Reading: Finished Harrow the Ninth (then grabbed a copy of Nona the Ninth)
Listening to: “Spawn of the Changing Raven” by Black Tiger (HDK 54) and “Journey Through Realm and Region” by Unsheathed Glory (HDK 154)
Watching: The Tempest (Stratford Festival 2019)
Playing: old NES and Sega games like Super Mario Bros. and Golden Axe
Recently, a student asked why I like the Middle Ages so much.
This was in a short fiction elective, and we’d been reading lots of genres, some sci-fi, some fantasy, some realistic, some fairy tale-ish, some Southern Gothic, some suspense. During one of our discussions, we somehow came around to my particular tastes as a reader, and I said that I’ve always been drawn to stories about the past, particularly the medieval period in world history, and one student spoke up, a bit bemused, asking why.
“Because for as long as I can remember, I’ve like that era,” was what I said, which isn’t a good answer.
Why do you like something?
Well, because I always have.
Not a good answer. Circular reasoning. But I didn’t have any answer to give. Why did my tastes develop the way they did? Was it the media I consumed as a young child that influenced me? Was it something genetic, something intrinsic to my personality?
I honestly don’t know. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to stories with knights and castles and forests and monsters. Sometimes those stories were older than medieval (Greek myths preoccupied a lot of my late-elementary years), sometimes they weren’t medieval at all (I had quite an obsession with both Oz and Candyland as a wee youngster), but even if I strayed at times from Ye Olde Medieval Times, I always returned to knights and castles and forests and monsters eventually.
It might have been the media I consumed, the stuff floating in the air. The 1980s were a time when medieval fantasy was emerging as viable mass entertainment: the Conan movies, Red Sonja, Dungeons & Dragons, Legend of Zelda, etc.
As a kid, I was devoted to shows like The Gummi Bears, and to movies like The Princess Bride and Labyrinth (neither of which is strictly “medieval,” but they’ve got some of the trappings, i.e.: castles, goblins, sword fights, kingdoms), and when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out, I was ALL IN. I had the action figures, the soundtrack, and the ticket stubs to show my devotion.
I also had books, like Rosemary Suttcliffe’s Arthurian novels for young readers. And the Endless Quest D&D books. And Narnia. And The Hobbit. And the Prydain Chronicles.
Going to my first Renaissance Festival as an eight-year-old cemented this obsession. Once you’ve wielded a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival, there’s no going back.
Basically, there was a lot of medieval-ish stuff in the world for kids in the eighties and early nineties. I was exposed to a lot of it, and I loved it.
But why did I love it? That’s the thing I can’t explain. Not every child who grew up in America back then ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every child who traipsed around the local Ren Fest ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every kid who saw Conan grew up to be obsessed with sword and sorcery, and not every pre-teen who watched Kevin Costner shoot a bow and arrow ended up loving the Middle Ages as much as me.
What gives?
I didn’t have a good answer for my student, and I still don’t. She made it quite clear that she finds all this medieval stuff to be boring as hell, and I told her that’s great. Different strokes for different folks. The world would be boring if we all liked the exact same thing all the time.
But why do we like what we like? How much is driven by innate personality and how much is driven by outside influence? Nature vs. nurture, etc.
I can try to explain why I love the Middle Ages to my student, why I’m drawn to it, but those explanations won’t really have an impact on her. She’s not interested (nor does she need to be), and my enthusiasm won’t make her enthused, no matter how passionate my defense.
I do think it’s interesting that she was so curious to know. My love of the Middle Ages was so foreign to her experience that she was driven to seek an answer, to get an explanation. For her, my love of the medieval period was as strange as my love for black coffee. She was mystified by my tastes, as I often am by people who take an interest in Real Housewives or eat Velveeta cheese.
But that’s just it. Taste is taste. We can’t explain it, not fully. We can hunt for past experiences, for childhood affinities, for memories and upbringing to explain it, but when it comes to it, our tastes are what they are, and it’s no use arguing someone out of their tastes nor for arguing someone into your tastes.
We can share. We can gush and be enthusiastic, and maybe that will get others curious, maybe help them explore something unfamiliar and strange. Who knows, maybe several years from now, this same student will remember my passion for the Middle Ages and become curious enough to read the Brother Cadfael Chronicles, or The Once and Future King, or Beowulf, or whatever.
Or not.
There’s no explanation for taste. It’s a kind of alchemy, but it’s also a kind of magic. The spell either works or it doesn’t.
Or maybe, eventually, it does. When we least expect it. The heart wants what the heart wants.
And my heart — now and then and hopefully always — wants castles and knights and swords and dragons.
I’m hoping to blog more in 2024. I have an idea for a series of posts about board games, and since this term I’m teaching British Lit, Short Fiction (which will mostly entail reading short SFF stories with my students), and Creative Writing, I figure I’ll have a few things to say about writing, literature, and the fantastical as it pertains to my work in the classroom.
