Tag: full of theories

Recently I was a guest on the Breaking the Glass Slipper podcast. BtGS is a feminist SFF podcast that wanted to do more episodes on intersectional issues, so we talked about disability representation in SFF. You can give it a listen here!

(I will confess that I am terrible at listening to podcasts myself, but it can be so much fun to be on them–one gets into good conversations. So we’ll see if I can’t get better at this.)

There are two standard cultural narratives about being unexpectedly deprived of internet, at this point in our relationship with that piece of technology. I bet you’ll recognize them both.

The first one goes: I didn’t realize how much I was missing by looking at the internet until we had an outage and then I stopped and smelled the daisies and talked to my family and my life was so much richer and I resolve to do without the internet loads of times going forward yay. The second: I didn’t realize how dependent I was on the internet until we had an outage, and then I was frustrated and agitated and could not cope and oh golly I guess I have a real problem here and I resolve to do without the internet loads of times going forward yay.

You can see why these are stories, I guess, because “I already knew this thing and lo here it is” is not much of a story. Except when it goes against the standard cultural narrative, in which case sometimes maybe it is.

We had a long internet outage yesterday morning, and it completely disrupted my morning routine. Usually I read social sites and news of various types while I’m reading my breakfast in the morning, and I use streaming video to watch something during my workout. Yesterday I checked my phone to make sure there was nothing urgent, read the newspaper with my breakfast (instead of with my lunch as usual), and watched video on DVD with my workout. In short, I coped just fine, there was no failure of cope, there was not even a moment where I wailed, “But what will I do?” But it was an annoyance, and I feel fine about that because I have considered how I use the internet in my morning routine and am happy with it. The internet is a tool, I’m happy with what I use it as a tool for, there does not need to be a ritual chanting of “fie upon you, get away foul internet.”

I have also said several times recently that I want to improve my relationship with doughnuts. Specifically, I currently eat a doughnut between zero times a year and twice, and I feel that three or even four doughnuts in the course of a year would be superior. People are making lots of fancy gourmet doughnuts these days, and I feel that trying a few more of them on rare occasions would improve my life in a tiny but measurable way. I do not have to participate in ritual decrying of doughnuts as bad for me. Of course they would be bad for me if I was eating tons of them all the time. But I think that my current doughnut count is actually slightly low. As a sometimes food, sometimes could come around more often. Not a lot. Just a little.

So…I think it’s worth noticing, when the shape of the narrative isn’t fitting. I think it’s worth noticing when the story doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. I get on the internet in the morning, I check in with my friends, I read a bit, and I’m good with that. I’m happy with my tools. I hope you can be happy with yours too.

I’m teaching the critique workshop at Fourth Street later this month–it’s June oh good gracious it is June–and there are all sorts of things that we are just not going to have the chance to talk about, since we’re only doing a little bit of panel discussion and a lot of critiquing. I watched a movie about an improv group, Don’t Think Twice, that made me think of a topic that is certainly outside the scope of that panel discussion, so here we are! I really liked the movie, and I recommend it to people who are in creative pursuits, especially people who are in creative relationships.

The thing that they can’t really fit into a well-composed movie of about 90 minutes–and oh gosh I am glad they kept it to that rather than letting it sprawl–was…well. I feel like, especially early on, especially the first time you get a well-functioning creative group, whether it’s improv or a band or a writing critique group or what. Even if it’s a group of two. I feel like there is a certain sense that you will never have something like this again. That it must be preserved at, if not all costs, certainly very, very substantial costs, because it is your only chance at such a creative synergy.

And…it is. And also it’s not.

A well-functioning creative relationship is worth working at. It’s worth preserving. Definitely not to be thrown away at a whim. And when you look back at someone’s life as a whole, there are clearly creative partnerships, working relationships, in which they functioned like no other time. People and dynamics that were better for their work than any others, that turned out to be irreplaceable.

But.

You can’t tell in advance which ones those will be, necessarily, and which ones will just be really intense for the person in them and kind of useless for the work. You can’t tell which will be lead-ups to something even better, even more fulfilling and interesting.

Which is not an excuse to treat other humans badly. I mention this because of the opposite: it is a reason not to be treated badly yourself, not to stand by and watch while someone is treated badly, on the theory that the creative relationship is indispensable. It’s even a reason to pay attention to whether the work that was wondrous and irreplaceable a few years ago is still going that way. Because “this isn’t working well for me” is enough reason not to keep critiquing together, not to keep performing together, whatever it is you’re doing. It’s not trivial to find people to work with. Sometimes it’s not even possible. But that doesn’t mean that the person or people you’re working badly with now have to be clung to and endured no matter the cost to yourself or others.

