Now that it’s summer and school is out of the way, I figured I’d get back into it.  And I’ve learned something.  Something very interesting, but also a bit disappointing: As an unpublished writer in the authosphere, the period between becoming involved and having learned what you can learn is very short.  It’s the honeymoon phase of being a blog reader.  Everything is new and wonderful, and you can’t get enough.   There’s always something else to discover.

Right after my discovery of the writerly blog community, I went crazy.  I searched all over the web, followed all the links I could find, read every post.  And for two years, there was plenty to keep me going.  But towards the end of that period, I began to find that very few of the new posts on my favorite blogs were really relevant to me.  All the things about reading blogs I had once enjoyed now felt tawdry and dull.  I had seen it all before.

I was beyond the point where blogs could be a useful resource to me purely as a writer.  There was still plenty of scandal and gossip to entertain me, still reasons enough to hang around, looking at old photos, reliving a few of the best memories.  But it wasn’t enough to hold me there.  After our little break-up, I would occasionally log into my reader, scroll through a few posts when I had nothing else to do.  Once or twice I even spent a few days going through every unread post.  But then I would get bored again, and move on to some other, more exciting activity.

And now coming back after more than a year of not reading blogs and articles and writing sites, I find that that still holds true.  I tend to scroll past most posts, every now and then opening something interesting in a new tab.  But not too many new tabs, because the information isn’t all that new to me anymore.  I’ve seen the same posts a hundred times before.

But I want that feeling back.  I enjoyed tearing through entire new blogs in a day or two, learning a secret with every scroll.  And there’s still stuff I want to learn about, approach in greater depth.  But blogs are a somewhat shallow medium.  There’s only so much discussion you can have, at least with other people’s blogs.  I often feel a bit weird responding with what are essentially entire blogs posts of my own.

For that reason, I hope to be much more active here at the Chimney, but I know it’s going to be rough going.  Because one of the primary ways to encourage discussion on your own blog is to contribute to the discussion on someone else’s.  And yet I feel like I wasted all my energy for such discussions, and now I find it very hard to come up with anything constructive, because you can only have the same discussion so many times before you have nothing left to say.

I’m a bit curious as to the turnover rate on blog readers.  Being back now, I see many of the same commentors on the various blogs I follow that I saw when I first discovered those blogs.  I wonder how they’ve managed to stay engaged.  Maybe they don’t follow as many blogs as I did.  Maybe they stick to one or two, or have other activities and interests that limit their time in the blogosphere.  Maybe these topics that I find so passe are still fresh to them.  If so, I envy them their interest.  I wish I knew where mine has gone.

The example she uses is a poem called The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The poem is literally about a man who dies while working as a gunner on a bomber aircraft during WWII.  Massey’s professor claims the poem is metaphorically about humanity’s tendency to war and violence.  She herself believed it was about the man’s lonely death which was considered no more than a mess to be cleaned up when the plane returned to base.

I side with Massey.  That’s exactly what the poem was about.  But consider when it was written.  The poem was published in 1945, and likely written even earlier–during WWII.  Which could indeed have been described as a “never-ending spiral towards war and violence.”  Certainly no one could argue that that is the context of the poem.  But that doesn’t make it the meaning.

As writers, we may or may not be aware of the explicit context of our work.  We may or may not be using our work to intentionally highlight that context.  But even if we are, it’s incorrect and arrogant to assume this is the case.  The professor in Massey’s story was in fact wrong.  Not in his facts perhaps, but in his presentation of them.  Human language is far more reliant on presentation to convey its meaning than many people seem to realize, and a failure to consider the implications of that presentation is at the root of much of the disagreement and conflict we encounter in our society.

Like a lot of readers, I have a long TBR list full of great books I wish I had the time to get around to reading.  A surprising number of those books I learned about online.  Many in forums, but an equally large, or perhaps larger number from reading blogs.  I can’t say for sure how many I learned about directly from the author’s own web presence.  I’m sure a large number were recommended by other members of the online writing community.

I think that the majority of books I learn about through social media I learn of through the community as a whole, which includes writers pimping other writers’ books, but not a lot of writers pimping their own books.  So it becomes hard to say whether web presence by a specific author has an influence on the sale of their books.  Even in terms of my own buying experience.

What I can tell you is that I’ve bought a lot more books of recommendations or browsing the bookstore than I’ve bought books off my TBR list recommended by social media.  There are plenty of books I’ve decided I want to read, but once I’m away from the internet, I forget titles or just am not exposed to enough immediate incentive to buy them, even if I loved them when reading about them on a blog or twitter feed.

