Morning can't get here fast enough for me tonight: Snip going into hunting-mode in front of the fridge turned out to indicate the intrusion of an Unauthorized Party, which I splatted as it tried to escape under the back door, and when I returned to the scene a short while later, thinking myself a trifle obsessive for doing it, I spotted and whomped a baby Intruder in the same general vicinity. Not sure if this indicates colonization of the underfridge region yet or if they're coming in under the back door as they smell the catfood... Exterminators will be greeted with open arms when and if they turn up in a few hours, and I can't help but wish the landlady had gotten on the stick about it a year ago when the problem first started rearing its ugly little head. Bleah.
[EDIT, 4:45 AM -- two more Intruders in the interval; one within smashing range of desk and smashed, one possibly eaten by Snip as it made repeated attempts to run out from under the fridge. I wonder if something already happened exterminationwise downstairs to get them running up here all of a sudden...?]
Anyway. How 'bout that Greek synchronized-diving team, eh? Mm, speedos -- Er. Don't mind me, just trying to take my mind off of things...
In between the various interruptions, I'm still wrestling with the business-side-of-writing stuff; I've been following![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
msagara's notes on the general process with interest, and little by little I think I'm arriving at a clearer idea of what exactly to call this creation of mine, which has been a sticking point throughout. The trouble has been that the Manuscript doesn't fit very neatly into any of the pigeonholes I've yet measured it against, which complicates the agent-finding process; one is somewhat ahead of the game, it is generally considered, if one can come up with a succinct "if you liked X then you'd like this too" sort of comparison for one's work to make the agent's job of imagining your piece in front of various editors just that little bit easier. Unfortunately, so far all I've been coming up with is what it isn't: it's not steampunk, although it's in that general neighborhood; it's not urban fantasy or magic realism, although it's out that direction of the spectrum as well... &c. But it struck me this morning that of all my readings in the field, the thing mine most resembles in general tone, strangely enough, is Pratchett's more recent Discworld work. Which is an odd comparison for Brain to have come up with, on the surface of it, for mine isn't trying deliberately for humor; when I said "Pratchett", I'd bet that most of you immediately thought of the Luggage, or the Librarian, or the asides about Bloody Stupid Johnson, and my work certainly isn't anything like that.
But increasingly, lately, neither is Pratchett's. Take the stories that center around Vimes, for example; there's a world-weariness there, a way of treating serious Real-World ideas in the clothing of the fantastic, that seems to me to be the closest fit I've seen to the outlook I feel coming across in my own fiction -- a way of looking past the fancy-dress and flashy effects to the underlying human story of it all, which is not necessarily the first thing one thinks of when the label "fantasy" appears on the spine of a book. What I've been seeing in the genre anymore, by and large, is either fantasy-by-the yard, with interchangable plots and indistinguishable protagonists, or preciously Literary tomes that one needs a degree in Postmodernist Theory and a machete to come out the other side of alive. Neither extreme seems to offer much to the Reader who simply wants to curl up with a good read that won't insult their intelligence.
So when do we get to take ourselves seriously enough as a genre to write from the courage of our convictions? Some of the more interesting pieces I've read recently, such as David Sosnowski's Vamped, are turning up in the mainstream section despite their clearly fantastic premises, so there is a market out there for treating fantasy-readers like grownups -- but how does one pitch to that, beyond throwing out vague statements about believing that one's Manuscript might have "strong crossover appeal" which sound like wishful and self-aggrandizing BS?
I wrote a story about a guy. So, this guy can raise the dead and his sidekick's a golem -- but that's almost beside the point of the thing. Boy meets Girl, Golem falls in love with Girl, Boy never does quite figure out that Golem's reflecting his own desires but Boy gets Girl anyway... Isn't that what it's supposed to be about? Yeah, dropping the Ring in the Crack of Doom is cool and all, but isn't it Frodo and Sam we're really returning to, time and again? How did that get overlooked in favor of all this fantasy-by-the-pound Product on the bookstore shelves, and how can we start taking it back?
