Personal Liberty? Auto-Liberation.

I think I'm going to lay off the publishing industry related news for a little while. I had something of an epiphany yesterday - one that, in retrospect, was long coming. A little more than a month ago when I was recovering from Deathly Virus of Death, the time my immune system demanded to have off writing put a little chink in my confidence. Working breathtaking amounts of overtime the few weeks after that gave the chink time to fill and freeze and split, but it took me a while to notice my armor was in pieces. Stepping back from my work gave me all kinds of time to start doubting it, and myself. Especially because the (usually exact wrong) self-flagellating response of a perfectionist writer to the lengthy lamentations of literary agents and editors about the state of things and slush kicked into full gear. But it seemed perfectly natural - if the publishing industry can worry about these things near constantly, certainly my own work deserved at least equal scrutiny.

I admit that over the past month and a half or so I've spent more by far thinking worrying about writing than actually writing. At all. Worrying about the quality of my writing, the quantity, the subject, characters, theme, genre, and overall place in the publishing world, and the reading world. Things that my google reader and twitter accounts chock full of agents and writers across the spectrum post at length about on a daily basis. Things which, dear readers, are like Web MDing "itchy big toe." Five minutes of scanning or three hours of compulsive reading will leave you equally panicked and convinced that you have gangrene, frostbite, gout, and the bubonic plague all at once, when really probably your toe just itches.

There's a wealth of good advice on the internet, but I've realized that when I'm not actively writing, I approach publishing news with the same quivering heart palpitations as when I google "dizzy headache" - I can tell myself I'm looking to find out the cause of my malaise and a solution to it as much as I want, but I realized, yesterday afternoon, that I was doing nothing but feeding my fear that something was really drastically and unbearably wrong. Because "scalp pain?" and all other similar queries all eventually link to "Cancer, imminent death," I've been finding more and more excuses to fear for my writerly life and... you've got it, not write.

Then I saw this. That's right, a YA author's terrible Ke$ha parody about procrastination (if you didn't click, do - it's better than you think, and basically exactly word for word captures what I go through on bad days, minus the dancing). And it hit me - it doesn't matter if vampires are out and minotaurs are in; doesn't matter if steampunk beats cyberpunk; if post apocalyptic is the new contemporary romance. It doesn't matter because if I'm not writing something I'm passionate about - or, worse, not writing at all, it doesn't matter who's buying or reading what, because I won't ever have anything to sell - or anything to say.

So yesterday, I closed down twitter, shut off my email, put away my google reader, opened up a nice clean word document, and started writing something that's been dancing around in my head the whole time I've been skittering scared. And you know what? It was the most productive day by far that Ive had since I started seriously dedicating myself to the craft. I wrote straight through until 3:30 in the morning, and I could have written until dawn if I didn't have an early rise ahead of me. And everything flowed, and my writing was better for it, because I wasn't worrying about the ultimate publishability of what I was writing, or how long it would take me to get from blank page to fin, I just wrote. It was refreshing, because I think realize now that I've been putting entirely too much pressure on myself to perform, without really any good reason.

And of course I'll still be keeping an eye on Janet Reid's ever changing query requirements, but I think I'll spend less time thinking about what the machine thinks it wants for dinner. Because even if no one ever sees a single word I write, I think it finally hit me that it's important to me, at least, that I write it. And I'd like to think that's where the best writing comes from, anyway. I suppose we'll see.

What do you think? Not just in writing, but in life - does thinking too hard and worrying about what other people think get you down, or does it challenge you to improve?

BP and Things

So, this will probably be a short post, to ease me back into the whole idea of posting. I've been locked in an epic battle with the Plague for some time now, which has mostly involved me sitting on the sofa watching Family Guy reruns and going "uuhnnngh" while my immune system does the epic stuff, but I have had the wherewithal, at least, to continue sloughing through the daily news because I figure it's nice to have at least a vague idea of what's happening on the planet.

So, BP oil spill.

There are enough people on the internet already yelling about this - the consequences, long and short term ramifications, long and short term solutions, blame game, Worst Case Scenarios, how ineffective and offensive everyone involved is being, etc. - that I don't really feel the need to throw my hat in.

What's interesting to me is that this is A Thing which is going to define this time period. It's still happening, right now, and everyone already knows that it's an epoch, something that will be in our history books from the next edition on. And it's also something that 99.9% of the world population is completely powerless to do anything about. It's not a revolutionary historical moment, it's a disastrous one, and short of engineers and think-tanks directly involved in solving the problem, the most anyone can really do about any of it is... well, this or this, or this.

Which, to me, feels like the final union of a lot of factors that have been on my mind in recent years. To whit - the bitter, cynical rage my generation has against an inefficient and untrustworthy government; a deep-seated feeling of helplessness and the inability to effect real change against a system which, though broken, is bigger and stronger than us, and ultimately immutable; and the ability to instantly purge the anger to assuage the feeling of helplessness through our technology du jour.

