No less a writer than Norman Spinrad has hit the publishing death spiral, and with a flip of the bird to those who tried their damnedest to ruin my reputation when I laid out the whole evil “buying-to-the-net” process back in December ’06, I’ll simply say:
When my two older kids were younger, I used to charge them five bucks every time the word fair slipped out of their mouths.
“That’s not fair? Five bucks, please.”
Since five dollars was, at the time, equivalent to a week’s pay for chores for them, and since I actually made them pay me, that word quickly slipped out of both their vocabularies.
The only word in the English language I have less respect for than fair is bored, which means the person saying it has voluntarily turned his brain off.
One summer vacation, my two oldest complained that they were bored. I told them to find something to do. They whined that there wasn’t anything to do. So I showed them how to turn their brains back on.
It took one complete summer vacation, but they learned how to NOT be bored…and if either of them reads this post, I’m sure they’ll regale you with the horror story of what they had to do that summer…and why, to this day, neither of them has ever claimed boredom in front of me again.
Back to fair, though, which is the subject of this essay.
Over in the Rebel Tales community right now, a discussion on publishers’ target audiences popped up, and drifted into writing awards (ack), and into a comment that women don’t get as many awards for writing SF as men do, and that this was probably because the panels are made up of men…and the writer appended the comment with the stated hope that Rebel Tales would “set a standard of fairness in all genres.”
Five bucks, please, for using profanity in my house.
If this were the best of all possible worlds, everyone would receive equal justice.
Meaning: Everyone would reap the rewards for the consequences of his or her own actions.
Life in this world that we live in is not evenly just, but the concept of justice is born of a clear standard that can be objectively identified and objectively remanded. All men are to be held equal in the eyes of the law. Actions = Consequences.
Justice is an attainable standard, even if it is rarely attained.
Fairness, on the other hand, ignores actions and consequences. It ignores where things come from, how they are created, who created or acted, why they did so, and to what end they worked.
Fairness states not that all men are equal under the eyes of the law…but that all men are equal.
And all men aren’t.
Fairness demands that more women should be in positions of power because there are more women than there are men.
Fairness demands that people who have built businesses with their minds and hands and backs should make no more money than those they employ, because everyone who works at the company is ‘just a person, like everyone else.’
Fairness demands that competence be ignored as a standard because competence is unfair: some people have it, others don’t.
Fairness demands that half of all awards in all fields at all times should be granted to women and half to men—and that those awards should be further subdivided across standards of
…Fairness has no respect for achievement, no respect for effort, no respect for quality, no respect for intelligence, no respect for ability, no respect for motive.
And this is because FAIRNESS has no respect for the INDIVIDUAL.
Fairness, because it insists that all men are equal, can see humanity only as a vast, faceless lump.
The instant fairness looks past the dogmatic lie that “all men are equal” to see individual people with their individual and unequal skills, motives, morals, integrity, desires, and actions, it dies choking on that lie. So it doesn’t look.
Justice is the desire of the honest individual, who takes action with integrity and accepts the consequences as his earned due.
Fairness is the desire of the unthinking herd, that envies what it has not earned and demands a piece of it just because it’s breathing.
Justice is my standard. I will not accept any other, nor will I compromise.
Fairness earns only my contempt.
So, no. Rebel Tales will NOT set a standard of fairness. We will reward competence and quality. If the only people who demonstrated competence and quality were men, then I would publish only men.
If you want a place in Rebel Tales, earn it by being good enough to belong there.
I’m teaching a “free or really, really cheap” writing workshop called Crash Revision: How To Revise Your Novel In 7 Days.
Mine is a general course, geared to writers in every genre—it’s not romance-specific.
My workshop is part of the 2010 Writers’ Boot Camp at SavvyAuthors.com.
I also have two items in the “book raffle,” though neither of mine is a book, and both are spectacular.
This short course starts on March 28th. You have to be signed up before then to be a part of it.
And some info on my workshop hosts:
SavvyAuthors.com offers tools and resources for romance authors at every stage of their career.
Finally, a COMPENSATION DISCLAIMER:
I’m not an affiliate of SavvyAuthors.com. I’m not making a dime from the workshop, nor will I receive any payment for recommending the site.
I’m doing this because I think it will be fun, and interesting, and challenging, and because it will let me meet some new folks.
