Lilith Saintcrow

Cross-posted from the Deadline Dames, where there’s even more writing advice. And pie!…Okay, I’m lying about the pie. But it’s still awesome. Go look.

I am still thinking about that epublishing post, guys. It might be done next week, if I’m not in the wilds of Novel Revision Deathmarch. This Friday’s writing post is brought to you by Reader A. C., who wrote me last week with the question:

How do you shut off the fear of being judged? I feel like if I was to release my writing to the world I would wake up every night in a cold sweat thinking “Oh my god, people are reading what I wrote and judging me!”

Which is really a very good question. This is the single biggest block to a lot of writers submitting their work. A lot of the anxiety^[1] stems from conflating judgment of your work with judgment and rejection of you. The rest comes from that old bugaboo, the Inner Critic.

Get used to it, because this never goes away. One’s method of dealing with it gets refined, but the anxiety over judgment and rejection is a Basic Human Fear, and it does not go away. We are cooperative creatures, and that anxiety over rejection is one component that helps us be cooperative instead of narrowly self-interested to a degree that would jeopardize our survival as a species. (I know this is a laughably simplistic view of a complex social-sciences issue. Bear with me.)

You as a writer will never get used to being rejected. At least, I never have, and no writer I’ve ever spoken to has. There’s always the heart-in-mouth panic when the agent doesn’t return a call, the nail-biting when the editor has the manuscript. Writing is something performed essentially in solitude–even if there are other people in the room, even if you are collaborating, there is still those moments of just you and the words on the page, and that’s IT. You have no measure of whether or not it’s good except your own, initially, and we are taught not to trust our own judgment on this level in a hundred little ways every day. The delayed-gratification aspect of writing–months or even years until something is accepted or sees print–pours fuel on the flames. Workshops and critique groups, well, we all know how I feel about those. Then there are reviews, and fan/hate mail, and that particular brand of hell known as bad Amazon reviews…

I struggle to think of a career that is more perfectly designed to turn a reasonably-adjusted human being into a f!cking neurotic. I really can’t think of one. (Politics doesn’t count; people are neurotics before they go into politics.)

We’ve got this anxiety. It’s not going to go away. So let’s pull an Einstein. Instead of trying to figure out why the speed of light is what it is, Einstein just took it as a constant and went on trying to answer questions around it. We all know the anxiety is there, so let’s talk about what to do about it.

My advice here basically boils down to three simple words.

Do it anyway.

If you want to be a writer, if you want to get published, you can’t afford to sit around wailing or to be crippled by that anxiety. Look, I can tell you the worst thing that’s going to happen. Brace yourself, it’s right here.

The worst thing that can happen is you get rejection slips. Everyone gets rejection slips. It’s a piece of paper with someone’s opinion on it. Big deal. So is the newspaper and a billboard. The opinion may be backed up by something, may not. But in the end it is only a piece of paper.

It is up to you to start a fire with it.

Slight side note: Yes, this piece of paper means you haven’t sold your work. If you’re lucky, it has a piece of personal feedback on it. There are stages to rejection just like everything else, and a personal note on a rejection letter is a step up. But a lot of writers shoot themselves in the foot by not taking those personal notes seriously. If an editor is sending out fifty rejection slips a day (and some do) a personal note is GOLD. It means they took time to go ABOVE AND BEYOND, and to tell you the thing that stopped them taking your story, or offered encouragement because you’re close but not quite there yet. Plenty of new writers don’t understand what a personal rejection note means and they get discouraged. It’s one of the last gates before acceptance.

All right, back on target. Here’s the thing: you have to find a way to make that anxiety a spur to be better. You have to find the way to turn the anxiety around so it’s working FOR you instead of bleeding off energy.

To be absolutely, honestly truthful…my way is sheer stubbornness. You don’t like it? You don’t? Well, I’m gonna show YOU! I’m gonna get so good, I’m gonna work so hard, that I’m gonna be able to laugh in your FACE! Yeah! HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES? It’s the same reflex that got me through my childhood, high school, boyfriends with quick tempers and quicker fists, and every other setback since. It’s getting knocked to the floor six times…and getting up seven, because you’re too stupid-dumb-stubborn to know when to quit.

It’s not elegant and it’s not pretty, but it gets me through the rejection-anxiety. Other writers use the anxiety in different ways, but always to bring themselves back to the page. The chances of getting something accepted for publication go up astronomically when you actually consistently produce work. They go up even more when you listen to the rejection and keep writing. They go up even more when you listen to the personalized rejection slips and keep writing.