Assignment for my Readers: what ought I to check out from the library next, in light of the above remarks? I'm looking for examples to bolster my sense that there's an existing, but underserved, market for works that use the trappings of genre as a metaphor for "real-world" concerns, as opposed to "that oughta shut the little bastards up for 370 pages' worth" Extruded Fantasy Product. (I could name Names, but I suspect you'd already have a good idea if you've done any reading in the field lately...)
[EDIT, 4:45 AM -- two more Intruders in the interval; one within smashing range of desk and smashed, one possibly eaten by Snip as it made repeated attempts to run out from under the fridge. I wonder if something already happened exterminationwise downstairs to get them running up here all of a sudden...?]
Anyway. How 'bout that Greek synchronized-diving team, eh? Mm, speedos -- Er. Don't mind me, just trying to take my mind off of things...
In between the various interruptions, I'm still wrestling with the business-side-of-writing stuff; I've been following
msagara's notes on the general process with interest, and little by little I think I'm arriving at a clearer idea of what exactly to call this creation of mine, which has been a sticking point throughout. The trouble has been that the Manuscript doesn't fit very neatly into any of the pigeonholes I've yet measured it against, which complicates the agent-finding process; one is somewhat ahead of the game, it is generally considered, if one can come up with a succinct "if you liked X then you'd like this too" sort of comparison for one's work to make the agent's job of imagining your piece in front of various editors just that little bit easier. Unfortunately, so far all I've been coming up with is what it isn't: it's not steampunk, although it's in that general neighborhood; it's not urban fantasy or magic realism, although it's out that direction of the spectrum as well... &c. But it struck me this morning that of all my readings in the field, the thing mine most resembles in general tone, strangely enough, is Pratchett's more recent Discworld work. Which is an odd comparison for Brain to have come up with, on the surface of it, for mine isn't trying deliberately for humor; when I said "Pratchett", I'd bet that most of you immediately thought of the Luggage, or the Librarian, or the asides about Bloody Stupid Johnson, and my work certainly isn't anything like that.But increasingly, lately, neither is Pratchett's. Take the stories that center around Vimes, for example; there's a world-weariness there, a way of treating serious Real-World ideas in the clothing of the fantastic, that seems to me to be the closest fit I've seen to the outlook I feel coming across in my own fiction -- a way of looking past the fancy-dress and flashy effects to the underlying human story of it all, which is not necessarily the first thing one thinks of when the label "fantasy" appears on the spine of a book. What I've been seeing in the genre anymore, by and large, is either fantasy-by-the yard, with interchangable plots and indistinguishable protagonists, or preciously Literary tomes that one needs a degree in Postmodernist Theory and a machete to come out the other side of alive. Neither extreme seems to offer much to the Reader who simply wants to curl up with a good read that won't insult their intelligence.
So when do we get to take ourselves seriously enough as a genre to write from the courage of our convictions? Some of the more interesting pieces I've read recently, such as David Sosnowski's Vamped, are turning up in the mainstream section despite their clearly fantastic premises, so there is a market out there for treating fantasy-readers like grownups -- but how does one pitch to that, beyond throwing out vague statements about believing that one's Manuscript might have "strong crossover appeal" which sound like wishful and self-aggrandizing BS?
I wrote a story about a guy. So, this guy can raise the dead and his sidekick's a golem -- but that's almost beside the point of the thing. Boy meets Girl, Golem falls in love with Girl, Boy never does quite figure out that Golem's reflecting his own desires but Boy gets Girl anyway... Isn't that what it's supposed to be about? Yeah, dropping the Ring in the Crack of Doom is cool and all, but isn't it Frodo and Sam we're really returning to, time and again? How did that get overlooked in favor of all this fantasy-by-the-pound Product on the bookstore shelves, and how can we start taking it back?
Assignment for my Readers: what ought I to check out from the library next, in light of the above remarks? I'm looking for examples to bolster my sense that there's an existing, but underserved, market for works that use the trappings of genre as a metaphor for "real-world" concerns, as opposed to "that oughta shut the little bastards up for 370 pages' worth" Extruded Fantasy Product. (I could name Names, but I suspect you'd already have a good idea if you've done any reading in the field lately...)
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