So here I am on Friday night, haven’t managed a weblog entry, haven’t managed to write fiction all week.
I’ve been absolutely buried in Lesson 14 for HTRYN. Could not figure out how to show people what they need to do related to revising Simple Time in their novel. I had the whole lesson outlined, thought I knew how I was going to present it—and then my presentation didn’t work, and I re-outlined, did clusters, did bullet points, wrote things, deleted things.
My whole week I spent on JUST that lesson. In the end, I had a breakthrough, and HOW I needed to present the issues of Simple Time became clear, easy, obvious. Like falling off a log.
But it cost me the whole week, so here I am on Friday night, when I’m supposed to be done for the week and taking a break, and instead, the migraine that has plagued me much of the week is with me again, and I’m pushing through on the demo for Lesson 13.
The lesson wasn’t the only wreck in the week—but it magnified the several other wrecks.
I have not abandoned the writing diary, the newsletter, the TalysMana novel and weblog, or any of the other things I’m working on. This week, though, every just fell apart.
I’m sincerely hoping to sleep for two straight days once I get this demo done. But right at the moment, it’s looking like a long night.
And I had so many other things I wanted to talk about this week.
So I DID get over 600 words done on TalysMana done Sunday night. Posted the chapter, which will go out on schedule.
I’m not doing fiction tonight, because the holidays ate my deadlines alive, and I’m pedalling insanely trying to catch back up.
But I wanted to tell you this, which relates to my New Year’s Resolution, and which I want to make available to everyone:
Here’s how you turn your dreams into reality.
What you want, what you love, what you want to build your life into, what you want to leave behind when when you’re dead and gone…These are what you build. If you look at some action you could take and you don’t care about the work and the inevitable failures that you are going to have to get through before you can even hope to succeed—you’re going to do it, create it, build it anyway because it’s what you love—you’re on the right track.
These are the steps I’ve taken in my own life.
I hope the help you find the joy and fulfillment in your own life they have given to mine.
All caps… Yes. I’m shouting.
You know I wanted to come up with some magnificent challenge for myself to pledge as my New Year’s Resolution, to have going in some beginning fashion before I turn 50 in October of next year.
And I was standing in the shower just minutes ago, and thinking about TalysMana and Becky’s NOW-limited-to-50-EVER TalysMana Viewer, and about Rebel Tales and what I want to accomplish with that, and about all my novels, and about my How To Write A Novel And Build A Career Course, and about the novel revision course, and about FM, which I started and then ran for years, and about the Clinics, and the other smaller projects I’ve done.
And about the 33 Mistakes Books, and why I produced those.
And my thoughts turned to themes. The theme at the heart of TalysMana. The theme of my life. How everything I’ve done has been related, how it’s all been pointing toward something.
There was this ‘click’ in the back of my mind. A moment of clarity. An understanding of what comes next, and why it matters, and how to do it.
This is the biggest thing I’ve ever imagined, the biggest dream I’ve ever had.
I’ll have an interesting post for you on New Year’s Day.
Watch this space.
Okay. So I’ve done 1800+ words tonight, and there are going to be a whole lot more before I’m done. What I’m writing is already 5622 words long, and I still have a couple of critical elements to include by tonight.
Problem. My writing tonight is non-fiction. My two beta testers are starting into How To Revise Your Novel next Monday, and in between the hospital stuff, Margaret and I have been working madly to get the course software debugged—and now that it’s done, I’m wrapping up Lesson 2 tonight because I MUST have a buffer between myself and the lessons students are taking, in case I get sick. But I still have a lot of stuff that has to go into the course before next Monday.
Two lessons is all I had for the whole insane Think Sideways run.
Two lessons is evidently all I’m going to have as a buffer for HTRYN, too.
Not much in the way of sick time. 
That’s my night.
How’s your writing coming along?
Good words last night, along with surprising action as my MC remembers something horrible that shaped her life, and decides to fight for survival.
I’m stunned to realized that working at this ambling, casual pace, I’m already over 20,000 words, and that if I were planning a normal-length book, I’d already be 20% done.
This is something I’ve forgotten over the years, and am delighted to remember. If you aren’t just teeth-grittingly desperate to get paid again, you can write even small amounts, and so long as you do it regularly, you’ll rack up an impressive word count in very little time.