Are you noting the theme here? The only way through this is to put your head down and keep writing. Find the way to put that anxiety in the traces to pull your plow. Otherwise, it will run around inside your head breaking dishes and making a nuisance of itself. Once you get it harnessed, once you figure out your way around it, it works as hard as the demon it is. But now it’s working for you instead of against you.

If there was an easier way, someone would have found it by now. That someone would be mega-rich and wouldn’t tell the secret anyway. So, we have to work with what we have.

And there’s a funny thing about the process of using the anxiety instead of letting it use you. The bravery or stubbornness or what-have-you that you find to get you through it starts cropping up in other areas of your life. Sooner or later it proves useful elsewhere.

If nothing else, that’s a reason to keep writing too.

I can’t give you a magic pill to make the anxiety go away. I can tell you that you’re not alone. And I can tell you something I learned in dance class. It’s easy to be invisible in dance class, because everyone else is so worried about where their hands and feet are, they’re not looking at how big your ass is.

In the end, someone judging you on your writing, or making personal statements about you on the strength (or not) of your writing, is only making a statement about themselves. (And not a nice one.) We’re all afraid of what we write “opening the kimono” and telling people about our fears, showing them the way to hurt us. This is not a reason to stop writing. This is even more of a reason to tell the truth, to find your way around that anxiety, and to shame the Devil, as the saying goes.

Nobody whose opinion you need to be worried about is going to judge you personally, the way you’re afraid of, on your writing. I can’t be any clearer than that. But the anxiety over if someone might is actually a gift. If you can find out how to harness it inside your head and make it work to get you on the page every day, to tell the truth and take your chances, to spit in the eye of Destiny and spin the roulette wheel…

…then, my friends, your success is only a matter of time.

Now go get it.

[1] I am using the word “anxiety” instead of fear because I believe it’s more precise. Fear is a survival mechanism. Anxiety is a social mechanism. I agree with Gavin de Becker that there is a huge difference.

John Scalzi with Ten Things To Remember About Authors. I may not agree with him all the time, but I certainly agree with him more often than not. And, erm, if you’re wondering what he’s indirectly referring to, my thought would be this recent Internet Dustup.

Though, of course, I could be wrong. I probably am. For I am human and imprecise…

Plenty more stuff about Roy Blount’s op-ed in the New York Times concerning Kindle’s Text-To-Speech function. (My initial take on it was yesterday.) I’m just going to point you at Wil Wheaton, who got together links to Scalzi, Gaiman, and Doctorow’s responses. Doctorow’s in particular seemed to go over the line into enraged. YMMV.

I am left wondering if these guys read the same op-ed I did. I saw it as Blunt saying: “We need to be vigilant about our rights here.” I really wonder if others read stuff about the piece elsewhere on the Net that colored their response to it, calling Blount a big meanie etc. etc., and getting All Het Up.

One thing Scalzi said was that he pitied the person who thought TTS was a replacement for audiobooks or someone reading work aloud, implying that therefore this tech wouldn’t take off and be a threat. Look, that’s not the point. I understand ebooks and am glad my work is accessible that way, but I don’t read them. (This is purely personal preference, here.) I prefer paper and I pity people who don’t have the sensual experience of a book in their hands. I can still insist that I get my royalties from ebooks and that torrenting is stealing.

It doesn’t matter that a computer reading it isn’t the same experience as a human reading it. The point is that the technology is there and someone is going to try to figure out how to make it workable to steal. Just like people figured out how to make ebooks easy and workable to steal. This is just human nature, folks. Someone is going to do it; plus, this is a new way to distribute and spread author’s works, we need to look at those rights and get them codified in contracts JUST LIKE AUDIOBOOKS AND EBOOKS. It’s that simple. I don’t see anything wrong with saying so, or with Blount saying so from his platform as president of the Author’s Guild. I like AG and am a dues-paying member because I think it’s valuable for the legal help alone, though God knows I don’t want to ever have to use that. So, I disagree. Not vehemently or anything, but I really totally disagree with the points being made so far in that corner of the Interwebs.

Anyway, that’s probably my last word on the whole issue, since it seems emotions are getting involved and that means nastiness can’t be far behind. Besides, I’m spitting distance from finishing this short story, and I want it done and out of the way early so I can fix the second YA book.

