serakit

Apparently we are talking about the Milford Method and writers workshops, thanks to this Tor.com article. (Well, mostly we are talking about it on Twitter, but since I don't do Twitter, I am talking about it here.)

I have come to the conclusion that I am probably better off for never having made it to Clarion. For that matter, I haven't really taken a lot of creative writing classes in general. Playwriting classes, yes, but Milford seems not to have penetrated those (despite--or perhaps because of-- the college one being taught by a graduate of Iowa) and there's a fair bit of focus on "does this work upon the stage" (ie "are you going to be torturing your actors or director"), which tends to keep it from winding up too much in beating-up-on-the-creativity-land, especially given that the ones I was in had a lot of actual discussion. "And we will now do a table read and then we will talk about how the dialogue flows" formed a major part of playwriting critique in every class I took.

(It hadn't occurred to me until this moment, but the majority of my formal creative writing education was about how to write plays. Of course, putting on a play is not a solitary endeavor, and so I have not really done much of this now that I have left environments with a large group of easily accessible people to put on plays with.)

I do remember avoiding the entire lit department in college on the advice of the lit students I knew, because it was big on what I did not know at the time was Milford and everyone hated it. I have been vaguely aware of the existence of writing workshops for a while and I have often wondered how exactly this was meant to improve your writing. The process sounded dreadfully regimented. I always really liked having my plays read in class because then we'd have a nice discussion of them and people were looking at my work and thinking about it and talking about it! But that worked because it was a discussion. Currently my best worldbuilding tool is infodumping at Mathfriend about my works-in-progress and he will ask questions about things that sound like potential holes-- "So how does X work, then?"-- and this forces me to think more deeply about what I'm doing.

None of this is to say I'm against critique! Remember my delight in how much the True and Proper Line Edit the good folks at Zombies Need Brains gave "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams" improved not only that story but all my subsequent writing. I don't understand writers who are like "Now I am so famous I can dispense with editors!" I really don't. But that was helped a lot by being asynchronous. I got a day or two to get the instinctive "AGH THIS STORY IS COVERED IN COMMENTS" out of my system before actually engaging with it.

Gatekeeping is another matter.

Because while I've always thought the critique method sounded painful, the idea of spending several weeks hanging around with a bunch of other young writers and some well-known writers and editors sounded tremendously fun, and also then you've met some well-known writers and editors and maybe you've impressed one and this will be helpful later. For a lot of people it seems like it is helpful later; there are a number of tales of people in those groups remembering each other and soliciting stories or making introductions. Looking at the tales that have surfaced since the article went live, it looks like the connections are what actually helps people-- the people who talk about how it forced them to do better at writing are often really vague about what, specifically, it helped them do better, while they're very specific about "It introduced me to so-and-so!" And the number of editors and agents who say being a graduate of certain workshops means they'll take an extra look is enormous.

I will be coming up through the slush and whatever audience I obtain through my other projects like fanfic and the podcast. (And I have also found the podcast quite educational in the learn-by-doing sense. It's the only long-term joint creative project I've ever worked on, and both the length and the process of working with someone else teach things I could not have learned any other way.) I don't have money for workshops and my day job doesn't allow the time for most of the famed ones... and with the pandemic, I'm not even at conventions, although three pro sales and a few more not-pro sales puts me into the category of "people who could reasonably volunteer to be on panels." The lack of connections will likely make things harder for me in the course of making my name.

On the other hand, I seem to be doing reasonably well for myself so far--  a few short story publications a year and a podcast every other week, and I'm not burned out on writing like the bulk of the workshop folks who don't go on to make it big.

It's a start.

It's interesting the different definitions of "Fandom Old" that you see floating around. Because it seems to depend a lot on the area of fandom. For convention fandom it's people who were there for APAs and saw Harlan Ellison misbehave in person. For fic fandom, though, it's anywhere from "remembers when Kirk/Spock was referred to as 'the premise'" to "remembers the citrus scale and the world before AO3" to "lived through Strikethrough."

Now, I'm not one by any of these definitions-- I had found fic by the time of strikethrough but I wasn't really involved in fandom as such; I was mainly a reader and wrote a couple of unutterably terrible id-fics that I summarily disappeared from the internet a few years later.