What I’m doing now is amateur writing (amateur in the Latin root-word sense, amator, which means lover). I’m writing out of simple love of doing it.
This is the way anyone who loves to write can write a book. Last night I ended up working on website fixes, so only had about half an hour to actually write before I fell over in an incoherent blob right around midnight. There have been a couple of nights when I got my words in fifteen or twenty minutes, decided I liked my stopping place, and quit for the night.
Writing does not have to be an all-consuming labor of ten- to sixteen-hour days—something that’s beginning to edge its way back into my weary brain as personal truth, rather than abstract theory.
It can be play, rather than work. And you can still love the story that’s coming together.
And on that note, I have a long week planned next week. And my older son is on leave, and going to come visit for a few days before he takes off for another stint in the desert. So I’m going to knock off at noon and call it a day.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Matt has assured me on more than one occasion that the reason men choose to do anything is, first and foremost, because they think doing it will get them laid.
Design the Eiffel Tower? Compose a magnificent concerto? Do a hundred pushups a day? Write a novel?
The man thinks “This will get me laid.” And he’s right. For a man, the secret to getting laid is to stand apart from other men—to be really good at something valuable, or admirable, or cool, to be competent, to be different than every other man a woman knows. Men don’t have to be young or gorgeous, to have great hair or a square jaw or a perfect body to get a woman or women. They have to stand apart.
If you’re a woman, on the other hand, breathing will get you laid, and sometimes even that’s setting the bar too high.
Doubt me? Think you aren’t pretty enough, young enough, whatever enough?
If you’re a woman and you’d like to test out this theory, walk with a female friend into any place where men gather to buy manly things (Home Depot, Best Buy, auto parts store). Carry a stopwatch. In an empty aisle, one of you will say, a bit too loudly, “God, I need to get laid. I want to meet someone.” The other one of you will start the stopwatch. I’m saying this line will bring at least one man into your aisle within thirty seconds. He’ll amble in casually, looking at something in your aisle…only not. He’s checking you out.
If he looks up at either of you and smiles, you have just met someone. Remember saying you wanted to meet someone? If he’s an employee and appears as if from nowhere, and asks if you ladies need help, you probably also have just met someone. (Well… he could just be the one guy working that day who isn’t avoiding working and who wants the challenge of figuring out what “one of those bendy thingees that go on the inside of the square thingee in the car” is. But what are the odds?)
Ball’s in your court.
A smile from a man is usually an invitation to explore possibilities (in public places, to smile back or to say hello), something women learn before puberty. Men smile when they see things they like. Doing so, they’re expressing interest.
The automatic female reaction to being smiled at by an unknown man is to look away or to frown. This is so automatic it’s almost instinctive, and if women don’t realize they’re doing it, they end up believing that there are no men in the world who would want them, because they’re turning down all sorts of invitations without acknowledging they’ve even received them.
Clearly, no matter who you are, not every man will test the waters with a smile because all men have different attractiveness filters… but as many men as can do so without getting shot or fired will find an excuse to amble over to the Romantic Comedy section where you’re standing to see if what they just heard might translate into something they might want.
The basic (not unbreakable) rule between the sexes is that men put together their best offer, based on their skills, talents, interests, and abilities, and they broadcast the offer—and women select from what’s offered. Women get offers by fitting into any given man’s classification of “Yeah, I could go for that.”
So what does this have to do with writing?
Men can get laid by pursuing writing and doing it well (or at least well enough to impress women.) God knows, it worked on me. I met not one but two future husbands because they wrote.
Women will NOT get laid by pursuing writing. No woman will ever get a man by casually mentioning that she writes novels. This is not a workable female pick-up line. The ONLY workable pick-up line for a woman is some variant on “I might consider sleeping with you,” or any action apart from words that would allow a man to think this.
Smiling. Blinking.
Breathing…
I need to take a moment to throw in a caveat here. Crossing gender attraction lines, I’ve noticed that in general, gay men seem to use the same filters for selecting men that straight men use for selecting women—appearance, not accomplishment. And that gay women seem to use the same filters for finding other women that straight women use for selecting men—accomplishment, not appearance. So a lesbian writer might very well attract a mate with the “I’m working on a novel” line.
