Lo! An Actual Entry!
Jun. 18th, 2009 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancinghorseAfter all the Twittering and the blatant self-promotion, I owe everybody an actual entry. Keeping the farm afloat in this economy has taken all of my energy and then some, and I don't seem to have anything left over. What little brain is left, most days, has just about 140 characters' worth of things to say.
Yes,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
birdhousefrog did fly out when I hit nuclear meltdown, held down the fort, fed me, and nursed me through the end of The Revision That Ate My Brain (also my liver, my lights, my sanity...). She is a hero of the revolution.
Now I have another revision to do, before I tackle new material. I am still working on various projects and lining up the brain cells to do the subscription version of the fourth Caitlin Brennan novel. I also have been working hard getting set up at Book View Cafe, which involves a great deal of scanning and formatting of hardcopy too old to exist in electronic format. Seriously, some of it was written in longhand and submitted in typescript. That was back during the Cretaceous.
It's all been tremendously time-consuming and exhausting, but it's also tremendously exciting. Publishing is changing rapidly and profoundly. Rules of thumb that were the done thing a year ago have become very slippery or even counterproductive, and modes of publishing that once were minor or marginal are looking more and more like the face of the future.
I've gained a great deal from this, not least the realization that it wasn't just my confidence as a rider that was destroyed over the past few years. I'd completely lost my confidence as a writer, as well. It's so difficult physically and financially to get out among other writers that I'd become very isolated, and only really exposed to editors, agents, and the public faces of my colleagues. What I got from that was the conviction that money was the measure of success, sales figures were all that counted, and authors were valued by the number of copies they sold and/or the number of awards they won. It got to the point that I couldn't write at all. Why bother? No one wanted it, and it wasn't any good anyway (i.e. wouldn't hit the NYT list).
It's been a shock to realize that I have name and fan recognition. I'm considered a marquee name at BVC. (Me? Moi? Noooo.) It's also a shock to realize that I can write--still and always--and while it's been painful to change genres, and writing for kids is the hardest writing of all, I can do it. I've got what it takes.
No, don't pooh-pooh this. It doesn't matter what someone is from the outside, if the inside can't see it. It's very real and crippling when you sit in front of a screen and no words come, because you're convinced that whatever you write is unsalable crap. Especially when after decades of selling everything you come up with, you're suddenly collecting rejections or being told to gut and rewrite endlessly. Yes, yes, and starlets moan that it's hard to be beautiful, but if you live on your writing and suddenly there's no income coming in, and nothing you propose even gets past the agent, you get to a point where you honestly don't know what to do next. It gets even worse when what you want to write, and what your readers are begging for, gets a flat No from the publisher. All the gears grind to a halt.
That's where I've been, along with far too many writers like me. Friends and colleagues have been amazing about helping me through this. I've needed to arrive at a more realistic assessment of who I am and what I have to offer. Which is, in order: not exactly chopped liver, and rather a lot.
Hence, Camp Lipizzan. If I can't go to the writers, I'll bring them to me. I have something unique here, and it's time to stop hogging it all for myself.
Hence, too, my first foray into the world of e-publishing with the BVC freebies. There will be more coming, and the start of paid content at BVC and elsewhere. Some of it will surprise you if you have me bracketed as Serious Historical Fantasy. (Watch for, for example, "Elvis Invictus" at BVC. Or the far-future-sf unicorn story. Or...)
Through all of this, the horses have managed to stay healthy please god knock silicon, and while there have been few funds for lessons, I have made the most of the ones I've taken. I've used the time to learn to stop clamping and tensing up when doing things that count in my warped little head as Dressage, and to work on trusting my skills--always a struggle, but less than it was. Pook is getting deep and broad over the loin, which is a strong testimonial to correct work. We work regularly and comfortably in walk and trot, and canter gets easier. I can canter anyone else, and that includes Pandora and ze keed. Who is sound. Sound, I tell you. Sound. And that, for a horse thrown back at me a year and a half ago with the implication he should be put down, is a very, very good thing.
