When you start out as a writer, other writers tell you about rejection, the low pay rates, the luck required in your break, and the virtue of persistence, but no one tells you just how long things take, how time digs into your skin and bones, and how you a year can pass in false starts and wait times.

When I began selling short fiction, there was a joke going round, a kind of self deprecating bit of humour, that stated that Gordon Van Gelder would reject you within two weeks. You had to laugh. Someone in the States running a professional magazine could turn you down 12 times before some of the people running magazines in Australia could get back to you. It took a while for me to realise that Van Gelder was more the exception than the rule, though there are a few people who come quickly to mind now for a quick turn around (Sean Wallace at Fantasy Magazine, for example). It always struck me as surprising that more people weren’t like Gelder, a point that’s been driven into me moreso after running my own business for the last three to four years. Split it whatever way you want, but it’s good business to be quick with your replies: it keeps you on top of your workload, reduces stress, and encourages good will.

Of course, part of the problem and why that’s not always the case, is that everyone wants to be a writer. Why wouldn’t you? I know I enjoy the glamour of scraping by, being read by small audiences, being involved in bad deals, and thinking in terms of months and years. About ten years ago, I found myself thinking, early in one particular year, that I ought to make sure I have things lined up for the next year, so I can keep my name out there. Insane, isn’t it? But there you go. The worse part is, I must enjoy this lifestyle, because I’ve made sacrifice after sacrifice to keep writing, and I don’t regret it. No doubt some time in a sanitarium will be coming up for me, but it won’t be before the people who envy what I have are there first. Yeah, that’s right: some people actually envy what I have. That’s how desperate you can get as a writer. You want to get your start, your voice out there, so badly, that anyone who is doing anything is a few rungs up you, and you want to be them. It starts very simple: you envy the person who can publish a short story. Then, once you’ve done that, you envy the person who can do it regularly, and after that, the person who can do it in regular markets, and then, after that, it’s the person with a collection, or a book coming out. After you’ve done the book, the process starts again, and you envy those with regular publishing schedules, agents who work for them, and finally, holidays. There are thousands and thousands of people, each of them at a different level, and that’s what causes the wait in publishing.

So, you wait.

You submit, you query, you call, and you wait. Sometimes, you wait a night, sometimes a week, but more often than not, you wait a month, two, three, sometimes a year. Mostly, you give up by the time you reach that, but a part of you is willing to knock on, to keep going, to have a thin sliver of hope that something will come out of it. After a while you become so bred on rejection and starvation that the vaguest hint of hope will fuel you.

Time, it’s the thing no one tells you about. In the time it takes you to get a start, you can have a birthday, you can get married, you can have a child. You can change careers. You can get divorced. You can lose someone you cared for. Waiting for someone to respond, waiting for your stuff to get published, life happens. Time ticks by. You work through it and try not to think about it, too much, because it’s the best thing to do. You query people, but you don’t want to be one of those annoying people, so you do it slowly. You just keep working. Once stuff is published, you wait for money. You learn patience, but only the hard way. You go through moments when you’re frustrated, when you want to give it all up, when you want to take someone by the shoulders and shake them and tell them that the reason there is no fortune five hundred publisher of novels is because things are run by a bunch of bad high school students who don’t want to do their homework. Or so it seems. When you calm down, you realise it is just people. A lot of people want to be writers. The system is soaked with them. You’re just another, and unless you’re a name, you’re subject to time, to waiting, to watching as things stretch by, and you try not to let it rip away your love for what you do.

Which is always the risk.

Maybe I just like the name of the song, but I also dig the sound.

The sound has me thinking of Howl, their 2005 release, which I liked a whole lot. Think I’ll go track it down.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Slowly, bits here and there, between writing, between working, between this and that. I read it a long time ago and I remember not enjoying it so much, to the point that this might have been one of the books I put down, and never finished.

I’m a big Nabokov fan, however. I adore Pale Fire–it’s probably one of my favourite books, ever. So when I got the last of his books, the unfinished Laura, which is tossed around at being connected to Lolita, I thought I’d sit down and read that book first. I know only the very basics of The Original of Laura, so I don’t know if I need to do this, but I’m doing it, and I’m enjoying Lolita this time around. For whatever reason, the first time I read it, I missed the humour in the book. I suspect that Adrian Lyne’s film adaptation of Lolita might have had an undue influence on my reading at the time–I was working as a projectionist back then, and running the film when I decided to read the book. There wasn’t a whole lot of intentional humour in it, if I remember right.

