Control What People See When They Google You

Ironically, I found this image on Bing.

People will do web searches on your name as soon as you are in the public sphere.  Make sure they find something worth finding.  

It was my second to last semester when I heard the best advice of my entire writing program.

Normally, I wouldn’t be caught dead paying attention in class, but for some reason my iPad was taking forever to update the Phantasy Star II app, so I happened to hear it. But I also noticed that the woman who was saying it was a working writer who had broken into e-pub through blogging and was making enough in only five years to work very part time as a teacher and devote herself to writing.

And it wasn't the first time I'd heard such a thing either.

See, there’s a real changing of the guard going on in the business of creative writing right now. Publishing houses—even some small presses—have their heads buried in the sand--the sand that looks suspiciously like their own asses. They don't seem to know what's going on with computers.

The old guard and the new guard shift RIGHT about at people my age (maybe a little younger). This isn’t a small change either. This is a huge, nothing-will-ever-be-the-same, "It's a cookbook" change that is rocking the publishing world more than Lady Gaga and Beyonce rocked Telephone. It is roughly analogous to the same change that hit the record industry in the early 2000's and they still don't know exactly which way is up. Technology making new things possible, plausible, possibly even superior to prior versions of "The Way Things Are Simply Done™," yet some of these fossils are still insisting that fax machines are the antichrist and that e-mail will be the downfall of civilization.

      

This or be told speculative fiction isn't "real art."
Tough choice.                                     

The old guard are still running enough to call the shots in traditional publishing houses, but their power falters every year. If you’ve ever, I don’t know, looked around a Barnes and Noble, you know there are still a couple of books being published.

Sure, your local bookshop starting to be more Shakespeare-bust electric pencil sharpeners (where you stick the pencil into his left nostril) and Moleskine journals that lure in white people by the truckload, but there are still one or two shelves of books behind the coffee shop, the CD rack, and the Jane Austin tote bags.

The old guard’s world is a world of gatekeepers and status quo. It is a world where few have the power and they lord it over the rest.  A world where the only course to endgame is short story credits--->cover letter--->agent--->publisher--->book deal, and at every step someone is judging whether or not the work is of enough appeal to move up the chain.

This person is almost always white, male, heterosexual, and middle class. Even in today's world where that is only statistically very likely (rather than universally true) they still maintain the aesthetics and values of those cultures.

The old guard tend to love books as physical objects. They talk a lot about the smell of books—so much so, in fact, that you’d think they need to grind wood into a powder, mix it with glue and ink and rub that shit on their gums to test its quality. They channel fuddy-duddy Giles from first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and talk about computers as newfangled infernal contraptions. They seem confused, and I have to say maybe even a little befuddled, by the impact of e-readers and blogs on reader's market.

The old guard claim that the future of publication is "totally up in the air," but they have no way to know where the wind is blowing, and with every innovation and technology, they seem caught with their pants down, clinging to the vestiges of the old ways as if they were ice cubes in their clenched fists. They disagree on the impact that e-readers and computers will have in the next decade, and some even insist their impact is nominal now—even though every single speaker not in publishing basically unanimously agrees that they have officially changed the game. The old guard claim they have absolutely no way to know where the industry is going.

And they are losing their jobs in droves.

They even (my hand to God) had not noticed by 2009 when I was in the Business of Writing class that their 15% drop in book sales exactly matched the reports that e-readers now accounted for 15% of the market share.  They just thought people were "reading less these days." Again--I'm not making that up.

With speakers and guests right around my age something strange happened.

The new guard aren’t “unsure” of what is going on within the publishing industry.  They are unanimous, loud, and very confident of their predictions. They don’t disagree with each other but rather have a spooky sort of consensus that you really don't see very often in writers. They can see the impact of e-readers, the trends, and the way the wind is blowing:

Paper books are on their way out, and computers are going to devastate the power of the gatekeeper model.

Not all paper books. Not completely. Never.  We love them too much for that.

Not beloved copies or masterpieces. Not “vanity copies” that hipsters will insist on mail ordering to match their seventies-style Puma sneakers and will tuck conspicuously into their skull covered tote bags. Not the mega-bestsellers who will always be financially viable to publish physically.

