Clarion Blog-A-Thon: The Final Week

The Clarion Blog-A-Thon ends this Sunday, and thus far I have raised $1,500 for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.  I would really like to get to $2,000 before the week is over.
But I’ve already got a fabulous signed limited edition Neil Gaiman print to offer, as well as sneak peeks at my (now-completed) dystopian science-fiction novel – what else can I offer to inspire you to donate?
How about fabulous hand-made jewelry from World Fantasy Award-nominated and New York Times bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente?
And not just any jewelry, mind you; themed jewelry. Choose a book of Cat’s – any book, from the YA goodness of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland to the Russian WWII action of Deathless to the sexy map-making of Palimpsest to the old post-modern fairytaleism of The Orphan’s Tales.  Or heck, even choose a short story!  No matter what it is, she will create a necklace based on that work, just for you.  (You’ll also receive a signed copy of the work in question, you lucky dog.)
How do you get in on this action? Simple. Just donate at least $5 to the Clarion foundation. At the end of it, I’ll choose one lucky winner from the folks who’ve donated, and they will get the necklace.
But wait!  There’s more!  I realize that not everyone who’s donated will have a need for jewelry, and this gift is sufficiently special that I want the person who gets it to want it with all their heart.  So if the first “winner” of the prize turns out not to want a necklace, I will instead purchase for them one Catherynne M. Valente book of their choosing, so they may catch the wave of Valente-inspired goodness.  (I’ll be doing this out of my own pocket, so to save my bucks I’ll say that I’ll do this up to four times.  Not that I think I’ll get to four times.)
If you’d like to see what kind of jewelry Cat makes, you can check out this lovely Sherlock Holmes-themed piece she made for my wife, or this other necklace she made as a gift.
So what does being in the Blog-A-Thon get you?  Let’s reiterate:

• A $5 donation will get you entry to a raffle, for both Cat’s jewelry and this limited-edition Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli print (worth $100) are the prizes.
• A $10 donation will get you access to the clarion_echo community, where I am currently live-blogging the writing of my dystopian YA novel where an orphaned child is growing up in a world where science has solved this whole “death.” (I do a fuller job selling the novel here.) I’m not just blogging the chapters I’m writing – I’m dissecting each chapter as I write it, in an attempt to give you some of what a professional writer sees when he’s looking at his own first draft.
• A $25 donation given in time will give you the remaining story critique, where I will professionally crit your short story, assuming you want one. I’m kindly brutal. Or perhaps brutally kind.
• A $100 donation will get you something absolutely crazy, albeit not during the Blog-A-Thon: when the novel is done, I’ll write a story according to a prompt you give me. You will not own the story – your idea + my sweat makes it mine – and I can’t promise timeliness or publication, but anyone who donates $100 can provide an idea and see how it sparks in the hands of someone else.

To help, just click this link and donate. (If you want in to the clarion_echo, send the receipt for the donation to theferrett@theferrett.com, along with your LJ user name – and I’ll make you a member of this friends-only community. (I think I’m caught up, so if I haven’t added you, please contact me and accept my apologies.)  And remember, I’d love to get to $2,000 at the end, so even if you don’t want all of these lovely prizes… I’d still appreciate your help.

Understanding the Nerd Mentality

“They’re doing a reboot of my favorite comic?  That’s awesome.  I love seeing new creative takes on things!
“They’re making it grim and gritty? Super.  The old comics were too childish, with all those happy endings and nice people.  That’s not the way the real world works. Make it with a lot of scowling people, filled with angst and alcoholism and real-world issues.  Turn old friends into rivals?  Make everyone a little more self-centered?  That is awesome.
“And they’re making it extra-violent, too? Holy fuck, that’s great!  The old comic books were from a simpler time – you never saw the hero sweat.  Let’s throw some fountains of blood in there, a couple of women stuffed in refrigerators to show the bad guy is really bad, and when the hero fights he should have, like, I dunno, guts oozing out his ribs.  And people should die in buckets around them as they collapse buildings.  That’s making things match today’s modern society!
“Whoa!  Of course they’re putting in sex.  This isn’t the namby-pamby days of old where the hero and heroine kissed chastely! Naw, they gotta get down and dirty!  Show some tits!  Have them clawing at each other on a bed!  And when the girl comes out, she should be dressed real slutty – all leather and sado-masochistic, desperate to fuck the men she hates, wanting to hurt herself!  Yeah, that’s the way women work!
“What?  Making the lead character black?  What bullshit is this? Nobody’s black.  Or gay.  Or female.  It’s horrible that they’re making these pandering changes just to get sales!  Why do they have to mess with the status quo?”

