Category: observations/thoughts (Page 5 of 12)

500 Max

I’ve noticed these past few days, as I’ve tried to trust my writing process and get words done for my current work in progress, that after cycling back through the manuscript and adding new words and continuing the story, I can only manage a maximum of approximately 500 words before I stall out. Sometimes I only manage 300 or so, other times I get close to 600, but without fail, I get near the 500 mark and I feel my energy ebb.

When my mind starts to wander and I disengage from the story, I usually get up from my desk and walk around. If I’m diligent and sit back down after ten minutes, I usually can continue writing, following the same process again of cycling and adding and moving the story forward. But another 500 words later and my brain is melting again and I need to take a break.

It’s interesting that 500 words seems to be my max. I get close to that number and then my brain just nopes right out of the story. Why does that happen? Is there something about 500 words that breaks my concentration? I don’t watch the word count when I write either. I only know that when I feel that disconnect happening and then look at the word count, it’s hovering somewhere between 300-500 words.

Weird.

Substack, Notes, Time, and Attention

Substack — the platform I use to publish my monthly newsletter — has been introducing a range of different services lately, including a Chat option and now something called “Notes,” which is a bit like Twitter, minus the hellscape stuff.

(They also have an app which you can use to read newsletters, participate in chats, and now follow and read Notes. I guess an app was inevitable, but the whole “app” thing is just annoying to me. It’s another way to keep people in constrained ecosystems instead of allowing them the freedom of the entire internet. Whatever, I’m just old, I guess.)

I haven’t used Chat yet, and I’m not sure how I feel about Notes either, though I do welcome healthier alternatives to places like Twitter.

But that’s just the thing. Is Substack’s Notes going to be healthier for society, and for people individually? I suppose if Notes stays committed to Substack’s goal of being a place for quality writing, meaning they’ll avoid adding all the features that have made Twitter and Facebook and the rest of the major social media sites so damaging to our psyches, it’ll be fine. I guess. Maybe. Like I said, a healthier alternative to Twitter is generally a good thing.

But does being healthier than Twitter mean actually healthy and good? Twitter (and other social media sites) have business models that incentivize bad behaviors and content. No doubt about that. But even if they reformed their ways to be less toxic, does it really benefit society overall to have everybody jawing away on the internet, scrolling through feeds and threads and all the rest of it, commenting on other people’s posts, and generally spending huge chunks of time online consuming media?

I say this as someone who has spent a huge chunk of her life since her early twenties scrolling through feeds and threads and consuming media. I know the allure. I have found much worthwhile and beneficial content by scrolling through threads. I used to love the old Twitter when it was mostly me following a bunch of old movie fans and critics who wrote about arts and culture, and I learned a lot and met cool people.

But I can’t help feeling like we’re still trading away our attention and our time to activities that are not as enriching or as sustaining as other things. I’ve long been a fan of blogs, and I’m a fan of newsletters now, because these are usually longer and more sustained forms of communication. They’re more like reading the newspaper or a magazine. There might be a conversation in the comments section, and that’s great. But the comments are always there, at the bottom of the post, waiting to be discovered by any reader at any time now or in the future, and I can choose to engage with those comments or not based on my own time and attention. Both the blog post and the comments are in a fixed place within the internet ecosystem. They are there for me to discover weeks, months, or even years from now.

But social media sites — even better ones like Substack’s Notes — are still social media sites. They still operate on a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) basis. The conversation is on-going, and if you don’t keep up with it everyday, and devote lots of time to scrolling and commenting (or maybe just lurking), then you will miss out on… well, on something. We all celebrate the “conversations” that happen on these sites, but a conversation happens in real-time; it’s a temporal experience.

(Yes, okay, I can always go back and read an old Twitter thread or whatever. I understand that. But to really optimize what Twitter, and now Notes, is all about, you need to join the conversation as it’s happening, not months from now. A comments section on a blog or newsletter is similar, but a good comments section becomes a text unto itself, and I can read through one without feeling a need to comment or participate. And also, due to the more permanent nature of newsletters and blogs, we understand that the conversation that might stretch for days, and even if I write a comment months later, someone might still read it because those posts are waiting in the archives for anyone to read at anytime. Social media sites, on the other hand, move too quickly, and they are meant to be interacted with on the daily, so going back to an old Twitter thread and leaving a reply is pretty pointless. No one’s going to see it. You might say no one’s going to see a comment on a year-old blog post, and perhaps in most cases that’s true, but I can tell you that many, MANY times I have stumbled upon someone’s blog from years ago, and I’ve read those comments, and many of them have been helpful. That really never happens with a social media site unless I already know the post and the thread I’m looking for.)

