So you want to be a writer…
If you want to be a writer, that’s cool. All you have to do is write.
It doesn’t really matter if you get published. Or show anyone what you write. If you write, you’re still a writer.
The more you write, the better you’ll get. If you want to be a good writer, you have to write a lot.
There’s no certain path to being a great writer. Nobody knows what makes a great writer. But all great writers were good writers first.
If you want to be a famous writer, it’s the same. There’s no sure path to fame. But you can’t become a famous writer unless you write and keep writing. Each time you write something and put it out there, there’s the chance it will catch fire and go viral. And that can’t happen if you don’t keeping putting things out there.
There’s no right way to write. Just as there’s no wrong way to write. Just write.
For some people, writing is easy. For some people it’s hard. But there are all kinds of writers and you can be one of them.
If you show your writing to other people, some of them will like it and some of them will hate it. But if you like your writing, that’s enough.
And if you don’t like your own writing, you can write more. And the more you write, the better your writing will become.
Don’t let anyone discourage you from writing if that’s you want to do. If you want to write, write.
(with apologies to Charles Bukowski)
An Expensive Lesson
Worldcon in Glasgow wrapped up today. I didn’t attend any of the last day’s events. Of course, I didn’t end up attending Worldcon in person and only attended a few events remotely. I had signed up very early (I had a badge number in the 3000s as opposed to 15k or 16k by the end.) And I had purchased plane tickets and made hotel reservations before January. I signed up before they announced their “disease mitigation policy.” (Due to my chronic lung condition, I have to be very careful of respiratory infections that are likely to put me in the hospital.) I had been hopeful they would adopt a masks-required policy. But they didn’t. Even so, I planned to attend until I learned that I hadn’t been afforded a place on the program. At that point, I decided to cancel my plans to attend.
I was able to recover some of my sunk costs. I had (at significant expense) purchased fully-refundable airline tickets, so I was able (at some significant effort) to get the airline to refund them. The hotel had required us to basically pay for our stay upfront as a non-refundable deposit, so that was a huge loss. And, of course, I had purchased attending memberships for myself and my son, which were worthless. I offered my attending membership to someone on Mastodon who might want to attend in person, but no-one expressed interest. So I ended up using my membership to attend online. (Someone suggested that I could offer the memberships via other networks, but I said, “F— ’em. If they can’t bother to follow me on Mastodon, they deserve NOTHING.”)
I had been planning to travel to Glasgow with my son, my brother, and his wife. Instead, they flew here (as we had originally planned) and then we just hung out and spent the week together visiting. It was wonderful. I had just finished constructing a new patio with comfortable patio furniture, so we had a marvelous time.
I did attend a few events online. Although, to be honest, it made me feel bad every time since I had been so excited about attending and it was merely a reminder of what I was missing.
I did notice, however, that — in spite of the “disease mitigation policy” which said “We strongly recommend that every member wears a mask, particularly indoors or in crowded areas, such as the registration area and programme rooms” — the number of people actually masking was extremely low. I got several views of the audiences in presentations and counted masked and unmasked participants, and the ratio was between 1/5 and 1/10. So, if I had attended, I probably would have spent a lot of time having to cower in my room. Brrr.
Instead, I had a great time with my brother. My mom, who is over 90, lives with me and I always feel a little guilty that my brother doesn’t get to spend as much time with her. So it was great to have us all hang out together. And we’ve been going on fun adventures. We went to Hawley Bog together today. We’ll go to the Bridge of Flowers tomorrow. And we’ve visited a number of breweries — totally appropriate for Brewers.
In a couple of days, they’ll head home and then it will be time to start getting ready for classes to begin in the fall.
So, in the end, it was an expensive lesson. But it’s just money. We had a nice time anyway, even if I didn’t get to go to Glasgow or have the opportunity to promote my writing.
Using Geomorphology and Botany for Settings in Fiction
I have been fortunate enough to travel rather widely in my lifetime which helps me create settings in my fiction. But, I have also studied both geomorphology and botany which informs the salient features to describe settings realistically in my writing. I believe these both contribute levels of detail which add to the verisimilitude of my storytelling.
Geomorphology is the study of landforms. The earth has many interlocking geological processes that combine to produce landforms. The canvas upon which geological process act are the rocks: Igneous rocks, generated by volcanic activity; sedimentary rocks, created by deposition; and metamorphic rocks, that transform igneous and metamorphic rocks, through heat and pressure, to adopt different forms. As rocks are uplifted, through orogeny, weathering causes them to erode. Often, during uplift, rocks are deformed, broken, or folded, and these patterns can be exposed by weathering. And, in many places, glaciation creates particular forms of erosion that yield many unique landforms that remain behind after the ice has retreated.
The geology coupled with hydrology represent the biotic factors that determine what kinds of plants (and other organisms) that will grow there. And they, in turn, create the conditions for a succession of communities of organisms that follow. Knowing the communities of plants can really help create the atmosphere for a setting: Are there evergreens? Or deciduous trees? Or just grassland? Or maybe just a crust of lichens on bare sand? All of these can really help bring a scene to life.