This is an observation at second-hand, so I may be wrong. But I did not want to ignore this part of the discussion, and would be happy to entertain comments across the complement of gender variants in adult human relationships.
But. WRITING.
When we are sane and not self-destructive, human beings do things because they improve our chances of survival. For men, survival is wired to be broadly procreative, and while the male selection criteria for choosing a mate runs along varying lines of “breathing, healthy, would have sex with me,” attracting a mate or mates requires accomplishment. “I’m working on my next novel,” is a good line, better if you can back it up by presenting something you’ve written that’s really good.
For women, who cannot parent two hundred kids because women’s bodies devour themselves in the making of each one—Angelina Jolie being the exception who proves the rule—survival is genetically wired to being as narrowly procreative as possible—to having the best possible mate we can attract (by being young, pretty and healthy…or at least receptive), and then keeping him around for protection and to take care of food and shelter while making the occasional baby.
So writing does not fulfill the ‘attract a mate’ survival need in women—women don’t need to be accomplished to procreate.
What survival need does writing fulfill for us?
I didn’t start writing as a pursuit of self-actualization, that’s for sure. Or to find my inner self, or to change the world, or to find a mate. I wanted to write because my income mattered to our survival, and I wanted to find a way of making money that would let me stay home with my kids. I’d read that Anne McCaffrey had started writing for the same reason, and I thought, “I could do that.”
Writing for me was not a love-at-first-sight pursuit. I got to know it, and fell in love over time. Like the other relationships in my life that have lasted, there was an initial attraction, followed by a lot of work, with the big payoff (true love) coming only with knowing each other well.
But how representative is my experience to the experiences of other women? To you as a female writer? How valid is what I’ve observed and been told about men to you as a male writer?
I don’t know. But I want to know.
Dig deep. Be honest. What do you hope the end result of your writing will be?
P.S. Why is this on my blog?
Well, I’m working on this novel…
Seriously, though, it’s topical to a part of the book I am working on, and something about which I’d really like to get other views.
As noted elsewhere—I hauled ass like nobody’s business for eight months to create a way for me to write the novel I wanted to write without having to do it to anybody’s specifications but my own.
My mad plan worked, and for the first time since I was an RN, I had a regular, reasonable income that did not depend on me writing at a hard run in order to keep us all fed.
I got started on the Dreaming the Dead—the novel of my passion—and I was having a wonderful time with it, sitting down late at night every night and getting as many words as I got before I fell asleep. No pressure, no specific deadline (a vague one in the back of my mind only), and not even any dedication to the idea of writing to a market or marketing the book when it was done. I was writing for the sheer love of writing—to spend time with characters I could not find anywhere else, to explore a fascinating problem, to uncover mysteries and wonders.
Yes, I fully intended to send it to my agent. When it was done. When I was damn good and ready.
And then…
And then…
Brief aside here: You might have noticed, if you’ve been around here or in Think Sideways, that I … ah … am not a good relaxer. I am very good at deadlines, very good at pushing hard toward goals, very good at driving myself.
Taking my time? Taking it easy? Doing things just for fun? Not my best skill. I know this about me, but I sometimes forget it. End Brief Aside.
I forgot why I had worked so hard last year and part of this one. I forgot that THIS book was supposed to be special, different, NOT the same ferocious race to the finish line, doing the absolute best I could in the absolute least time humanly possible so that I could get paid and we could eat.
I forgot. And I set what seemed like a reasonable deadline for myself. 2000 words a day, more or less.
I also forgot that my life is different now. When writing fiction was all I had, writing fiction WAS all I had. I could put the rest of the world aside for long stretches and just push for the finish line.
I wrote, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t getting other things done. When I got other things done, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t writing. Over the last couple of days, I got hammered by headaches, stress, and guilt, my productivity on everything dropped to miserable levels, and I started hating life. In one week. From one change: the decision to write Dreaming the Dead to a “publish it” deadline.
I sat down this morning and took stock of what I have going on that is NOT the novel—stuff I love and am thrilled to be doing and want to complete.
You can look at the mindmap I did here, or the outline version here.
The fact is, my life is full of cool and wonderful work. And writing fiction is the cool and wonderful play I had planned for the end of each day.
I need to get back to my original plan.