For Brit Lit this semester, my focus is on monsters. We’ll start with Beowulf, then The Tempest (and perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth too), and finally Shelley’s Frankenstein. What makes something a monster? Are monsters made or born? How does our idea of the monstrous change over time?
Mostly I wanted to teach these three texts, so I created a driving question to link them all. But mostly, I just wanted to read them with my students. I’m curious to see their reactions, especially for Beowulf, which is always a harder sell in an all-girls school. I mean, I’m a woman and I love Beowulf, but when I’ve taught it to young women in the past, it’s been a mixed reaction. The only major female character is a monstrous fen-hag, and the other women in the story serve as peacemakers and such (to solidify alliances and end blood-feuds), so I get why for some of the young women I teach, there’s not much to engage them.
But I’m hoping some of them will come to love the action, the world-building, and the overall spirit of the poem. I myself read it in high school (part of it anyway), and I’ve loved Beowulf ever since.
I’m not making any kind of resolution to blog everyday or anything. Not that such a goal is bad; I’ve attempted every-day blogging before and it was great. But I can’t meet such a challenge this year, nor do I really want to. I’m more focused on staying consistent with my fiction writing and increasing my word count in that realm. But I still like blogging and don’t want it falling dormant. Thus, my commitment to a more regular blogging habit for 2024.
Maybe once a week? Maybe once every two weeks? Maybe several times a week? I don’t have firm plans as of yet. I’m waiting to see how these first few weeks of January shake out, how much time I can actually find to blog more frequently, and how easy it is to find topics to write about. As I mentioned earlier, I have plans, but maybe those plans aren’t tenable. Time will tell.
One of my biggest goals/ambitions for this new year, on a personal level, is to finally start playing more of the board games and role-playing games that adorn my shelves. We have an entire closet filled with board games we’ve (mostly) never played. This is so frustrating! I LOVE board games, and yet here in my very house there languishes a collection of sundry entertainments and diversions of which I have never availed myself. This is madness!
I plan to correct such mismanagement by taking one game out each week and learning to play it. I may play it with husband or friends, or I may play solo, but either way, I’m committing myself to playing the board games in my house. Carpe diem and all that.
I’m going to try blogging about the games too; I just need a snappy name to call this “regular” feature. (I have “The Things That Shaped Me” feature which I should also get back to, but maybe I’ll call my board game excursion “Cabinet of Curiosities” or something of that sort… which I know is already a tag on my blog, but this will just make it more official.)
Anyway, I’m not calling any of this a “resolution.” I make New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve already made a few in other realms of my life for 2024, so I’m not opposed to resolutions in general. But I’m not making a blogging resolution this year. Nothing that firm. This blogging commitment is more of a New Year’s inclination. An urge to blog more. Let’s see how it shakes out.
As December rolls along, my house continues to think it’s mid-October. There are no wreaths out, no tree, no decorations of any sort. It’s the fifteenth-of-fucking-December and there is still no Advent calendar on our wall. The only thing going for us is that the Glade plugin is pine-scented.
Every year, the same thing happens. I drive around town at 7:30 p.m. to get more medicine from CVS, hoping to stave off the fevers of at least two children, and I’m confronted with all the beauty of sparkling houses decorated with lights and lawn reindeer, a merry reminder that my house is the Scrooge on the block, the one place that still has an artificial jack-o-lantern on the porch that probably doesn’t even work anymore.
Last year was the exception to my mid-December lack-o-Christmas-cheer because last year I didn’t really work at a normal (any) job in December, so I had free time to put the Advent wreath out and dust the piano and maybe put out one of our three nativity sets. Last year still had sick kids up the wazoo, but at least I had the tree decorated and a couple of presents wrapped.
This year is a return to the mean. I’m working full-time again — teaching — thus it’s-end-of-the-term-and-grading-is-all-I-do-now mode has been activated, and I can barely blink to figure out which day it is, let alone figure out how to make my living room livable enough to put up decorations.
This time around, this December fifteenth, while driving home and enjoying other people’s Christmas lights, I realized there will never be a time (until my kids are grown, maybe, or we win the lotto) when I won’t be running around like a lunatic in December, stressed out of my gourd and barely hanging on. There will never be a time when my house will be gingerbready and ready for Christmas weeks in advance. (I’ll be happy with DAYS in advance, honestly.)
No, I will always be living my alternative Christmas. I will always be last-minuting the mistletoe. I will always be getting the tree up just in time, and wrapping all the gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve, watching It’s a Wonderful Life and crying my eyes out and self-soothing with spiked eggnog. That is MY December twenty-fourth.