No, it will probably be a little like Star Trek where they read everything on their little pads, but still give each other real books as gifts and had a few titles in paper form in their quarters.  But the books you gather up by the truckload and consume like jelly beans. The books that my roommate, Uberdude, has wall-to-wall causing a fire hazard in one entire room of our house. The ones that can’t hit an increasingly high circulation number to make their publication "worth it."  They're gone. Twenty years...maybe thirty--tops.

The low-risk alternatives of print on demand and e-publishing are just making the old system not worth it anymore unless you're Rowling, King, or Brown.

But the thing is that the developments in these technologies are not just changing the publishing industry. They are also changing how a writer deals with that industry. Writers don’t even need agents anymore. Writers don’t need publishers anymore. They can take their work straight to the presses themselves. Fuck, they can hit a button and be published the same day electronically. It’s a major major game changer when the gate keepers are being port rounded, and the artists can say “Screw you guys; I’m going home,” in their very best Cartman voice. Suddenly, the artists have power again, and don't have to conform to a vision of either "what sells" or what a very narrow demographic of gatekeepers think has the literary worth to justify taking a loss on.

The old guard writers we met through my CW program were almost always professors, editors, publishers as well, or had some other day job. They made virtually no money off their writing.
(Small presses can't really pay, and if they can it's a pittance.)  The biggest royalty checks those writers got was when a class (usually a creative writing class) picked up one of their books to study, and it became a required text for the course—and if that kind of strikes you as a bit of a ponzi scheme, you’re not alone.

By contrast, MOST of the younger writers were able to be working writers after a few years at it. They cobbled together ten different income streams from web content to freelance work, to erotica to be translated into Taiwanese , and some punched a part-time clock to shore up their defenses, but they were doing it. They were writing for a living, and not getting caught in 9-5 writing gigs that left them sapped and exhausted when facing their own fiction. They were getting their creative work out there with computers and technology. And a lot of them didn’t see agents and big publishing houses as the goal. A lot of them thought that was one way among a dozen to reach endgame, but the real money was in extremely cheap e-reader only versions of their work where they would pocket MOST of the retail price, marketed online.

And the most common advice the young guard gave us was this: “Control what people are going to see when they Google your name.”

We live in a world where some people sneer at online publication. They think it is beneath them. They think it isn't "real." They have nothing published online, or if they do it is their second or third tier work.

Guess what comes up when you Google their name?

That's right. The crap they didn’t think was good enough to submit to a “real” venue.

What’s even more dangerous is stuff you don’t even know is out there. The drunk text manifestos on how Nazi Germany wasn't so bad because at least the trains ran on time that you put on Friendster back in 2002. You want to push that stuff onto page 23 by replacing it if you possibly can. If you don't, the first thing someone sees of you, when they look you up, is some poetry you tweeted during your “EE Cummings Punctuation Phase” about how hard it is to be a white, het, male in today’s world.

So part of my mission for this blog is to have fairly tight control of what someone is going to see when they Google my name–lest I end up with people knowing about the Great Spumoni Incident of Aught Two, and I don't need anybody knowing about that.

~shudder~

Old and Unimproved

[Note: this entry will soon become the latest menu in The Reliquary, so all the text here in the brackets will disappear in a couple of weeks.]

Well, I'll TRY to Google free-to-use images for
 "Old and Unimproved" but I'm sure there won't be anything useful...
Oh.  Um.  Okay, that works!

As of this writing, I've been blogging at Writing About Writing for almost two and a half years, and some of my earliest articles are showing their age.

They need sprucing up–a few more jokes, more inappropriate sexual humor, more stock images with hilarious captions, reformatting in some cases, and some of them were from a time before I fully realized that internet attention spans mean that a twenty page article should be at least ten separate posts.

Like anyone is going to still be awake after the third paragraph unless there's some werewolf on vampire erotica going on.

As I go through and repost these crusty old relics, most will simply be revised with a new coat of paint–the changes made right on the old article. Some, however, will be changed so drastically that they basically become entirely new articles. Their friends won't recognize them at the store and will say "Oh my God it IS you!" in that way that people who've been to the gym love and people who've had kids hate.

I'd like Writing About Writing to remain, among other things, a real-time demonstration of the writing process. In the same way that I hope people are noticing that I've been at this for years and still make less than a Malaysian sweatshop worker hour per hour (so that they never think it was overnight success should I achieve something more notable), I would also like to be transparent about the power of revision and how much a writer can improve with daily practice. So if ever I alter an article fundamentally, I'll put the original version here, that people might be able to take a look at it.  I'll also put the New and Improved version next to it.