Anyway, I don’t want to be too Debbie Downer about Substack’s Notes platform, but I’m not ready to race over and give it my time and attention. It’s the new, flashy thing on the block and everyone appreciates Substack’s subscription-based business model, so we’re all eager to support this Notes thing too.

(And for the record, I think the subscription model is great, though I’m not sure how sustainable Substack’s version of it is in the long run, because there are many newsletters I read for free only because I can’t afford to pay $35 to $50 per year for twenty different newsletters. If Substack would let us lower the subscription fee to $5 per year for our newsletters, I’d probably become a paid subscriber to nearly all the free newsletters I get now. But with a yearly subscription being at minimum $30, it’s just impossible for me to give money to all the writers whose work I enjoy.)

But I avoid social media sites precisely because they are time-sucks for me. They’re the reading equivalent of sugar — tasty and fun, but not very filling — and when time and attention are limited, I don’t want to consume these empty calories. I want something substantial. There are times when a post and thread on Reddit are really great reading with useful information (these are usually the RPG/OSR posts, because people are there to share ideas), and there are times when someone on Twitter (and now Notes) will post a link to a great article. But you know what? I can post links to articles here on my blog too. And so can everyone else. We don’t need a social media app to share links to cool articles. So if Notes is just about sharing links, then why don’t we share links in our newsletters? I mean, many of us already do this!

I don’t see the benefit to Notes (for me personally), other than it’s a “nicer,” “safer” social media space. Again, that’s good, as far as it goes, but it’s not something I really need in my life. I know as a writer and indie publisher, I’m shooting myself in the foot AGAIN by not jumping on the discoverability/marketing bandwagon of social media, but I just can’t bring myself to spend my time doing something that leaves me so unsatisfied. I don’t begrudge anyone using Notes or Substack’s Chat or anything else, but it’s just not for me. I like my blogs and my newsletter and my early 2000s iteration of the internet. And yeah, okay, I like my RPG/OSR subreddits.

But I gotta be picky when it comes to my time and attention. The older I get, the more precious these things become. And Substack’s new features don’t interest me. I’m cool with writing and reading newsletters, and I don’t feel much need to join in the latest “thing.” Especially when that thing takes my attention away from the other things I already like.

I guess I did feel a need to get this rant off my chest, though. Sorry about that!

Am I Still Curious?

Austin Kleon’s newsletter a week ago had an item about curiosity, and I started to wonder if maybe I’m becoming less curious as I grow older. Part of it grows out of the anxiety of being middle-aged. My life is half over, so I don’t have as much time to wander down wrong paths, and if I explore something new only to find out it wasn’t worth my time, I will have lost that time in pursuit of a dead-end.

Maybe not a dead-end. That feels a bit dramatic. But maybe a detour that has set me off-course?

I suppose this raises the question of what exactly my course is right now. I’m not sure of the answer to that. I do know that where once I would read every article or essay or blog post that caught my fancy, I now tend to delete or pass by those items that don’t already hold a compelling interest for me. My interests are shrinking, basically. I feel like I have to devote my attention only to “those things” (whatever they might be) that are “worth” my time. Worth it, I guess, in the sense that they’ll help me write fantasy stories, or they’ll help me raise my children, or they’ll help me be a better person. And if something doesn’t fit into those paradigms, then I’m likely to skip it.

Not very curious of me, I know.

I suppose this all goes back to the attention economy stuff, and where we choose to focus our attention. I worry that if I focus my attention on the “wrong” stuff, then I’ll end up missing out on the worthy stuff.

But curiosity shouldn’t be so limited, right? How am I to know the wrong stuff from the worthy stuff if I don’t explore? What am I missing out on as a result of this cautious approach to my own attention?

Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s good that I guard my attention. After all, I don’t want my time to be taken up by empty-calorie ephemera or stuff that I ultimately find boring. I want the remaining years of my life to be fruitful and full. But, I also can feel myself calcifying a bit when I turn away from something new that doesn’t fit into the existing paradigm of what I’m already interested in.

