mariness

So quite a few folks pointed me to this screed from Alexis Madrigal, an online editor at the Atlantic, written in response to this annoyed post by Nate Thayer. Both the original post and the response have garnered a lot of attention, although I agree with the commentators on the post that the response is less about current pay rates at the Atlantic and more about "What the hell is going on at the Atlantic?"

Oh well. At least they don't employ David Brooks.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, what caught my attention was not so much the discussion of financial issues, but something pretty much buried deep down in the article: "Any time I imagine the glamorous world of writing for The Atlantic or The New Yorker or Harper's in 1968 or 1978, I remember that most journalists were going to homecoming football games and writing about the king and queen."

Not many people know this, but I started out as a sports writer.

Truth.

My first paid, professional pieces were for the local paper, reporting on the the high school soocer team. It was pretty cool -- I got to go around on the bus with the team and say that I wrote for the paper AND I got paid. My mother still has the articles somewhere.

Here's what the Atlantic's article missed entirely: I wasn't a journalist. I did exactly no investigation of the high school soccer team (not that I had much to investigate) or anything else. The later occasional (very occasional) articles I did for the Miami Herald and the Sun-Sentinel weren't much different: short fluff pieces describing some places around South Florida. I never entered a journalism program, and although I certainly applied for multiple positions at various magazines in my senior year of college, these were all for editing positions, not staff writing experiences.

Because I was fully aware that what I was doing wasn't journalism. It barely counted as reporting. It was a cheap way for the local paper to get some local things covered while giving all of us writing creds to help us get into college. Any actual investigation of our school was done by the New York Times (the daughter of the education editor for The New York Times attended our school, so we got a bit more national attention than probably justified, and no, this has nothing to do with my current occasional screeds against the publication; I didn't know her at all although Facebook continues to insist that I did. I hate Facebook. Moving on.)

And here's the dirty little secret: contrary to what the Atlantic's editor is suggesting, this is exactly how many local papers got those homecoming king/queen articles going. Sure, sometimes they hired people (and high school students) hoping to start the fast track to journalism. And sometimes they hired people just thrilled to get their names in the paper for whatever reason, or who wanted to say, "Well, I occasionally write for the Y" or who were told by their high school counselors to get their acts together and have something besides "piano" on their college applications -- preferably something involving an organization.

Am I saying I got nothing out of that? Not at all. I learned how to type up my little articles and send them in and learn early on that even local editors can be ruthless with your limited copy if they think a nice ad about a furniture store will look better there. I learned early on that often, other things -- like my job at the library -- will pay better than writing gigs, but you have to pay taxes anyway. I learned the very basics of writing pitches, which later helped me write a few things for newspapers later. Listing that on my college applications probably helped me skip my senior year of high school (a definite plus) and was later of considerable use in my first query letters to larger newspapers and magazines and led to some decently paid freelance work which helped pay the bills. (And some very irritating freelance work, but we'll skip that for now.) And I could always tell myself that yes, I'd been published -- when I was fourteen. (Well, technically when I was seven, but very, very few people apart from my grandfather really counted that one.)

And I got paid.

I don't claim to know where U.S. journalism is going. It's got its decidedly weak spots (pretty much all of the coverage of Hugo Chavez' death has been just awful), though longer magazine articles can still provide something worth reading. (Also from the New Yorker: coverage of a Congo literary festival -- much shorter than the piece I linked to above and The Borowitz Report. Also, no David Brooks.) The Tribune Company is reportedly trying to sell off its newspapers to focus on television. So who knows? But as a writer, I am perhaps not surprisingly hoping that pay continues to be a part of real journalism, at least.

Generally speaking I try to avoid the self-publishing/traditional publishing debate like the plague, on the grounds that when it comes to self-publishing I really don't know what I'm talking about, except to note that everyone I know who has done well with self-publishing (i.e., earned actual money) has done so the old-fashioned way: with an incredible amount of hard work. It absolutely can be done, no question, but it absolutely requires lots of work, also no question, either through getting your name known in the first place and then self-publishing your backlist, or starting out as an unknown and getting your name known. Anyway.

But when this many people (and by "people" I mean in part "The New York Times," assuming that counts as "people" and not "frequently clueless robots") start talking about a problematic self-publishing enterprise owned by no less than Simon and Schuster, and previously Penguin, I sit up and feel the need to spread the word. Here's David Gaughran, breaking down the numbers for you and self published author Jennifer Powell with some additional links.