In my experience social media definitely generates interest, but I can’t say that it’s actually gotten books out of the store and into my hands.

It’s something I greatly regret, and I always plan to make a stronger effort next time, but it does seem to be the reality that a strong web presence is not enough to generate actual sales.

Feliz Navidad

Buon Natale

Joyeux Noel

ﾒﾘｰｸﾘｽｱｽ

God Jul

메리 크리스마스

Hyvää Joulua

Gleđileg jól

С Рождеством!

Feliz Natal

Wesołych Świąt!

and Happy Solstice!

But the concept of privilige is so much more wide-spread than that.

There are all sorts of little ways in which we judge people, and all of these involve privilige, sometimes they are tied into bigger chunks of privilige.  And sometimes it’s just this one little thing, and because you can’t tie it into a larger idea of privilige, you classify this person as less because of it.  There are all sorts of things that fall into this category.  Using a credit card at the store, writing a check, how to hug somebody properly.

And I know that if everyone in the world read my post, many of them would be saying:  “What do you mean ‘hugging somebody properly’?  You just hug them.  How could you not know how to hug someone?”  But hugging is a learned behavior.  You learned how to hug people during some period of time (if you have learned how to), likely when you were growing up.

And so when you go to hug your 21-year-old roommate, or girlfriend, or cousin, or friend, and they pull back, or are a limp fish, or manufacture some excuse not to hug you, just consider: maybe they don’t hate you, maybe they aren’t secretly angy, maybe they don’t not care about you, maybe they aren’t planning to break up with you, stop being friends, or whatever else.  Maybe they just didn’t grow up in a household where they learned how to hug.  Or maybe the reason they’ve never been in physical contact with you is because due to something in their life, they associate physical contact with negative feelings or treatment.

The same thing goes for writing a check, or making an appointment with a doctor, or anything else.  Maybe they didn’t get a bank account when they were sixteen to keep their birthday money, or their trustfund.  Maybe they don’t know how to call a doctor because they didn’t have money for medical care.  This person is probably already feeling awkward, or scared, or like shit, because they know they don’t know how to do this thing.  And they know how people are going to react.  I’m sure most people have seen this happen.  “How do you not know how to use a computer?”  “Anybody knows the “A” button means “yes”.  “How can you not work a dish-washer?”  “Dude, how hard is it to order a drink at the bar?”  “What?  You can’t read?  Are you stupid or something?”  “You can’t ride a horse?  What the fuck have you been doing with your life?”

Some of these things we already associate with privilige.  Some of them we feel are bigger problems, and desverve more sympathy.  But what they have in common is they are all learned behaviors.  Do you know why this person doesn’t know how to do that thing?  Because they didn’t have someone to teach them how.  You know how to do it because someone taught you, or you learned yourself.  But even if you did learn yourself, guess what?  This person is going through exactly what you went through:  watching other people do this thing while trying not to be too obvious, covering up the fact that they don’t know how and hoping they won’t be found out, feeling like shit because how dumb must they be to not be able to do something everyone else seems to know how to do, and knowing that if they are found out, that’s exactly the question other people are going to ask about them.

Now, I’m only here to preach at you a little bit.  I do actually have a writing-related point to this.  When you’re trying to figure out how a character would act in a given situation, or what they might reasonably know how to do, consider:  What skills would they be in a position to learn?  Did they cook the dinner in their house as a kid?  Did they have spending money?  Are they familiar with physical forms of affection?  If their parents don’t trust them with money, there’s a good chance they won’t know how to write a check or use a credit card.

Perhaps more relevant: How might they react to what other people can do?  What do they see as common life skills?  What do they see as a common reaction to a situation?  Someone who butchers their own animals for meat might see being scared of blood as weak and a personal failing.  Someone with rich parents and a trust fund might be surprised to find a friend doesn’t know how to pay with a credit card, or order in a fancy restaurant.  Someone with an old hand-me-down for a car might be curl their lip at a rich kid who needs a mechanic to check their oil.