But Nabokov’s Lolita is funny, and really, I’m glad I’m giving it a go again.

Anyhow, as you saw, yesterday I did an interview with Kaaron Warren. It was a bit of a spur of the moment thing we decided to do, but it was kind of fun, and if people enjoyed reading it, I might actually go out and find the occasional person to interview for this blog.

Kaaron Warren (kaaronwarren) is the author of numerous short stories, the novel Slights and the collection, the Grinding House. Her second novel, Walking the Tree, has just been released, and later this year, her second collection will also be released.

I thought it would be fun to interview her for the blog, entirely under the idea that after spending a bit of time with Kaaron, you would go and buy her books.

Don’t make a liar out of me.

Walking the Tree (It Comes With DVD Extras)

Walking the Tree is your the latest book to be released. How are you feeling about it?

Haha.

You’re talking about the extras for Walking the Tree? A kind of DVD extras: you buy it and at the end there’s a key for the reader to go to a site and download a free novella, with the story narrated from a different point of view?

That’s pretty sweet. There’s the link right here in our interview for Walking the Tree so people can buy it right now. Can you give us a quick pitch for it?

Sounds pretty neat. How can readers expect it to differ from previous Kaaron Warren work?

How then, will the third Kaaron Warren novel differ from this one, you think?

The first story I came across of yours was ‘The Blue Stream’, which, if I have it right, was published in 1994 in an issue of Aurealis, when it was run by Dirk Strasser. What kind of things, writing wise,
were you looking for back then?

He called you?

First guy to called me in relation to writing was Robbie Matthews. I had no idea how he’d gotten the number, but he told me he had a huge database of writers names and numbers from ASIM. It was just faintly creepy.

Is this use of telemarketers the Kaaron Warren writing practice, then?

What’s changed in what you want from your writing now?

Which brings us to an interesting point, I think. Looking early at your publications, you bounce a lot between high profile markets, and low profile ones. Things like Penguin anthologies such as Strange Fruit and then mags like Going Down Swinging and Fables and Reflections. It was a big difference in audience—was it something you ever gave much thought to, or a desire to keep in print, or just a little of fingers in pies?

Has that changed any now? Do you look at collections and mags and think that they have to meet a certain standard, or deliver something new, for you?

That makes a nice way to segue into the 2005 release of your first collection, The Grinding House. Published by the CSFG, it came with a really sweet cover by Robyn Evans, and it seemed to be a nice focal point for Kaaron Warren, pulling together roughly a decade’s worth of work into one place.

Yeah, I remember that. I still reckon a collection is a good place for a novella—it’s a place where you can stretch yourself and not worry about the awkward word count and selling it.

Nah, I don’t have anything to tell. I just like collections with novellas in them. It gives a collection a strong, I dunno, backbone, if that makes sense? I remember reading a collection by an Israeli
writer, Etgar Keret. I think it was called THE BUS DRIVER WHO WANTED TO BE GOD. it was full of all these quirky little stories, but after a while it just felt like there was no meat.

As for me, I think, outside books, I’d be around 19, 20 thousand words. You?

Who’s in it?

You know, I haven’t heard of any of them. Isn’t that cool? Bunch of new authors to check out.

You talk about the creative job that motherhood is, but there’s a sense that that itself has became a theme through your work. Would you agree with that?

Haha. Maybe! Though I have to admit, I really didn’t like Down to the Silver Spirits. How’s that for gushing interview praise?

It was shit, so I trashed it. Part of it ended up morphing into another story, if I remember right–but that isn’t so unusual, really.

Nah, I’m really not an Aldiss fan. His stuff just leaves me cold.

I love how it says that Aldiss had a cameo and then was cut out of it and replaced by an actor portraying him.

Nah, that kind of stuff isn’t for me. I can barely stand photographs of myself, much less the idea of subjecting others to me.

I had a job a few years back as an extra in a film, a local dodgy thing. I have to say it turned me off film making entirely—it was one of the least creative and most repetitive things I’d seen. Granted,
I’m sure not all sets are like that, and a lot will depend on the director, but it kind of killed my interest in film making. Should anyone want to make a film about my stuff, they can give me the cash and then I’ll bugger off.

Anyhow, I see I have been put into my place about your concerns for fiction (though I think if I’d said ‘family’, I might have been more correct), but do you think that The Grinding House was a good representation of yourself as an author?