Now don't get me wrong: Yes, fund raising is happening. Yes, protests are happening. Yes, people are pissed, and with good reason, about something which is, genuinely, out of their control. But I think something larger, socially, is at work here. Because all too often our anger about something is manifesting itself in the form of humor, which to a point makes sense - when something is so bad, you either laugh or cry, and mockery is a powerfully destructive tool against authority - but on the other hand, at what point do we just go "haha, yeah, little mermaid" "haha, yeah, Michael Bay would totally make that movie" and close the window and move on to our next favorite lol and forget about it. Is the act of "empowering" ourselves through instantaneous social satire really helping us ignore what's going on. I said at the beginning of the post that, more or less, I like to keep my finger on the pulse of things, but I'm not Diana, I don't read eight independent news sources a day or have cameos on C-Span. Mostly I bum around on yahoo news and publisher's weekly and keep my eyes and ears open with my grain-of-salt-tinted glasses on. Compared to genuinely informed people, I'm a total noob, and I'm a victim of what I'm talking about, too. I have a very peripheral understanding of what's going on on this planet , just enough to feel like I don't have to dig deeper.

I don't want to sound like some googly-eyed alarmist, and I'm not even saying we should all form a symbiotic relationship with bbc.co.uk. I just have this vague sick feeling like it's getting too easy to laugh off our righteous indignation. Which, when the new definition of beach gear is these guys, really that anger is about all we have going for us.

And the easier it gets to chuckle and click past this one because we can't stop the oil from spilling, I wonder how much easier it'll get to gloss over things that maybe we could change.

Or is it just me?

**Edit** apparently not just me. Today's newspost at Penny Arcade gives an interesting, if brief, assessment of our expectations about the human capacity for problem solving created by videogames. Silly Tycho, didn't you get the memo? Gamers are going to save the world!

Murphy

Of course Murphy would have it that on the self same day that I read a yahoo article about how your migraine might actually be an aneurysm in your brain JUST ABOUT TO ASPLODE that I would get my semi-monthly headsplitter. In case you were wondering, the combined effects of a migraine and a mild hypochondria induced panic attack = peekaboo hand/finger silhouettes at the edges of your vision. Wtf, body?

A mild setback

As many of you know, in the past weeks I've started devoting myself to writing almost full time, and, more recently (and perhaps less well known), I've started inundating myself with information about the publishing industry as a whole, and agents specifically. They say you should dress for your dream job, and I know that part of that is knowing what I'm getting myself into, and how to go about it. The research I've done is pretty encouraging; the market is actually better for my genre than it was even two years ago, but (for better or for worse) hasn't really changed a whole lot in the procedure of things since high school: it's still mostly writing, patience, and more writing, and more patience, with a dash of not being an idiot about the whole thing by taking some time to understand the process. Which is very comforting, because I've been doing rounds of learning how to and writing queries and summaries, finding agents with relevant interests, and staying peripherally aware of the publishing world since, oh, say, my junior year of high school. And since then, a lot of agents and publishers have gotten on board with the whole internet thing, which makes everything a whole lot easier. With places like http://www.agentquery.com/ there's no reason to ever hassle an agent that won't pick you up, and you can feel out a personality fit from afar, because many of them actively maintain personal and professional blogs. Though, from reading said blogs, there are enough people still doing it wrong that I'm consistently made to feel like a shining star just for not having my head up my ass.

But I'm becoming increasingly aware that the hardest part of being a writer, right after self discipline (which is far and away the greatest battle for any artist), is self promotion. Everyone is talking about writing as a business - "authorpreneurship" - because if your book isn't salable, and if you don't have a plan for how to sell it, evidently the dollar signs drop out of the eyes of potential publishers like dead flies, and you (and your book) drop to the bottom of the pile. And I sense that this might be a problem for me - it's admittedly at least a fraction of the reason that I started this blog (though the tie ins for self promotion and the need for human communication and self-expression, at this point, are weirdly interconnected). I'm bad at maintaining contact with people, and bad at networking, and aren't blogs part of how people in "the biz" do that? So even if I only have six unique readers so far (and, boy, do I love whoever you six people are, you're my shining stars!), that's a start, isn't it?

Well, maybe.

To be honest the whole thing is still sortof unreal. I'm consistently fairly hopeful, but less consistently productive. I'm still working on the B.I.C. thing - or rather, the not spending all my free time poking around the internet and actually getting some shit done. I'm trying to self-impose deadlines with a handy dandy spreadsheet to track my progress, but it's one of those things where I have to balance between quantity productivity and quality productivity. NaNoWriMo is all about the frantic race for quantity which can act as the urgency induced inspiration that so many of us require to bust through writer's block, but at the same time I've found that it leads to MASSIVE GAPING PLOTHOLES because in the rush for wordcount there isn't much room to think out subsequent plot points. So I'm discovering my book as I'm writing it - pushing to force myself to write something anything to make that awful blank page stop staring, and then going "oh, so that's what happens" and forcing myself to accept and learn that rewriting, even and especially on the shitty first draft, is healthy, if painful to my inner racer.