It’s snowing here, off and on–it’s too warm to stick and we’re getting spatters of desultory hail too. It’s good writing weather. Hell, any weather is good writing weather. Especially when you’re writing an antihero half-vampire in suburbia.

I do love my job.

Let’s talk, you and me. Let’s talk about money.

I like money. It makes it possible for me to feed my children and my book habit. I work damn hard every day for the money I get. Right now I’m on a jag of seven-day workweeks getting stuff done. I’m glad to have the work. I’m glad to have earned the work by being a professional.

But there’s something I’m having trouble with this morning. It’s the assorted silly and ugly responses to Roy Blount’s (president of the Author’s Guild) op-ed piece in the New York Times–the one where he says quite reasonably, “But people who want to keep on doing creative things for a living must be duly vigilant about any new means of transmitting their work.”

He’s talking about the Kindle 2′s voice capability. And in the blogsphere this morning I’ve come across many responses, most disagreeing with him for various specious reasons. These responses are mostly people who do not make their living from writing. This issue is bound up, with me, with the issue of DRM and piracy and a lot of others.

There is this persistent baseline assumption hanging around that artists don’t deserve to get paid because what they provide is a luxury. (It’s very Puritan of us.) This unconscious line of thinking says, “Why should artists bitch if I want to get their work for free? There’s lots of people willing to work for free–the Internet is awash with free fiction, free art, free free free and all for me!”

Yeah, and as Harlan Ellison obliquely noted in his famous rant, you get what you effing pay for. And there are a lot of people wanting writers to work for nothing.

I am cranky this morning, so I can boil my response down to two words. F!ck that.

I am not saying that everyone who calls themselves an artist deserves a mansion. Far from. Traditional publishing provides a popular product because of quality control. The gatekeepers and wickets an author has to go through to get traditionally published are just that: quality control, because a publisher is laying out cold hard cash to produce the books on paper. (This ties in with that huge post on epublishing I’m still planning.) Good e-presses have quality control as well, and guess what? Their books cost more because of that quality control. People pay more for professionally-produced audiobooks and music because of quality control. There are people selling podcasts–not just handing them out for free–and that money goes toward quality control–better tech to capture the voice, better stories, more in-depth reporting, etc., etc. (Publicity podcasts for free are a different animal. Don’t use them as a red herring.)

Blount’s point here is that authors deserve to get paid when there is a new means of transmitting their work. Those rights need to be guarded. Not just because we have to eat like the rest of you–but because YOU want quality fiction. Don’t you?

We could be nice and sweet and let our work get taken for free, a chunk at a time. And starve to death. Then, no more quality fiction.

Don’t tell me that the wave of the future is all free stuff. (To begin with, the Internet is not ubiquitous yet. It just feels that way to anyone in it.) Look, I can produce a better product when I take more care with it. That’s just the way it is. When I am properly paid for the care I take–when it’s possible (even if hard work) for me to feed my kids on what I make from writing–I don’t have to spend eight to ten hours at the office then come home and scrape up energy to write. I can spend those eight hours writing. (And then usually another three or four writing too, but that’s another blog post.)

But the unspoken assumption in a lot of people saying that the Author’s Guild is greedy, or that DRM didn’t work for the music industry so it won’t work for publishing, or throwing any number of red herrings up to say professional writers shouldn’t get paid for their work–which is essentially what I’m seeing all over the place–is that writers do not DESERVE fair pay for their effort, because what they produce isn’t important.

If it isn’t important, why should we produce it at all? Do you really want to wake up one day and have nothing but shoddy fanfic[1] for free on the internet in the place of books, quality ebooks, and quality fiction? Yes, you and I know it’s not going to happen. People love their books and music too much.

But do not expect those of us who write or play–those of us who produce these things you enjoy–to act as if it’s happened, or to live on air. We are not effing epiphytes. Don’t expect us to roll over and play dead when there’s a new means of transmitting our work and there’s a question of rights to it. Naturally a lot of people want shit for free. That’s human nature. It’s also human nature to say, “I spent a lot of time and effort on this shit, pay me before you use it.” That’s what an economy IS, tension between those two points.

The trouble is the persistent assumption that artists don’t deserve to be paid at all. That basic assumption is all bound up in the myth of the suffering artist–that you have to be a self-destructive, penniless, alcoholic jerk to create Great Arte that will sell for millions after you die in a garret. Screw that. I want to be a well-rounded decent human being and use my life doing the things I love, creating what I believe I was meant to create and making a reasonable living from it.

