So I'm reading for the Andre Norton award (and I'm not going to get them all read), and I'm on China Mieville's Railsea, and though I'm having no difficulty getting through the story I'm having a couple of problems with it. The relevant one at the moment is in buying into the premise, which is (roughly) a vast sea of intertwining railroad tracks "sailed" by trains fulfilling all the functions of ships - pirates, navy, merchants, and "molers," who hunt the gigantic burrowing animals that tunnel, hunt, and breach through the ground below the rails, which is qualitatively different in some undefined way from the "hardlands" on which people actually live. For the sake of the story I can deal with that, but it keeps bugging me that burrowing animals like the great southern moldywarp, apparently analogous to sperm whales (since one of them is standing in for Moby Dick) breach all over the place and leave molehills and have room to live and hunt without breaking the tracks.

So far the whole business of track maintenance is handwaved by references to "angels," mysterious trains that no one ever more than glimpses that fix tracks when no one is looking; but even if we grant that (and I am hoping that some information that makes it less handwavey comes along in the second half of the book), it should be common, in a great moldywarp hunt, for one to come up under the tracks and wreck them and the trains on them. They must come up very close to them, or the molers couldn't pursue them in their jollytrains, since the dirt itself is much too dangerous to get onto. Even if the moldywarp takes damage in the process, the tactic should be worthwhile, as breaking the track before the train can shunt (another point handwaved a lot), and in particular breaking a bunch of related tracks near their point of intersection, would cause the train to derail and turn the molers from hunters into prey.

This point alone is enough to keep me from voting for this book, especially in the stiffness of this year's competition.

Coincidentally, gaming group e-mail this morning contains a message, from my husband, discussing discrepancies in the description of a kind of magical construct we recently dealt with and the information describing how to construct it. We were going to sell the remnants as scrap metal, but with these discrepancies we have no idea how much of the scrap metal we have. The problem should be familiar to most gamers, "D&D economics" having plagued the simulationist end of the player spectrum since the infancy of role-playing games.

Hand-waving this sort of thing by saying "It's only a game/story" or "It's magic" or "Just roll with it" is common, but it is not adequate. Science fiction and fantasy, whatever the medium, attracts a large number of people who actively enjoy figuring out how things work - engineers, programmers, actual scientists. Not just at the physical end, either. Practitioners and enthusiasts of the soft sciences and the arts like to see linguistics and cultures that work. An artist who makes kinetic sculptures is as likely to be a nitpicker on a mechanical point as an engineer, because the jobs overlap.

Okay, there's a point of diminishing returns in worrying about fiddly details; but a lot of people give up long before that. And yes, a big chunk of the audience doesn't care. But those who do, care a lot. Disrespecting this more demanding segment of the audience seems counterproductive to me, as they are also the most loyal and dedicated audience one could ask for.

The most effective tactic, I have found, for the creator who doesn't have the expertise or patience to work out the details of how some essential part of his vision would work in the real world, is to subcontract the labor. A wise DM who has a geologist continually criticizing his dungeons will make talking to this person a routine part of his planning. "You know what would be cool? An obsidian dungeon with a big lake in the middle with a whole lost civilization of giant kobolds. But I don't know how that would come about, and wouldn't the tunnels be too slick to walk in?" Next thing you know, the player's drawing diagrams and talking about water tables and lava tubes and suddenly you have A Better Idea, and you put the dungeon together and instead of constantly having to interrupt the game to answer this guy's objections on the fly, he's eagerly pushing the rest of the party through a much more improbable scenario than you would ever have come up with on your own. Reduced labor and stress for you, increased fun for him, everybody wins.

Alternatively, for those of us working for larger audiences, identify the least plausible part of your vision, and attack it head on. Research the stuffings out of it and find a way to show it working, vividly and immediately. Make all the visible detail convincing enough, plausible enough, ordinary enough, and most of all consistent enough, and the audience will take the parts you don't show on faith, or work them out for themselves. Fandom is full of people producing starship schematics from hints collected throughout the lifetime of a series, resolving minor discrepancies, and having a blast doing it.

This advice is most applicable for fantasists, but it applies in the mainstream, too. How many TV shows have thrown you right out of the plot by their reliance on magical computers, inaccurate history, absurd biology, or impossible physics? If you like a genre or a show enough otherwise you'll willingly suspend your belief by its neck until it's dead, if necessary, but the creators need to make that as easy and fun as possible for you. If it's more work than fun to believe in a situation, the audience won't do it.

Besides, the Better Idea tends to lurk like a moldywarp under layers of lazy imagery. Digging down to them is well worthwhile.

For reasons that will be clear to anyone who goes back a few days and reads the comments, I've disabled anonymous commenting for the foreseeable future. I don't much mind the trickle of commercial spam, but harassment spam is too tiresome to deal with. Even the effort of deleting it seems like too much reward for the person seeking attention through it.

At first blush, this looks like a hazard of publication, but that's not, in fact, the case. I've been dealing - or, more accurately, failing to find a way to deal - with this kind of person for my entire life. I've never been in a school, or a workforce of more than six people, where I didn't attract at least one, and I won't pretend to understand what motivates them, but none has ever found me through the medium of my published work. Some responses to that work have been problematic, but they have all been relevant to the work, and most are unambiguously positive.

And yes, I'm including negative reviews in that tally. As long as a review focuses honestly on the work (rather than on the reviewer's cleverness or the personal life of the author/performer/artist/whatever or some other nonsense), a negative review is better than no review, especially from a reviewer well-known to the audience. Some of the most useful movie reviews I've ever had access to were written by a local journalist whose taste differs so radically from mine, and so distinctly from my husband's, that a bad review from him was better than a rave from someone with whom we were not familiar. "Bob Polunsky hates this movie and thinks the twist ending makes no sense. Let's go!" Conversely, if he had no fault to find, we'd stay away, saving ourselves from an hour and a half to two hours of tedium and the movie from the bad word-of-mouth we might otherwise have given it. Since we stopped seeing his reviews movie-going has been a lot more of a crapshoot.

And honest negative criticisms of your work have value; either by pointing out a real weakness that you had overlooked, or by forcing you to think consciously about your choices. Far fewer conscious choices go into my work than you'd think from reading this blog, when I am necessarily in cool mode and deconstructing a holistic process. And though some unconscious choices are gloriously right and much better than I could have made had I been thinking about it, others are simply lazy habit and need to be questioned. Even a criticism which, in the end, I decide is invalid from the perspective of the target audience may give me an insight into the peripheral audience that will prove useful later.

As for personal contact with the target audience - if you keep it in perspective, that can be glorious. In the literary world especially, the celebrity stalker is far rarer than the nurturing and enthusiastic fan. It was cheering to go into my reader this morning and see Kathleen Duey's response to those who have been responding to her recently. Kathleen is an excellent writer who deserves all good things, and who has labored far too long and too hard in relative obscurity, so it is good to see her audience feeding her spirit.

The person who pretends to be the audience in order to attempt to poison the spring of well-being is, thank goodness, an anomaly at the professional level. At the amateur level, alas - at the level of Tumblr and fanfic and the platform-specific communities arranged around particular interests - they are all too common. But that's not a function of publication with these various platforms, but of the nature of human community.

You cannot build a snake-proof garden. If a person wants to be a jackass, he'll find a way to be a jackass; but work interests him not at all unless he can find in it an avenue to damage the workman. He has some personal agenda, some (usually imaginary) status to build and maintain, some toxic self-image that demands to be fed the bad feelings of others. Work done in a professional spirit (and one may do amateur work in a professional spirit; it is not the exchange of money that governs this) insulates the author as a person, so their hunting grounds are offices and playgrounds, newsgroups and social networks, clubs and classrooms, where they can manipulate the environment and take best advantage of the social virtues - patience, kindness, the desire to be fair - to corner their victims.

I have seen people who shrink from rejection of the work as if it were this kind of personal assault; and I have met people who hesitate even to seek publication for fear of - who knows what. I can't tell you how to avoid personal bullies, since I obviously haven't learned how to do it myself, though at least they can no longer hurt me, just waste my time and try my patience. But I can tell you that you needn't fear them getting at you through your work. Your work is not you. It is important, and it's made of pieces of you, but it is not you. Surgically remove your ego from the process, and you will soon find that, rather than exposing you, it shelters you.

Mind, that surgical removal may be difficult at first, but you'll never get past a certain point till you do it, no matter how brilliant you are. And your work will improve, because when you stop seeing the excision of your excess adverbs as the excision of part of your soul it gets much easier to go through with it; while ceasing to fear the exposure of your deepest self enables you to touch the hands of people you will never meet and make them feel less alone.

What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?

Who were you before that?

Who are you now?

How did that transformation happen?

You don't have to tell me (I'm certainly not going to tell you mine!), but you should tell yourself. Because that's your character arc. If you don't understand your own, how can you be sure you understand those of your characters? And you're already using it anyway, just as you use everything in your life when writing because your life is the handiest mine of material.

I don't know why the elements of a story are called arcs. I should try to find out. When I use the term in presentations I spontaneously delineate a curved line in the air with my finger, and I tend to think of them as structural arches holding the story up, but I don't know how the term originates.

Character arcs aren't absolutely necessary for telling a good story, but most modern fiction includes them, or pretends to, as a matter of course. It's one of the artistic problems that serial fiction has - writers and audiences feel incomplete if there's no character arc, so the writers of superhero comics, sitcoms, cartoons, and soap operas write stories involving them - but the series bible doesn't change, so the next episode puts the character right back where he was before the life-changing events of the story. Wise artists in serial formats accept this and use it to reinforce the character - Charlie Brown has learned the hard way not to trust Lucy, but he can never resist making another try for that football, and each annual football event through the run of Peanuts revolved around his increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics in overcoming the lessons learned in past football seasons. If he ever held true to his intention of not kicking the football this time, he'd grow up too much to be Charlie Brown any more.

