The best projects I've worked on have all had time to rise... or set, or digest, or sit, or brew, or whatever you call it. Once the initial creative task is done, you need to let the subconscious take over, or just give yourself time so you can freshen your eyes and detect your mistakes later.
Some might call this downstream thinking, which has a negative connotation. However, I think the best downstream planning realizes that you don't know exactly where a river will take you, and you better plan some time to stop paddling and puzzle over the delta.
Besides, every plan I've ever worked with has crumbled upon contact with the enemy.
So let that yeast do its work, baby. Let your projects - at work, at school, in your creative life - rise.
So I decided to get back into self-publishing some eBooks. This was spurred by several concurrent factors:
I'm working on a novel and I need a break from time to time.
I was reading about it on some writing forums and I was like, "Oh yeah! Electronic self-publishing!"
Most importantly, as I mentioned in my last post, I heard an entrepreneur speak the other night, and something he said struck me. He was talking about how people don't think the Chinese have money (I'm not sure why anyone would think this; I don't think this; but in any case), and he said, "If you make something, you have money." This made me think about all the stories I have sitting in my trunk, and I thought: "That could be money!"
Although (3) was a source of inspiration, I don't actually think of self-publishing as very money-generating. I have made a lot more money selling stories to magazines. It was actually something else the guy said that cemented it: so, 4. You have nothing to lose.
I don't know why I never thought of it that way before. Before, I always thought that self-publishing could cause me to suffer if it wasn't done right. And I know I'm not the only one. There's definitely a stigma, and that creates fear.
But I guess I'm over that fear. I'm confident in nearly everything I write. And those stories could be money. And self-publishing might or might not hinder or boost my career. Who's to say? But there's things I've created with potential value.
And it's a pretty fun way to kill some time...
The covers
Anyway, we all know the most fun thing about eBooks is making covers. What's really interesting for me is to see how far I've come in two years. I first self-published in April 2011, right around the time I started my current job in communications and marketing. Since then, I must have worked on at least two dozen graphic design projects (although I'm not the designer myself). To see what effect this has had, here are the 2011 and 2013 versions of the cover for my short story "What the Market Will Bear." Guess which one is new!
(I just noticed that there is some kind of error on one of those E's. CURSES.)
Next steps
I've got plans to do a five story collection. I wanted to make it six and make that a tradition, so I could call them "six packs," but then I thought about how much a douchebag that would make me. Today Ben and tomorrow Ben don't always agree.So, five it is.
Also, the main thing is not to get too obsessed. I tend towards utter disregard and total obsession. I'd really like to mostly stick with my novel; the point is just to have a valve to let off steam.
Although I've been working on a novel for two months, I didn't have the fire. Nor the flame. Mostly, I had the fear.
Last night, I got my mojo back. Last night, as part of my MBA program, I had the pleasure of hearing Antoine Paquin speak. Here's a video of him speaking at Carleton University. I was supposed to watch this video before my lecture, but I didn't, so I can't speak to how good it is. In my class last night, though, he was really inspiring. He's just a dude who wants to get shit done, and I really respect that.
It also helped that, yesterday, I discovered ChangeThis.com, and, as a consequence, a fantastic manifesto by Hugh MacLeod called "How to Be Creative." It says a lot of stuff I already know but that has been subsumed by a lot of other kinds of thinking, the kind that yokes itself to external rather than internal values.
Hope the shares are interesting, and good luck, whatever you're working on.
I guess this is my first non-literary freelance gig. Or, at least, non-literary freelance gig that pays money (I've worked for free at newspapers and blogs before). So far, I think it takes an inordinate amount of energy to accomplish. To be brutally honest, it's not terribly fun. On the one hand, blogging can never compare to interstellar battlecruiser battles or frogmen versus squirrelfolk ambushes. But, particular to this gig, there are far too many lenses I have to wear to write this blog: I'm a student at the university where I am also an employee, for one; second, the blog is published by that university; and third, I'm writing it in French.
That's not to say there isn't honest and forthright material in my posts. There is. But the competing priorities - student, blogger, employee, second language student - make it less easy to speak with absolute candor. It also takes some serious brainpower for me to write in French, brainpower that's already being drained by my courses and my own creative writing. That makes it harder to think of what might be interesting to say on a student blog. For that reason, I can't but wonder whether it all comes out sounding very trite.
But no matter. They're paying me better than the science fiction and fantasy magazines that are not buying my short stories, and it's another credential to both my literary and professional CV. That said, though, I'm only halfway through my contract and I'm already burnt as I wrack my mind for interesting subjects that are also not ridiculously controversial.
Well. I'm not doing a very good job of promoting my writing. Go forth and Google Translate my genteel prose. Amazement is sure to follow.
Since I started my MBA in French, I now get a lot of advertising, in French, about business things, like entrepreneurship opportunities, business books, etc. What's funny is I only have contact with my MBA group and professors via Gmail (from a forwarded University email address), and I see a lot of that French advertising on Facebook.
It's crazy. I use Mozilla with a bunch of extensions that block data trackers, but there's still the fact that Google is obviously selling my email data to Facebook and other media providers. It's such a small thing: compared to all the other traffic in my inbox, that French traffic is next to nothing. And yet, and yet: it's changed the language in which I am solicited.
Crazy! The future.
Is crazy!