Grumpy-Man, Grumpy-Man, Does Whatever A Grumpy Can

The new Spider-Man is going to be black. Well, half-black and half-Hispanic.
The comics blogosphere is in an uproar about this, because apparently some people are all like SPIDER-MAN IS NOT A BLACK GUY and everyone else is like HELLO, RACIST? (Although, I should note, the opinion of anyone blogging about “Spiderman” and not “Spider-Man” can be summarily discounted.  True fans know.)
So there’s a lot of fury being thrown around right now.  But I must be old, because I’m pre-furious about a situation that hasn’t even come to pass.
Here’s the deal: the quote-unquote “real” Spider-Man is going to remain caucasian. (And there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)  This is the Ultimate Spider-Man, the Spider-Man of a parallel Marvel universe, who died last month in what turned out to be a pretty heartbreaking comic.  (The actual final face-off against the Green Goblin was underwhelming, but Brian Michael Bendis nailed Peter Parker’s last words so perfectly that it still brings tears to my eyes.)  So the “official” Spider-Man remains as minty fresh as ever – alas, the only Spider-Man that’s getting the makeout is the out-of-standard-continuity one, the one designed for bold and crazy experiments such as this.
The good news is that this is the only Spider-Man that’s consistently written well these days, so it has a good shot at succeeding.  And I absolutely adore that Brian Michael Bendis wanted to do a Spider-Man comic starring a non-white lead character after seeing Troy in Community dressed up in a Spider-Man outfit.  (The actor, Donald Glover, is a huge Spider-Man fan and actively campaigned to get the role.)  If Peter Parker must be dead, and the Ultimates universe must continue, then this isn’t a bad choice.
But I’m upset about what’s going to happen ten years down the line.
Here’s the deal: all this shit over the black Spider-Man?  It’ll pass.  Comic nerds are notoriously angry about changes to anything – remember the vast letter-writing campaign that erupted when Michael Keaton was cast as Batman?  Remember the comics furor over the fact that the new movie Spider-Man had organic web-shooters instead of designing them?  Remember Bootgate, the eruption of anger that spilled over when it turned out the new movie Superman had different boots?
I’m not saying there’s not racism in comics-land – there is – but you have to also account for the fact that comics fans are cranky old guys who get furious about any change.  Some of that fury is because comics fans grew up on comics, and the primary urge is EVERYTHING SHOULD STAY EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD AND JUST DISCOVERED COMICS AND EVERYTHING WAS COOL.
No, what’s going to happen is that the actual comic will come out, and because it’s written by one of the most consistently good writers in the industry it will probably be much better than the accusations of “stunt casting” would merit, and you know what will happen?  We will fall, slowly, in love with this new Spider-Man.  We’ll find that he has his own charms, and he’ll have adventures where we root for him – and in the beginning, yes, he’ll be heavily under the shadow of old Peter Parker, but over the course of years he’ll crawl out and make his own pathway. We’ll look back at this criticism and be amazed we made such a mountain out of a molehill.
This, if the comics field doesn’t collapse in the meantime, will last for about five to eight years.
Then someone at Marvel will get a great idea: What if Peter Parker comes back?  That’s a stunning plot twist!  And then they’ll arrange it so that Peter WHOOOO RISES FROM THE DEAD and then suddenly the character they’ve spent so much effort to get us to fall in love with will be a second banana for life.
Don’t believe me?  Hey, ask James Rhodes. Ask Kyle Rayner. Ask Wally West.
And I’m outraged, because hey, years from now, a black Spider-Man can’t catch a break – he’ll be the hero as long as the white guy ain’t around, but the minute the white dude comes swinging back in, we’ll be all like, “HEY, PETER, HOW YOU DOING?  OH, DON’T MIND HIM THERE, HE’S JUST NOT AS COOL AS YOU.”  And the black guy will be forgotten, and what started out as an attempt to be hearteningly progressive will actually wind up a sort of unconsciously racist sort of thing as the minority character gets shoved aside.  It’s not entirely racist, since both Kyle and Wally were white as well and the primogeniture of comics means that the “real” character eventually returns to center stage – but it’s gonna have some real uncomfortable overtones when it happens.
So yeah.  Here I am, Old Bitter Comics Fan, not worried at all about the current scandal, looking forward to seeing this new take on Spider-Man, but actually angry now about what’s going to happen a decade down the line, assuming the comic is successful and comics don’t tumble into a black hole.
I need to get a life.
(Also, I find myself wandering around the house, singing an altered version of the Spider-Man theme song: “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, now he’s half black and mex-i-can…”  I’m more excited about this casting change than I’d like to let on.  [And yes, I know, Hispanic doesn’t equal Mexican, but “Hispanic” just doesn’t swing in the song, baby.])

