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Already bitched about this a bit on Twitter, but.
It's nice when people say stuff like 'oh if [fic writer] wrote a book, I'd buy it', because they mean it as a compliment, but I'm already in like idk 12? 20? collections of fiction and nonfiction, not counting all the journalism and adjacent shit. Why do they assume I'm not published? It's a weird thing to assume given that I'm pumping out a fuckton of fairly competent fiction, and makes it feel like I didn't do all that work. (Is the implication that I shouldn't be here, doing this, but should be off doing Real Shit?)
'Published' is not a hard thing to be. The pay is shit, so it's honestly not that selective. And I know people don't buy those books my pieces got into, because I can see my royalty statements. I've had a couple online pieces go viral or whatever, but again, I got paid maybe $40 for each wonderful experience of an entire Reddit board being set up to a) assume I was a guy, because I was writing about 'masc' subjects, and also b) hate me, at length. The therapy session to bitch about this cost more than I got paid. You want me to what, dox myself and possibly compromise my actual pay-check so that five fandom people can prevaricate about buying a book and one of them can do it? Yeah, no.
I've been long-listed for a couple awards, and gotten a couple. I've had, here and there, a couple of reasonably high-profile gigs I was excited about. Even that leads to: absolutely nothing. There is no steady work in this field now, there is just Hustle to no end. The whole business of arranging work and self-promotion now rest entirely on the writer, however ill-qualified they are for either task. You must live an active social media life, pretending to be more twee, dumber and less critical than a decent writer ever is and, further, possessed of good but safely Milquetoast opinions. The job now involves offering yourself (or some version of yourself) up to the buffets of opinion and the souring thereof, which will have something to do with you but will mostly be guided by how tired people are of seeing your name. My friends who are doing the absolute best, here, get very insufficiently rewarded for their writing, let alone this secondary career of playing themselves on television. They are making significant trade-offs to do this rather than an easier gig for more money. I respect them for following their vocation, but I cannot stand to be thus insulted, and to be expected to be grateful for such 'opportunities' besides. So when someone says 'oh I'd buy her book', I think---they don't know enough about the field to know that this is just saying 'oh I wish you'd donate another cake to the church supper' after having finished off the first.
It's a big slog, and I don't know that I care anymore. You have to be an egoist to soldier on in any of these fields under present conditions, and this is not among my several personality issues, The other thing you can be is committed to a given project: so committed to Your Novel that you're willing to be spat on, not as a stage in the proceedings, the way to become Chief of the Beggar Clan, or in pursuit of that kind of advancement (because there is no advancement), but because you believe so much in your book that you're willing to do this to see it get out there. And I don't believe in any of my projects that much, right now. Like, maybe pre grad-school trauma, but now? Eh.
The other-other thing you can be is a craft artisan self-publishing or whatever just because bustin' makes you feel good. Which is fine, and which I get because I droop when I don't write anything. But at that point, why bother do that rather than fic? The slender shred of greater cultural valuation? It's the same sort of hobby activity.
It's not that I think everything should be weighed by capitalist metrics. Logically, I don't think that at all. But why participate in heavily capitalism-shaped activities without commensurate capitalist rewards? I can't stand to work on those terms and fail, again and again, or 'succeed' only to find I've still been shafted. If it were detached from industry and economic valuation, I could see it. (Walpole wasn't inventing the gothic novel for the money, he had stupid amounts of money: there's certainly a whole era of such gentleman-scholars.) But the more fandom moves to e-girlism rather than gift economy, the more difficult I find it to justify participation.
On Facebook, I watch an acquaintance who has 50 excellent, ground-breaking BBC radio plays to my one, mediocre first attempt grow bitter, begging for work: gay and old and useless now, apparently. I asked a friend to think of him, if he needed script writers. But if even he is fucked, well, what am I? And the worst part of this is, I still envy him his chances, born of an era I simply didn't live in (and, to be honest, of his gender and nationality). How incredibly stupid I am---I look at this man, in his declining financial position, and I think, god I'd shank someone for the opportunity to write what he's written, to be as good as he is. I'll never git gud thus, I'll always have had one chance where I was working out how to write a radio play and you can tell. But what has growing highly skilled even done for him, in the end? I'm going to die like that, old, gay, useless, and have far less to be proud of than he does.
Why have I spent my whole life trying to be someone who could bake excellent bread, only to grow up to find there's no more bakeries? Why can't I pivot, now that I know this? Katy said once, "that piece must be important, for you to choose to spend so much time on it". Is it? Are any of them? I think I just grab low-hanging fruit, with little idea of where I'm going with this. But I am insane for still boiling with envy when someone gets a contract I don't. Yet I wasn't even happy when I discovered that perhaps the most successful person from my undergraduate Iowa Writer's Workshop year (far prettier than me, much better at sewing, arguably better at cooking: the type of person whose very friendship is, accidentally, an insult) also sustains herself with a shitty nonsense job like mine. I felt for her. She's so much better than that. She deserves a better sector.
I've said before that I want to be competent and productive, to make things like a baker makes bread, and to know my work is sound and get paid a fair price and move on. I'm not precious about this. I cannot sustain woo-woo in my mind. It's not graft I object to, or a modest life. It's impossibilities, and the way people say shit they don't mean just to talk, and the outdated or absent understanding such chat relies on. So many absent-minded compliments read like demands for more, more, more, more work, and people mostly don't even mean them, but fucking hell the noise.