All of those are pretty obvious examples.  But your characters will have specific set of prejudices and abilties, based on their background and social group and living situation.  And if these factors don’t match up with what your character actually knows or can do, I’m going to be very suspicious.  The same for if they are mysteriously blind to various forms of privilige when they shouldn’t be, or aware of them when their background doesn’t explain why.  And I’m going to wonder if maybe you as the author are blind to this privilige.  I’m unlikely to judge you personally for this, but I’m not going to have any sympathy when someone else calls you out.  Because as a writer, this is something I expect you to know.  Writers research all kinds of things during the course of writing a book, and privilige in all its forms is something you damn well better be aware of if you want to portray the real world accurately and fairly.

Here’s a very incomplete list of why I am a terrible person:

1.  I am a hypocrite.  I do not stand up for what I believe in.  I let people say racist things, and sexist things, and just plain terrible things.  I laugh when people say these things.  I say these things.  I have told racist jokes, and sexist jokes, and Hellen Keller jokes.  Even though I knew they were wrong.  Because if I held to every principle I believe in, I would be very alone.  Most of my friends would not be friends with me anymore.  Most of my family would refuse to talk to me.  Many of the people I stood up for would blame me for making their lives harder.  And it is very easy to say that maybe I should find different friends.  Well, I have an excuse for that, too:

2.  I am pathetic.  I don’t make friends easily.  I am shy, I have severe social anxiety, and most of the time I can’t understand for the life of me why anyone would want to talk to me at all, much less be friends with me.  And so I am willing to bend my rules quite a bit to keep from losing a friend.

I once had a huge fight with a friend of mine.  It was one of many such fights.  He made a comment about me on Facebook in response to a status that had exactly zero to do with him.  It was rude, and irrelevant, and I still don’t really understand why he said it.  And he had been following me around facebook making similar comments in similar contexts for several days before.  That comment struck a nerve like a planet-killing asteroid, and so I called him on it.  But I didn’t want to ruffle feathers.  Not everything he says is like that.  Not everything he says makes me want to break his nose with a violin case.  So, I pretended like it wasn’t a huge deal.  I called him out with a joke.  And so of course he refused to listen.  So I called him out again, more strongly.  And he got mad.  We started trading shots back in forth and he ended up, in complete seriousness, threatening to beat the shit out of me the next time we met.  And he could.  He could drop me on the floor in three seconds flat.  He gets in lots of fights, and there’s usually broken bones involved.

I am never completely innocent.  I have done things I believe are wrong, I have trapped myself.  If I tell someone I think they have done something wrong, they can point to all of the times I have done that thing, and no matter what excuse I have, and I have many, it is never enough, and so I shut my mouth and agree that I am wrong and that I have no right to criticize, and I apologize for calling them out for their words and actions, and I tell them that what they have done is okay.

I’m still not sure I wouldn’t deserve it if he beat the shit out of me.  I said some pretty bad things to him in the course of that argument.  But, what I was sure of, was that I didn’t want to lose this person as a friend.  And so, even though I believed that he was at fault, and I still would have clocked him if we had been face-to-face and he said one more thing, I apologized, and I let him work me around until I ended up taking all the blame, and he had only responded as any sane person would.  And I felt it was completely worth it, and I would do it again in a second.  Because if our friendship got trashed, it would have caused major damage to several other relationships, which I also didn’t want to lose, even if he chose not to be vindictive about it.

3.  I am selfish.  The status quo sucks, but because I am a white, hetero-sexual, American male, I can look at all of the acts which violate my beliefs and say: “This does not affect me.  It does not make my life harder.  But opposing it would; and because I am selfish, and I like having friends, and not being treated like a freak, I will put up with and even participate in these things in order to maintain my current position.

4.  I am a coward.  My position is not perfect.  I have money problems, and I get bullied, and I have no idea what the fuck I am doing, and I feel like shit every day for giving in to peer pressure, and sometimes I wish I could just go to sleep and not wake up in the morning.  But things could be worse.  They could be a lot worse.  And one of the things that would make them worse is standing up for what I believe is right.  And so I will not do it.  Because I am afraid of what would happen if I did.

And all of those things make me hate myself.  But clearly not enough to do anything about it.  And that’s why I say I am a terrible person.