So how do you evaluate? Well, I don’t honestly know for other creative relationships. But for writing critiques, there are several things: Do you still want to work with the person/people? Are you looking forward to their feedback, do you think it will be interesting? If you had to choose someone to work with now, would you choose this person/group? Do you think you know in advance what they’re going to say about everything you do, and if you think that, are you right? Do you find yourself unproductively annoyed or frustrated by more of their feedback than not? (Sometimes useful feedback can be annoying on the way in, and it’s up to you how much of that you’re up for. But unproductive annoyance is another matter.)

One of the tricky ones: if these things are true, how enmeshed in a group situation is the person? How possibly would it be to get yourself out, and how worthwhile? Sitting through “I think you should describe the living room in excruciating detail on the first page” is annoying; being in a crit group with someone you know to be a bigot is far worse. Disagreeing with someone persistently about what a story should do is bad; being in a group where someone is allowed to treat you with contempt while the rest of the group doesn’t seem to mind it is in a different category of bad. Sometimes it’s worth enduring a group where the fit has gone slightly awry if it’s mostly still a good group. But there have to be limits, and some part of you will know where they are.

“This isn’t working for me” needs to be a fine thing to say in critique relationships. “I just don’t have the time to dedicate to this group that I used to/that I feel it deserves/etc.”: an entirely valid reason not to do it. A lot of times writing groups just quietly reach a natural end date even if they’re working well when they do meet, because the rhythm of people’s work isn’t conducive to the rhythm of the group. But if you don’t want to get feedback from people on your work, you do not have to. Even if it’s otherwise working fine. Even if “everyone else” seems happy with the status quo.

Especially if you went for long stretches of your life without anybody caring about your creative work, it can be really hard to let go of the people who first do that. And sometimes you get really lucky and meet someone in high school or college or in your first workshop–even if your first workshop is in your middle age–whose feedback you’ll value for the rest of your lives. Sometimes someone who was awesome when you were both twenty will still be awesome when you’re both sixty. It’s sad when this turns out not to be the case, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect on you. Sometimes it doesn’t reflect on either of you and you’re both still awesome, you’re just not the right people to critique each other’s work any more.

Sometimes this means taking a leap. It means striking out without a new crit buddy, a new group, a new situation that you understand. Sometimes it’s really useful to identify why something isn’t working (wrong genre? wrong category? wrong life assumptions? wrong schedule?) in order to get at something else that might. It’s worth iterating. But always, it’s worth knowing that there is no last chance for as long as we’re alive. Be kind, be thoughtful, but also be clear that there are many forms and types of critique relationship available, and you don’t have to endure indefinitely in one that isn’t working for you.

I made a jokey tweet (…that is entirely true) about my lack of high/low culture divide. (Specifically: “I think you would be alarmed if you knew how often, “Sir Mix-a-Lot’s identical twin brother does not like big butts, and cannot tell the truth,” is my IMMEDIATE response to philosophical conundrums and logic puzzles. My high/low culture separation is nonexistent, basically.”) And some stranger came along and said, “And yet weirdly, you say that almost in a tone of self criticism, as if it were a /bad/ thing. :)” So first of all: good use of emoji to indicate tone in a medium not well-suited for that, stranger, well-done, I get that you are being extra-friendly.

And generally, I am in favor of this trait of mine. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I don’t only select friends for it…but it’s strongly, strongly correlated with the people I’m closest to. The last person I talked to about Debussy, for example, is also the person who got “Hooked on a Feeling” in my head for the last 48 hours and counting (…THANKS). Another dear friend inspired me to write her a story because she loves classic space stories and mid-twentieth century British literary fiction, so I got the peanut butter and the chocolate together for her, since I like them too. It’s just…an ease of conversation thing, an approach that makes it easier not to have to signal conversational turns because we’re all up in those things together. But here’s what I mean about signaling conversational turns when I haven’t figured out whether someone shares that trait yet:

There’s the problem of someone thinking that a low culture reference in what they intended to have as a serious conversation is automatically a joke. Example: someone wants to talk about writers who handle family relationships well or interestingly. They bring up A.S. Byatt and we talk about her works for some time. Great. If they think I’m changing the subject or not taking them seriously if I mention Lois McMaster Bujold (long series space opera), Fonda Lee (kung fu movie-influenced fantasy), or Hilary McKay (children’s), that’s not going to work, conversationally. It’s not going to help. I know that some of my friends who focus on genre get immediately indignant, defensive, and declare that people who have that reaction are being jerks. But I think they don’t necessarily mean to, they just…are trying to work from context they don’t have.