And my Advent will always be ganky. It will always be helter-skelter and mismanaged. There’s just too much to fucking do in December. Too much. School stuff and work stuff and house stuff and illnesses. OMG the illnesses! Everyone cycles through three rounds of illness every flippin’ November/December now apparently. Apparently that’s a thing in my life for perpetuity or until my kids run off to college (or the circus). Apparently everyone must get sick in early December; it’s like an iron-clad rule. Everyone but me, apparently, which, I must admit, is a small but very grateful mercy.
I realized as I was driving home tonight and feeling bad about my lack of Getting All the Shit Done skillz, that I will always be living this alternative Christmas. My Decembers will always be wracked by chaos. I will never not be having hair on fire. This disordered life IS my life.
And then I sighed. A wave of relief washed over me. I’m living an alternative Christmas. I’m not like the rest of you, with your house lights and your tree up and your Christmas parties and whatnot. I’m living my own Christmas season, my own messed up Advent, my very own alternative seat-of-the-pants-flying-rodeo that is a blur and a burden, but hey-o, it’s MY burden. This is how I do Christmas. Not very nice, not very naughty either, just… well, it’s just how I do it.
It’s not my preferred way. Boy, howdy is it not my preferred way!
But it’s my way. My life and no other.
I need to accept it, embrace it, even love it. Kinda. Sorta. Maybe “love” is too strong a word. But something love-ish. Something that goes beyond acceptance into a kind of okay-ness.
It’s okay that I have literally no decorations up yet. It’s okay that I’m still behind on my end-of-term grading. And it’s okay if I don’t sign-up for something to send into my kids’ classes for their holiday parties next week. It’s all okay. It’s still Christmas even if I never put up the tree.
(Don’t worry, I’m putting up the tree. It’s just, it’s still okay EVEN IF I don’t. That’s all I’m saying. Christmas isn’t decorations. It isn’t cookies. It isn’t even presents. But yes, I do have presents for my kids; I’m not that horrible.)
Christmas is about the birth of Christ, celebrating the Incarnation, and kneeling in awe and wonder at the miracle of God becoming Man. No decorations or Christmas lights are required to celebrate the Light of the World.
So what if I’m horrible at Decembers? It’s how I roll. These hectic days are just the way things are. Can’t escape them, can’t solve them, can’t worry about them anymore.
As each new December comes around, I’m hoping it will the one where I turn things around. But that’s a vain hope. It’s a pressure I’m putting on myself that isn’t worth worrying about. I’m an alternative Decemberist. A free-spirit of suckitude. I’m just never gonna get my shit together.
And that’s okay.
I’m teaching The Martian Chronicles again, something I haven’t done for almost a decade. I think the last time I taught a science fiction novel of any kind was 2014 or 2015 when I read Fahrenheit 451 with an Honors American Lit class (you can see my affinity for Bradbury).
Of course, the first comment I received from the students this year was, “This is WEIRD,” and yes, kids, it’s weird. It’s SCIENCE FICTION. I would think that in 2023, in America, in which we are ruled by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and in which new Star Wars and Star Trek shows spring up like daisies), a science fiction novel wouldn’t weird these students out.
But it has. We are about a third of the way through, and while they are starting to groove to Bradbury’s particular brand of magic stardust, they are still a little befuddled and bewildered by the strangeness of things. I mean, it IS a strange book, but that’s part of the fun! Science fiction’s strangeness is part of its charm, part of why I like to read it.
As I keep reminding the students, science fiction is a genre of ideas. It’s all about the Metaphors (as Bradbury liked to call them). About the Big Questions. About life and death and God and the meaning of time and the power of memories and the ways in which our imagination can wield incredible, life-altering power. It’s about the eternal stuff, the primordial stuff. The point and purpose of life.
And things have to get a little weird if we want to get to these big ideas. When we ride on Bradbury’s rocket ship, we have to be ready for wonders. After all, life and death and God are all pretty strange things. Think about them for a moment and wonder: Why did life even begin? Why did the universe become the universe? Why must things die, why not infinite growth, infinite life, etc.? Why did God make all this (if you believe in God and his creative spirit)? And if there is no God, why not? What is the meaning of things without him?
And even the more practical questions: Why do we hope to find life on other planets? Why do we want to go to other planets? What will happen if we ever meet an alien species? How will we save our own planet from the destruction we’ve wrought against it? Can it be saved? What will we do to the other planets in our solar system? What will we do to ourselves in pursuit of these things?
What is happiness? What is love? What is memory? What is time?
To play in these fields of wonder, Bradbury must write with fire and rocket fuel. I am loving the experience of rereading the novel, and I’m also enjoying how my students are reacting to it. Despite all the science fiction television and movies around them, this almost-seventy-year-old book is still knocking them around, still peeling back the layers of metaphor and thought to reveal hard questions underneath.
I chose this title on purpose because “working writer” could mean a writer who makes her financial living AS a writer (which is probably the most common way we use the term), or it could mean a writer who has to work a different job to pay the bills (I’ll admit, this interpretation is my own invention). There’s the “working writer” and there’s the writer who works (another job).