Hmm, I seem to have gone off on some kind of tangent. Oh well, back to The Page!

p.s. new RSS and email subscription options, fabulous six!

First!

So I feel that it's fitting that my first post be about the eternal struggle between blogspot and wordpress. While my decision, if you're reading this, is probably obvious, I feel that it's worth saving anyone else considering treading these roads some time. So, without further adieu, the fruits of the better part of two days worth of HRGBLURGWORKDAMNIT:

I went with wordpress first, because for whatever reason, it held a more prestigious place in my mind, and it happened to have the url that I wanted, and I had already perused some of the themes on their website when I first started thinking about making a blog. So I figured, hey, I remember liking some of those, why not! So I made an account, snagged the url, and started to go through their set up your shit tutorial, which was nice. The interface is terribly swish, by which I mean it's all smooth and rounded and fancy looking, but after about 15 minutes I wanted to smash it on the ground - which, I will emphasize, is one of the instances that my frustration had NOTHING to do with my lack of html/java/web savvy, but instead had everything to do with the fact that, despite being pretty, wordpress's layout is really counter intuitive. It took me almost ten minutes to figure out how to reset my password, because there are many multiple pages which sound like "settings" or "preferences" or "hrugflurgmyfriggingpassword" but which deal with numerous other things tumbling in stacks of buttons all the way down down down the left side of the page. Many of these pages also have false bottoms, where it looks like the page should end there, but then there's a liiittle bit more underneath it. Like my password. Which was dumb of me not to notice, but it didn't save me looking in like five other places first.

And though that was all frustrating, certainly with enough time to get used to the interface, it probably wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, it also isn't my only qualm with the system. While, at a first glance, wordpress has more templates in their startup, and a metric gazillion on http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ what you don't find out until after you've made the blog is that you can't use any of the non-basic themes (or design your own) without either hosting your blog on your own domain, or paying an annual fee.

The CSS editor lets you modify the visual style of your blog. You can edit your CSS and preview the changes for free. If you would like the ability to save your changes and make your design visible to the public, please purchase the Custom CSS Upgrade.

Sounds like a trap for people who feel like spending all day designing their fantastic new blog layout without reading the little paragraph at the top and then trying to submit it and having their heads explode. Thankfully, I'm a reader, and when I saw that - and subsequently decided that I wasn't all that fond of any of the 90 basic templates anyway, I hopped over to blogspot to see what I could do there.

Blogspot only has 16 basic site layouts (most of which have multiple color schemes), and I didn't find any on their website, but http://btemplates.com/ has exactly the same number (and, likely, exactly the same) layouts as wordpress does, formatted for blogspot and... the clincher, totally free. I hate to sound like an ad, but I have to finish the sentence with - and surprisingly easy to use. Which brings me to the interface. While I spent my whole time on wordpress fighting with the UI, blogspot hits me with this fantastically old school interface - it's boxier and anti-swish, but it's extremely intuitive. All the interface is at the top of the page, simply and clearly divided into four tabs with sub headers with link titles that clearly indicate what they're linking to. It takes about three clicks to upload a new template, and you can save all of the changes you make to the basic template as your own one, just in case you manage to horribly screw everything up and need to go back, but don't want to lose your work. Both blogspot and wordpress have ways to simply add content to your blog, and the interfaces there are roughly the same, but blogspot also has a cardbord cutout version of your website layout, where you can add and alter features drag-and-drop style. Also, when you're on your blog itself, there are edit buttons for your widget and html boxes, so if something's wrong or needs updating, you can do it right there. Though, admittedly, I'm not sure if I like it or not yet - it's very convenient for the building phase, but looks a little clunky. Perhaps I'll find a way to turn it off? One last thing I like about blogspot - when they talk about ads, they talk about it in terms of making money for the blogger, not forcing the blogger to pay, like wordpress.

For the negs, I'm having trouble figuring out how to add links within the blog (ie. shaples.blogspot.com/about) (Just kidding, it was right in front of my face), and some of the basic widgets that they offer (like the twitter one) didn't seem to work until I got them from the third party sites. Though, that said, both twitter and facebook have blogspot-specific functionality, which wordpress does not, though zomg, you'd think facebook wasn't trying to take over the world for how long it took me just to get the stupid like and share buttons working. Yeesh. Wordpress has an email subscription feature in addition to the RSS, which I like, and has a huge website statistics box front and center on the dashboard, and blogspot doesn't seem to have either - which I think encapsulates the difference. Wordpress has a lot of built in functionality on their http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7841692274072922644website, and you have to pay to get it - with blogspot, you have to do a little more footwork, but it's free.

Oh, and it's harder to get back to your editing page from your main blog page on blogspot, which is probably something that won't be an issue once I'm done getting the setup set up.

TLDR version: Blogspot is free and I am cheap. Blogspot wins!

Let me know what you think of the blog - the layout is likely to change somewhat, but suggestions and gentle criticism would be quite helpful!

<3