So you need to make your peace with character arcs - you'll be writing them, or writing around them, for your entire career. And the fact is, you're probably going to be writing around your own for the duration, too.

By tradition, the first novel is expected to be autobiographical, and a lot of writers never get past it. They have one story to tell and then they stop; or they think of new ways to tell the same story, in different kinds of fancy dress. Which may be artistically sterile, or may drive an increasing richness and subtlety of imagination. That's up to you.

You have more than one character arc in your life, though. The worst thing that ever happens to you may not have happened yet, and isn't that a cheery thought? But in addition to that - your character arcs intersect with those of everyone around you. One reason I'm not telling you mine is that it's inextricably bound up with that of my husband and I'm not discussing the details of my marriage with the entire internet. So when you examine your own character arc, ask yourself about those of the other people in your life. Odds are good that the time you got hit by a car was the start of the driver's character arc, too; your divorce had a profound effect on the life trajectories of your children; the bully you learned to walk away from needs a character arc if she's not to be stuck in bully mode for the rest of her life. And those character arcs are a part of you, too.

Where does that take you?

And if you're thinking that all this is too much, your character arc hurts too much for artistic treatment, go read some Nancy Werlin. I don't care what your character arc is, it does not hurt more than hers, and she's been dealing with that for several books now.

So, let's say you've gotten your work out there in your preferred venue. Let's say it's even moderately successful by whatever yardstick is used to measure success in that venue. (I would advise you to be flexible in your concept of success, as it will need redefining many times over the course of your career and it's best to be prepared.) What happens then?

Well, then you get responses. Or you don't. You get paid. Or you don't. You get asked to do things. Or you - no, wait, that's one of those sure things. You will be asked to do things, by total strangers, and all of these things will come at some cost to yourself. After all, you're published now! You must be ready and willing to give workshops, critique work in the same medium (or, sometimes, in a totally different medium), to advise other people who want to publish in the same venue, to mediate for other people who want to publish in the same venue because you have connections now - right? You must, in fact, be obliged to be available to anybody, anytime, and be glad to do it because it's "exposure"?

Do not, ever, fall into the trap of working for free, or of paying someone else to allow you to do work.

By "free," I do not mean "not paid in cold hard cash." As I've discussed before, cash is only the form of recompense that we can buy groceries with; it is not the only form of payment. You can get paid in satisfaction; in genuine effective publicity (by which I do not mean a chance to sell your books directly to schoolchildren); in prestige; in an equivalent exchange of work; in the pleasure it affords you to perform the service; in many, many potential forms. Only you can decide what currency will best recompense you for the service required.

The pleasure of being useful is a real and valuable one. None of us makes it through this world without help, and we all have people to whom we are grateful; but no one enjoys feeling like the recipient of charity. Having received considerable generous help from playtesters in making Widespot, I started hanging around the creator feedback forum, a part of the board I'd never entered till I needed it, hoping to return the favor - not to the same individuals, necessarily, but to people like them, and like me. "Paying forward" through volunteer work is an effective tactic for improving yourself and your community, if done in a sincere and generous spirit.

Nothing spoils paying forward like having it treated as a debt. If someone starts a thread asking for advice in making a neighborhood, I may download that neighborhood, playtest, and share my advice as someone who has done similar work. If someone contacts me and asks me, as someone who has done similar work that he has admired, to download a neighborhood and poke around in it and give him the benefit of my experience, I am fairly likely to do so if my life isn't crazy busy, because this sort of thing is done only by a small portion of the community and odds are good he's having trouble getting useful feedback. If I don't think I can afford the time to do so (bearing in mind that this is play that edges toward being work) I will at least try to give him references that should help him accomplish his purpose. If someone sends me an e-mail with an attachment demanding that I look at his neighborhood unless I'm a stuck-up bitch - well. I've got a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

I'm less generous with my writing critiques and advice; but that's a matter of supply and demand. The demand for advice on both writing as a craft and writing for publication is high, but it is not higher than the supply. Educating would-be writers is a full-fledged industry, and if you don't have the research skills necessary to tap into it, your first step is to get them. Generally speaking, if I don't know you personally, I don't want to read your manuscript; but I don't overvalue my time or my expertise. I agreed to mentor a high school student with writing ambitions last year, I've been in short-term critique groups in which we were all trading advice for advice, I've been involved in workshops for which I've been paid in free convention memberships, and I've been paid my school-visit rates for workshopping.

Among children's writers, the rule of thumb is that the less a school district pays you, the worse your school visit will be. If they want you, they will pay for you; and the more they pay for you, the more likely they are to prepare the classes so that your talk will do them some good, give you bathroom and lunch breaks, and not spring surprises on you like agreeing to four sessions with small groups in the library while actually arranging five sessions with large groups in the auditorium. (Yes, it happens.) If they pay you, they will treat you as someone whose time has value. If you don't, they will treat you like dirt.

That doesn't mean you should never, ever agree to do a free school visit. If you want to present for free in the poor district the day after you present for pay in the rich one; or at your own child's school where you know the librarian; or to polish your presentation and gain confidence, by all means work something out. But if someone approaches you to do one, and says the budget is limited, name a figure and offer to negotiate. If he wants you, he'll negotiate. If he goes away and never comes back, he didn't want you. And if he starts poormouthing about how you'd get a chance to sell your books and you should do it For the Community, you don't want him.

The people who try to pay you in guilt for doing them favors should always be given short shrift. Politely, of course. But if you allow them to get their teeth into you, they will suck you dry and then kick you. Sure, if you turn them down now they might temporarily reduce your standing in some community they share with you by badmouthing you; but the truth is, they'll badmouth you after they've sucked you dry and you can't give them anymore, anyway.

And the odds are good that the people they're badmouthing you to are either people who know what they're like, or people just like them, so you won't lose anything. Whereas, if you did him his favor, you'd be out your time, your effort, and a good chunk of self-esteem at being played for a sucker.

With rare exceptions, we all find our way to the audience through a number of people. Editors and critique partners, publishers, marketers, educators, reviewers, legislators, and in the case of the younger audiences particularly, parents, often have a lot more direct control over whether our work ever hits the target audience or not.

So we try to please them. We datamine rejection letters for hints, revise according to advice and try again, agonize over making the perfect query, study the markets till our brains bleed. And far too often we forget some important things.

First, that the gatekeeper is not the audience.

Second, that the gatekeeper does not owe the creator anything (outside the stated terms of an existing contract).

Third, that other gates are out there.

Widespot is currently sitting in the moderation queue (essentially a slushpile) at Mod the Sims, a large download host which has evolved procedures to control what kind of content it provides. This is my second time through. The first time, I misunderstood many points on the submission format desired and messed up the submission so badly they had no choice but to reject it. I had to re-take all the pictures, which is far more difficult for me than someone who sees straight lines can easily understand. Then the moderators closed the moderation queue for a period of time necessary to clear out a backlog and update some of their policies, which took over a month; and then I had to double-check the revised guidelines and reassess my drafted submission document before finally starting my submission thread, shortly after hundreds of other people with smaller submissions had swooped into the queue ahead of me. So now I'm waiting.

That all sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Then this will sound familiar, too. The original rejection, an obvious series of cut-and-paste boilerplate, cited crimes of which I am guiltless, though my botching of the format may have misled the moderator in charge of accepting or rejecting it into thinking that I was. I expect these objections to be dropped now that I have (I think) done things right. But a couple of items do give me pause. Like this one:

Item 3: ... your sim does not represent a unique and different overall look. While your sim may have an interesting face, anyone can create interesting faces spending a few minutes fiddling in Body Shop - the idea is to create a unique overall look... The submission guidelines clearly state that sims without custom content created by the uploader (i.e., new eyes, new hair, a variant skintone) will not be accepted.

Leaving aside the vexed and unanswerable question of whether anyone else ever would produce Dixie Land's face, and granting its theoretical possibility, the citizens of Widespot are not the shells generally uploaded for sharing, but characters in an established neighborhood with an ongoing storyline. It is Dixie's looks in combination with her stats, aspiration, biography, relationships, and history in the context of the whole neighborhood that make her and the other citizens of Widespot both unique and fun to play (as my playtesters assure me they are).

I more or less expect the story content of the neighborhood to be treated as the necessary custom content in this instance. Insisting on other kinds of custom content, such as genetics or clothing, would be counterproductive. Firstly, because Widespot is intended as a Base Game Only/Custom Content free neighborhood which anyone with a Sims2 game can drop in and with a minimum of hassle. Custom content would be unnecessary padding and violate the purpose.

Secondly, I can't make any other standard kind of custom content. Wouldn't know where to start. I can't do visual media to a professional or even amateur display standard, as I've demonstrated to my own satisfaction many times. I can make story and character all day long, and frequently do. Demand exists for inhabited neighborhoods with ongoing storylines, and this is where I can make a contribution. So I think my sims fit the intention of the guidelines even though they violate the letter of it, and I think the moderators will recognize that.

But you know what? I could be wrong. And if I am, Widespot will be rejected and that will be that. Because I'm not going to shoehorn stuff that doesn't belong, which would make me less satisfied with my work and would please my target audience less, into my work just to get it hosted. I'll find some other place, with different criteria, or no criteria; or I'll put a link in the sidebar of the blog and keep it on Mediafire as long as I can, directing people to the blog in my sig; or eventually I'll write off spreading it any further and be satisfied with the dozen or so people playing it now.

If, however, the moderator doesn't like the house the Lands live in and makes specific suggestions about how to make it acceptable without adding anything not available in the base game, and I can make those changes around the Land family as they are frozen in pause on the Friday morning that I intend the story to begin - heck, yes, if that's the only thing standing in my way, I'll do that in a heartbeat. Because the Land house really is a bit of a mess. It's playable, and to a certain extent the mess is deliberate, as it's supposed to have started out as a one-room cabin and added onto willy-nilly as finances allowed and a growing family required; but I got contradictory feedback on its aesthetic in playtest and I stopped fiddling with it more because I'd run out of ideas than because I was truly satisfied. As long as the concept of the house isn't violated by a suggestion, I'll tweak it as often as I need to in order to get it uploaded in the place I believe the intended audience will find it most easily.