I can’t describe it, but in the last couple of years, I can feel my mind closing itself off from the unfamiliar. I’m becoming more and more a creature of habit, and while these habits have made my life more ordered and sustainable, they also have the unintended effect of blocking out the unexpected. I’m getting too used to staying in my lane. I have my interests, and anything that’s not part of those interests gets shunted to the side.

Maybe this is unavoidable. Again, we only have a finite amount of time on earth. At some point, I have to discern what is worth my time and what isn’t.

But I don’t want to become someone so closed off in her elder years that she can’t see beyond the limited scope of her familiar interests and ideas. If I’m going to continue writing into my old age, I need to cultivate curiosity and growth. I can’t let my mind calcify and harden because if I do, I’ll be squeezing out my own creativity and imagination.

Being open and curious will take an act of will. I have to consciously practice it, otherwise the default will be to harden and close myself off from the unfamiliar or seemingly “uninteresting.” I’m not sure how to find a balance between cultivating my own curiosity while also using discretion when it comes to where I focus my attention. Maybe the balance means keeping these two ideas in tension with each other. Maybe there is no “solution” as such, just a continual effort to be both curious and discerning.

Caught Between

What kind of writer am I? My writing heroes are Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Astrid Lindgren, C.S. Lewis, Neil Gaiman. Are they “literary” writers or “genre” writers? Serious or pulp? Do they write art or entertainment?

Let’s back up a bit. First, I have always loved fantasy and science fiction, and these two genres have historically been considered “low-brow” by the literature establishment in the U.S.

Tolkien and Lewis in particular had to deal with all kinds of disparaging remarks about their adult fantasy novels from snooty critics.

Le Guin has fared better because she wrote more than just sci-fi/fantasy, and she came to prominence when the genres were gaining more legitimacy. Lindgren gets a pass too because she often wrote for children. Bradbury was a force unto his own. He wrote pulpy stuff but somehow was embraced as literary (sometimes).

But still.

Science fiction and fantasy — speculative fiction — have always maintained a place outside the center of literary esteem. Even now, there feels like a divide between “literary” stuff and “genre” stuff.

I have a subscription to Poets & Writers magazine (that is soon to expire and I won’t be getting a renewal), and the thing that always strikes me when reading it, is the way it seems to ignore nearly every contemporary writer I enjoy reading today: Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Helene Walker, Susanna Clark, Ken Liu, Naomi Novik. Yes, I understand that a large portion of the magazine is devoted to poets, but still, it’s surprising that some of what I consider the best speculative fiction writers today aren’t even mentioned.

Again, there is a divide.

And this divide extends into process and craft and how we should think of our writing. Am I a writer of literature, or am I writer of entertainment? Literature writers are supposed to labor over their craft, write multiple drafts, strive for greatness and make Capital A “Art.” Entertainers churn out their product, write what sells, and scoff at pretensions of “art.” Yes, I know I’m simplifying things, and yes, I know these lines between low-brow and high-brow are gradually blurring, but there’s still this sense (and maybe it’s only in my own mind) that if one wants to write and publish fiction, one must decide.

I hate this choice. I don’t want to make it. I hate the binary between purity (aka art) and business (aka entertainment). This is what happens, though, when I want to sell my stories. When I turn them into commodities, when I participate in the market, then I’m ceding ground to “writing as a business.”

Of course, I want to eat and have a roof over my head, and I want to “make a living” as a writer, so that means I need to think like a business person and regard my stories as “products” to be sold (or intellectual property to be licensed). I want to sell my fiction. I want to market my writing. But I don’t want to feel like I must abandon my creative voice in order to write books that people will buy.

Listening to self-publishing podcasts or reading subreddits for self-published authors can get depressing sometimes because everything seems to be screaming, “Write to market!” Readers want conventional fiction that adheres heavily to tropes (with just a little bit of tweaking to keep it interesting). Readers want vampires and shifters and badass females in their urban fantasy; they want elves and dwarves and dragons in their high fantasy; they want LitRPG, or they want Space Opera, or they want Grimdark. Write to market, write to market, write to market.

