Doing it right is the baseline I'm talking about.
Fussing over stuff that doesn't improve quality, just makes extra work, is a whole different thing.
]]>I learned this from Robin Hobb, though I'm pretty sure she didn't realize that she was teaching it to me at the time: there is no extra credit in science fiction.
By which I mean, one of the things that I do, that other writers do, that people in various other fields probably do too (though I don't have direct experience of that) is that we make extra work for ourselves because of... I don't know, acculturation probably that if we JUST WORK HARDER and are teacher's pets and volunteer for extra labor that somehow we'll get better outcomes. This is superstition, really--because publishing is an enormously unpredictable and random business where quality is not always rewarded, and a lot of things can go wrong. And like anybody who makes their living off a capricious and dangerous environment (actors, fishermen) writers are prone to superstitions as a means of expressing agency in situations where we're honestly pretty helpless. (Nobody controls the hive-mind of the readership. Oh, if only we did.)
Now, by extra credit, please note that I don't mean the things that I consider part of baseline professionalism in a writer: turning in a manuscript that is as clean and artistically accomplished as possible, as expediently as possible, and working with your editor to polish and promote the resulting book. What I mean is raising those bars to unsupportable levels, such as: "I will turn in a completely clean manuscript so that the copyeditor has nothing to do!" and "I have a series of simple edits here, which I will resolve be rewriting the entire book, because then my editor will be more impressed with me."
Spoiler: The copyeditor will have stuff to do, because part of her job is making sure that if you break house style you're doing it on purpose. Also, your editor will probably be a little nonplussed, and possibly sneak a pull out of the bottle of Scotch in her bottom drawer, because you've just made a lot more work for her.
Other manifestations include: "I must write forty guest blog posts today!" and "I must write at least twenty pages every single day to validate my carbon footprint!"
(That latter one is the one I tend to fall prey to, for the record.)
I see it a lot among women writers especially, probably because we feel like we constantly have to validate our right to be in a space that is only intermittently welcoming, but it's certainly not a gender-specific problem.
And the thing is... it just isn't so. You don't have to do a pile of extra credit work. It doesn't help, and might in fact be detrimental--to your health, your sanity, and eventually your career. It's possible to out-produce your readership's appetite; it's possible to out-produce the publishing slots available to you; it's possible to fuss yourself so much over tiny details that don't actually matter that you add years to your production schedule and die broke in a gutter, or talk yourself out of finishing the book entirely.
They're never perfect. They're just as good as you can get them, in the limited time available, and then they're done and you learned something and the next one can be better, you hope.
And nobody's going to bump your 4.0 up to a 4.2 because you did a bunch of homework you didn't actually need to do to get the finished product as good as possible, and also out the door.
]]>I was doing more of the editing work on the front end, but it meant stopping to make each sentence good before moving on to the next one.
Net gain in speed overall because that time and more came off the back/editing end, but it does mean that churning out 7,000 words in a day is a once-a-year experience for me now, and happens only under perfect conditions.
]]>Around my house, we say, "helpy," or use the construction, "Helping like kittens."
Which has the added benefit of defusing the situation by making everybody giggle.
]]>I make far, far more money for much less work from the traditional publishing side of things. About 95% of my income comes from the trad side of things.
Also, I don't really enjoy being a publisher: it's a whole lot of fiddly pain-in-the-ass work to do it right, and my experience is that my editor adds a fair amount of value to the finished product by being smart about narrative and having a fresh perspective on my work. Her input makes my stories better--and churning out six books a year is exactly what I'm trying to not do. First of all, I wind up competing with myself and cutting into my own sales. Past experience has taught me that stepping on my own feet doesn't actually benefit me in terms of income.
And then there's managing sub rights sales, foreign rights, and so forth. I honestly don't have the infrastructure to license my books for translation in Japan. My agent does, and that's free money.
Also, the problem is not producing 8 pages a day. I did that for years. The problem is producing consistent, innovative, well-written and plotted work that is not just more of the same.
I could indeed churn out hackwork at a tremendous rate, but I don't actually find that rewarding.
Words are cheap. Ideas are cheap. Good and surprising ideas, strong narrative structures, and honed prose--those take time and consideration.
]]>I don't know where we, as a society, got the idea that punishing people, including ourselves, is a productive way of getting them to work hard and well. The science does not support it.
I hear you all on the shitty job burnout. I've done my time in the customer service mines, and--even more terribly--the incredibly-dysfunctional-small-business-run-like-an-emotionally-abusive-family lines.
Wheeee! I'm not sure I could actually manage that again, although the benefit of getting burned out in certain kinds of shitty jobs is that you can slack more conveniently than when you actually have to turn in a novel manuscript at the end of six months...
]]>I know, because after fourteen years of working flat-out at my writing career, I'm taking a break. And it's not entirely by choice.