The difference is that adding custom content would violate the work and, therefore, make it less suitable for the target audience; but changing the arrangement of a few walls and floors in the house may substantially improve it. These are the only considerations that matter, in the end.

If a gatekeeper rejects your work, it will not be (necessarily) because the work sucks; nor will it be because the gatekeeper is a Philistine with no taste; and it certainly will not be (in any viable market, even the internet) because the gatekeeper has some animus against you personally. It will be because, in the gatekeeper's judgement, the audience he's serving will not be well-served if he passes it. He may be right; he may be wrong; that is not the issue. The gate keeper controls this gate and if he won't let you through, you need to go look for another gate. Don't stand at this one whining to go through - you'll just make yourself obnoxious.

And for pity's sake, don't mutilate your work to please a gatekeeper. You'll regret it, I promise. Consider all suggestions as dispassionately as you can, see if your judgement coincides with his on this point, and only make changes that your judgement approves. For what profiteth it an author to gain publication, and lose the point of book?

I admire gatekeepers. They are, for the most work, overworked and underpaid. I've seen editors in the office and at home, and you would not believe the places they find to stack manuscripts, or how much work they have to get through with how little help. Most of them can't do any actual submission reading at work because they're too busy doing other parts of an editor's job. Librarians and teachers and parents are in much the same boat, and I presume that other kinds of gatekeepers are, too. If submission guidelines are difficult, it's because the number of people who think they've made something good enough to share far exceeds the number of people who truly have, and even some of those people have not taken sufficient care to be standing at the right gate. The more of these people who can be eliminated before the gatekeeper has to waste any time on them, the better for everybody.

Nobody owes me, or you, or anyone, publication. The loyalty of the gatekeeper is not to the creator, nor to the shareholder (if there is one in the market in question) but to the audience they conceive themselves as representing. Which is as it should be and I, as a creator, would not ask anything different of them.

Which doesn't mean I'm not really, really tired of sending queries and partials and fulls out into the cold world and never seeing them again except with the word "no" stamped on them. Especially when I know, as well as anyone ever knows these things, that the work is good. That isn't always what matters, in this imperfect world.

But that's life.

I felt steady enough to scrub the sole of my left foot, but found the feeling deceptive.

Had the wind come from the south, I'd still be alive.

Elsie watched her own head roll across the sand, bounce three times, and come to a stop canted on her chin. She'd always thought her chin was too big, and now she had proof.

"Don't worry about it," said the cat. "You're not going to sleep, so you might as well roll with it."

She'd barely gotten settled when the wind blew the door open, again, and this time the blue thing was too fast for her.

Half an inch! Half an inch! Half an inch onward!

Once upon a time, in a land where trees grew sideways, the earth burped.

(It's true. Altered mental states loosen up your creative inhibitions. But they're no help at all in maintaining the creative tension needed to produce an actual work. You're much better off learning to control your creative inhibitions and putting them to work for you. This has been a public service announcement. We will resume our regular blog habits Tuesday. I devoutly hope. You may ask: Why did you drink three cups of Irish Breakfast in the first place, then? Because I couldn't have functioned even this well without it.)

One of the many false dichotomies our society presents to us is the conflict between creating for ourselves and creating for a market. Creating for ourselves seems pure and virtuous, the only road to greatness, while catering to a market is crass and debasing. Except that creating for ourselves is self-indulgent and egotistical and creating for a market is sensible and realistic.

Either way, you should be grateful if somebody notices you, much less pays you anything.

Here's a tip: Whenever anybody offers you a choice between A and B, choose C. Or D. Anything except the forced, false choice the other person is trying to manipulate you into making.

Creating those things that we want ourselves is vital to our happiness; but if we want to share, whether for pay or not, we must consider who we are to share with. No cook who serves steak to vegans will be happy with the result - and if he knew he was making a meal for vegans, he has no one but himself to blame.

Generally speaking, we are only ready to create for an audience after we've gotten a certain amount of experience under our belts. We create, and then we look around and try to match our creation with a target audience that can be expected to enjoy it. Our first attempts to aim may be in entirely the wrong direction; I know many YA authors who had no idea they were YA authors until accumulating a critical mass of rejection letters from editors and agents working in the adult field telling them to try a YA market. Other people (and I've never encountered one of these who went on to anything I would call success) try to break into the literary world by writing for children and teens because they assume it will be easier than writing for adults. This was not so, and is not so, and God forbids that it should be so, but I'm not going off on that tangent right now. And I've even met a few insouciant people who wanted to write for "everybody," and that's not happening either. Especially since these people tended to assume that "everybody" was similar enough to themselves to make no never mind and this is me walking past another tangent.

Eventually, however, the audience has to enter the creative process, usually at either the planning or revision stages, because consciously thinking about them in most arts is too much to ask of the brain during the white heat of creation. Performing artists, of course, must be aware of and responding to the audience as part of the work, and the knack of doing this without being paralyzed by self-consciousness is an important part of their standard toolkit. Which is probably why so few performing artists write books well - without the audience right in front of them to play off, they can't judge how well they're doing. Those of us in the non-performing arts learn to look at our work as the audience would, or we don't get far.

I speak of "the audience," but as any actor can tell you, the audience is not a single entity. Even inside the confines of a theater, the individuals can be sorted into different types of audience, from the serious fans in the front row to the employees of the house snatching bits of the performance as they come and go, and then there's your co-workers backstage.

Most works have an ideal audience which is very specific. I wrote all my middle grade novels, first and foremost, for myself at the age of 10. Widespot has an ideal audience of two: myself, and my newsgroup friend Aegagropilon, whose tastes are similar to mine, though her playstyle is not. All those published works that began as stories told to the family, or to the Girl Scout troop, or to the members of the river excursion on that golden afternoon, were created first for their ideal audience. I don't know any work whose ideal audience is a viable economic market.

The target audience is more abstract, but is the important one and you can get to know it pretty well. English-speaking children between the ages of 9 and 14 who enjoy fantasy, or mystery, or have an interest in archeology, are a diverse group overall, but they have common characteristics that hold true across subcultures and over time. You can learn how to please them, and how to serve them, and how to get the response you want from them. You do not have to be one of them to understand them well enough to create for them any more than a cook has to be a vegan in order to cook without using animal products, but you do have to respect them and partake of some of their tastes. If you think 13-year-old boys have a repugnant sense of humor, do not write a joke book for 13-year-old boys.

The target audience for Widespot is the particular set of Sims2 players who make regular use of the Mod the Sims newsgroup, both for socializing with other players and as a source of custom content. Whereas I am, nowadays, fairly zen about writing for middle grade and YA audiences, I found myself having to consider the MTS audience consciously at every stage of production. I knew I could please Aegagropilon and me; I could probably please the handful of people who consistently "like" my posts and pictures about what goes on in my own game, but what about other people out there? Most people find my cartoony sims, with their exaggerated features, ugly, so should I try to build pretty sims for once?

On the other hand, what is the use of my making sims that don't bear the stamp of my personal taste? Which is shaped by a problem with facial recognition - I have a hard time recognizing real people, let alone a bunch of animations built on a finite set of facial templates. So I compromised, getting the features on each sim I made exactly how I liked them, then adjusting them one or two steps toward the median. Most of the sims I didn't build at all. I built their parents, and used the game's tool for combining genes to make offspring, rejecting offspring who I thought looked more bizarre than the market would bear. It's the same principle that guides me in deciding how much of my research to let show on the page.

Of course the MTS audience contains many, many lurkers, as well as people whose tastes vary wildly from mine, and not everyone who uses the downloads area where I hope to make Widespot available also uses the discussion fora or frequents the same ones as me, whose reception of it I couldn't predict. I couldn't tailor for those people, so I had to count them as part of the peripheral audience. The target audience for a shareable neighborhood, moreover, couldn't be based too much on me, because I am unlikely ever to download a neighborhood. I have more ideas than I know what to do with already. I don't need anybody else's.

The biggest demand for new inhabited neighborhoods is from two kinds of people. Many wanted to jump right into play without spending a lot of time doing their own building and character creation, but had played the neighborhoods that shipped with the game to satiety. Others have a tendency to fall into ruts, building similar-looking sims and playing the same scenarios over and over, and feeling a need for someone else to show them a different path. These are the people I can be of the most service to. For their sake, I needed to present a challenge to their preconceptions and their habits right out of the gate. Every household needed to be in a crisis that needed a resolution - soon! - and the decision had to be a hard one. Ideally, it should challenge their assumptions about what's supposed to happen and turn their expectations on their ear.

That's why the obvious Cinderella figure who, in the default fairy tale scenario, would marry Prince Charming and live happily ever after, didn't fall in love with Prince Charming until after getting pregnant during sympathy sex with the elderly widower. Also, Prince Charming, though he has plenty of Nice points, is a spoiled rich boy who has knocked up the neighborhood's obvious Bad Girl, who has also had a fling with Prince Charming's dad, a Criminal Mastermind. It's fun to see how people who normally treat Nice points as an indicator of where sims stand on the good/evil scale scramble to sort that one out! Every way forward in every storyline is going to hurt some innocent or violate some principle. If you want to get into a rut in Widespot, you have to dig it for yourself.

But was I really prepared for all the ways players might move these stories forward?

I've talked on here before about how you can't control the work once it's out in the world. No two readers ever read the same book, because of what they bring to it. When writing for young people, you also expect/hope to be read differently by the same person at different ages. Heck, the nature of brain growth is such that a kid who starts reading a book on Friday night and finishes Tuesday morning may have grown a new synapse in that time which changes the meaning of the first paragraph for him. This is one of the delightful things about writing for people with growing brains. It's also how stupid arguments arise over what a book "really" means.

