TL;dr…I drone on about embracing one’s weird stories.
Several writer friends confessed they don’t read many other writing blogs: “Because below a certain level of skill/experience, they all have the same bravado, bewilderment, and desperation to promote their work.”
Above that level, writers’ blogs are often about other things than writing, an informative and often hilarious conversation that draws in readers. A digital salon, if you will.
So what am I doing today?
Talking about writing and worldbuilding, yadda yadda.
If you’ve been following my mutterings on Twitter, you’ll know I’ve been combing through thirty-six years of writing for a self-published anthology project.
Yep. Thirty-six years. Even though I wrote journal entries and poems back into the 70s, it wasn’t until 1984 that I remotely considered publishing my work. An English professor in college liked one of my hastily scribbled pieces enough to say: “You might have a future at this.”
Dawn, if you’re out there, I thank you.
That fantasy short story may or may not be in this anthology, because it needs some reworking. The prose is mostly fine but the worldbuilding has changed. I haven’t decided whether to keep it as a Lonhra Sequence story, or merge it into the Neolithic fantasy world of ‘Red Amber’.
Inside my more-than-three-million-words-of-crap, I’m aiming to find around a hundred pages of poems and short stories. Some have been previously published. Most haven’t.
The first story published, ‘The Blood Orange Tree’ made it into an anthology in 2000. Before that, Harlan Ellison said of it, “That wasn’t entirely full of crap.”
Most of my ‘poems’ are actually songs, or text for book art pieces, or both. Many have already earned money from art sales (more than they would have, as poems).
My backlog of notes contains more pieces that are too unfinished to use, or are destined to be query-worthy stories for commercial publishers.
I’m under no illusions that this anthology will lead to any serious money or awards.
I’m doing this because it’s a good exercise in selection and editing. It adds to my published catalog. It’s a shout-back to myself in sixth grade, and my first vivid lesson on inaccessibility and (mis)understanding markets.
A very long time ago in semi-rural New Mexico, being a nerd was emphatically Not A Good Thing. It wasn’t cool. There was no cultural support system. If you don’t think nine-year-olds in the 1970s didn’t contemplate suicide as an alternative to an elementary school where *the principal had a grudge against your family*, you are a happy sheltered ray of sunshine.
Sixth grade was better than fifth grade, which were both Olympus Mons-levels above grades one through four.
Fifth and six grade (what they call Middle School in the US now, I think) had a real library, teachers who cared, and a saner principal. The same students I’d dealt with before, but something was changing.
I read Tolkien’s LotR for the first time, and lunged headlong into world mythology. That built (rebuilt? reinforced?) my tendency toward internal storytelling and worldbuilding. I’m told I told fantasy stories as soon as I could chatter at age two or three, but I don’t remember those.
By age eleven I learned that being *weird* was a great defence and deterrent to the inevitable bullies. I was just crazy enough the bullies were afraid it might be contagious.
Cue a sixth grade English class and a required myth-building assignment. As I dimly recall, each student was to build an original myth in five to ten pages. I’d been immersed in Tolkien, real-world myths from around the world, and my own private worldbuilding that verged on fanfiction (which young-me didn’t even know existed).
So of course I bit off more than I, the poor teacher, or anyone else in the class could chew.
I turned in a twenty-page hot mess about the sun and moon being two siblings who fought over ruling the earth. It was unnecessarily complex, stole outrageously from every source I could think of, had no plot or hero’s journey or moral lesson, and was deeply weird.
The teacher privately asked me if I might take it back and replace it with an expanded story about a cute little talking cactus and a thunderstorm I’d written a month earlier.
I agreed to take back the story, waited until the day of the absolute final deadline, and turned in the sun-and-moon story. Again. With more pages.
And I’d made it *even weirder*.
We had to read our stories aloud. Mine took far longer than anyone else’s.
It was absolutely the wrong story for that ‘market’: it was long and confusing to anyone but me. I could see bewilderment, boredom, and hostility from my classmates. I did not care. I was having fun with that awful story.
The realization that I didn’t care, that I likely could do nothing to hold their attention and approval…was unbelievably freeing. I would certainly get a bad grade; I think it earned a C-minus, which was kind and fair. I might get into a fight later, but they all had to sit there and listen. (1)
Because I’d realized all the other weird nerdy stories I’d been reading had obviously been published and loved by a lot of people. My tribe was out there somewhere. (2)
That epic fail of a story did several things that slowly changed my life for the better over the next decade.
It got the English teacher off my back, because odd proto-goth girls did not serve well as blonde angelic star pupils to be dusted off when the school board came around.
(Consulted by the English teacher, my Mom said, ‘She’s been reading National Geographic magazines, Tolkien, Dunsany, Bronowski, and Joseph Campbell, what do you expect?’)
It got my fellow students off my case, because that story was *so weird*. Being an introvert, I admit my dearth of school friends didn’t really affect me one way or the other. I cherished the few who understood me.
As disorganized as it was, the story showed me how to learn from failure, though I didn’t always apply the lesson.
It also primed me to respond with more internal storytelling to an explosion of modern myths: Tolkien’s ‘The Silmarillion’, Star Wars, and the SFF mass market paperback boom of the late 70s and 80s.
Those led me into visual arts and design, where I make a lot of my living today.
So go and find your weird stories, my dear friends. Try to get them commercially published (it has advantages) but don’t be afraid to self-publish.
#
(1) I pulled nearly the same stunt as salutatorian at my high school graduation. Try and vette my speeches, assholes.
(2) Isolation actually protected me, by giving me time to grow up a bit before running into the groups that should theoretically have been ‘my tribe’, but were often pits of exploitation ruled by warring Tiny Dictators.