But I am old enough to remember the internet before The Algorithm ran everything, and therefore apparently old enough to be absolutely shocked by encountering someone very seriously arguing that algorithms on fic sites are a good thing because they mathematically figure out what you're interested in and are therefore perfectly one-size-fits-all, while rec lists are bad because not every rec list is for every person. Which is just "????" (Apparently the only thing that makes algorithms bad is capitalism, and if we didn't have capitalism algorithms would be perfect. Aside from the usual "we live in the society we have, not the one we want" issue, AI technology isn't actually there to the degree this person seems to think it is.)

Since I still visit fanfiction.net occasionally and I've been known to peek into whatever of the truly old archives remain-- Petulant Poetess and Sycophant Hex both still exist and I have a lengthy outline for a fic that's inspired by something originally posted in 2004-- I very puzzledly went "Wait, what fic site has an algorithm? When has ANY fic site had an algorithm? I know I don't use FF.net much but I would notice if it had got an algorithm!"

Apparently Wattpad has an algorithm. I have never visited Wattpad because my impression of it is that it is a commercialized mess and the few times I've tried to read fics I've been linked to there their interface has been horrible, but an algorithm? Really? (You are supposed to be able to sort your search results by date updated, date posted, likes, and sometimes number of comments or reviews. I would prefer it if more sites also had a "word count" option, but that's not standard. Minimum is the ones I listed.)

The tone of some of the complaints I've seen floating around about AO3 suggest that younger internet users are so used to the algorithm deciding everything that they can't find things on AO3 because they don't have the relevant search skills. Which explains a lot about the current social moment and is also terrifying-- most of the people I deal with at work who don't have basic search skills just straight-up dislike technology in general. Computers are hard and complicated and they don't want to use them. (That is less generational than you're probably assuming. I run into plenty of new adults who also think this.) This suggests a lot of the Extremely Online people don't have basic search skills, which is alarming. I mean, it explains why people keep insisting AO3's algorithm is terrible-- the idea that there isn't one is apparently so inconceivable that it's easier to think "it's terrible" than just accept that it doesn't exist-- but it says some alarming things about the current state of the internet.

(I mean, we all know most of the complaints about AO3 boil down to "They won't let me link to my Patreon," which... I am old school enough to be like "Get sued for copyright infringement on your own time; don't drag the archive down with you" about that. I assume Wattpad is relying on the safe harbor laws? Even FF.net officially doesn't allow it; they just mainly moderate by algorithm so you can get away with things like "P*tr**n".")

Seen on Tumblr: "I’m so glad Lucy and Mina saw some good cows today. If TMA has taught me anything, it is that seeing good cows means everything is well and nothing bad is about to happen."

I laughed so hard.

Another pointer to something neat: I've discovered Medlife Crisis, because my Nebula subscription continues to be worth it (seriously-- this is the one streaming service I'm actually paying for and it's basically like if informational YouTube were curated for the most interesting people and eliminated commercials), and in their discussion of cult doctor followings and the problems thereof, they reference this magnificent song by Henrik Widegren about Paolo Macchiarini, a surgeon who lied about his revolutionary trachea replacement technique which slowly killed several people and when some doctors finally said "hey this is killing people" they were questioned as to how they got hold of the medical records and threatened with firing. (As befits a song about fatal trachea transplants there some ick bits in there and of course it's talking about death.)

Go listen to the song, and also check out Medlife Crisis-- they exist on YouTube as well, so if you don't have a Nebula subscription you can still find them.

I have a story in the latest issue of Cossmass Infinities. It's called "Love Letters" and it is an epistolary meditation on suicide and romance: the story is the protagonist's letters to her boyfriend after she responded to his proposal by fleeing the planet to go wandering around the solar system. It's a very quiet, thoughtful story, since she's trying to find herself and we're seeing the world through her eyes.

The digital issue is only $3.99 and you don't just get my story; you get a bunch of other amazing stories too!

(Also, while I know SFWA changed their criteria, I spent too long around the old criteria for "it's my third pro sale" to not have a certain magic to it.)

