State of the Artist

I got an email today about it being the last day to sign up as a speaker at Worldcon. So I did, and I listed this blog and my neglected Instagram as info sources. 

My last entry here was kind of petulant and depressed, because that’s how I’ve been feeling. I was doing my taxes this year and it asked me about my Schedule C, and I had to stare at the screen and ask myself if I was still doing this writing thing. For which I made about three bucks last year, and paid like a hundred bucks in SFWA dues.

I was so stoked when they let me into SFWA. Here I was, hanging out with the other science fiction writers.

Then they did a “Big Question” sort of thing, asking about AI. I have mixed opinions on AI, which is good at some things and terrible at others, so I wrote a piece about “it’s nuanced.” 

But that reply earned me nothing but verbal abuse because the correct hivemind opinion is “AI is evil and should be uninvented right now, and has no redeeming features.” I sure failed that test!

I had just dropped my last novel, Star Language. I’m proud of Star Language but it’s a very antisuccessful book, in every way possible. 

First, I used AI in the cover, and I was very transparent about how I randomly generated a face with one AI, then took it into different AIs to render in various art styles until I was finally satisfied with the result – then I photoshopped the mouth and collaged it into an arrangement with some NASA star photography. 

Apparently there wasn’t enough photoshopping to dispel the AI cooties though. I was about to replicate the cover in hand embroidery (one of the many useless creative forms I’m good at) for that organic authentic look, around the same time I entered it into a literary contest. Which crashed and burned due to the organizer’s sexual misconduct. 

I was really proud of Star Language. It’s currently in the hands of a friend with Mexican ancestry who agreed to subject it to yet another sensitivity reading, because it is what I described as “Intro to Malinche for North Americans, with space aliens instead of Cortes.” I could be wrong, but it seemed to me when I was writing it that while every Mexican person seems to know who Malinche is, not many North Americans do. So I took the idea of Cortes buying a bunch of local women for his men to molest, and one of them turns out to be really good at languages – and learns his, and acts as official translator for the invasion. I turned the drama up to eleven, based the dysfunctional maternal relationship on Jeanette McCurdy’s autobio, and came up with a polyglot heroine – who does not know the story of Malinche, even though she has Mexican ancestry, because her mother is a climber who is busy trying to look white. And history repeats, leaving her stunned when the alien saviors turn out to be predatory conquerers.

I still haven’t re-done the cover yet. I’m still kind of stunned at the way the world kind of gave me a hearty slap for inserting yet another aberrant piece of art into it. After the contest fiasco and the AI-tainted cover I made it to one last Baycon to try and promote it, but lots of things went wrong at the convention, and my cat passed away a few days later, and a few more awful things happened in the wake of that, including chronic pain and neck surgery. I’ve made a few attempts at novels but I seem to be back to the pattern I was keeping for the first fifty years of my life – writing a third of a book before deciding I can’t go on. The current work in progress is a courtroom novel that isn’t speculative fiction at all (although one of the defendants is based on someone who writes it). 

But I’m not quite ready to give up on SF – only mostly. An excerpt from Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler is coming out in an anthology of stories about dinosaurs in space.

I can’t get my co-author to finalize that one, otherwise I’d be seriously promoting it and shopping it to publishers. But Sally has been insisting for the last six years it’s not final, she still needs to make changes … which she won’t give to me. So … I guess that’s her trip, not much I can do there. 

After RWRW with Sally I did one called Approaching Storm, which was half “fantasy lover in a magical dimension” and half “female John Wick takes on Qanons.” Sumiko Saulsen was the editor on that one, and has since had some decent (and well-deserved) success in this field. I took it out of print though, because I was being quite vocal about my political opinions, and did not want them to reflect on Sumiko. Who has very similar opinions and is outspoken about them, but I feel like if I’m going to go around kicking hornet’s nests I’d rather not have anybody else getting stung just because they’re standing nearby. 

It's not like I can just stop being a writer though. I was born with a word-spewing machine inside my head and this is what I do. I just happen to be doing it in challenging times, where people have to do things like building up an influencer persona in order to get their writing out into the world, with heavy competition from robots. 

And while I’m good at writing, I’m not that great at influencing. I’m direct and blunt, and I have niche tastes. I tried following Kesha’s advice – just be yourself, except turned way up – and I can do it for short spurts, but I have a hard time maintaining that kind of energy, especially when I’m dealing with health issues. I tend to make science fictional friends, then get quietly unfriended, and go back through my posts and realized it happened after I made some kind of pedantic correction or did something that I get encouraged/paid to do in other realms. One time I inadvertently informed a writer that one of his friends associated with someone he thought was evil -- straight into the airlock for that one. 

I was eavesdropping on another science fiction writer’s social media, where he was discussing Star Trek, and someone said halfway facetiously that you couldn’t claim to be into science fiction if you weren’t conversant with the latest version of Star Trek. That’s the other part of it. I’m here a little bit because of Luke Skywalker, a whole lot because of Ursula LeGuin and Wendy Pini and Octavia Butler, Robert Sheckley – and so much of the other good stuff that gets overlooked. Right now I’m infatuated with the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and have been waiting until I finish the latest book to dive into group discussions (I was holding off on the series until it got near the end because I figured there was no way I could keep a plot that convoluted in my head). 

But that’s the other part of it. I don’t mesh with the hivemind. I don’t watch television, I grew up in a slightly different culture. Right now I’m kind of excited to see the new Andy Weir movie and I’m wading through social media posts going “ugh, Weir is the worst writer ever, he writes for dads, and bro dudes!” And here I am thinking “wow, I kinda liked the book.” 

That’s a constant thing for me ; I tend to enjoy things the hivemind doesn’t like, and vice versa. Being way out of synch with the hivemind is tolerable in a world where people don’t live and die by their social media reputations, but it’s suicidal if you’re trying to be an influencer. Particularly one who markets to kids (even if they’re only writing YA because the market expects non-YA to have explicit sex and I’m way too uninterested in it to compose decent erotica).

So that’s where I currently stand in relation to science fiction, deciding whether the fringes are good enough or whether I’d be happier avoiding that subculture entirely and moving to writing about ruthless court battles. Is this my crowd, and do I want to make the relationship a forever thing by writing more science fiction, or am I just a tourist who needs to head to the next stop on my literary package tour? Or do I just need to go to Disneyland again?