How then do you think the new collection, which will be released by Ticonderoga Press later his year, will differ from it?

It does seem that living in Fiji has had a large impact on you, and in what seems to be a largely positive way–has it felt that way while you’ve been writing the stories?

Have you ever gone back and read your stuff?

Not really. I glance to make sure everything looks good, but, on the whole, I just see the errors and mistakes and ways I could have done something differently and better. Maybe it’s not the best way to be, but I guess I’m just demanding on myself, and it’s never reaching what I think it should be.

That sounds like all my work…

Why are you typing it up?

Heh. You know, I wrote a book when I was fourteen, or thirteen. Some awful fantasy novel. I lost it when my Mum sold the computer a few years later, and I always regretted that.

I want you to look very closely at this picture and try and keep it in your minds eye. This was a perfectly healthy twenty two-year-old young man who in the service of his country got half of his head blown off. I think that’s important, I think that’s newsworthy. Let me tell you how newsworthy I think it is. I think that it’s more important than chocolate cake recipes and far more important than comic book reviews. It is more important than who fell and whose swell at the winter Olympic games.

It is far more important than any self-serving load of crap banged out by Pseudo doctor Amy. It is more important than American Idol or Lost or any other mindless goat droppings the public chooses to chew on. This is some American mother’s son, her little boy, he may be gay or straight or transgender but his life is fucked forever.

How did this come to happen to this poor mother’s son? It came to happen because the people in the media who are supposed to foster a public debate on such public issues as war instead used their franchise to promote articles about chocolate cake and comic book reviews. They see their free press as free to choose not to look when bad thinks happen. They feel no need to explain to his parents or to anyone that the war that blew off half of this poor boys head was based on out and out lies.

It was a war perpetrated by people who hoped to gain from it be it in oil or pipelines or service contracts and like the media they don’t care that this mother’s son is mangled and mutilated. Do you care? I’ve been married twice for a combined twenty-five years and in that time I doubt my wives ever baked a chocolate cake. I don’t read comic books or watch goat crap TV but you see I’ve got a son about this boy’s age. My heart aches and my mind fills with rage because the people that have the power and authority to show this picture would rather talk about American Idol and from where I sit that makes them an accomplice to a war crime.

Link.

I was just surfing through the net this morning, catching up on things. I have some things to write, some things to do, but yeah, I came across this, and it’s heartbreaking photo, and it’s quote about parents fighting over the parts of their children. It’ll probably be linked a lot, but that’s not so much of a hassle.

I was in the post office this morning and caught a glance at the Australian Literary Legends stamp collection. One of the girls there had a sheet of them out.

If you haven’t heard of the literary legends, and I certainly haven’t, having no real interest in stamp collecting or what is on them, then you may or may not be interested to know that the six white people who appear on very white stamps, are Peter Carey, David Malouf, Colleen McCullough, Bryce Courtenay, Thomas Keneally, and Tim Winton. I suppose it’s hard to argue with the selection, though one could have hoped for a little more racial diversity, or perhaps interesting writers. I have never seen any literary merit in Courtenay, for example, and I’ve long considered Winton to be hugely over rated. But most of that is taste. If you wanted a poke at some of the most commercial and critically successful authors within the country, the six here make an easy and reasonable selection.

But still, there’s just something so… white about them and so horrendously mono cultured, which is, in a way, ironic in what the majority of the authors have written about. No doubt someone will accuse me of reading too much into a set of stamps, but there’s something about them there that takes no acknowledgement of the diversity and interests of the authors and their topics. It’s as if the designers of the stamp had no real awareness of the authors they were dealing with, and no real appreciation of Australian literature.

Link.

There is money to be made in selling the stink in gas, would you believe. D, who was up here this week, has a new job for the company that sells the stink in natural gas.

I had never give it much though, to be honest. I knew that somewhere gas got a smell, because it went from requiring caged birds in mining shafts, to that smell when you leave your oven on by mistake. But it never occurred to me that the addition of mercaptan to the gas was done on purpose and for safety, or that there was a job where you went round selling the stink.

If anyone job ever demanded fiction, it was the Man Who Sold the Stink.

Well, maybe. I’ll see how I go.

The deadline for Polyphony Seven has been extended to March 15th. Did you pre-order?