So many people going on about voting doesn't help and this is all the Democrats' fault. And.. voting is not sufficent, no; it is also necessary to get involved in other ways, whether that's going out to protest or sending money to an activism organization.

But otherwise we're back to what I've said before: if you don't vote, and they do, all you get is the other side voting and the other side in power. And our system is a lot of checks and balances; Democrats having a marginal majority does not mean they can magically do whatever they want. People saying "Biden should just issue an executive order dissolving the Supreme Court" are... fuzzy... on how the government actually works. Democrats aren't perfect but they're better than the Republicans, and for all the "both sides!" stuff (which is not any better a look on leftists than "neutrals," by the way), Democrats would not have done this, and they wouldn't have permitted it if they'd been in a position to stop it.

It's easier to burn something down than build something up. All the Republicans have to do is cause chaos. They need many fewer seats to do that, and they've been good at not having internecine warfare long enough to get just enough people to cause chaos. Democrats need a lot more of the government to do anything useful, because they need to build things up. I saw someone say that Biden should have packed the court and respond to being asked "how?" with "I DON'T CARE HOW." Which tells me a couple of things-- you're okay with living in a dictatorship as long as it's your dictatorship, and that you have absolutely no idea how government works.

"We're not donating to Democrats until legislation happens" is also another way to ensure legislation never happens, by the by. If they have no money to campaign then the Republicans get elected.

Going on about overthrowing the government is fun (if you're a certain type of person), but your revolution isn't a revolution until it's got a budget, a date, and actionable steps attached to it. Now, I think violent revolution is a bad idea-- there are specific historical reasons the American Revolution resulted in a functioning government that don't apply to most violent revolutions; we really need to teach the actual history of the French Revolution past the storming of the Bastille-- but if you're not going out and planning out exactly how you're going to do it, you're not doing anything useful, and you are doing active harm by promoting fatalism and convincing people there's no point in activism because they're not doing violent revolution. (And most people? Are not down with violent revolution.)

Do you really want a civil war? Do you? Have you thought about what that would actually mean? Likely death of anyone whose disability requires advanced medical care, for one. Quite a lot of other death, most of it of innocent civilians. Lots of rape, murder, looting, because those are things that happen in war zones, and your having a righteous cause will not prevent awful people from participating. And in the end, unless you can get a majority of people to agree your government is legitimate, probably a huge terrorism problem no matter who wins, and you're going to have to be brutally repressive if you want to hang on to power unless you have a majority. Which you won't.

Stop fantasizing about how you think the world should be and work with the world you have.

(Not that any of these people are going to listen, if they see this, because if they were the kind of people who were willing to listen to this speech they wouldn't be calling for civil war in the first place.)

So there's this tumblr post getting batted around the internet that uses permanent changes doing ballet makes on your body and no one batting an eye at "permanently changing your body is why you're supposed to start young" as metaphors for people kicking up a fuss about trans kids wanting to make permanent alterations to their body. Which is all very important trans messaging, but I am distracted by the idea that dancers stand in turnout naturally explicitly because dance makes permanent changes to their body.

I did not particularly like dance but I did start young-- I took ballet once a week from the earliest child classes (I do not actually remember beginning) to the year before I would have been old enough for the pointe classes, whereupon I stopped because tights were a sensory nightmare. But I only did it once a week and I stopped in middle school....

But do people who haven't danced really stand with their feet parallel to one another with their knees facing straight ahead of them? Because I find that position exceedingly uncomfortable, and I wouldn't have thought I'd done enough dance to actually affect my skeleton.

My music theory background is haphazard at best, but given that it was also fairly extensive, I can do a good imitation of someone who has a firm grasp on music theory: I had beginning piano, intermediate violin, a school music class focused on writing and recording songs (in which I was not one of the favorites and so not given a ton of attention but I still absorbed some of it), some time in a very casual chorus... and all of this before high school.

The problem, of course, being that most of these things lasted for only a few years, and the only one to take into account where I was, individually, was piano. (Which was also the first one, and thus not in a position to cover the gaps of the others, and done when I was quite young and therefore did not go into a ton of detail.)