Now, this is a writing blog.  I said it was a writing blog.  You expect it to be a writing blog.  The obvious connection to writing here is flawed but symapthetic but realistic characters.  A realistic character will not have a good reason for everything they do.  They will do things that conflict with their beliefs.  They will do things that conflict their society’s beliefs.  And they must absolutely do something that conflicts with the readers’ beliefs–because otherwise their flaw is no flaw.  Their reasons for doing these things will range from righteous to deplorable.  People will disagree over whether their actions are justified.  But if you want the character to be sympathetic, these actions must be understandable.  And in much of the fiction I have read, whether speculative, or mainstream, or YA, I don’t see people doing these things, and it really takes the tension out of the story.  Your hero does some horrible thing and I am about to have a fascinating moral debate with myself–but wait!  A god revives all the people he killed, or it turns out that things were not as they seemed and the hero is completely justified, or maybe he got so far as picking the lesser of two objective evils.  And so I can’t possibly fault his decision, and all that angst you built up on the way to this climax falls flatter than a week-old glass of coke.  And all the sympathy for the character and the terrible choice they had to make vanishes, and I want to throw your book against the wall, or maybe smack you in the back of the head with it.  Bad Aurthor!  And then I will go leave a scathing review on Goodreads or Amazon, because the one thing I do have the guts to stick up for is protecting readers from a shitty book.

1.  Is responding to a review ever a good idea?

2.  Are you happy when you’re not writing?

3.  Epic Fantasy is what?

4.  Things You Should Learn From Writing

5.  How Selling a Book Really Is

6.  FanFic is fun, whether you’re writing it or arguing about it.

7.  How Good Writing Can Still Make a Bad Book

8.  Starting a Book?  It Might Help to Know the Endgame

9.  Your Agent Rocks, but She Isn’t Wonder Woman

10.  If I Had a Jam Jar as Big as #8, I’d probably go ahead and fill a swimming pool with jam.

11.  If you wanna get a record deal, you gotta do coke.

12.  Distractions, baby.  I love ‘em.

13.  How Do You Feel the World?

14.  Writers and readers are characters, too.  Don’t let anyone tell you they aren’t.

15.  Why One Character is Never Enough

16.  Revise, Rinse, and Repeat

17.  Good descriptions, but I’ve never been a fan of mixing genres and age categories.

18.  Samuel’s Real Skinny on Self-Publishing

19.  A Path to Publishing with Bookends, LLC

20.  Life doesn’t happen to us, we happen to life.  And it isn’t always pretty.

21.  Sex, Genetic Determinism, and James Tiptree Jr

22.  Men read romance, too.  Considering her blog, I’m considering buying this book.  Internet marketing works, people.

23.  If only SFF authors wrote posts like this, they would sell a lot more books.

24.  Still don’t like it.

25.  I love my state.

26.  More bullshit about social networking.

27.  Literary writing is still literary.

28.  Young authors are great, and I’d love to see more.  But old folks still got game.

29.  Chick lit is still lit people.  Deal with it.

30.  How long will books and movies stay on their own sides of the line?  Alternate endings are…?

31.  Inciting incidents and authorial experience.  Do established authors get more slack?  Do they deserve to?

32.  Can you be a dummy and write YA?  That’s what the title of a book by this lovely lady says.

33.  Writing Tips from a Dark Future.

34.  Short Story Submission

35.  A link to a list of Marketing Links I stole from Sierra Godfrey.

36.  Short stories are not novels, Mr. Martin.  But otherwise good advice.

37.  Other authors are awesome, but you are, too.

38.  Never say that hard work doesn’t get you anywhere.

39.  Push some paper, publishers.  We know you can do it.

I never set out to be an aggregator blog, but it’s almost all I can do to keep up with these round-ups in-between the cracks of “real life.”  That will change eventually, I hope, once my schedule settles down.  Hope y’all find this links useful in the mean-time.

18.  You Can Get Back in the Game

19.  Cons, Panels, and Big Names vs. You

20.  How Not To Prop an Agent

21.  What Readers Want/What Blog Readers Want.  Reaching A Broader Blog Audience.  Why Writing Blogs Don’t Help Writers, or do they?

22.  I don’t know if pets are people, too; but we can certainly learn people-related lessons from them.

23.  People-watching ans Story Inspiration

24.  More on Self-publishing.  And more.

25.  More on the Digital Transformation

26.  How To Handle a Critique

27.  Writers are Hypochondriacs

28.  Conlangs are one of my favorite topics.  For a long time, I’ve considered building a language on the blog, posting once a week.  Unfortunately, the incredibly awesome Chris Doty over on the Clarion Foundation blog beat me to it.

29.  Jim Butcher on Writing over at Clarion Foundation

32.  Selling Books is Not a Bonus

33.  I have a book problem.  Thankfully, I am not alone.

34.  Social media has become a powerful force.  Even anonymous social media.  Like FML.  Or LikeALittle, which allows users to flirt anonymously.  Own your flirts, people.  Or better yet, just walk up to him and say something!