Slight side note here: Don’t even start with the “Well, everyone wants to do that–and nobody would do the sh!t jobs if we all had the means to be Artists and Do What We Love.” This is not true. This profession, like any other, depends on professionalism and hard work. There are a lot of Speshul Snowflakes who expect to be paid for essentially producing nothing, which is NOT what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the writer who consistently produces sellable product, and gets through those quality control checks publishing has evolved. The proportion of “writers” willing to work hard enough to eventually make it is small. The means to do what you love comes with hard work and discipline. This is universal. So don’t say I’m advocating that every Speshul Snowflake get a stipend. Because I’m not.

I’ve achieved a certain small amount of success doing the thing I love, and of COURSE I’m going to want to continue to be paid for the work and effort I put into it. Sure, tomorrow sales could tank and the world could decide I’m a bad writer (I already know I’m not a writer for everyone) and I may have to go back to flipping burgers, fixing plumbing, delivering pizza, doing insurance analysis, something.

But that is going to be because you, dear Reader, don’t want me anymore. I don’t want it to be because you want me, but I can’t make a living because some asshole decides he has a god-given right to steal and torrent my work, or because Amazon decides I don’t get a slice of those (insert rights here) rights just because THEY want all the money, world without end, amen. It’s natural for huge corporations to have to be forced to give up any cash at all, whether to their workers or what-have-you.

Naturally I am going to support the Author’s Guild and argue that I deserve to be paid for my work. That’s why I’ve worked so damn hard to get through those quality control wickets and be a goddamn professional.

People in our culture tend to be shocked and offended when artists want to get paid, because it strikes right at the heart of the Puritan assumption that all art is luxury and suspect, and therefore Not Worth Anything. (Except gloating over in the middle of the night.) Add in the human propensity to want things for free, and you have a cocktail of assumptions swirling around, and an overly-strong emotional response when those assumptions are challenged.

I used to think that I could argue with people over this issue and that they would eventually admit that I deserved to make a living too, if I was producing a quality product. (Yes, I know products and businesses fail all the time. But these people are asking me to fail at making a living because they don’t want to pay for something they use, not because they don’t want the item in the first place.) Now I am to the point of just shrugging my shoulders and saying, “Of course you want shit for free. That’s human nature. But don’t expect me to roll over and give it, and don’t expect me to be quiet about it when you want me to give up my rights–they’re called rights for a REASON, you know–or when you expect me to work and produce these things you want for free when I’ve got rent to pay and kids to feed and books to buy.”

I think it’s incumbent upon artists to be businesspeople too. And expecting shit for free is not how business is conducted.

I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me, and they will talk about how I’m shortsighted and how electronic rights are meant to be free or are going to be free anyway in the future so why bother fighting now, or how the Kindle’s voice capability is just for the reader and not for the writer, and on and on. But all I keep hearing under all that is the ugly assumption that writers and artists are assholes for expecting to get paid for work that’s gone through the quality control wickets. And while it might be a widespread assumption in our still-very-Puritan culture, I don’t have a lot of patience with that dreck anymore.

Especially not today, when I woke up cranky.

Over and out.

[1] I like fanfic and think it’s great practice for beginning writers, as well as a stage each writer goes through. But the overwhelming percentage of fanfic I’ve ever seen is, well, only fanfic-quality. This isn’t a bad thing–but do you want this to be the only fiction you have access to? Do you?

Thanks to Brian, I just found out that The Demon’s Librarian is now available on Fictionwise! It hasn’t percolated through to Amazon yet, but traditionally my ImaJinn releases show up on Fictionwise about a week or two before they come out in paper.

I’ll keep you updated. I like this book a lot–and a most jaunty and sincere tip of the hat to Wendy the Super Librarian, who I blameTHANK for the original idea.

So, without further ado…the blurb!

When Francesca Barnes finds out demons are preying on schoolchildren in her city, she does what any red-blooded librarian would do—she does some research and goes hunting. But the books she finds in a secret cache don’t tell her the whole story. Chess has no idea what she’s just stepped into, or just how special she is.

But Ryan doesn’t know he’s been betrayed by the very Order he serves. And if Chess does by some miracle survive, he won’t ever be able to touch her again…

I’ll let everyone know as soon as it’s available in paper. In the meantime, I hope the ebook fans will enjoy this little romp.