It's nice when people say stuff like 'oh if [fic writer] wrote a book, I'd buy it', because they mean it as a compliment, but I'm already in like idk 12? 20? collections of fiction and nonfiction, not counting all the journalism and adjacent shit. Why do they assume I'm not published? It's a weird thing to assume given that I'm pumping out a fuckton of fairly competent fiction, and makes it feel like I didn't do all that work. (Is the implication that I shouldn't be here, doing this, but should be off doing Real Shit?)
'Published' is not a hard thing to be. The pay is shit, so it's honestly not that selective. And I know people don't buy those books my pieces got into, because I can see my royalty statements. I've had a couple online pieces go viral or whatever, but again, I got paid maybe $40 for each wonderful experience of an entire Reddit board being set up to a) assume I was a guy, because I was writing about 'masc' subjects, and also b) hate me, at length. The therapy session to bitch about this cost more than I got paid. You want me to what, dox myself and possibly compromise my actual pay-check so that five fandom people can prevaricate about buying a book and one of them can do it? Yeah, no.
I've been long-listed for a couple awards, and gotten a couple. I've had, here and there, a couple of reasonably high-profile gigs I was excited about. Even that leads to: absolutely nothing. There is no steady work in this field now, there is just Hustle to no end. The whole business of arranging work and self-promotion now rest entirely on the writer, however ill-qualified they are for either task. You must live an active social media life, pretending to be more twee, dumber and less critical than a decent writer ever is and, further, possessed of good but safely Milquetoast opinions. The job now involves offering yourself (or some version of yourself) up to the buffets of opinion and the souring thereof, which will have something to do with you but will mostly be guided by how tired people are of seeing your name. My friends who are doing the absolute best, here, get very insufficiently rewarded for their writing, let alone this secondary career of playing themselves on television. They are making significant trade-offs to do this rather than an easier gig for more money. I respect them for following their vocation, but I cannot stand to be thus insulted, and to be expected to be grateful for such 'opportunities' besides. So when someone says 'oh I'd buy her book', I think---they don't know enough about the field to know that this is just saying 'oh I wish you'd donate another cake to the church supper' after having finished off the first.
It's a big slog, and I don't know that I care anymore. You have to be an egoist to soldier on in any of these fields under present conditions, and this is not among my several personality issues, The other thing you can be is committed to a given project: so committed to Your Novel that you're willing to be spat on, not as a stage in the proceedings, the way to become Chief of the Beggar Clan, or in pursuit of that kind of advancement (because there is no advancement), but because you believe so much in your book that you're willing to do this to see it get out there. And I don't believe in any of my projects that much, right now. Like, maybe pre grad-school trauma, but now? Eh.
The other-other thing you can be is a craft artisan self-publishing or whatever just because bustin' makes you feel good. Which is fine, and which I get because I droop when I don't write anything. But at that point, why bother do that rather than fic? The slender shred of greater cultural valuation? It's the same sort of hobby activity.
It's not that I think everything should be weighed by capitalist metrics. Logically, I don't think that at all. But why participate in heavily capitalism-shaped activities without commensurate capitalist rewards? I can't stand to work on those terms and fail, again and again, or 'succeed' only to find I've still been shafted. If it were detached from industry and economic valuation, I could see it. (Walpole wasn't inventing the gothic novel for the money, he had stupid amounts of money: there's certainly a whole era of such gentleman-scholars.) But the more fandom moves to e-girlism rather than gift economy, the more difficult I find it to justify participation.
On Facebook, I watch an acquaintance who has 50 excellent, ground-breaking BBC radio plays to my one, mediocre first attempt grow bitter, begging for work: gay and old and useless now, apparently. I asked a friend to think of him, if he needed script writers. But if even he is fucked, well, what am I? And the worst part of this is, I still envy him his chances, born of an era I simply didn't live in (and, to be honest, of his gender and nationality). How incredibly stupid I am---I look at this man, in his declining financial position, and I think, god I'd shank someone for the opportunity to write what he's written, to be as good as he is. I'll never git gud thus, I'll always have had one chance where I was working out how to write a radio play and you can tell. But what has growing highly skilled even done for him, in the end? I'm going to die like that, old, gay, useless, and have far less to be proud of than he does.
Why have I spent my whole life trying to be someone who could bake excellent bread, only to grow up to find there's no more bakeries? Why can't I pivot, now that I know this? Katy said once, "that piece must be important, for you to choose to spend so much time on it". Is it? Are any of them? I think I just grab low-hanging fruit, with little idea of where I'm going with this. But I am insane for still boiling with envy when someone gets a contract I don't. Yet I wasn't even happy when I discovered that perhaps the most successful person from my undergraduate Iowa Writer's Workshop year (far prettier than me, much better at sewing, arguably better at cooking: the type of person whose very friendship is, accidentally, an insult) also sustains herself with a shitty nonsense job like mine. I felt for her. She's so much better than that. She deserves a better sector.
I've said before that I want to be competent and productive, to make things like a baker makes bread, and to know my work is sound and get paid a fair price and move on. I'm not precious about this. I cannot sustain woo-woo in my mind. It's not graft I object to, or a modest life. It's impossibilities, and the way people say shit they don't mean just to talk, and the outdated or absent understanding such chat relies on. So many absent-minded compliments read like demands for more, more, more, more work, and people mostly don't even mean them, but fucking hell the noise.