35.  Maintaining Tension Makes Better Books

36.  Contemporary Fiction is Not Boring

37.  How To Keep Your Short Stories Short by Lydia Sharp

38.  Unfinished Manuscripts Can Be Avoided

39.  Plotting, Pansting, and Writing Rituals

40.  Fast Writing and Writing Software

41.  What Do Yoour Books Say About You?

42.  More on Branding

43.  I’ve resisted using writing software for so long.  I’ve tried a few programs, and they always seemed more stifling than supportive.  But I keep hearing authors singing the praises of Scrivener.  I might have to give it a shot.

44.  More Agents As Publishers  Something I’m still on the fence about, assuming there are safeguards involved.

45.  Murphy’s Law of Agenting

46.  Anecdotes aren’t evidence, and reviews aren’t sales.

47.  Genres are descriptions.

48.  Emotional Truth in Fiction

49.  Giving Your Reader a Happy Ending

50.  Five Ways to Improve Your Writing with Janice Hardy

51.  How To Keep Up Online.  Ironically, it mentions the value of round-up posts.

52.  Choosing Narrative Distance

53.  What Juliette Wade Looks For in Critique Partners

54.  Making Your Characters Cry Is Not Enough

55.  Start With A World or Start With A Story?

56.  Levels of Revision

Whenever I’ve read blogging round-ups in the past, they’ve always been relatively short.  Maybe 15 or 20 links at the most.  When I look at my two round-up posts, 32 and 56 links respectively, I can’t understand why there’s such a difference.  I’ve mentioned before that I read a lot of posts a week.  Usually 200 or more.  That’s from about 30 or 40 blogs.  Which means about 4-5 posts a week on average.  In fact, you’ll notice if you go to all the links that I’ve linked to several blogs multiple times.  Because I have a bit of layman’s OCD, I read every single one of these posts.  I also do it because each of these blogs offers me something I can’t get from any of the other blogs I read.

And there are many more blogs out there that I don’t read.  But I assume many of them are blogs that could provide their own value to me.  I don’t think anyone will disagree that there’s a glut of blogs out there.  There are probably more blogs that could provide value to a person than they could keep up with reading 24/7.    But are bloggers overloading their blogs with content?  Many blog readers are loyal, meaning they read posts even if they don’t end up giving value.  Does this do a disservice to blog readers?  Could cutting down on the posts actually increase page views by giving readers more time to read a variety of blogs?  And finally, should a blogger be selfish and do whatever they can to increase their own pageviews, or is there a benefit to directiing some of that traffic somewhere else?

1.  Not sure they put enough sugar in this lemonade.

2.  Still not sure about this whole agent as publisher thing, but at least the Knight Agency seems to have some safeguards in place.

3.  Fear is the mindkiller.

4.  Prologues, Again

5.  How to Break into Reading Fantasy

6.  Everything you have ever read in an “edgy” YA book is just the tip of the iceberg.

7.  Being a published poet is hard.

8.  Follow the rules.  Writing is work.  You wouldn’t ignore the rules to apply for a scholarship or a research grant, why should queries be any different?

9.  How to Build a Villain by Jim Butcher

10.  Writing speed matters.  Writing is like a raffle.  The more entries you have in the hat, the better chance you’ll win the prize–in this case a fan of your work rather than a one-time reader.  And here’s how you can max out your wordcount.

11.  You Can’t Always Be the Star.

12.  A In this day and age, writers are often told they need a website, a blog, a twitter, a facebook, anything to connect to fans and find new readers.  But a lot of people aren’t seeing this for what it really is.  As an author, you are a product line, and like any product, you need to establish your brand.  If you start out writing Paranormal Romances, and seven books in you throw in a near-future syberpunk novel, it’s going to confuse your reader base.  Everything you do contributes to your brand, so make sure you keep on top of how it will affect your career.

13.  Nobody knows the numbers you need.

14.  Reading this article makes me realize I am screwed.  I love to write about future generations on the same world.  Damn.

15.  Notes on Writing

16.  Have You Met Your Blogging Goals?

There are only seventeen links here.  Why?  Because 211 posts to read through this week, with these sixteen being culled from the first 100.  Part 2 will be up tomorrow, likely with 16 more links from the second hundred posts.  There’s a reason for the ragin’.