Time for a Rant

There is horse neep and farm blather to come, and the book is proceeding apace, but I have just had a major peeve petted till it sends off sparks, so here we go.

It's fairly well acknowledged among fiction writers that for sheer fantasy and willful distortion of the facts, you need a journalist. I've given many an interview only to find that the result was, shall we say, creative in its interpretation of what I said. Which I always put down to the nature of oral discourse and the fact that most people (imnsho) never listen. They have a set of assumptions, and as long as what you say fits those assumptions, you're fine--but if you depart from the template, those departures will just not register.

So I did an e-mail interview for my alma mater's alumnae quarterly, thinking it would be less subject to error than a phone interview which I couldn't do anyway because I can't hear well enough. I supplied numerous dates and facts. I supplied a cover flat of a recent book, and a photo of myself. I looked forward rather cheerfully to the article.

Ah, delusion.

You will all be glad to know that Judith E. Tarr is a fantasy writer of extremely minor distinction who did her junior year of college in England and made her first fiction sale, a short story, to an anthology. She sounds like a nice person, and she's a horse person like me, from the evidence of the photo that accompanies the article. However, even though we supposedly graduated in the same year, I don't seem to have met her.

Now I don't excessively mind the screwup on the story sale (I had already sold six novels and published one) as the chronology isn't glaringly obvious from the resume I gave them. The England thing was specifically stated as "I did a master's degree at Cambridge" but it's not a huge deal really, it doesn't affect the way I make my living.

But really, they could get my name right. Seriously. It's on the book cover. I've written almost thirty of the things over the past twenty years--the college library has a fair number of them. I gave them the URL for my bibliography, and I signed myself with no middle initial. I honestly do not know where they got that particular nom de plume.

And people wonder why I feel like chopped liver so much of the time. Everyone else featured in the article got her name right, got lots of mention of how much she's written and how illustrious she is and how wonderful a writer she is. I got "Fantasy writer Judith E. Tarr sold her first short story to Much More Illustrious Alumna" and that was pretty much it, except for the inaccuracy about where I spent my junior year.

From which I have learned the following lessons:

Don't trust a written interview to result in accurate copy.

Don't expect an interviewer to check the facts in any way, shape, or form--up to and including the correct form of your name.

Do blow your horn as loudly as you can--brag on every award and nomination, spell out how many books you've written, trumpet your achievements in every possible way or you'll come across as, well, liverwurst. The interviewer never heard of you before she got the assignment, never read a book by you and has no intention of doing so, and modesty or reluctance to brag will only get you the damnation of faint (if any) praise. If you take the low-key approach--you'll get what you deserve.

PR is about the noise, baby. The louder the better.

And damn I'm bad at selling myself.

At another time I might be less honked off and more wryly amused, but right at this point, it's making some things just a little too painfully obvious. I've been in sf and fantasy for over twenty years, written scads of books--and it seems to be signifying essentially nothing.

Editors love my work. Just about every genre editor is a fan and gets excited when I wander afield from my usual-suspects publisher, and a new project always has at least two of them duking it out for the book. Reviewers adore it, I have a file box full of rave reviews and good-better-best notices, starred reviews, best-of-year mentions, you name it. Fellow writers show a lot of respect and a gratifying amount of admiration for what I've done.

Then it gets to the next step and basically dies. Awards? One of my publishers said once, "She might as well write in invisible ink for all the notice she gets at awards time." I've won a couple of minor ones, but I had to get Fantasy off the spine and Fiction on it before I got a World Fantasy nomination. I don't get upset about this, awards aren't what I do this for, but I do regard it as a symptom--though of what, I'm still trying to figure out. Lack of hornblowing? Lack of the common touch--or the lit'ry touch depending? Can't be lack of quality or the editors and writers and reviewers would be letting me know it. Especially the reviewers.

So here I am, finishing up my second pseudonymous 'Way Cool Blowout Project that I did purely for fun (well, profit, too, but mainly it's about the fun) and because I needed a fresh outlook on life, and book one got the kind of editorial and reviewer reactions that I'm used to (so it's not the name, with or without initial)--and readers are reacting more actively than they ever have. And that's good. Because ye gods, I need it.

But really, it's enough to let my original byline just die. Twenty years, thirty books, they can't even get my name right. Why even bother?

Good thing writers get to reinvent themselves as often as they or the market will bear. In fact, I think I feel another pseudonym coming on....