Here’s my example: when I was in my mid-teens, I had a cousin I loved very much, and she loved me very much, and I noticed she was laughing at pretty much everything I said. Not, like, hearty deep laughter. But polite laughter, baffled laughter. And I realized that we had diverged enough that she was trying to figure out what on earth I was saying, what would make me say the things I said, and the only thing she could think of was: she would never say any of those things except as some kind of weird joke maybe? And it was polite to laugh at people’s jokes? Therefore hahaha, OUT OF KINDNESS AND CONSIDERATION. So sometimes people are not trying to be jerks about breadth of artwork included in a discussion, they’re trying to get the context for what you are signaling. It’s a pitfall, not a conversation-ender, if you can manage to signal clearly that, no, you are still talking about the same thing they’re talking about. Communication can be achieved here. It just sometimes takes work.

The other end of the spectrum comes when people have past bad experiences with people trying to one-up and show off with how superior their tastes are. This is a crappy thing to do to people, but pretending no one ever does it won’t make it go away. So…if someone is trying to have a fun conversation about stuff they like, and you are trying to have a fun conversation about stuff you like, the trap comes in when they have been conditioned to read your fun as a dominance game over them, a way to show off how much better you are than them. And it’s useful to try to listen to the other person’s reactions carefully, to figure out when they’re being ignorantly dismissive for fun and when they’re protecting a bruise, where they’ve been smacked a bit before. (Sometimes, sadly, even literally.)

So yah: it’s easy to just dismiss the line between high and low culture, to look at some of the fruitful and amazing art that comes from ignoring or even gleefully trampling it. To say, nope, we want none of those divisions here. I’m on board. And every few years someone writes a manifesto about doing just that, as though nobody who came before them ever did, instead of practically everybody. But…if we can ever leap to “maybe this person’s context is different and it’s worth trying a little more communication to be sure” instead of “JERKS!”…if we can think of communication pitfalls instead of insurmountable problems…that seems worthwhile to me, when I can make it work.

The hopepunk panel at ConFusion was mostly not about the -punk part at all, but Nisi Shawl’s punk past weighed in for a moment, when she talked about doing it all with three chords if that many, not with complex technique, just jumping in and bashing out a song on feeling and momentum.

And I thought…wait…but…

That’s not cyberpunk at all.

In a lot of ways the cyberpunk movement and the subsequent -punk movements have meandered around how much they are or aren’t living up to punk’s rebelliousness, sticking it to the man, going against the establishment, corporatism, whatever else they have identified as punk roots.

But musically. Let’s be honest. Three-chords-if-that? Is not an accurate parallel to what cyberpunk was doing. Or any of its heirs.

Do you think they’ll get offended if I call them cyberprog? Steamprog?

Can I write some solarprog? Like solarpunk but with lots of obscure chord structure and orchestration?

Should I go back to twitter now? Okay.

I’ve read two blog posts by friends about exiting Campbell eligibility, about timing of publishing and keeping work in the public eye and feeling good about professional development personally even when it comes out in weird chunks. One is by Arkady Martine and the other by Jordan Kurella, and I am simultaneously happy and not at all surprised to see them focusing on the important parts, on where they are as writers and where their upcoming work will be, and not on specific awards eligibility.

Obviously I’m not in the same place; Campbell eligibility is more than a decade in the rearview for me. But the way that how work is going and what the public sees do not correlate is something that I’ve had to adjust to. Sometimes I can write up a storm and no one gets to read it for ages. Sometimes I’m struggling, flailing, thrashing around, and people keep smiling and telling me how great things are going for me right now, because what they’re seeing is the result of a really great time.