Important note: no, not everyone is or should be publishing in the hopes of making money. Sure, that can be one reason, but for many people, the idea is just to get your work out there, to share whatever you've created with the rest of the planet. And that's fine. But I don't think that anyone should be publishing in the hopes of losing money either.

As most of you know, the U.S. Department of Justice instituted a lawsuit against five of the Big Six publishers and Apple, accusing them of price-fixing/colluding when they chose to set up an agency price model to sell ebooks. Three of the publishers agreed to settle.

Here is a very detailed response to the settlement from one literary agent, which also contains some very interesting statistics about ebook pricing. Long, but worth a look.

newbabel chats about his experiences with publishing here.

In unrelated alarming news, right after the loss of the left cursor key, my h key seems to be having difficulties. I really don't feel like replacing the keyboard on this computer, but nothing else, saving beating computer manufacturers on the head, seems to be coming to mind as a long term a response. (I'd love to try writing without an "h" but I'm not sure that would actually work - look how many words in this post alone need an "h." Such a little letter, h, so quiet, so supportive, so hushed when it makes its own appearance not helping to transform other sounds. You'd think it would be delighted to vanish on a little vacation and remain unnoticed. But apparently not.)

Two items:

1. The New Yorker on digital publishing.

2. Ethical Vampires: Part one and Part two.

But I find myself impelled to chat about the table of contents for The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF. As many others have pointed out, this supposedly mindblowing book does not have one story in it by a woman, or a person of color. Or Isaac Asimov. (tchernabyelo has an excellent post suggesting that the Table of Contents even does a disservice to white male writers.)

I was going to stay silent on this, really, I was. I suck at these sorts of conversations. And then I remembered three more conversations/blog posts I've been in/read about just this week that chatted about the perception that men read/write science fiction and women read/write fantasy. Never mind that a couple of the major bestselling fantasy writers out there have been men (Tolkien, Robert Jordan, George RR Martin, Ted Williams.) (Or, amusingly enough, that it was two guys who told me to read Twilight. I'm still working on forgiving them for this.) Never mind that some of the major bestselling and ground breaking science fiction writers have been women (Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Nancy Kress, far more) Never mind that the boundary between the two fields is extremely questionable to begin with and many works of speculative fiction contain elements of both, and many writers write in both fields.

No, what's upsetting me is the robots.

When I was a kid, I had no taste in books whatsoever. None. For crying out loud, I read Enid Blyton and Bobbsey Twin books. Yes, it was that bad. My horrified parents and grandfather tried to help by sneaking in decent books, some of which I did like/love. Two things, though, could automatically make any book ABSOLUTELY GREAT:

Robots.
Dinosaurs.

(Alas, no one ever wrote the ultimate book for me: a book where all the dinosaurs were secretly robots and trampled all over schools and found pirate treasure and kidnapped criminals. I did tell you I had no taste as a kid, right? Moving on.)

I loved robot books. Good, bad, indifferent – it really didn't matter; if it had a robot in it, I read it. I also watched Star Trek and played Star Wars with all of my friends, all of whom wanted to be Han Solo because, let's face it, Han had an ACTUAL spaceship and in the last two movies redeemed himself by also having robots.

Fantasy, at the time, was a decidedly secondary love. Yes, I loved Oz and Narnia and the Nesbitt books. But I wanted robots. And come to think of it, Oz actually had a robot (Tik-tok, the mechanical man who needs to be wound up). No wonder I loved Oz. Talking animals AND ROBOTS. But I digress.

In case it hasn't been clear, I'm a girl.

And each and every time someone says something like this:

" That probably has something to do with my concept of "mind-blowing". Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for."

I want to respond with, "BUT, ROBOTS!"

I mean, I could dispute this by chatting about Connie Willis and Ursula LeGuin and Nancy Kress, or about how the phrase mindblowing sf does not necessarily have to exclude a focus on people, life and society, or how much of the very best science fiction focuses on how hard scientific concepts change people, life and society (and robots!). I could note that this just again perpetuates the ingrained and frustrating fallacy that not only sees science fiction and fantasy as two opposing genres (even though they're continually shelved together in bookstores and libraries), so ingrained that even someone like this particular anthologist/editor, who has focused on and published female writers before, finds himself repeating it.

Instead, I'll just say it again:

I love robots. Really, really, love robots.

Even the ones that don't look like dinosaurs.