But I have even less control over what happens in Widespot, and I was a bit apprehensive about it. I grow attached to all my characters, and at least in a book I know they'll get the ending I feel is right for them. The Widespot characters I had to let go of completely during the opening scenes of their stories, or the whole project was pointless. Most people would play to resolve the situations I gave them, while others would play to make them worse. They would make villains out of sims I created as flawed but sympathetic, victims of sims of whom I was fond. Was I prepared for that? If I wasn't, I would have to restrict access beyond the ideal audience. I could not make a toy, give it away on the street corner, and then complain about how the recipients used it.

I addressed this concern at every step of development, doing my best to envision all the possible ramifications of each decision I made. I had a "Fivey threshhold" in my head, so named for a board member whose games tend toward what Louisa May Alcott used to call "sensation literature." The game is rated T for Teen, and its commercially-available content is much tamer than the standards for sex and violence in modern YA, yet Fivey has managed to use mods and staging to tell stories of serial rape and murder, infanticide, domestic abuse, prostitution - and, I hasten to add, redemption and recovery, though that's not what sticks in the reader's head. So as I worked on each element, I would periodically ask myself: What awful thing might Fivey do with this? If I could stand it, I could proceed.

But I found myself fretting about Certain Other People, people I really don't want to get their mitts onto Widespot. After what I told you about Fivey, you are now thinking that they must be certifiable psychos, but in fact my problem with them is more that they are ruthless bowdlerizers. Everything that I find interesting about a neighborhood they destroy. The thought of them pushing around my imperfect little pixeldolls distressed me, yet I didn't see any way of excluding them from access. When I mentioned this to Aegagropilon, she reassured me that these people would never download Widespot. What with aliens, interracial couples, boys who play with dollhouses, girls with masculine faces, improbable noses, and use of face templates that one of the people in question had condemned as "monstrous," I hadn't included anything that would attract them. They were not my audience, they would never be tempted to play with my toy, and nothing they said about it would matter.

This is important to remember, too. The target audience is permeable. Not every 9-to-14-year-old who likes fantasy will like your particular MG fantasy, and that's all right. Not everyone to whom the 9-to-14 year olds who do like it recommend it will be in that age range, or normally like fantasy; but they might like it, too. A middle grade book may be read by a precocious early reader, by a reluctant older reader, by a parent, by a librarian, by a grandparent, by someone with insomnia who has absolutely nothing else to do. Anyone can happen along and experience your work. If they enjoy it, good. That's how breakout hits and bestsellers happen.

If they don't, it's not their business.

Not even of the Gatekeepers.

But the reasons for that are complicated and this post is already way too long. (But of which of my posts is this not true?)

Supposedly there's an old cookbook somewhere that starts the recipe for rabbit stew with the instruction: "First, catch a rabbit." I'm pretty sure it's not true, but I'm a big fan of it as creative advice, particularly for people who intend to publish. You can't publish what you don't have, though it's astonishing how many people try. It's arguable that the serial format enables people to succeed, too, but that's a whole post on its own.

I have recently exhorted people to stop putting off what they want to do until they get the tools they want and just go do it. I have also recently said that if you need a necessary tool you will find a way to get it. This probably sounds contradictory to some of you out there who feel toolless, but it's not. That some tools are harder to get than others doesn't make them any less necessary to achieving the goal, and a tool that is necessary to finish a job is probably not necessary to begin it. The only tools you absolutely, positively cannot start without are the ones you own yourself. Brains. Will. Skill and the capacity to acquire skill.

The skilled, professional workman has a wide assortment of tools, well-maintained and suited to the work he does, always at hand; but it's a rare workman indeed who always has all of them. I know my medium - the English language - well enough that I seldom have to use the tools I have handy to fine-tune it, but when I need them I have multiple dictionaries, a thesaurus, The Elements of Style (I thought I had the Chicago Manual of Style, too, but it looks like I don't and I haven't needed it since college anyway), and so on, along with baby name books, guides to formats, atlases, books of quotations, references on dialect, etc., right on the desk. Plus the internet, but the books (like my brain) keep right on working during power outages and equipment failures, and their formats never become obsolete and unsupported, so I like them.

The Forteana and folklore shelves are also adjacent to the desk, as is a Peterson field guide since I'm more likely to need to refer to and describe a bird than any other non-pet animal. Resources specific to a project also cluster around the desk during active work on the project. Work on Len involved a binder full of photocopied material, including the 1866 Texas Almanac; timelines; reference books about the Civil War, Texas, horses, guns, clothing, slavery, folk remedies, the chemical qualities of plants, and a dozen other things, and that wasn't half as reference-intensive as 11,000 Years Lost.

A change in medium requires adding to the toolkit. This can be a shock to someone who's used to being skilled, which is why my grades in German, French, and Spanish were always lower for written than for spoken work, back in the day. Conversation in one language is much like conversation in another - full of hesitations, gestures, and plunging ahead to make oneself understood in defiance of logic and grammar. When I wrote, however, I couldn't wrap my head around the necessity to dial back on what I tried to communicate and consistently tried to write in an unfamiliar language as complexly and fluidly as I wrote in English, when my grasp of grammar and syntax in the new language were not up to the task.

There is no shame in having to dial back like this. It can even be exciting to realize how much you have to learn. E.B. Lewis, whose keynote at the recent Austin SCBWI conference I quoted recently, talked at some length about how, when he started looking at picture books after establishing himself in the fine arts, he realized he had to learn a whole new visual language, and it was clear to me that the thrill of mastering this language was part of his motivation for expanding into illustration. His fine arts education background gave him a leg up on articulating and regulating what he needed to do; but it was no substitute for learning that language.

Whether learning a brand new skill or expanding into a new medium, it's a good idea to lay out your toolkit and identify the tools that are missing; but you can start work with what you've got. My normal practice when I know I need a lot of research to tell a story is to read everything I can lay hands on related to the topic, knowing that the plot will emerge naturally if I feed my backbrain and give it time to work.

When I started work on Widespot, though, the research I had to do was not related to the story at all. I needed mechanical game knowledge, cheat codes, and mods - hacks, really, but the term "hack" has a whiff of the illegitimate, and what I needed was not a way to avoid mastering the game but a way to manipulate it in order to set up the storylines I wanted to place before my audience without making neighborhood-corrupting mistakes. This required a certain amount of research, experimentation, and downloading, then learning to use what I downloaded, before I could even open the game with Widespot in mind. This took time, and did not feel like creating at all.

So creation of Widespot began where story creation always begins - between my ears, and in the current notebook. A lot of people use computer journaling or their phone these days, but I'm a big fan of hard copy, as I said above. The first notes for Widespot don't look very different from my first notes for a novel, either. A lot of lists, for character roles and story elements. Lots of question marks. A mapping of the boundaries.

Being wiser than I was when taking German, French, and Spanish, I confronted my limitations early on. Although I'd been playing the game for over a year, and felt I'd done pretty well blundering along like a bull in a china shop learning as I went, the necessity to please an audience rather than just myself required that I dial back on what I wanted to do. I needed to keep it simple. To make an engaging, drama-rich neighborhood with the minimum number of characters, buildings, cheats, and modifications I could manage. The simpler I made the job, the more likely I was to do it right.

Considering an audience beyond oneself changes the whole ballgame. In this case, to maximize the audience, I wanted to make a Base Game only neighborhood,as the expansion packs are not backward compatible. A neighborhood built with the Apartment Life engine would not work for a user whose game installation included only the base game and University expansions, whether I put apartments into the neighborhood or not. Similarly, if I dressed my characters in clothing created by a fan, it would be replaced with a random outfit for a player who did not have that piece of clothing in her own Downloads folder; moreover, I would be morally and legally obliged to ask that creator's permission to use that item, just as I am if quoting someone else's poem in a story. (It is a common misconception that it's okay to use other people's stuff without credit in a public context if there's no money involved. Intellectual property rights among the fan base is another topic too big to digress onto right now, so just trust me on this for now.)

This meant that I not only had to get technical help to take my full installation and keep it from creating an all EP neighborhood, but that I wouldn't have all the story elements I was accustomed to dealing with when playing the game. Base game characters had all the personality statistics and skills I was used to, but the choice of Aspirations (the trait determining what the sim wants out of life) was more limited, as one was added in the third expansion. Base game sims have memories and interests, but no hobbies or inventory of items they can carry around; they have relationship scores but no mechanic for determining romantic attraction; they can visit community lots and invite people over but they cannot go on dates; they can get a limited number of careers, paint pictures to sell, and play the piano for tips, but they cannot work in retail stores, open their own businesses, throw pots, or play any instrument except the piano. Base Game neighborhoods have no weather and their plants don't grow. You can design individual sims with varied faces and dress them in different clothes, but the number of hairstyles, base facial templates, and outfits available is (as I quickly found) stultifyingly narrow, especially since hairstyle and clothing choices are important parts of characterization in a visual medium.

So, like a painter accustomed to working in oils and mixing his own paints suddenly being restricted to a four-color palette controlled by hex code, I had to retrench and scale back my expectations, at least to start. But the thing about limitations is, that they're a challenge. And challenges are fun to overcome.

All right, so I only had five aspirations instead of the usual six. What could I do with those five? What if I make five households, each dominated by the values of one aspiration (though I needn't make every member conform)? The Family household would have lots of kids, of course; the Popularity household should be well-connected; the Fortune household should be filthy rich and it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife and I don't have all the romantic mechanics that were added in the Nightlife expansion but base game jealousy works just like it does in the full game, with sims being jealous on behalf of their relatives - what if every household in the neighborhood has a member looking to marry into the Fortune household?

And off I go. If you've read any of the Garage Sales, you know how it works from there - for me. I always, always, start with text on a page, analysis and organization segueing into inspiration and some finished work or other - game, blog post, novel, vocal presentation, doesn't matter. My rabbit can only be caught this way.

But what about your rabbit? How do you make the transition from that bright shining idea in your head to a work existing in the objective, material universe where the audience can get at it? Do you need to sketch? To walk through the action? To set up 3-D models? To pick out a few notes on an instrument?