You Know, It's Almost Like I'm A Real Writer

In case you hadn’t heard: on Sunday, I finished the first draft of my first post-Clarion novel.  This took me nine months of effort to write, and I was surprisingly drained afterwards.  It was like I’d birthed a baby.  A really ugly baby.
(Unlike babies, thankfully, I can do a lot of plastic surgery on this one until he’s beautiful.  I’m never a first-draft kinda guy.  Though don’t get me wrong, the novel is readable, and entertaining, even in this nascent and flawed form.)
This is both good news and bad news for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon.  It’s good news because, if you’ll recall, a $10 donation will get you access to the full first draft of the novel, posted a chapter a day, complete with commentary on what works and what needs to be fixed and why.  I’d already posted 23 chapters (along with almost 20,000 words on various essays on the techniques I use in the novel), but I was concerned that I might get to the end of the Blog-A-Thon and go, “Sorry, couldn’t find an ending for you, just pretend it’s like The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
No!  The ending’s there, and it largely works!  This is a joy.
The bad news is that the Blog-A-Thon is over this week, and LJ being fucked for a week means that I’m very behind on chapters.  So now I’m posting two, three chapters a day in order to finish it all up in time! So what I have is a completed novel that will be published to a select group of people this week – won’t you be one of them?  I know the economy sucks, but it’s for a good cause, and the beta version of the novel (plus mega-doses of writer advice!) is worth at least $10.
In other news, my divorce-through-a-magic-portal story “A Window, Clear As A Mirror” got a “Recommended” review from Rich Horton over at Locus this month!  This is my first “Recommended” review from them ever; they’re pretty hard to get.  Rich said this:

The 13th outing for Shimmer includes a very nice offering from Ferrett Steinmetz, ‘‘A Window, Clear as a Mirror’’, in which a man loses his wife to a portal to the Sunlit Lands, and finds himself in an odd way – first through a relationship with a refugee from those lands, and then by traveling there to find his wife. I suppose one might call it bittersweet, though that’s not quite right: resignedly true, I suppose.

If you’ll recall, this is my favorite story that I’ve ever written – and my money-back guarantee is still open on it.  If you buy it from Shimmer (the .PDF version’s a mere $4), and you don’t like it, I’ll refund your money, no questions asked.   I really love this story, and if you’ve liked any of my other stories, I think you’ll really dig this one.
And finally, my story “My Father’s Wounds” is due out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies next week – and it turns out it’s getting the full podcast treatment as well!  So I’m totally psyched.  I love hearing competent people read my stuff.  (I’m still learning how to read competently.  It takes a long while.)
 

Surviving Your Post-Clarion Experience

So.  You’ve been through six weeks of the most intense, most educational, most stressful writers’ boot camp around.  And in a week, as of this Saturday… it will all be over.
How do you survive that transition?
There are eighteen students leaving this year’s Clarion in a week — and as it turns out, happily, the advice I’d give them upon leaving the pressure cooker is pretty much the same advice I’d give to writers in general.  And that advice is this:
Advice #1: You’re Gonna Have That Gap, And That’s Okay.
The best advice I have to give is not from me: it’s from Ira Glass, talking about the Creative Gap.  Sit down, spend five minutes, and watch it.

If you’re not in a place where you can watch this right now —and you should find the time later — this is the relevant quote:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you…
 
Everybody goes through that. For you to go through it—if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase—you’ve got to know that’s totally normal. The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work.

