to be the main criteria editors apply to Patreon stories when ruling them out for acceptance. (This is a whole ‘nother long and interesting discussion, I think.)
  2. I recently switched from two stories a month to one and I’m going back to two.
  3. I need to remove the postcard incentive because I keep forgetting to send them, and figure out something else. Suggestions?

Today’s wordcount: 5476
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 112800
Total word count for the week so far (day 2): 11487
Total word count for this retreat: 42856
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, finished “California Ghosts” and “I am Scrooge”
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: an hour

Classes that are coming up soon and still have room! All times are Pacific Time.

  • July 15 (Wednesday), 7-9 PM ““ First Pages Workshop Section 1
  • July 17 (Friday), 2-4 PM ““ Writing Your Way Into Your Novel, Section 2
  • July 19 (Sunday), 9:30-11:30 AM ““ First Pages Workshop Section 2

3 Responses

  1. I would happily support the public availability of the stories. So many great works of art that we all share come from the patronage system. True, as we are not a single patron we don’t share in the fame, but I don’t believe anyone who is contributing to your writing wants to keep you to herself.

  2. Hi, Cat. Instead of a physical postcard, a virtual one would be interesting. You could write “thank you, [name]” on a small slip of paper and take a photo of it somewhere in your world, then email it to the recipient.

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Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.

Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.

 

"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Writing Thoughts: Dwelling On Process

Picture of a tortoiseshell cat, upside down and looking cute.Here is the only thing I know to be true about writing advice: none of it is 100% true. There are always exceptions, always idiosyncrasies of individual process.

Here is the smartest piece of writing advice I ever got: said by Syne Mitchell while I was at Clarion West in 2005, “Try different things, find what works for you, and do that. Lots.”

Writers should pay attention to our own process. Sometimes we’re reluctant to do so. We worry that like the centipede in the story who stops being able to walk after thinking about exactly how she does it, looking at our own process will damage or kill it. A Schrödinger’s cat: we know we’re doing something, but if we look to prove that, it’ll vanish.

This is not actually true. Looking will, most probably, not kill it. If you are the rare exception that cannot look at their process without damaging it, a brief examination will let you know this without damaging anything too much. Maybe. There are no guarantees in writing advice.

But if you are part of the vast majority that WILL learn from it, what will you gain?

  • A knowledge of WHEN you’re productive that will help you make the most of that time. Is the morning your most productive time? Then schedule your writing for those hours rather than the draggy and low word count afternoon.
  • A knowledge of WHAT conditions make you productive. Does the coffee shop’s bustle and a few doses of caffeine stimulate you into productivity? Or do you need solitude and the ability to read aloud as you go? Find it out and do it, do it, do it.
  • Permission to indulge yourself. Do new notebooks spur you to new stories? Then go for it. Does a two hour walk shake loose the clarifications you need for that revision? Then put on your sneakers.
  • A sense of yourself as an artist. Because you are, you know. Your mind is a precious machine capable of creating wonderful things. Coddle and care for it. Appreciate the amazing combinations it makes, the verbal webs it spins, the hard glitter of its jewels.

Take a few weeks. Track your daily word count as well as the circumstances that accompany it, such as when and where you wrote. But go further than that. Track the other things that affect it: your mood, your diet, your sleep. You may find that daily walk doubles your output, that the days when you took time to eat breakfast rather than just slug down a latte, change your outlook.

FOr many of us, stress is a killer of productivity. I know nothing can drive me faster to the distraction of Bejeweled Blitz or cruising my Twitter stream. All the more reason to de-stress your life whenever you can, all in the name of writing.

Enjoy this writing advice 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.

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An Armload of Fur and Leaves

In the last year or so, I found a genre that hadn’t previously been on my radar, but which I really enjoy: furry fiction. Kyell Gold had put up his novel Black Angel on the SFWA member forums, where members post their fiction so other members have access to it when reading for awards, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The novel, which is part of a trilogy about three friends, each haunted in their own way, showed me the emotional depth furry fiction is capable of and got me hooked. Accordingly, when I started reviewing for Green Man Review, I put out a Twitter call and have been working my way through the offerings from several presses.

Notable among the piles are the multiplicity by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and two appear in this armload. Clockwork Boys, Clocktaur War Book One (Argyll Productions, 2017) is the promising start to a fantasy trilogy featuring a lovely understated romance between a female forger and a paladin, while Summer in Orcus (Sofawolf Press, cover and interior art by Lauren Henderson) is aimed at younger readers and will undoubtedly become one of those magical books many kids will return to again and again, until Vernon is worshipped by generations and prepared to conquer the world. Honestly, I will read anything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, and highly recommend following her on Twitter, where she is @UrsulaV.

Huntress by Renee Carter Hall (Furplanet), which originally appeared in 2015, and whose title novella was nominated in the 2014 Ursa Major Awards and Cóyotl Awards, is a collection of novella plus several shorter stories. I’d love more in this fascinating and thought-provoking world, particularly following the novella’s heroine, the young lioness Leya, and the sisterhood of the huntresses, the karanja.

Always Gray in Winter by Mark J. Engels (Thurston Howell Publications, October, 2017) demonstrates one of the difficulties with furry fiction, which is the reader’s uncertainty where to site the fact of furry characters, primarily whether to take them as a given or have some underlying science to it, such as bio-modified creatures. Here Pawly is a were-cat, but the unfamiliar reader is forced to spend so much time figuring out whether this is something people take for normal or not that the story sometimes gets confusing, and with multiple POV shifts, the reader keeps having to re-orient themself. It’s tight, sparse military SF that readers familiar with the conventions of the genre will find compelling, entertaining, and quickly paced; newer readers may find themselves floundering a bit.

The Furry Future, edited by Fred Patten (Furplanet, 2015) is a solid and entertaining anthology that showcases how widely ranging the stories that use the rationale behind the existence of anthropomorphic beings as part of the narrative can be. Authors in the collection include Michael H. Payne, Watts Martin, J. F. R. Coates, Nathanael Gass, Samuel C. Conway, Bryan Feir, Yannarra Cheena, MikasiWolf, Tony Greyfox, Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden, NightEyes DaySpring, Ocean Tigrox, Mary E. Lowd, Dwale, M. C. A. Hogarth, T. S. McNally, Ronald W. Klemp, Fred Patten, and David Hopkins with illustrations by Roz Gibson and cover art by Teagan Gavet. This book is one that scholars writing about furry fiction will want to be including on their reading lists for reasons including its focus, its authors, the snapshot of the current furry fiction scene that it provides, and the variety of approaches to anthropomorphic body modification.

Along with the furry fiction, I wanted to point to an indie humorous horror collection that is one of the most specifically themed I have yet encountered, Ill Met by Moonlight by Gretchen Rix (Rix Cafe Texican, 2016), which features evil macadamia nut trees, including “Macadamias on the Move,” “Ill Met by Moonlight,” and “The Santa Tree” in a lovely sample of how idiosyncratic a sub-sub-niche can get. The production values of this slim little book show what a nice job an indie can do with a book and include a black and white illustration for each story.

You can read this review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/armload-of-fur-and-leaves/

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