If you don't think writing daily will make you better, take a look at the shit I was putting out just a few hundred days ago. And speaketh: "Lo! Verily thou wast most shittacular! Yea, but behold, thou art now slightly less shittacular."


O&U: The Trouble With Writing Short Stories  N&I: The Trouble With Short Stories
O&U: One Book To Rule them All      N&I: One Book to Rule Them All 
O&U: A Writer Goes to Burning Man  N&I: A Writer Goes to Burning Man
O&U: No Apologies                              N&I: No Apologies: A Defense of Speculative Fiction

The Trouble With Writing Short Stories

One of the major difficulties I’m struggling with right now is my natural proclivities in writing longer works and that I’m currently in a place in my writing where only one form of fiction—the short story—really gets me much traction. I keep getting into a spiral where I feel like the only thing I should write ought to be “useful” short stories, but I’m almost never in the mood to write them, so I get a little stuck trying to force it, the creative engine stalls, I stare at blank screen a lot.

I once had an instructor--Janusprof--sneer at me. He asked me what I was “dying to write,” and my answer was “longer stuff.”

"That's not an answer!" he insisted.

Unfortunately, he didn’t really get how genuine that answer was for me. I’m pretty sure, even at the time, I knew what he was going for some touchy-feely internal conflict that has torn me apart and drawn me to the page, if only for the chance to express it. It’s born of this “high-art” ideal about the nature of art, and expression and what “counts” and what doesn’t (and seems to be the reason that most MFA programs produce a laughably huge outpouring of literature about the horror of middle class childhoods). It’s like he never read a Xanth novel or something… Somewhere along the line while the “high-art” instructors are wringing out their souls for inspiration, passing judgment on what isn’t art with the sly invective of “commercial,” they forget that most students are there for an actual, marketable skill set—not to be molded into a cookie cutting of the same bourgeoisie aesthetic.

The real bitch is that the question could possibly have been a valuable one from one in the position of mentor rather than merely teacher, but only if said mentor had not had a predetermined sort of answer in mind--which Janusprof obviously did.

The problem was I was being quite honest when I said it.

I was dying to get back to writing longer works. I really was. I was tired of the short story format that is most convenient both for reading and writing in college. It always felt a little artificial to me—not the way my creative mind naturally works. I was learning elements of craft and filling my writing toolbox in a bit of a contextual vacuum. I understand why we write short stories for college writing workshops or why they are convenient for teaching elements of literature. They fit tidily into the classroom structure. I also know that most people (including me) could stand to learn how to be concise rather than verbose. And I appreciate the short story as an art form probably more than the next guy—unless I happen to be standing next to a Pushcart editor or something. But what calls to me, what I yearn for—both in reading and in writing—is longer works.

I love reading novels. I can’t even remember a time when I would feel the girth of thick books and marvel at their potential to suspended me within another world for as long as possible. I read Gone With the Wind before I had acne, just because it was the thickest book I could find. I gathered cans from around town for two days to scrounge up the money to purchase Stephen King’s It, mostly because I was aware that it clocked in at over a thousand pages. I even tried my hand at War and Peace just because its heft felt so comforting to me—although I must admit that one never got finished. My principle complaint with my Kindle is that I can’t hold a book like 1Q84 and feel how deliciously hefty it is. I particularly enjoyed series books where I could stay in a world and with a character. More than once I blew months worth of savings on a run of novels because I’d enjoyed the first and I needed to be able to pick a new one up as soon as I was done with the old without any kind of interruption.

Unsurprisingly, I gravitate towards writing the same. I imagine full and developed arcs based on childhood books and movies, and sometimes even picture epic quests that I cannot tell outside of a trilogy (or more). One of my bucket list works (writers bucket lists don’t involve places they should go; they involve things they should write) is an epic high fantasy chronicle that sits firmly ensconced in my head that would be no less than five or six books if I wrote it. I was also always “writing books” from about nine or ten on. I sent more trees to their doom commandeering notebooks and legal pads in order to begin some opus or another on than I will ever admit to a nature conservationist. In high school, the successes and the failures in finishing manuscripts all began as novels I shared with my friends. It never even occurred to me to write a short story.