And that’s the thing about Clarion: when you come out, you often feel this huge pressure.  You’ve spent six weeks among the best in the business, and now you have to deliver.  And if these next words aren’t golden, you’re a failure, you suck, my God how did anyone think anything of you?
Relax.  Take a deep breath. Let it go.
This feeling of “not-good” is healthy.  It’s the sign that you’re taking the craft seriously.  Yet if you allow that feeling to seize you, holding back because if I can’t produce brilliance, it’s worth nothing, then you’re not helping yourself.
Keep writing.  Elizabeth Bear taught me a wonderful mantra at Viable Paradise, and there are times I chant it repeatedly: It’s a draft, it can suck.  Let that suck seep from your pores, get it all out, because stressing over Your Grand Career is just going to hinder you.
There are so many unknowns.  So many.  All you can do is get better, and you do that by continuing to write.
And speaking of that…
Advice #2: You Are A Writer…
At Clarion, you had a vastly empowering thing: for six weeks, not one person doubted you were a writer.  Your teachers agreed you were a writer, your peers all agreed that you were a writer, and you had all this wondrous time to write.  That made it easy to be a writer.
Then you leave Clarion, and you discover that maybe you’re not.
In the outside world, you run into all these distressing people who don’t know you’re a writer and don’t care.  They will make requests of you that suck away your writing-time.  They will see you not as A Writer, but as A Student or A Parent or A Barista…
…and that erodes your confidence, especially when those rejections start to flow in.  Every rejection feels like a little “Nah, maybe you’re not.”  And outside of that helpful Clarion bubble-culture, it can be hard to retain that necessary feeling of writer-ness.
But there’s two things about writers.  First is, they make space to be writers. When the world crushes in with its deadlines and fun times and work, real writers push back.  They realize that the world is a big sponge that will suck up every last minute of your time, unless you stop that world and say, “This hour is for my writing.”
You need to have the confidence to say “Yes, that’s my time.”  That’s part of being a writer; taking that space by yourself, even when Clarion doesn’t give it to you.
(And if you’re lazy one day and fail to write, don’t use that as an excuse to fail a second day.  It’s okay to fall off the horse; it’s not okay to lay in the mud for a couple of days because hey, I already fell, maybe I should just take a vacation while I’m down here.)
The second thing about writers is that they get rejections.  Do not look at a rejection as a sign that you’re not a writer, but rather that you are.  You know who doesn’t get rejections?  The people who keep all their manuscripts on their hard drive and never send them out.  The only way to not get rejected is to not actually try to get published.
If you’re a writer at all, you’re going to pile up tons of rejections.  So wear them with pride.  Every writer has a box full of “No”s, and your goal is to get as many of them as you can.
It’s okay.  Remember.  You’re a writer, and this is what writers do.  Sometimes that feels a little weird, standing amidst the piles of laundry and proclaiming, “I AM A WRITER” – but writers also do laundry.
Advice #3: …If You Want To Be. 
You know what’s okay?  Not being a writer.
You might want to try it for a while.
Some people find that the post-Clarion pressure is too much, and it destroys them.  But while it helps if you write a lot to flush all those terrible, terrible words from your system, you have to find what works for you.
And sometimes, what works is giving up.
Thing is, if you view it as “I’m going to stop writing for a week, but then I have to get back to this,” that’s just going to make you feel guilty and stressed the whole damn time.  Your creative batteries may not be charged by that diamond-hard pressure of MAKE A STORY NOW, MONKEY-BOY.  And if you keep trying to force it through, then you may crack.
So seriously.  Give up.  A lot of people came out of Clarion and discovered that this writing thing involves a lot of agita and one too many doors slammed in their face, and realized that while they had the native talent, it was just too much of an effort to turn this raw materials into finalized career.  And that was a very useful thing to know.
You don’t have to do this.
And for a lot of those people, once they gave it up for six months or a year or whatever, their subconsciousnesses started churning and soon enough, like green shoots poking through cracked concrete, they found the stories welling up again.
Others found out that they had no need — that they were happier not making the attempt.  And that’s okay.  Spending six weeks to find out that this is not a path that’s going to make you happy?  That’s cheap.  Some people wander in the wrong careers for years.
Life is hard enough without holding a gun to your head.  Be free to choose another path if writing doesn’t make you happy; it’s equally valid.
Advice #4: This Feeling Will Never Fail You.
When Cat Valente told me I needed to go to Clarion, she mentioned how “the Clarion kids” were at conventions.  “It’s like they all know each other,” she said.  “And they have these happy reunions, even if they’ve never met.”
Which is true.  When I see you at a con, you tell me what year you are, and I will clasp your hand and give you the big secret Clarion grin.  Because I know you’ve been there with me.  We’ve done this together.
But your classmates?  You’ll stay in touch — through Twitter, through private mail lists, through chats.  And I know what you’re wondering:
Will this feeling of togetherness last?
And I am here to tell you: Yes.
God yes.
Whenever I see my old classmates, it’s like I’ve found my secret family again.  We pick up right from where we left off, and it’s some of the old tensions, all of the old love — that beautiful realization that we shared this moment, and in some part of our brains we’re always sharing it, and now we’ve synced up again in real-time to do it again.
Space will divide you.  Time will divide you.  Differing paths will divide you.
But you’ll always be one.
(Hey, come on – you think I’m doing all this writing for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon just for kicks?  I do it to honor the Clarion experience.)