It’s not that I don’t like elves and dwarves and dragons in my high fantasy, and it’s not like I don’t want badass ladies kicking butt in my urban fantasy, but I don’t write with these things in mind. I just don’t. I write from my dreams and whatever weird stuff shows up in them; I write from the strange melange of influences I’ve had in my life, everything from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to Phantastes to Pirates of Dark Waters to Luis Bunuel. I try my best in every story to make it something I would want to read, and I try my best to make it entertaining and also meaningful. But when I write, sometimes my high fantasy doesn’t have elves. Sometimes my urban fantasy has nary a badass lady in sight. It’s just how my brain works, and my imagination. I know I need to keep working at my craft, but I want to believe that I can write both something true to myself as an artist and something that will sell. Am I a fool for thinking so?

I think the divide between art and entertainment is an illusion. All art — even the “literary” stuff that gets featured in Poets & Writers — is meant to entertain. The pulpsters and the literati are all doing the same thing: spinning yarns to enchant an audience. I was heartened recently when reading Le Guin’s collection of essays, The Language of the Night. One of the essays dealt with this false dichotomy between art and entertainment:

“Therefore I totally oppose the notion that you can put Art over here on a pedestal, and Entertainment down here in a clown suit. Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.

(from “The Stone Ax and the Muskoxen”)

I think it helps to remember Shakespeare. His plays were popular. They were entertainment for everybody, from the lowest dregs of London society to the very highest of royalty. And yet, we watch Shakespeare now and consider his work High Art. The same plays. The same lines. Entertainment and art.

Thus, the choice is an illusion.

I’ve never set out to write a story that I didn’t think would be entertaining. I might have failed in the execution of a story, but I never failed in the intention behind it.

There is only the work. There is only the hope that in writing my stories and spinning my yarns, I will make something “deeply and genuinely entertaining,” and thus, make a work of art.

What kind of writer am I?

Perhaps the answer is trite, but it remains true. I am myself. I don’t have to choose.

Leaving Twitter

It’s about time.

I mean, it’s about time I left Twitter because I really don’t use it to communicate. I’m a lurker. I read the stream of stuff that shows up when I log on — other people’s stuff — but I don’t post anything. Weirdly, since I really enjoy blogging.

But I don’t enjoy posting things on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or whatever. I’m too shy. (Again, weirdly. Because I do share stuff here and in my newsletter. I have no idea why blogging is easier for me, but it is.)

It’s also “about time” because it’s about time. I waste a lot of time reading what other people are writing on Twitter. I waste a lot of it thinking about the cool things people are doing on Twitter: all the books they’re releasing, all the clever ideas they are having, all the funny stories they are sharing. I read Twitter and then I get down on myself for not releasing as many books or having so many clever ideas or sharing so many funny stories.

I don’t want to waste time. I want to write more stories. I want to write more thoughts on fantasy literature (hello, newsletter) or my writing process or what I’m reading, but I want this writing to be long-form, to be personal, to be less of a race to popularity.

Also, I have a fundamental antipathy to social media. I signed up for these sites years ago because of the promise that they would help me connect with people or whatever. And I can’t deny that they didn’t help a little. I met cool people at the TCM Film Fest via Twitter.

But I didn’t make any lasting connections. Maybe that’s on me; maybe I didn’t use Twitter the right way. Frankly, I don’t think it matters. Right or wrong, I haven’t found it to be beneficial.

I’ve wasted a lot of time reading other people’s tweets. I don’t post my own stuff very often, mostly because I’m shy, even on the internet. I don’t like sharing little bon mots. I’m glad other people do and that they’re good at it, but it’s not for me.

I like blogging, I like my newsletter. I’m gonna try a micro.blog and see how that goes.

But I’m deleting Twitter. Probably in a day or two. I should have deleted it a long time ago. I think I was afraid of doing it, as if somehow having a Twitter account was necessary for reaching my readers.

But it’s not. It’s not necessary, at least not for me. For me, it was a negative experience. Not that I didn’t have fun reading stuff on Twitter, but it caused all these residual negatives that I’m better off getting rid of it.

Maybe it’s easier to be on Twitter, maybe it’s safer. Less risky. Build a platform the way everyone else is doing it. Maybe I’m a fool for getting off the big social media sites (though my husband will continue to maintain my Facebook page because he likes to… I forget I have Facebook most of the time).

But I’m tired of the time-suck. I’m tired of the way social media makes me feel like I’m in middle school again. These are my hang-ups, not anyone else’s, so if other people love Twitter or Instagram or whatever, that’s great. If people feel that they need to stay on these sites professionally, also great.

But I don’t want to anymore. I’m done.

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