Between life stress and overwork, I hit a wall at the end of last year. I've been struggling with actually accomplishing my job for a while--hating to sit down at the computer, being avoidant, generally feeling not so much blocked as if every word was being taken off my hide with a potato peeler. I started feeling this way back in about 2007, a situation which I think is linked both to a bad reaction to an OTC medication that made me profoundly depressed for about four months, before I figured out what the problem was, and also my internalization of some criticism at a peer workshop I attended. (The workshop was great, and I got a Hugo-winning story and a major uptick in skill out of it. But it also turned me into the proverbial centipede who gets asked how she manages to run, and, well, I started tripping over my own feet left right and center.)
Because I had contracts and writing is how I make my living, I told myself that I had to write anyway, and I did, though I was late on a novel (CHILL, now published in the UK as SANCTION).
Somewhere in the process, though, writing went from being something fun--the job I'd always wanted--to a real misery, a thing I avoided and dreaded. I became hypercritical of my own work, and nothing I did was ever good enough. I'd gotten into the habit, in other words, of kicking myself over basically every element of my work and holding it to impossible standards. I figured if I just kept writing I would get through the stuck, and everything would be fine again.
Nine years later, I realized that Things Were Not Going So Well, and were in fact getting worse. I've been producing good work--my critical record speaks for itself--but I was incapable of identifying it as good work.I was disappointed in all of it, and no matter how hard I worked or how much I produced it never quite felt like enough. I started having clinical anxiety symptoms, and when a bunch of real-life stress including family illnesses showed up, I didn't have the spoons to cope with work and family and various other issues.
Anyway, the good news is, I got help. And I'm taking a year off from my production schedule and rejigging my deadlines into something more manageable. And I'm learning to say no. No, no, no, no.
Which is scary, frankly, because what if I say no and nobody ever asks me again? But honestly, when your reaction to being invited to a project is a spike of panic, that's when you need to back off yourself. Burnout is a real thing, and it's really prevalent in creative professions and ones with intense schedules.
Especially ones with a messed up rewards system, which publishing definitely has: you do a thing, and then there's intermittent reinforcement, which may follow on the actual completion of the thing by more than a year in some cases.
Damaging.
The other thing I'm doing, which I think is probably even more important than a little rest and taking the pressure off, is that I'm rewarding myself for work. This is the thing about mammals, right? If you punish us for a thing, we will avoid doing that thing in the future, and react to being forced to do it with anxiety and distress. But if you reward us for doing it, then we anticipate the opportunity to perform the task and get rewarded.
(If you really want to screw up an animal, sometimes reward it and sometimes punish it for the same behavior. Or keep increasing what it has to do to get a reward. You get real basket cases that way!)
So really, if you want to make yourself like your job, the best way to do it is to take some of the pressure off, and when the work gets done, to give yourself a cookie.
Cookies are really underrated as a means of motivation.
I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out, honestly. But it seems to be working so far!
There's this!
]]>It's actually a bit different from most other epic fantasy.
]]>Max Gladstone has a new book out--LAST FIRST SNOW--and his stuff is great. It's mid-series, which makes it tricky for a Hugo nom, though. Aliette de Bodard has a book coming out that I'm super excited about--HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS--but of course I haven't read it yet.
I did finish Zen Cho's SORCERER TO THE CROWN, which is a very good first novel. Another very good first novel coming out is Fran Wilde's UPDRAFT, which is out on Tuesday. Sadly, I think neither of them is eligible for the Campbell due to short fiction sales, and neither is quite a Hugo contender. However, I'd be happy to see both books on the Locus Best First Novel list, if we can widen the award remit for a moment.
UPDRAFT is science fiction dressed as fantasy; SORCERER is fantasy dressed as screwball comedy.
Ken Liu's GRACE OF KINGS is very good, but like much epic fantasy, and it takes a while to get going.
I'm in the middle of Seth Dickinson's first book, THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT. It's a political fantasy, very good so far, and I know it's going to end in tears because I got spoiled.
I'm also reading Yoon Ha Lee's NINEFOX GAMBIT, which I think doesn't come out until 2016. It's good: a little of Yoon's trademark space opera opacity, some very clever military science fiction hacks. First novel, and again Yoon's not to the best of my knowledge Campbell eligible because of short fiction. But, see above, Locus Awards. :)
And I'm reading Fonda Lee's ZEROBOXER, which is an SF YA that's pretty delightful. Also a first novel. Fonda, I think, is eligible for the Campbell. I'm likely to nominate her, along with Dickinson.
I guess I feel naked if I'm not reading a book for every finger....
]]>"There's a new custom circulating in my tribe, and I think it's a good one, so I will be adopting it.
I have not in the past and I will not in the future participate in any popular award voting slate, public or private. I will not vote for any story or person or institution that is nominated for a popular award after agreeing to be on such a slate.
I believe that slate-voting is unethical and perverts the purpose of the awards--and disadvantages almost everyone, quite frankly--and I am personally invested in making sure my fandom does not decay into a series of cage matches.
That is the ethical decision I am making for myself."
I'm glad to see the pledge, as it were, getting traction everywhere.
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