And so I've wound up in a situation where I can more or less describe what I'm missing but not come up with the keywords to research it. Namely the relationship of fretted instruments to melody. This was what kind of what tripped up my brief flirtation with the guitar-- it did not start with an explanation of the relationship of the frets to the sheet music, and with no grasp on "how to play a scale on this instrument" I completely lost my footing.

But in general, I can handle sheet music. I might handle it with tab, depending on the instrument (part of why I can do so much more on the mandolin than the harp is that harps are not really susceptible to tablature), but sheet music has a notation that corresponds to a particular note and length-- though admittedly note length, for me, is very much a function of practice; I do not have a great innate grasp of... anything that should normally involve a metronome.

Fretted instruments are not melody instruments and I do not have a good grasp on what they are. Because all of my sheet music is for the melody, and then there are names of chords written above the sheet music. I do not have sheet music that *contains* chords.

In mandolin class, we were taught chords and given chords but the way we learned the relationship of the chords to the singing was auditory-- we all played the songs as a large group, and sure, you had the chords written down in front of you next to the words, but the way you learned the real rhythm of when you were supposed to play each one was by listening to the group. So I have a bunch of songs that I can play-and-sing fine on the mandolin because I learned them in college, in the group, and a bunch of songs that I can't figure out how to do chords that sound right for and the melody sounds incredibly weird especially when paired with singing.

(I have also yet to figure out how to modulate the volume of my mandolin so I can sing audibly over the chords-- I learned to play this instrument in a group of thirty people who were all playing and singing at the top of their lungs.)

I feel like there has to be a written resource on this somewhere if I could just figure out what I'm supposed to be googling!

You know, I grasp the concept of "we share food and utilities." This makes sense as a co-op.

Even panicky about whether I will find an apartment (yes, I know it's still on the early side, but last time I was doing this there were way more apartments by this time than there currently are), I am extremely wary of "we all contribute to a household bank account and that covers basically everything"-- like, they specify gas, toiletries, therapy co-pays, and medications as some of the things it covers, and all I can think is that this is not accessible, because it does not work the second you get someone in there who has ridiculous medical costs (like me) or ridiculous gasoline costs (also like me).

Will I probably inquire further? Yes, because the apartment market is shaping up to be tight. Will I have a lot of questions about how their finances work? Also yes.

And of course I am ever bearing in mind that even in a tight market there are some rabbit holes not worth going down and I will watch their answers to my questions accordingly.

So today's actual letter was just the equivalent of Arthur sending a thumbs-up emoji agreeing to the proposed "let's go out drinking" plan, but I want to address something I'm seeing a lot of in discussions of the book.

This book is from the nineteenth century. There's a lot of casual racism and misogyny and not just in Seward's entry. It's been there the whole time.

There is also a lot that would have had very different valence at the time: Mina planning to actively assist her husband with his soliciting and learning shorthand and typing actually makes her fairly up-to-date and modern for the time, for example.

So why are people suddenly fixated on Seward as the root of all evil? He... asked his patient about his delusions rather more than is good for the patient and immediately realizes it and goes "I shouldn't have done that." And for the time, his method was actually super progressive, since he's running an asylum where you deal with the patients by talking to them and they're fed regularly and kept clean. (Remember this book was published just ten years after Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Madhouse and they hadn't made a ton of progress in that time.) Yeah, it's not great that this is what was considered progressive at the time, but all the characters are of the time they were written in, and it makes zero sense to be like "Yeah, Quincey P Morris!" when being rich in Texas at the time probably meant someone did a lot of terrible things to your workers to get that way while going "Seward is EVIL! EVIL I TELL YOU!"

Yes, I've seen a few people who are just like "All of these characters are terrible people" at which point I'm like "Well no one's forcing you to read along" and those people are at least consistent in their worldviews, but it is ridiculous to be singling Seward out when you're going on about how xenophobic Jonathan Harker is adorable and wonderful or probably-a-robber-baron Quincey P. Morris is amazing and funny.

It is a novel that was written in the 1800s. Literary analysis of the times is one thing, but if you're just going to apply modern standards to a century-old book and go on about how terrible the characters are, why are you reading it at all?

(Oh, right, the same reason all the purity-culture warriors do this; someone might be having Insufficiently Woke Fun and that MUST BE STOPPED.)