Once you know how to open that connection between the interior of your brain to the exterior world, you will find you always have the tools on hand. I can write notes on the backs of receipts in blunt pencil, if I have to. You may prefer a piano but if nothing else you can hum; you may prefer to model shapes out of clay, but in a pinch bubblegum and duct tape will do you to start. The nature of that starting point is such that the only way for you to lose it is to lose control of the body part through which it manifests, which is in the category of pathology and beyond my current scope.

Get yourself through that starting point, and you'll find that the internal pressure to get the other tools you need to accomplish the purpose drives you right along.

I do not by any means confine my idea intake to the Fortean Times, nor to recent nonfiction; nor,heaven forfend, to nonpartisan nonfiction. This week I've been reading one of the older books in my collection of Forteana: Unbidden Guests: A Book of Real Ghosts, by William O. Stevens; Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1945. Mr. Stevens was an English professor and author, with an axe to grind about survival of bodily death. He's for it, and in this book mines the literature and his own acquaintance for cases he feels are persuasive and interesting.

Much in here is familiar, or at least routine; and how persuasive anybody finds any of it will vary quite a bit, but that's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. The story's all I care about; and in Chapter IX, Postscript, Section II "Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense," he gives me one that's entirely new to me. He's got hold of a pamphlet by a late 18th/early 19th-century Baptist minister describing (with a variable amount of theoretically checkable detail) a very odd tale of something that happened in an unnamed "Maine seaport village, which, one may guess from internal evidence must have been near Machiasport." The pamphlet reprinted a bunch of affidavits with first-person accounts of the phenomena, interspersed with a lot of theology, but the story Stevens extracts from what is probably a tedious read is bizarre enough for anybody.

In August of 1799, a spectral voice announced that the speaker would appear soon. On January 2nd (not what I would have called "soon") the voice returned, addressing the family of Captain Paul Blaisdel, identifying herself as the late Mrs. George Butler, and asking that her father, David Hooper, be sent for.

This kicked off a series of over 25 visitations, witnessed in many different places around the village by many different people, including the Baptist minister, who saw Mrs. Butler appear to him as a brilliant light in a field while he was on his way to debunk this obvious superstitious hoax. Some people heard her, some people saw her faintly, and some people saw her clearly; believers and non-believers saw and heard her; her friends and family received proofs that convinced them; and Mrs. Butler high-handedly ordered people about, held court in the Blaisdells' cellar, popped in on folks in other families unexpectedly, made predictions that came true, arranged a marriage against the wishes of everyone involved, arranged to be seen up close and personal by masses of people at once, responded to local gossip, insisted on the exhumation and reburial in a different location of a baby's grave, and generally was a nuisance for about half a year.

And then stopped. As these things eventually do; for believe it or not, Mrs. Butler is not the only discarnate entity ever to set an entire community on its ear. The celebrated Bell Witch Case is even more bizarre (so bizarre that the movie a few years ago toned down phenomena and left out most of the really good bits), and lasted even longer, and incidentally the Bell Witch also interested herself in the marriage of a member of the family she chiefly manifested among.

The heart of the supernatural novel to be derived from this obscure case, I think, lies in that marriage, which Mrs. Butler insisted on arranging between her husband and Lydia Blaisdel, a daughter of the family in whose cellar she liked to meet visitors. Local skeptical gossip explained the entire series of events as a hoax got up by Lydia to get her a husband; about which Stevens (relying for all this information, remember, on a single source, his pamphlet) says:

The girl protested tearfully that she would never marry a man who was scared into matrimony by a ghost. Her parents and his joined in opposing the idea. Once that summer Lydia tried to board a vessel lying in the harbor bound for York, where she had friends with whom she could stay. But it was all in vain. Somehow, in the end, the various parties came together in agreement and Lydia Blaisdel became George Butler's second wife. Within twenty-four hours of that wedding the Specter came to the husband and said, "Be kind to Lydia, for she will not be with you long. She will have but one child and die within the year."

I don't know about you, but the urge to rescue that poor girl, even if only in the pages of a novel, rises in me at once! Or her tragic story could be the background of a modern tale in which Mrs. Butler attempts to boss around a new generation, and the ghost of Lydia joins forces with the living girl to keep history from repeating itself.

Even Mr. Stevens, who is well-disposed towards his ghosts generally, admits that the whole affair seems pointless and even counterproductive. Mrs. Butler frightened and bullied people, made predictions without any helpful hints on how to avoid undesirable fates, arranged a marriage for her husband that ended well for nobody, caused considerable inconvenience for the Blaisdel family, possibly improved the local tourist trade, and went away again.

Real life, of course, often is pointless and counterproductive. Fiction requires more structure than that. But there's plenty of material here. One need only arrange it to have a point and be productive.

It would have made a decent X-Files episode, come to think of it. Scully would've put Mrs. Butler in her place, count on it!

We come at the desire to share our creations from one of two directions - the inside, or the outside.

The inside track starts with the creation. You've been working/playing on something you enjoy, and you've gotten good enough at it that you want to share it with other people. Maybe you know you're good; maybe you feel you need to hear what other people say about it; maybe you just feel that whatever you've made is as complete as you can make it, but it will never be finished till it has an audience. Maybe you've realized that more traditional means of making a living don't suit you and you want to get paid for doing what you love.

In capitalist terms, you have what you feel is a marketable skill, and you want to find the market for it.

The outside track starts with the sharing; and we see this a lot on the internet. You've been out there playing on the internet, you love social media, you understand electronic publishing forms, you're excited by the concept of "infinite canvas," maybe you hang out with talented people who share their creations and you want to have something to bring to the table. Maybe you see something that somebody ought to be doing, and decide that you're the one to do it.

Or, you see a market, and you want to provide for it.

Coming from either direction, we're likely to flounder, especially at first. I know my gut feeling is that I should just be able to put a good story out there, and it'll get read, because it's good. The process of submission has always felt onerous to me. I sold my first book by sending a complete manuscript to Margaret K. McElderry, whose name and address was on the dust jackets of many books I loved and considered comparable to my own; but even in those days (the late 80s, which don't seem so far away to me) that sort of thing was rare. Query letters, synopses, writing guidelines, agents - arrgh! If self-publishing had been as easy back then as it is now, I would have been tempted to use it - and I would have languished unseen, because I lack the business savvy necessary to self-publish successfully. The whole process of learning the business end of things, when you come at it from the creative end, seems too complicated. Too hard. We don't want to do it; we have to fight our reluctance to take the time to get it right.

But people who have that business savvy often have nothing to market. They have ideas - bright shiny wonderful ideas! - and they put off learning how to develop those ideas while they set up their platforms, thinking it'll be easy to bring the idea to fruition. And then they find out that it's work, but it's not in fact work the know how to do to a marketable standard. They may or may not know what the marketable standard is, or how to ensure that they reach it. They may think their brilliant salesmanship will cover up the holes. The whole process of learning the craft end of things, when you come at it from the marketing end, seems too complicated. Too hard. We don't want to do it; we have to fight our reluctance to take the time to get it right.

So there we are. What to do?

Well, start with what you know. Because you do know something. But you have to look at what you know differently than you've been accustomed to. Analytically. Odds are good you've been riding a zen wave till now, doing things which are intuitive for you. Thinking analytically may even seem wrong to you, or dangerous - for if you think too hard about it, you can't do it anymore, right?

No, not really. Not if you learn when to shut off the analysis and get zen again, and that's a matter of practice.

I've been writing for publication (as opposed to actively marketing or getting published, which are different matters) since I was fourteen. I don't remember in any detail any more how I went about it, and in any case the details are different now in this wildly different world. But it's only a matter of months since I first started building a Sims2 neighborhood to share, and the process wasn't, in its essence, all that different.

I had been playing the game for over a year, and hanging out on the fringes of the game's subculture for rather less than that, sharing "war stories" and advice and so on like any other player. If you're not familiar with the Sims line of games, they bill themselves as "life simulators," though they could also be called "virtual dollhouses." It is a quintessentially "sandbox" game as, instead of chasing monsters across pre-existing environments and following preset storylines, you create your pixel characters - as many as you like - and their environment - by default a kind of 20.5th century American suburbia - and guide them through school, work, marriage, child-rearing, etc. Your sims can live in hovels or mansions, marry well or badly or not at all, run businesses, support or neglect their families, succeed or fail, and die sad and alone or happy and surrounded by all they love best, just as you direct.

From the beginning, the franchise's fanbase has created all kinds of custom content for it, to make it even more freestyle, so that anybody who wants to play a Victorian or Ancient Egyptian or all-male neighborhood, or have sims with skins all colors of the rainbow, or play out a zombie apocalypse, can do so. That's all beyond me because I have no skills in the visual arts and don't care enough about them to acquire them. We don't even own a copy of Photoshop and have never felt the need for it.

But at some point, I became aware of a demand in the subculture for new occupied neighborhoods with established characters and storylines, like those that come loaded with the game. And there are indeed such neighborhoods out there for upload - just download the folder containing all the information for the neighborhood, drop it into the correct location in your game's files, and off you go. I didn't see the appeal myself but hey, I'm the one constantly generating more new ideas than I could use in a lifetime. Not everyone has a brain stuck in storymaking mode, and many of the same people who make the beautiful custom content I download to use because I can't make it would like someone else's story ideas to get them rolling for actual gameplay.

Once I'd been playing and reading other people's war stories for awhile, also, I began to see the attraction of playing with established characters, and comparing the fates of the Curious Brothers in one's own game to those worked out in others. I even started playing one of the Base Game neighborhoods, Strangetown, occasionally. But I saw nothing particular to interest me in the small number of third-party neighborhoods available for download; especially when I learned that most of them are more or less "corrupt;" i.e., that mistakes were made in creating and making them available which left bad code kicking around the game, which eventually would render the neighborhood unplayable.

And then I followed a link to a thread in which the process of making a shareable neighborhood without corruption was outlined, and I realized that I have a level of competence in the game that would allow me to follow the directions.