When I got into college, I wrote a lot of stuff I didn’t really want to write, but I did it as best I could because I figured every lesson that put a tool in my toolbox was a lesson worth having and a skill I wanted as a writer. I didn’t go to college on the this-is-how-you-win-at-life formula right out of high school, so I lacked most young people’s apathy and self-doubt.

I wanted to be there. Bad.

If I was going to stop working in my thirties to give that much time and effort to something, I was going to suck the marrow out of it, even if that meant writing what I didn’t personally care for. I wrote poetry and focused on my concrete imagery and word economy. I wrote drama and focused on dialogue and conflict. I wrote stories that were no more than two thousand words and did the best I could. I worked around the “no genre” pedagogy of the department. But even though I generated perhaps a dozen short stories (and three times that amount of single-page work with elements), writing those shorter works never felt completely un-forced.

Whenever I read some down to earth writing advice, after every last one of them gets done telling you to write a lot and read a lot, almost all say some variant of the following: write what you would want to read. Forget the snobby lit sommeliers that haunt the Humanities buildings of college campuses and concern themselves with how “literary” something isn’t, uttering phrases like “worthy of fiction” in a way that makes it clear they are imminently qualified to determine that your writing isn’t. Forget the promotional guru who has come up with a Vinn diagram outlining various demographics and where the most “accessible” story possible would be located. Ignore the well-intentioned family members who tell you should totally do a book just like Harry Potter/Twilight/Da Vinci Code/Whatever’s Selling Like Mad. Ignore them all. Write what you would want to read.

When I see that advice—write what you would want to read—I only think a little about speculative fiction, and a little about literary elements I appreciate the most like strong characters and plot. (Oh yes, my friends, I emerged unscathed by the “plot based fiction” naysayers of the literary world). But mostly what I think about when I hear that advice is “Write books. Write trilogies. Write epics. Create worlds. Make people regret turning that last page like they would regret saying good-bye to an old friend.”

Though my instructor found my reply to be uninspired, I found it enlightening, personally. My answer was firm and immediate. It came out of me almost before the question was finished. I didn’t even have time to mull it on a surface level. My gut knew something I didn’t. I don’t think until he asked me that, if I knew just how much I was really tired of being forced into the square pegs of short stories or how much I really yearned to get back to some of the unpolished and half-finished manuscripts that hide in the corners of my Dropbox folder like Tribbles.

The trouble is that right now, short stories are much more useful for me to be writing. In terms of a “career,” even though self publishing has changed the game for some (though mostly only people already well-known through blogging or journalism) and publishers and agents occasionally take a chance on a first-time writer’s longer works, the best way to get the attention of an agent or perhaps a publisher that will take unsolicited work is still to have a cover letter with accolades of short story publication on it. If you’ve been published, it shows them you are serious. It shows them that you have the skill to write. Mostly, it just sets you apart from the dozens—even hundreds—of trash manuscripts they get every year. They’ll pick up a manuscript with a cover letter sooner and give it a more considered read. So the best thing I could possibly be doing right now is churning out a body of short stories for publication and submitting the shit out them. Ironic that if I want to be a novelist, I should get cracking writing short stories, but true. While the publishing world is changing, keepers are still in front of many gates.

I also might like to take a crack at Clarion, but I know they too will to put me to work on short stories. 

The problem of “needing” to write what I don’t really feel inspired towards and feeling almost averse to the kind of writing that is that’s stymied a lot of my creativity. It’s the kind of thing I can do under external motivation like a school assignment or paid gig, but that is amazingly difficult to self-motivate when the effort to reward ratio tips below a certain point. Of course, every artistic process has parts that are less fun. Every artist has days they have to push through feeling less inspired. You work through them for the money shot—that bliss that comes from creation. However, right now this onus of career-advancing short stories and what I “ought” to be writing is messing me up. It’s REALLY messing me up. I’m starting to dread the coming of that time when I retreat to work. I’m making up excuses for why I should take a day off here or there. When I think “fuck it, I’ll write a short story later” and go to one of my long works, I churn away for four or five hours happily blissed out of my mind, and stumble into bed as the sun comes up with a goofy smile plastered across my face.

When I say “okay, tonight I need to start a short story” I just sit there and stare at a blank screen.

Maybe I'm trying to tell me something...

[A revised version of this article can be found here.]