That’s how it goes. And I get grateful that I got exposed to Bull Durham early, because I get Annie Savoy’s voice in my head saying, “It’s a long season, and you gotta trust it.” Well. Well, yeah. This is what I do. I was raised in the church of baseball, but I’m not its acolyte. I’m a writer. When I keep having story after story coming out, or when nothing comes out for ages but I’m writing like gangbusters–it’s hard to smooth it out perfectly, it’s hard to make it all perfectly even. A year is not the right scale for that, a year is too short. And that’s okay.

So when the end of the year rolls around, I’ll have some stories to link to, and I’ll be able to talk about what I did, and the two won’t really be the same. And again next year, the two won’t really be the same. That’s the nature of the beast. Being able to point to something and say, look, that’s what I did, that, yes, isn’t it shiny, I did something, me, and that’s what it is: that’s satisfying. But it’s even more satisfying to know that it’s the right something, long-term.

It’s a long season, and you gotta trust it. Yep.

One of my friends has gone through a deeply unpleasant divorce and continues to struggle with custody, and an unfortunate thing that I keep observing is that it’s almost impossible to write civil law around people whose main interest is making other people miserable. Almost every piece of family law assumes that people will act in their own interest or, if they are parents, ideally at least somewhat in their child’s interest. Structuring a law that will protect the vulnerable and allow for people in the structurally identical role who are purely destructive forces to not act destructively is incredibly difficult.

Which, given what I do for work, makes me think of dystopias. And specifically it makes me think of what I do and do not find interesting in structuring them.

There’s a certain school of writing, of teaching writing, that claims that we’re all the hero of our own story, and sure, I buy that, but that doesn’t mean that we’re all heroes with great or even good motivations–even internally. Not all of us even bother to lie to ourselves about our motivations. There are people in the world like my friend’s ex who will be very up-front about their desire to hurt. They are, however–and let me be very clear about this–quite boring. They are boring in real life. They are not particularly more interesting in books.

So if you choose them as your core dystopian power structure–if the heart of your dystopia is that some genuinely mean jerks have come to power, not because of an ideology or a clear set of concrete goals beyond themselves but just to screw with people in ways that aren’t even all that effective compared to what they could do if they were more rational–well. I can’t tell you that never happens, can I. But for me–for me personally as a reader–the fact that it’s real doesn’t give it a lot to grab onto. Especially if there’s a speculative element to the meanness.

Here’s where “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” contrasts for me with N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season–where they’re not doing the same thing and not trying to. The children in torment in the former are in torment for the sake of the point being made. (Perhaps that point is walking away from utopia in fiction writing. There are worse points, if so.) But it is not, I think, intended to be practical; it is metaphorical, poetic, nonlinear. You are not supposed to be able to draw a line between the single child’s suffering–and the next one when it dies, and the next–and what, exactly, about that suffering makes Omelas a supposed paradise. It Just Does. In The Fifth Season, on the other hand, it is very explicit, very extremely clear, how the suffering creates–not a paradise–but a livable society–what the consequences would be for ending it. What is being purchased and at what price.

There is value in making a general, stirring point, in rallying people to the cause of Goodness And Truth In The Larger Sense. But it’s also pretty easy. Not…not as easy as we would have hoped, is it? “How do you feel about Nazis?” is supposed to be the canonical easy question: I AM AGAINST THEM. Still. Still, even with people failing easy mode, this is easy mode. Pushing a bit harder on people, handing them a decision that’s made for heartbreaking reasons instead of dreadful ones, giving them characters who are trying to figure out where their compromises become counterproductive instead of characters who never had any morals to compromise…that’s not the only reason to write dystopia. But it’s a pretty solid one.

Last week one of my friends was saying on Twitter that he wants more of basically everything, more variations at every scale, so that there are more chances for it to lead to something cool, and I’m with him on that. And I think this is where the mechanism of Omelas comes in: I, personally, tend to default to thinking that it matters how and why your dystopia exists and is maintained. I tend to think that’s relevant to its stories and its downfall–on average. But there are going to be times when you have a particular story that is just not accounted for in the laws of people behaving according to their own interests. Or when that just can’t show up in the story, when the story is very short or very distracted into something else quite specific. It’s worth asking yourself about the mechanism of Omelas–you can wind up with a geologic masterwork like The Fifth Season. But occasionally the answer to that question is nope, nope we’re not answering the mechanism, the thing I’m doing is worth doing without poking at how. And that’s okay too. Some people will–yes, sorry–walk away from it. But–variety, more, more. Humanity is impossible to account for under one set of “I’d like to see more of” or “I really prefer it when.” So is its fiction.