And I realized that this was something I could do to contribute to and participate in this subculture at a deeper level. I don't know programming and I can't manipulate images, but by golly, I know how to wrangle stories and characters!

Furthermore, I knew my audience. The newsgroup where I hang out also hosts downloads, thousands of them, in a well-organized way, and has fora dedicated to helping creators work out creative problems. If I could make a clean, shareable, interesting neighborhood, and get it hosted at Mod The Sims, the people who know me there (I'm afraid I talk rather a lot) would be able to find and download it without any problem, if they thought, based on my posts, that they would like a neighborhood I'd made. Every one of my posts would be an ad for my neighborhood, even if I never mentioned it! For once in my life, I had a platform! Once I considered it in that way, of course I had to take a shot.

So I had the basic skill, I had the potential audience, and - most importantly - I knew where to go to get the skills I knew I didn't have in order to carry out the design.

It's the same for someone who wants to write for publication, or illustrate books, or design clothes. Look first at the resources and skills you have; and identify the gaps. You know, because this is not the first time you've learned how do something, that those gaps are closeable. Probably not all at once; but you can pick one to start working on. If you can't do drafting and you need to, where can you go to learn that?

"Oh, but I can't afford to take a drafting course, so I'll never be able to do this." Really? You'll never, ever, under any circumstances be able to afford a drafting course, and nobody can possibly learn drafting except by spending money to learn?

Then I submit that you don't really want to do the thing that requires you to draft, and should stop mooning after it and go do something you do, in fact, want to do. Because if you want it badly enough, you'll find a way!

Maybe you can save up for the drafting course and work on another, more accessible gap in the meantime.

And of course you can start noodling around with the parts of the project that you do, in fact, know how to do. So that's what I'll talk about next time.

This has been a month of quiet, almost sub rosa publication for me, with Sullivan appearing as an e-book and my Sims2 neighborhood, though not yet officially hosted anywhere, being played by a handful of people who PMed me about it to whom I sent the Mediafire link, and as a consequence I've been turning over in my mind the possibility of a series of blog posts about bridging the gap between creating something and publishing it.

It is a peculiarity of our age that traditional venues for publication are consolidating and growing less accessible at the same time that new ones are proliferating, along with windows into the affairs of others; so that where ever I go on the internet I encounter two kinds of people: those who think there's something special and esoteric about creation and publication, and those who think that there's nothing special about either at all and anybody can just go and do them. The first sort of person is likely to never venture to do what she wants because she thinks she's not special enough; the second is likely to rush in and attempt to publish too soon, with less than optimal results.

My main thesis is that we are all creative. Since we are a social species, we often wish to share that creation; but creating and sharing are two different things, and different kinds of work require different kinds of sharing. One may know how to do either thing and not the other, or find that habits developed in the process of sharing (for example) new recipes may not serve us well when we want to share a portfolio or a story. That's certainly what I found when I decided to make Widespot to share; yet I soon found an underlying unity between the experience of making the game neighborhood and making a book. So I was thinking a post or two of practical advice, extracting this underlying unity and giving examples of how the same principles apply, might be useful to beginners in almost any field, and the first thing I thought was: "Start with what you know."

But the more I tried to shape that first paragraph mentally, the more I realized that what you know is not where the process of creation or of publication starts.

They start with desire.

We all have the raw desire to create. If anything is a human universal, this is; and if some creative force suitable to be called God exists, then this creative desire is the divine connection between it and us. We create things we need, certainly; but more than that, we create things to create them. Scratch marks on stone, tunes hummed through hollow reeds, stories in word and gesture, piles of pretty rocks - we like to make them and we have always made them. It's fun. And beneficial, not only because we create things we use, but because we train our minds and our hands and our senses into competence, until we can make clothes that fit, food fit to eat, shelters that keep out the wind and the rain, stories that help us make sense of our lives, rules that keep most of us at peace with most of the rest of us most of the time. None of us is good at any of these things when we're born, but we learn them, and learning is fun, and fun is learning.

So we all start with play.

Creation is fun.

That's principle number one.

"But what about clothes?" I think. "I don't make clothes because I like to; I make them because if I don't, I don't have clothes that fit." And that's true - we all make things out of necessity as well as pleasure. But then I realize, I also don't create my clothes from scratch. I follow a pattern, modifying it as needed, and sometimes, when I'm familiar enough with it, and comfortable with it, I will make a major change to a pattern, like adding sleeves or pockets or something. But before I ever go so far as to design clothes, I would have to reach a point of actively liking to sew; and even if I designed a few items for me, I would require a certain level of competence before I felt called on, or any desire to, design them to share with anyone else. I'd have to know that my experience solving the problems of fitting a new design to my own body would be useful to others out there, somewhere, trying to get clothes that fit their bodies; and part of the draw of publishing a design would be to give those people something that would please them. It's work I can't do, until I've played with it awhile.

So play, or pleasure if you prefer, is the bedrock on which we create and the background that enables us to publish effectively.

That's point number one, and I'll leave you to ponder it while I work out what point number two is, possibly this week.

(We're all making everything up as we go along, mostly, anyway. You understand that, right?)

Hmm...I had something in mind for the garage sale earlier this week, but I didn't make a note and now I can't find it in my head. Oh, well, if it's any good I'll think of it again and meantime I still haven't filed that issue of Fortean Times, so let's see what else we've got.

Ah, here's something for those of us with World-Builder Disease: World's Oldest (so far) Pottery found in China, about 20,000 years old. It's about eight inches deep and six to ten inches in diameter. The picture shows a plain terra cotta colored sherd with ridges in it, though I don't know enough about pottery to guess whether they're decoration or tell something about the manufacturing process.

The reason this is a big deal, of course, is that traditionally pottery has been assumed to have been invented in agricultural societies, of which there were exactly none 20,000 years Before Present. Hunter-gatherer societies were assumed to be mobile (an assumption increasingly questioned these days) and pottery is bulky and fragile to move around a lot. However, I doubt I'm the only person not particularly surprised. Archeologists are constantly turning up artifacts and evidence that challenge and even disprove their assumptions; and news sources are constantly overstating the firmness and universality of those assumptions, too.

For one thing, Catal Hoyuk is a pre-agricultural city, though it is Neolithic. Hard as it is for us to imagine a permanent urban settlement without a sizable rural agricultural support infrastructure, the evidence is right there in Turkey.

For another, this is far from the oldest ceramic found. Some Paleolitchic "Venus figurines" are made of fired clay and are older than this pottery. Furthermore, evidence of cooking practices that could easily act as gateways to the discoveries necessary to make ceramic pots and pans a reality is abundant and non-controversial. Humans have used earth ovens (basically digging a pit and filling it with hot coals) and baskets, which can be lined to make them waterproof, for millenia. Probably for about as long as we've been cooking; which, since we can't maintain breeding weight on a raw-food diet and have evolutionary adaptations suitable for living primarily on cooked foods, must have been a very long time, possibly since before we were homo sapiens.

Which is all scientifically very interesting, but what does it do for a storyteller?

Why, what but give us a viable platform for imagining unique settings for our stories? Whether science fiction, fantasy, or historical, we tend to default to a handful of tropes when depicting alien societies, but this is far from necessary. What was prepared or served in that pottery (Alcohol? Soup? Porridge? Candy?)? Who prepared it? Who invented it? On what occasions - special or mundane - was it used? Imagining all this gives us a chance to free ourselves from our imaginative ruts. Maybe you don't have the patience or skills to do the research (much of it probably in Chinese archeological journals) necessary to reconstruct the society the produced the pottery; but that doesn't stop you from imagining a hunter-gatherer society unlike any ever imagined before, putting it on an extrasolar planet, and landing a spaceship in the middle of it. It doesn't stop you from imagining a magical world of hunting-gathering kingdoms in which witches use pottery vessels to brew up either trouble or solutions to problems.

Writers who have also worked in ceramics may have practical knowledge that makes the whole question of when and how pottery was first made look very different than how it looks from an academic angle. Someone outside a discipline may have difficulty trying to introduce a valid insight into the discussion; may not know how to express that insight properly, or who to express it to. But encapsulating that insight into a story - now, that's quite another matter. That's a way to get your own ideas out into the public discourse without feeling arrogant or risking rejection. Everyone responds to story imagery, if it's done well.

Fiction writers can and do change the discussion. It is not through publications in scientific journals that we see the past, but through stories written using that material - or, all too often, ignoring it. Fiction writers can speculate where archeologists can't. Fiction writers can take a potsherd and build a convincing world; and their audiences, including archeologists, can stretch their minds into new shapes around that world, and see new possibilities in the evidence.

Maybe even, by that roundabout way, enable themselves to make the hypothesis that eventually wins out over the others to become enshrined as fact.

Don't laugh. It happens. Our minds work that way.

Blatantly copy-pasting from the SFWA website:
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

Iron Hearted Violet, Kelly Barnhill (Little, Brown)
Black Heart, Holly Black (S&S/McElderry; Gollancz)
Above, Leah Bobet (Levine)
The Diviners, Libba Bray (Little, Brown; Atom)
Vessel, Sarah Beth Durst (S&S/McElderry)
Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (Random House; Doubleday UK)
Enchanted, Alethea Kontis (Harcourt)
Every Day, David Levithan (Alice A. Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Summer of the Mariposas, Guadalupe Garcia McCall (Tu Books)
Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
Fair Coin, E.C. Myers (Pyr)
Above World, Jenn Reese (Candlewick)

Holey cheese, I've even read two of these already! (In italics.)

Running my eyes over the list, my bet is on the China Mieville because he's a name that will be familiar to the adult readership. But I also expect that to be the book I like least. David Levithan's will be the funniest. Beyond that, I'll have to read them, won't I? Oh, good, a project.

Idea Garage Dale? I was in a hurry yesterday, wasn't I?

The e-version of Sullivan, That Summer is available from the publisher now and will go out to distributors next week.