As a student, when I took the classes, I went on many field trips where I had the opportunity to see the land forms in real life. You never forget when you’ve seen an esker (a sinuous hill of gravel that forms in channels under glacial ice) or a swarm of drumlins (tear-drop shaped hills that were overrun by moving glaciers). Or the drama of a terminal moraine — a huge hill that formed at the furthest margin of a glacier where it left a huge deposit of transplanted sand, gravel, and clay. All of these can add to the realism of a setting’s description.
Last year, my son and I drove to California for Baycon. I got to travel through some regions I’d visited before. Like the Badlands (pictured above) which was formed of many layers of volcanic dust eroded way revealing the colorful layers. But others were wholly new to me: One of the most interesting was driving from the Central Valley of California to the Pacific Highway that runs right along the coast. It was more than 100° F in the Central Valley when we started driving through the Coast Ranges. It became increasing arid as we entered the rain shadow of the mountain range. But then, as we cleared the peaks, became a cool rain forest with giant redwoods as we approached the coast. It was chilly in the low 60s by the ocean, just 50 or 60 miles distant, as the crow flies.
Some of the characters in my fiction can only describe their settings in general, qualitative terms. But part of why I wanted to write a series of stories about Lady Cecelia is because she’s a botanist. So she knows the plants and can appreciate the significance of the various plant communities they pass through on her adventure.
Alone, Cecelia cautiously got to her feet and, keeping a hand on the bed, carefully stepped to the window to look out. The view quite took her breath away. She was in a high room of a grand chateau that was situated along the side of a mountain valley. In the depths, she could see a cascading whitewater river that tumbled over immense boulders. Looking upward, she could see the tips of snow-capped mountains peeking up out of a vast evergreen forest. She opened the window and let the crisp, cool air into the stuffy room. It was scented with a delightful piney smell and she could hear the roar of the river in the distance. She breathed in deeply and smiled.
Lady Cecelia’s Journey, a sapphic romantasy road story will be serialized as six novelettes.
Writing Female Characters
I remember after I’d been writing fiction for a while, my son asked, “Why don’t you have any female characters?” I was flummoxed.
“But what about Mary?”
“She’s a yōkai — that doesn’t count.”
“But what about… Aless?”
“Who?”
“Aless — in It’s Not Just Black or White?”
“She dies on page 9.”
“Oh. Um…”
I had to admit that he was right. I really didn’t have any female characters.
As I wrote my debut work, Revin’s Heart, I added several female characters, but I realized that it still didn’t really pass the Bechdel test. Given that the story is a young man’s adventure story (though with a transgender protagonist) that’s not too surprising. But I wanted to do better. So for one of the side-stories, I decided to tell the story of the protagonist’s transition. And this included a number of strong female characters and a trans woman.
I’ve now written a number of pieces of short fiction (not all of them published) that have female protagonists. One unpublished manuscript is about an elderly witch that helps a female friend move. I’m not sure whether Better Angels or my weird little story, Always a Destroyer (in Romancing the Rainbow) really count, because although they have female protagonists, they are not really human.
Most recently, however, I’ve finished Lady Cecelia’s Journey, a sapphic romantasy road story. It’s told from the point of view of a somewhat naive aristocratic girl who, on the one hand, grew up very sheltered. But she also had many privileges and experiences that her girlfriend, a commoner, never got to have. Playing these contrasts off one another is part of the charm of the story for me. It’s a story I feel I can tell as I grew up in a well-educated, upper-middle-class family that moved to the countryside when I was in third grade, where many of my friends were members of the rural poor.
I’ve tried to craft three-dimensional characters for both of my protagonists. They each have a meaningful backstory that is not merely some dark tragedy. They each have goals and objectives in life that are not centered only around men. Or romance. They each have unique strengths and weaknesses. They each have a distinctive appearance, but they are not just their bodies. Or their clothes. And both grow and develop over the course of the story.
To be honest, I see many aspects of myself in both of them.
Men are frequently accused of writing female characters very poorly. The line that sticks in my head was the one attributed to Mary Robinette Kowal: “She breasted boobily down the stairs.” I think men who do this don’t see women as fully complete human beings: they can only see them through their own mental filter as an object. I hope ― and believe ― that I have done better.
But I guess I’ll just have to wait to see what people say.
Getting Ready for the New Normal
After 28 years of full-time employment, I am starting a new phase of life. This summer, for the first time since I started my career, I didn’t work over the summer. And this fall, I begin my “phased retirement” where I start working just half time. I’m excited to see what the new normal will be like.
Thirty five years ago, I began graduate school and have been working full time pretty much constantly since then. The last two years of graduate school, while I was working on my dissertation, I was also the full-time caregiver of my infant son, which was a fascinating experience but meant that I will busy nearly every waking minute.