(And since I study business now, I am less "afraid" of being advertised to...
Stern's book is surreal, and her style ranges from breathtakingly
numinous to bizarrely horrifying. Her writing is nearly flawless,
playing with a diversity of images, emotions, characters and situations
in a poetic prose that neither spares the words it needs nor undertakes
any it does not. The book is only 123 pages long, but it exhausted me:
each vignette required digestion as I struggled against, or basked in,
its conclusions.
Definitely a very, very interesting read, and worth reading again, which is something I think very few books are. I ended up comparing "Town of Shadows" to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, because, like, it's a pretty crazy deep book with a lot of possible interpretations.
Anyway, read the book, read the review, glory in Stern's haunting images. You will not be disappointed.
My short story "Skins" is live at AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review.
Look at this, said David, holding the package out.
Allison took it and looked at the image on the wrapping. It was a picture of a skin, and beneath the image, through the transparent packaging, she could see the skin lying wrapped there pink and flaccid. Yes, that was just the sort of skin David liked.
It's beautiful, she said.
Well? What are you waiting for? Try it on!
Accompanied by another beautiful illustration from Lisa Grabenstetter (the same artist who illustrated "Manhunt"). Officially my first nude illustration, I might add.
Via Helena Bell, "Bad Writing" is a fantastic documentary that you will probably enjoy watching if you are a writer of any stripe. I'd share some of my favourite quotes, but... there are too many.
It's streaming free for the rest of January, apparently.
After several weeks off due to illness, holidays, more illness, and - last but not least - dread, Elizabeth and I are back on the wagon, training for a marathon in May.
And wow, what an absolutely stupid time to get back into our training regimen. It's somewhere between -20 and -30 degrees outside, the streets and sidewalks are slick with ice and dirty with salt and gravel, and it's dark when we wake up and when we get home from work - meaning our runs are always in absolute gloom. I do what I can to avoid it - we should be running now, instead of writing blog posts about running - but I know it'll catch up eventually.
...get it? Catch up?
Anyway, the great thing about running is that it's a really meditative space. On last night's run, I solved a problematic ending for a short story I currently have under critique, and plotted out an entirely new short story. And in only three miles! Tonight we're doing five, so I hope that I can figure out how to plot the final stages of the epic fantasy novel I'm cobbling together. My basic problem: I need a trilogy's worth of space (I know, right? Who would ever have thought I'd say those words!), but I hate books that, on their own, end as cliffhangers.
Alright, well... better go put my half-dozen layers of clothing. It's off to the races with me.
"Django Unchained," the latest film from Quentin Tarantino, is a story set a few years before the Civil War in the American South. It tells the story of a bounty hunter who frees, and then partners up with, a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx), in order to collect a bounty on men that only Django will recognize. Django eventually becomes a bounty hunter in his own right, and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz), the bounty hunter who freed him, helps him rescue his wife from a Mississippi plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).
This was a surprisingly good movie, on multiple accounts. I tried to watch Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" over the Christmas season, and found I couldn't cope with Brad Pitt's heinously poorly written dialogue and what seemed like jumpy movement between scenes (a friend of mine claims that one must simply accept poor dialogue in Tarantino's movies). "Django," though, was fluid, every scene full of tension and something to keep me moving, and I didn't find anything wrong with the dialogue (even if it was, at times, a little cheesy). It was much longer than I expected - I think it was nearly three hours long - but, with the exception of a false ending, it never really flagged.
"Django" is a good pulp action flick and all that, but what was really interesting for me was Tarantino's setting - namely, the brutal world of slave-trading and slave-industry he depicts. One can't really trust Tarantino to provide the most faithful depiction of history; for example, I was really shocked and blown away by the concept of "Mandingos," slaves who are pitted against each other in gladiatorial fights, but it turns out there's no historical basis for this (looks like it's actually taken from a novel). On the other hand, there were scenes of whipping and slaves running away from brutal plantations that I found very powerful, that made me feel very angry and sad and upset.
So it's interesting to read that Spike Lee tweeted, vis-à-vis Tarantino's movie, "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them." Lee was hardly the only critic, either. And these voices are very correct. "Django Unchained" is undoubtedly a revenge movie with an unrealistic narrative: Django is a hero who achieves feats of vengeance that would have been utterly impossible in reality. In the same way that the American national myth that you can be whatever you want to be is untrue because of social, political, and economic realities, Django's feats could never, really, have been accomplished, and the revenge Django wreaks on slave owners is a fantastical wish fulfillment and cover for a horrid part of history.
But this movie definitely made me aware of slavery in a way that I never had been before (and in a way I'm surprised a Quentin Tarantino movie could make me). In Canada, most of the standard teachings on slavery are dedicated to Canadian participation in the Underground Railroad - in short, to an education in anti-slavery. We never really learned about the horror of the institution itself. I'm also reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson at the moment, and the way the biographer deals with Jefferson's hundreds of slaves makes it seem like they all had this warm, beautiful, family relationship; so "Django Unchained" is, ironically, probably a much more accurate portrayal of master-slave relationships in the antebellum American south than the Pulitzer-winning author of "The Art of Power."
Suffice to say, this has an inspired a need for some reading. And it's also got several excellent shoot-outs, about which, as a consumer of action movies (even socially problematic ones), I certainly can't complain.