A recent article in Esquire raised the question of whether it’s ever been harder to make a living as a writer, specifically a writer who writes novels and/or fiction, and the answer, not surprisingly, is that yeah, it’s pretty hard these days. Most fiction writers don’t survive on their book advances or royalties and thus must take to writing for TV or holding down teaching jobs.
As always, these types of articles completely ignore independent publishing and fiction writers who forgo the traditional publishing world. Not that every indie writer makes a living from her writing either, but there are many who do, and they never seem to get much ink spilled about them in these trad-focused think-pieces.
Despite this gaping hole, the article does raise some larger economic and even philosophical questions that I’ve been wrestling with myself for several years. It’s no secret that I quit my day job to become a freelance editor and author, and that the financial precariousness of that situation was something I didn’t find tenable for the short term (and maybe even the long term). It turns out, I happen to like getting a paycheck with regularity, and I like knowing that I can get health insurance without too much trouble either (though currently I’m on my husband’s insurance). I like knowing that I don’t have to write to survive. It takes a lot of pressure off the writing, keeping it fun and light. More play than work.
What struck me was a quote early on in the piece, from an author named Andrew Lipstein, who said, “‘If I’m not just supporting myself by writing, to those who don’t know the reality of it, it seems like it’s a failure in some way.'”
Yup.
See, if someone doesn’t support themselves with their art, then the wider world considers that a “failure.” We must monetize everything, apparently, and when we do, if we’re not making bank on it, then we’re somehow deficient in our talents and our art just isn’t very good. Money equals quality, obvs. If you’re only making coffee money on your art, then you’re a loser. That’s the message from our culture. We get it delivered from our earliest days when adults ask us as children what we “want to be when we grow up.” They mean our job, yo. What are we gonna do to pay the bills, and if we’re lucky, add some value to the world?
And listen, deep in my heart, if I could make a living from my writing, I’m not sure I would turn that down. I wrestle with the desire constantly. For one thing, I wouldn’t have to split myself in two (and three and four) to get all the things done I need and want to get done. Most days I’m split between teacher-self, writer-self, mom-self, wife-self, and human-with-a-body-and-a-house-self. If I could cut out one of those things, teacher-self would be the first on the chopping block. Not because I don’t enjoy teaching (I do at the moment), but because all those other things are non-negotiable. Yes, even writer. Without my art, I would not be whole. And my mom/wife/human self is just Who I Am. So teacher-self is the one optional thing, and thus, in a world in which I’m not worried about money, that would be the one to go.
But writer-self, as the Esquire article points out, is not as viable a way to pay the bills as other professions are. And while the article ignores indie publishing, I’ll say that even for indie authors, the vast majority of us don’t pay our bills with our writing either. So in that way, the article is right in the broad sense that writing fiction for a “living” is a hard row to hoe.
Still, the article’s obvious bias in favor of traditional publishing, and literary fiction in particular, obscures what could have been a much more nuanced and multilayered picture of what a “job” in writing fiction could and does mean in our current situation. It ignores pulp writers, and it ignores people who write and publish online at places like Substack or Royal Road. I don’t know all the ins and outs of such a picture and would’ve been curious to find out more. I’d like to know who exactly is making money from their fiction and how, and not just the MFA people who write for Hollywood, because that job is about as unlikely to me and the average fiction writer as is becoming the next George R.R. Martin.
What I hoped to learn from the piece was how ALL the myriad types of writers are trying to make ends meet and how the internet might be an asset or a hinderance (or at least a newer paradigm that shakes up the old world of publishing). We did get a bit about AI, and I have to say, AI flooding the market with books does concern me, even if those books right now aren’t very good (or violate copyright). And I appreciated the point about the Authors Guild not being able to collectively bargain. The fact that authors can’t unionize is shitty, and it just goes to show how our laws often make things harder for writers and artists to make a living with their work. The question of health insurance is another roadblock.
Still, I keep thinking about this idea of success being tied to income, and how my writing is only successful if I can monetize it and make a “living.” This is the mark of achievement. Any intrinsic value I might place on my art is meaningless in this framework, and if I can’t “cut it” as a working writer, then I’ve failed. That sense of failure lingers with me even as I’ve happily returned to teaching. Despite my happy return to the classroom, I still harbor dreams of making all my money from my books, and yet I continue to wonder if those dreams are coming from my heart or from what I’ve been socialized and conditioned to desire. Would I really be happier if I was a “working writer” as opposed to a writer who works?
The question is hard to disentangle from how we think about work and art and money. The fact that it’s so hard to “make it” as an artist says something about what our society values, and I’m afraid that message isn’t very comforting to those of us who want to make art.
© 2024 Jennifer M. Baldwin
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