I started my professional career in 1996 when I joined the faculty at UMass Amherst as Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center (BCRC). This meant that I was either running the BCRC and teaching a scientific writing class (during the academic year) or doing development and support during the summer (replacing hardware, updating software, building curriculum). I loved my work, but was constantly busy — I aimed for about 55 hours per week year round.
The year before the pandemic I was awarded a Professional Improvement Fellowship to develop a new honors course: Open Science Instrumentation and Data Collection, which let me bring together all of my skills. I proposed to mentor students coming up with a life science research question and developing an instrument that used a computing platform and sensors to collect and log data about their question. The fellowship offered me a semester off from my professional duties to create all of the instructional materials. It was glorious. But then the pandemic happened.
During the pandemic my department closed the BCRC and rewrote my job description as a teaching faculty member. I continued to teach the writing class and began to my new honors class. Since I was no longer obligated to spend my time doing computer support and development, I decided to repurpose that time for writing fiction and have written two books, Revin’s Heart and Better Angels: Tour de Force (plus several short stories published in anthologies).
Last year, I proposed the idea of a phased retirement to the department. I offered to continue to teach my honors class. However, because the “credit” for teaching the honors class would go to the Honors College, my college (the College of Natural Science and Mathematics) was only willing to have me teach the writing class, for which they get “credit”. So that’s what we settled on. This week, I’m getting ready to teach the writing class beginning next week.
Last year, when it wasn’t clear which class I would be teaching, I began putting off doing a bunch of the work needed to teach the honors class. That class required me to maintain and update a lot of instructional materials that had complex dependencies because the technology moves so quickly. Each year, I had to stay current with changes to the operating systems, development environments, campus networking, and the software carpentry instructional materials (which I was using for teaching). I had created a long list of tasks that I would need to do before teaching this year. And when I ended up not teaching that class, I was able to just throw out that whole list. As I’m getting ready for the fall, I’m still taking pleasure in discarding the last vestiges knowing that I won’t ever have to do that work.
In the past, I basically didn’t have time to write fiction during the academic year. I could only write during intersession and summer. But I’m hopeful that, this year, I will find that I have enough time to continue to write fiction year round. It will be nice to have that become the new normal.
Writing Influences from Manga
I’ve realized over the past couple of years that my writing has been significantly influenced by reading manga. I’ve been tracking upwards of a thousand manga and, therefore, have read tens of thousands of chapters of manga over the past 10 years.
Manga are a somewhat guilty pleasure for me. Undoubtedly part of the reason I like them is that in Japan there is much less pressure against cultural appropriation and male-gaze fan service. I particularly enjoy seeing Western culture appropriated and viewed through a Japanese cultural lens. It’s fascinating to see how holidays (like Christmas and Valentines day) or even the use of English language gets re-presented. And manga are well known for drawing females with exaggerated “charms.” But I also appreciate a number of uniquely Japanese perspectives that are fascinating from a Western perspective.
Japanese characters are allowed to have flaws that would never be permitted in the West. In Naruto, for example, the three legendary sannin are Jiraya (the “pervy sage” who lusts after young girls), Tsunade (a drunkard and inveterate gambler), and Orochimaru (who becomes a literal villain pursuing life extension through medical experimentation on prisoners). The characters are actually drawn from Japanese folklore and embellished in the manga.
There are a bunch of story structures that are so common as to be tropes in manga that are totally unfamiliar in the west. One of the currently most-well-known is the isekai, where the protagonist dies in the first chapter (often stereotypically struck and killed by “truck-kun”) and is reincarnated in some fantastic other universe with their memories and knowledge intact. Another is the “otome game” where the protagonist becomes a player in a visual dating simulation that typically involves a “heroine” that needs to match with a handsome prince while being tormented by a “villianess”. And there are vast number of romance (“shojo“) stories and “slice-of-life” stories, often revolving around food, cafes, and onsens (hot spring resorts).
I can see a vast number of influences on my fiction are derived from manga. I really like episodic and serialized fiction. Both Revin’s Heart and Lady Cecelia’s Journey are written in novelette length episodes that each have a unique story arc, but play a role in a larger, overarching story. The short stories of Better Angels: Tour de Force are similarly episodic in nature.
Some of the character types I enjoy in manga demonstrate “gap moe” which is when a character has two personality traits that are in opposition to each other. The classic example is the tsundere: a character who seems aloof or distant but who is actually very sweet or vulnerable and is covering it up with a harsh exterior. Another tropish example is character who looks like a delinquent, but is actually a good guy (or girl) with a rough exterior. This was my inspiration for the Better Angels who look and act like pre-teen girls, but with different programming modules, can act like singing-and-dancing idols or ruthless killers.
Reading manga as I do has probably detracted significantly from the time I used to spend reading fiction. I should try to spend more time staying current with Western fiction. But though it makes me feel guilty, I like really manga: they’re a window into a different cultural experience that I don’t get from reading most fiction published in the West.