There’s been a lot of links going round for the ten rules for writing fiction that was in the Guardian the other day. Mostly, they’re pretty ordinary rules, but occasionally there’s a funny one, or one that’s got a ring of truth to it, such as Anne Enright’s ‘The first 12 years are the worst.’

I don’t know that I personally have ten rules. I write, I finish what I write more often than not, and I sell it. In the grand scheme of successful authors, I’m not very successful, but most days of the week I feel I’m moving forward, and not backwards, and I figure that’s good to believe in. Some days, however, are better than others. Some days you can’t escape the sense of failure, the opinions of people, the business, and the hate mail. Still, you do what you can, hey? And to be honest, I think I’ve had a bit of a shift in my opinion towards writing in the last year. I look back and I think that I was very passionate for a lot of things in writing and it got me into a lot of trouble, most of the time–trouble I didn’t mind because, well, none of that kind of trouble was ever new to me. But now, splitting my time between working and writing, I’ve had to focus my passion a bit differently, if that makes sense. I like to think I found a way to focus some of it into teaching–though that really does depend on the student and what I have–but otherwise I think these days I have everything a lot more directed into what I do, and what I write. There seems to be less chances for me to get into trouble, but that said, nothing has come along that has really gotten me all fired up about the indignation of whatever for a while. At least,not in the writing community.

On the other hand, a year after I heard about it, I finally got around to buying Christian Bok’s Eunoia.

Here’s a quote:

“Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh–a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that chards a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A Law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.”

I am in awe.

Some days, I don’t know why I do the things I do.

Today is such a day. Today I am attempting to teach comedy. Mostly, I’m trying to teach about the different styles and genres within it, but I try to keep things interesting. My current student (who, right now, is sitting here reading an old copy of The Hobbit that I didn’t know I had) told me, without question, that a lot of writers weren’t funny. Terry Pratchett, he said, was boring. The Wee Free Men especially. Having not read The Wee Free Men I couldn’t say he was on crack, but the teacher at school, probably motivated by all the adults who thought it was funny and excellent, has him reading it. I don’t know. Adults. Who would trust them. Anyhow, I think the Hobbit is rubbish as well, but for some reason, I also have a copy of the parody, the Soddit, which I honestly couldn’t tell you when I bought or for why.

But, it’s a parody, right, and it’s educational, right–well, now it is–and already, the student has stopped to say that the Hobbit is funnier than the Soddit, which I’m fairly sure was not the intention when I came up with this plan.

Oh well.

In a moment I’m going to make him write a parody of War of the Worlds.

From Deb Layne (wheatland_press):

In 2002, the Polyphony anthology series debuted. Conceived as a short fiction venue for stories that would skate gracefully across the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, and literary fiction, it was quickly recognized as the standard bearer for cross genre work. Since then, the series’ six volumes have become a vital, unique collection of voices in literature of the fantastic.

Polyphony has been twice nominated for a World Fantasy Award and the stories therein have been featured in several “Year’s Best” anthologies, along with garnering accolades from several award judges and committees. Polyphony authors range from multiple-award-winning seasoned writers to the previously unpublished. The series is truly a melodic interweaving of many voices: old and new, speculative and literary, heralded and unknown. Polyphony has not merely crossed literary boundaries, it has reformed and redefined them.

The harsh economic climate threatens to kill this vital series. Wheatland Press is asking for your help.

The authors have graciously made concessions to make Polyphony 7 a reality. They’ve agreed to a reduced pay rate to see the volume published. Now we need readers.

In order to publish Polyphony 7, Wheatland Press must receive 225 paid pre-orders via the website by March 1, 2010. If the pre-order quantities cannot be met, Polyphony will cease publication. It’s that simple. The preorder link is here: http://www.wheatlandpress.com/
(mid page)

If the preorder number is met, then Polyphony 7 will be published on or about July 1, 2010.*

We have heard from many in the SF/F literary community that Polyphony is a vital part of landscape. We agree, but we cannot continue without your support. We hope that you will support our fine authors and their art by becoming part of the Polyphony community and pre-ordering a copy of Polyphony 7.

*The fine print: If we do not receive enough orders by March 1, then all preorders will be refunded immediately.

Do feel free to buy another Wheatland Press title while you are stopping by the website! Those will, as always, ship immediately.

And, also feel free to repost this announcement with impunity

If you got the time, support the publisher, and support the anthology series. There’s a new story of mine in the new book, as well.