In case, you know, you want to buy one. (I have good reasons for not working in advertising.)

This post doubles as a test of the setup for mirroring the blog at the appropriate Facebook site.

Before we begin, please, I would like to appeal to anybody out there who knows how to update Facebook with this blog to contact me and tell me how it's done. Because I know people do this sort of thing, but neither I nor the person who helped me set up pages for Sullivan and me can figure it out.

All right, on to the regularly scheduled Garage Sale and since I have a new Fortean Times again, I'll go back to that bottomless well, Human Weirdness. I open it at random and find myself faced with the Strange Days feature. A man who has licked every cathedral in the British Isles on a bet. A naked "Texas Wildman" who lives in a cave in "the hills" (a phrase which conjures up completely inaccurate pictures of the landscape in question) around El Paso, living by donating blood and recycling cans, who harasses hikers and puts out dead snakes as food for wildlife. Hmm...A Japanese man whose library cards were washed away by the March 2011 tsunami hopes someone on the west coast of the US will find and return them...Holey Cheese, an empty 28-foot yacht with no identification markings, a tidy cabin, and Dutch sea charts, recovered about six miles from a nuclear power plant in Suffolk. And the world's oldest parrot, Tarbu, dead at age 55.

Not surprisingly, given the structure of the Strange Days features, each of these news snippets lacks an important feature necessary to the production of a full-fledged story; but each of them has potential. Taking them in order:

With the cathedral-licking story (the feature for the page, with a full column of text and two pictures) we have an attention-getting, but largely pointless, story. A bet is not, in and of itself, sufficient motivation for odd behavior for a story. Something else needs to be going on for this to be a good novel; probably the licker's character arc. And a character arc is implied by his reluctance to claim the original forfeit for the bet, which was that the friend who made the challenge streak outside York Minster. This now seems disrespectful, and he's likely to change the terms to a monetary contribution to York Minster. Yes, something could be done with it; and something has, and possibly will be, as he has a blog on the subject and considers writing a book. Therefore, the rest of us need to keep our hands off of this until it's undergone a chemical change in the compost heaps of our brains and produced something that won't infringe on his intellectual property rights in the matter of his own life.

Moving on to the "Texas Wildman," what we have here is, on the face of it, only another homeless person with mental issues, and most of the mystery and intrigue of the situation would probably vanish if we knew more about it. The fact that the snippet is credited to the Sydney MX News rather than any closer news source would seem to indicate that the people who live near him find him more annoying and/or pitiable than interesting. This is not unusual, as the poor of distant places, for whose welfare one cannot by any stretch of the imagination be made responsible, are often exotic and mysterious, while those who live close by are a mere itch in the conscience we would rather not notice. Given that poverty and inadequate public mental health provisions are not readily soluble problems, what we have here is a character without a plot. The plot, however, could be generated by an unflinching imaginative exploration of the character. Is the assumption of mental issues true, to begin with, or does he in fact have rational, functional reasons for his behavior? If he does, what are they, and where do they take him? Who are the other characters in his life - family, friends and ex-friends, the hikers (does he truly harass them, or do they feel harassed by his mere existence?), the owner or representative of the owner of the land on which he lives? Perhaps it's family land. Perhaps he owns it. What about the snakes? Does he wear clothes to cash in his recycling and give blood? How do the staff at the plasma center feel about him? You start answering questions like that and investigating the difficulties of the life he's leading, you'll find yourself a story, I promise you.

The Japanese man with the library cards is a character without a story; an optimist, or someone with no concept of scale. You couldn't stop with the library cards for this person. You'd have to show him in action, moving through mundane life at a completely different level than those people around him - ridiculous, maybe annoying, maybe endearing - and make some kind of point about the disconnect between expectation and reality. I wonder what would happen if his life trajectory intersected that of the man in the cave? Or the cathedral licker's?

And then the Marine Mystery, oh boy! What we have here is a teaser leading nowhere, the mystery rather than the solution, a nearly blank slate. A writing prompt, in fact. First, you'd have to decide from which direction to tackle the situation - will you be telling the story of the people who created the mystery, or of people who come upon it after the fact and uncover that story? Either way, you need to work out what happened. Is the nearby nuclear plant relevant, or a red herring? Are we talking a supernatural mystery, a thriller, or a personal tragedy? What are the implications of the lack of identification on the vessel? What maritime laws are broken here; what maritime customs make sense of this or that feature that merely puzzles a landlubber?

The 55-year-old parrot, who said "Hello, my darling" to his owner every morning, is a character without a story. Unless, of course, you put him alone on that empty yacht... Read the rest of this post

Another thing Mr. Lewis said in his keynote, and which he considered so important that he actually said: "Write this down," was "Never compete with the imagination of the child." He was addressing the picture book illustrator particularly, but it can also apply to the tendency of writers to overexplain.

Not explicitly stated, but demonstrated during the "first impressions" panel, is that the writer and illustrator must not compete with each other. More than one picture book text was too wordy and left nothing for the illustrator to do, while illustrations were cluttered with unnecessary details that detracted from the overall effect and were probably better explained in text or left up to the reader to supply. A picture book text and illustrations will ideally work together without redundancy, so they have to trust each other and not step on one another's lines, as well as trusting the audience to get the point without a big textual or illustrative hand emphasizing it. This is one of the reasons why the picture book is the most difficult artistic medium to master.

I'm not given to flat statements of fact on subjective matters, or hierarchical arrangements of anything; but I think "The picture book is the most difficult artistic medium to master" is as near as nothing a statement of fact, not opinion, and anybody who thinks differently should try it. But that is by the way.

Anyway, it occurs to me that the point here is that we all have to trust our collaborators in the creative process. And we all have collaborators, unless we hoard our talent and never let an audience at it. The audience changes the art.

It's like the observer effect in science (I think, if I understand that effect correctly.) The most perfectly-designed experiment has to be observed, recorded, and interpreted before anything can be learned from it; and the act of observing, recording, and interpreting changes the result in subtle, unquantifiable ways. That's something scientists can't get rid of and just have to live with and work around as best they can.

Artists do have a way out of releasing their work to be changed willy-nilly by any old person who happens along; but the price of it is too high. Art that no one looks at is art you fully control, but - what's the point? Unless somebody somewhere sings your song, dances your dance, plays your game, reads your book, eats your meal, or sits in your garden, it might as well not exist.

Which means that we have to be prepared to relinquish control; and that starts when we leave room in the creative process for the audience and our other collaborators - the people who play the instruments as well as the people who listen to the symphony.

When we resist the temptation to compete with the imaginations of the children.

I'm finding Facebook a lot less intuitive than I expected. Therefore, there's nothing on it and I haven't invited anybody to be friends.

For the record, I will not be your neighbor on Farmville and if you invite me to play Sims Social I will explain to you exactly why it is Not Real Sims. So don't even go there.

So far this week all the social networking I've done involved going to the SCBWI conference in Austin. I drove up the night before, stayed overnight with friends, and as usual left not long after the raffle to come straight home. In between, though I had a good day. Especially compared to the last time I attended this conference at this place, when I had to simultaneously cope with Moby's brakes and steering letting me down pretty badly. I saw people I only see at conferences, met a person I only know from online, bought Cyn Smith's most recent book about the supernatural scene in Austin, Feral Nights (you'll never know how menacing a werearmadillo can be till you read this, I tell you what), attended panels and breakout sessions, bid at the silent auction, and all that good stuff.

I often say that I don't know anything about art, not even what I like; which is probably why my favorite parts of the conference involved listening to illustrator E.B. Lewis talk about the visual language used in picture books. Possibly because he was a teacher and a fine artist before he became an illustrator and was used to thinking and speaking analytically about art as well seeing and feeling analytically about it - these are separate skills for all the creative arts; many excellent artists can't explain why this or that work in their art does or doesn't succeed - he was able to discuss both the various pictures of his own that he used in his presentation, and the submitted portfolio pieces in the "First Impressions" panel in terms I could actually follow.

Make no mistake about it - the trained eye sees (and the trained ear hears) differently than the untrained one. I look at a picture with human figures and think that they're stiff; Lewis looks at it and says that the artist needs to decide whether his voice is stylized or realistic, because if the one then this is where to focus effort and if the other then that is.

It would never have occurred to me to think of an artistic voice in a visual medium, either; but once he started talking about it I started being able to hear it. And choosing between stylization and realism - writers have to do that, too, though I hadn't put it in those terms before. For all I know, so do musicians. It's certainly at the heart of the art of gaming.

I do not know how useful, in the long run, this sort of cross-medium enlightenment is, but I know it's refreshing, and I know it can't be useless. So I'm going to call that a weekend well-spent.

So anyway Friday afternoon I drove up to Austin to stay overnight with some friends prior to attending the SCBWI conference in Austin, and we went out to eat at Kerby Lane. I of course showed them the cover for Sullivan, and remembered during supper that I've been saying for ages that I'd get on Facebook when I had a book to promote, so now I need to hurry up about it. So I got advice on how to keep it from eating my life.

My friends had also, the previous day, been to an event for The Apes of Wrath, an anthology of great ape stories edited by Richard Klaw, including Poe, and Robert E. Howard, and James P. Blaylock. At some point in the course of conversation, one of us made a joking remark about how hard it had been resurrecting Poe and Howard and the other dead authors on the list to get a contribution.

But the really hard party, I realized, would be getting any decent work out of Poe once he discovered the internet.

See, Poe did not die poor and alone because he was an alcoholic, or a tormented genius, or any of that. He did so at least partly because he frittered away a vast amount of his talent, energy, and editorial capital in the 19th-century version of flamewars. He was a harsh literary critic of others and could not leave an argument alone.