We're still deep in the woods. It gets frakking scary. But we're working on finding ways out. On all fronts.
Yes,
birdhousefrog did fly out when I hit nuclear meltdown, held down the fort, fed me, and nursed me through the end of The Revision That Ate My Brain (also my liver, my lights, my sanity...). She is a hero of the revolution. Now I have another revision to do, before I tackle new material. I am still working on various projects and lining up the brain cells to do the subscription version of the fourth Caitlin Brennan novel. I also have been working hard getting set up at Book View Cafe, which involves a great deal of scanning and formatting of hardcopy too old to exist in electronic format. Seriously, some of it was written in longhand and submitted in typescript. That was back during the Cretaceous.
It's all been tremendously time-consuming and exhausting, but it's also tremendously exciting. Publishing is changing rapidly and profoundly. Rules of thumb that were the done thing a year ago have become very slippery or even counterproductive, and modes of publishing that once were minor or marginal are looking more and more like the face of the future.
I've gained a great deal from this, not least the realization that it wasn't just my confidence as a rider that was destroyed over the past few years. I'd completely lost my confidence as a writer, as well. It's so difficult physically and financially to get out among other writers that I'd become very isolated, and only really exposed to editors, agents, and the public faces of my colleagues. What I got from that was the conviction that money was the measure of success, sales figures were all that counted, and authors were valued by the number of copies they sold and/or the number of awards they won. It got to the point that I couldn't write at all. Why bother? No one wanted it, and it wasn't any good anyway (i.e. wouldn't hit the NYT list).
It's been a shock to realize that I have name and fan recognition. I'm considered a marquee name at BVC. (Me? Moi? Noooo.) It's also a shock to realize that I can write--still and always--and while it's been painful to change genres, and writing for kids is the hardest writing of all, I can do it. I've got what it takes.
No, don't pooh-pooh this. It doesn't matter what someone is from the outside, if the inside can't see it. It's very real and crippling when you sit in front of a screen and no words come, because you're convinced that whatever you write is unsalable crap. Especially when after decades of selling everything you come up with, you're suddenly collecting rejections or being told to gut and rewrite endlessly. Yes, yes, and starlets moan that it's hard to be beautiful, but if you live on your writing and suddenly there's no income coming in, and nothing you propose even gets past the agent, you get to a point where you honestly don't know what to do next. It gets even worse when what you want to write, and what your readers are begging for, gets a flat No from the publisher. All the gears grind to a halt.
That's where I've been, along with far too many writers like me. Friends and colleagues have been amazing about helping me through this. I've needed to arrive at a more realistic assessment of who I am and what I have to offer. Which is, in order: not exactly chopped liver, and rather a lot.
Hence, Camp Lipizzan. If I can't go to the writers, I'll bring them to me. I have something unique here, and it's time to stop hogging it all for myself.
Hence, too, my first foray into the world of e-publishing with the BVC freebies. There will be more coming, and the start of paid content at BVC and elsewhere. Some of it will surprise you if you have me bracketed as Serious Historical Fantasy. (Watch for, for example, "Elvis Invictus" at BVC. Or the far-future-sf unicorn story. Or...)
Through all of this, the horses have managed to stay healthy please god knock silicon, and while there have been few funds for lessons, I have made the most of the ones I've taken. I've used the time to learn to stop clamping and tensing up when doing things that count in my warped little head as Dressage, and to work on trusting my skills--always a struggle, but less than it was. Pook is getting deep and broad over the loin, which is a strong testimonial to correct work. We work regularly and comfortably in walk and trot, and canter gets easier. I can canter anyone else, and that includes Pandora and ze keed. Who is sound. Sound, I tell you. Sound. And that, for a horse thrown back at me a year and a half ago with the implication he should be put down, is a very, very good thing.
We're still deep in the woods. It gets frakking scary. But we're working on finding ways out. On all fronts.