This was no more unusual in the 19th century than it is now; newspaper editors, in particular, wasted a lot of ink in vituperative attacks on each other. But at least in the 19th century this sort of thing was limited in the damage it could do to a life by the pace of composition, publication, and response. You wrote your screed, you sent it to press, and then you could do something productive for a little while, and once it appeared, savor the unanswerability of your remarks for the time it took your opponent(s) to write their screeds and get them through the press. Whereas now, of course, you sling your mud at a Facebook wall, or through Twitter, or onto a newsgroup, and before you have time to shift gears not one but a dozen idiots, hacks, demagogues, and illogical evildoers have demolished all your perfectly-reasoned, balanced, and above all justified zingers with the hatchet of their blunt and inferior wits. So then you have to demolish them in turn and suddenly the day is gone.

The concept of Poe with a Facebook page, Twitter feed, online news outlets with enabled comments, etc., is not at all a bad one for a satire. If you happen to enjoy Poe's style particularly, you could have a lot of fun writing it.

Poe's style gives me a bit of a headache, personally; and flamewars give me a huge one. My approach to them is to walk away.

Which is a big help to my personal life, but not at all funny for the onlooker.

And, believe me, when you think you're making your most cogent points in a flamewar? That's when people who don't like you are laughing at you the hardest, while the people who love you are rolling their eyes and wishing you'd consider your blood pressure.

Another month, another Fortean Times full of potential waiting to be developed.

This month, I find an article on "ghost mobs," detailing the common 19th-century English occurrence of huge mobs of people on the lookout for ghosts - in cemeteries, in supposedly haunted neighborhoods connected to infamous crimes, outside buildings plagued by poltergeists, and so on.

Clearly related to other forms of mass hysteria such as UFO or cryptid flaps, the significant features of these ghost mobs were that they were overwhelmingly made up of poor people, that they focused on ghosts, and that they caused a good deal of trouble to the police. When 2000 people show up outside a single supposedly haunted house, it's a serious hindrance to traffic even before people start picking each other's pockets, drinking, and jostling for the best view of nothing at all.

Of course very few of these people ever even thought they got to see the ghost that attracted them. In 1834, a party of men climbed over a wall into a cemetery to confront the ghost, which turned out to be a woman guarding her son's grave against bodysnatchers - which raises the question, What if some of those supposed ghosts were in fact bodysnatchers? Very bad for business, ghost mobs.

Some of the mobs happened in response to a hoax - the classic "kids in sheets" meme seems to have its origin here - and some ended in tragedy. In 1803, a bricklayer, dressed in his trade's traditional garb of white linen pants, white flannel vest, and a white apron, had to come and go from work through a supposedly haunted area and was molested by curiosity seekers, some of whom were deterred when he threatened to punch them in the head, but others of whom, in one of those terrible combinations of alcohol, guns, bragging, and mass psychosis, killed him. His killers were ultimately pardoned, which I can't help considering a gross miscarriage of justice, despite the undoubted truth that no one participating in such a mob can be said to be entirely in his right mind. No one made them bring a gun to a ghost hunt!

Ghosts or no ghosts, we have the makings of quite a head-spinning mystery or thriller here. Whether it's a historical depends on exactly which elements one finds most intriguing. We have plenty of mobs, mass hysteria, and tragic juxtapositions of guns and alcohol in modern times to work with, and bringing the bricklayer's case forward 200 years might be illuminating. However, what I see when I look at this article is an historical mystery, beginning with a couple of bodysnatchers serving the medical cadaver trade staging a haunting in one place to draw attention away from their areas of operation, and ending with one of them in the dissection theater himself, having lost control of his own hoax.

Because no one can ride a mob. The mob rides everyone.

Late today, because the computer was sick - needed a new power supply. I've been writing a blog post in my head all day, but it seems to be two posts intertwined and I'm not sure I can separate them out enough. And it's late and I feel crappy, so I'll take the shortest component I can tease out.

I've remarked more than once on the difference between brains and their capacities at different periods of our lives. The advantage of the mature brain is that, though it has trouble learning brand new things, if it was trained well during its early years, it doesn't have to; it can recognize commonalities between this new thing it's doing and that old thing that it's done before, a hundred different times, in a hundred different guises.

But I was reminded again this weekend that you can't afford to get cocky about that. Not, at any rate, in any creative activity. Because each time you do it is different.

In this case, it was the slacks. I cut the waistband too small. As far as I could (or can) tell, I cut it exactly the same size as I did last time I made that pattern, and I can still wear the slacks I made that time; but I could barely get into the new ones and they would not have been comfortable to wear. Either I'd marked the pattern wrong, or something was different about the fabric, or - something. This morning I recut them (this is why I always buy at least half an extra yard of fabric; it leaves me with a varied stack of remnants too small to make a garment of, but it gives me lots of room to make mistakes) and now they fit, at last.

But I've found the same thing with other projects. This or that rhetorical trick, structural element, viewpoint, whatever, worked last time I wrote a story; but it won't work for this one. I can fight it, or I can try something different. I worked well with this editor on that book, but she's not right for this one. The greatest sonneteer in the world will write a bad sonnet if the poem in question is really a haiku.

You've got to work with what you've got, not with what you used last time.

Just because you know how to do something, doesn't mean you'll do it right this time.

The mature brain can't make much in the way of new synapses; but it can still be flexible.

When I was researching 11,000 Years Lost, specifically when I was looking into the floral and faunal assemblages of the period so my hunter/gatherers could be hunting and gathering, avoiding and encountering, the right range of living things, I saw a book on a top shelf called Ducks Discover America. Oh, boy! A natural history of ducks in the Western Hemisphere? How and when and why they evolved, migrated, emigrated, immigrated, mingled with Old World Ducks around the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, interacted with other species including humans - what could be better?

When I managed, with much labor, to elevate myself to the top shelf (short in a tall world; life is rough), that wasn't what it was. I don't remember what it was; only I had misread the title and it was no good to me at all.

But I wanted to read the book that belongs to that title. And my desire has not diminished.

Some ornithologist/paleontologist go write it, please.

I'll wait.

Not patiently, but I'll wait.

Yesterday was Award Day at the American Library Association Convention, and guess what? I haven't read any of the awards or honors.

Yet.

I'm particularly anxious to read Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which took both a Belpre and a Stonewall.

And it should surprise no one that Katherine Paterson landed the Wilder Award. It was never a question of "whether," with her, but of "when."

I no longer kick myself about not having read the award books before the awards are announced. It takes an on-the-ball reader to keep up with the industry as it comes out, and I'm not that person. Wasn't even in my young vigorous days. I'm a serendipitous reader who reads what she finds and finds what she reads - it's all contingency with me. Readers like me are why awards exist to begin with - they increase the contingency of books. Not just the award winners, either. Buzz beforehand increases contingency; the public guessing games of the on-the-ball. Sharing your favorite reads of the year is just so much more urgent in the lead-up to award season.

Another thing came to my mailbox yesterday: an e-mail prodding participants in the Paleoamerican Odyssey Conference in October to get their poster presentations in. I, of course, have no poster and will be going as an interested layman. But I'll be a very interested layman indeed, listening in on the conversations of people whose names became familiar to me in the books and articles I read while researching 11,000 Years Lost. I haven't been able to do avocational archeology since the Health Crap really kicked in, but by golly, I can sit in an air-conditioned lecture room with the best of them! Just thought I'd mention it here to increase the contingency factor. I'm sure many more people would like to go to this, than would find out about it in the normal courses of their daily lives.

And though ALA is all about books, it is an interesting fact that the floors of scholarly conferences are littered with more story ideas to trip over than those of literary ones. Because what you're coming across in the floor of a convention that's about books is ideas that other people have already turned into books of the sort you want to write. Scholarly conferences are all about the ideas no one has thought to put into your medium yet.

In other words, they're vast smorgasbords of yummy, yummy inspiration.

No, not the zipper (though I have now put in three in a row on the first try - it pays to do it again before you forget how); the Garage Sale!

Andrew May took the Mechanical Gorilla notion, merged it with the hoax Bigfoot killed on the side of the road, and produced a funny, pulpy tale of mad science, appropriately called The Mechanical Gorilla. Available in electronic format. Check it out.

I'm, like, a literary godmother, or aunt, or something.

My very favorite sentence, from sane-sounding scientist Dr. Azuma: "That would violate Cambridge Town Council's strict regulations vis-a-vis the utilization of combat robots in a peacetime urban environment." That's a whole lotta world-building, right there.

So I'm wondering - where are the queer literary takes on Shakespeare?

Recasting the culture's iconic literature to highlight the characters and concepts present, but not truly represented, in the original is a standard way of establishing a dialog between broad culture and individual experience, questioning received wisdom, or even just jolting modern audiences into seeing the classic work as relevant to modern day concerns. It doesn't often produce great literature (What do you think, is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead great? How about West Side Story?) but hey, what does? Nobody's surprised to see feminist glosses of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet with interracial casts.

The queer thing just seems so obvious. Think of all the cross-dressing in the comedies! Think of all the female parts - great female parts, Lady Macbeth and Juliet and Beatrice - first played by prepubescent boys in drag! Think of the characterization of the Duke and Olivia in Twelfth Night! Twelfth Night's genderbending creates such violent emotional reversals in the final scene that I found it a useful work to reference in the lesbian western. Len speds part of her scant income on it first of all the unfamiliar Shakespeare plays available to her in the bookstores of San Antonio because of the extended cross-dressing, hoping Viola's story will give her useful hints. She's disappointed in that; but it enables her to have an illuminating conversation with Di, so her money is not wasted.

But shouldn't there be, somewhere, a text exploring the situation with the possibility of same-sex pair-bonding not assumed away by magic hand-waving?

Where is the queer version of Romeo and Juliet? I can't believe there isn't one.

Maybe they exist and can't find publishers due to the continued squeamishness of the industry, or distaste for the ways the news media can be expected to react to them. If so, and someone reading this is the author of such a thing, listen up: This is the age of the niche market. If you can't get it over the transom to the mainstream houses, look farther.

Stupider concepts have seen print.

But for pity's sake, do it well.

I just sent off the galleys for Sullivan, That Summer and got a final of the cover in return. Not bad for a stock photo, huh?