Fanart and school and writing, oh my

[mary]

I can't remember if I linked to Coaster's group portrait of the Wolf House characters or not, but if I didn't, holy shit look at this motherfucker. IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY. SO HAPPY.

And then the other day Kivitasku drew these portraits and I went AH AH AAAAAAAH again. How are people so amazing? AMAZING.

Also there was this gorgeous review/pimp post written by a recent reader.

Basically everything on this tag and this one make me boggled and delighted and then boggled again. Also, they make me feel guilty that my own tumblr is full of stuff like "I LIKE EDUARDO'S BLUE STRIPEY TIES!" when there are fanlings following it and expecting like content or whatever.

Next Novel is stressing me the fuck out. I feel stalled and useless and all-over-the-place and exhausted. I'm scared that it'll take forever and I'll put care and work into it and then the end product will be absolute shit and I'll feel like a worthless fool for bothering. (Note that this is also exactly the reason I don't date, ha. Issues, what.)

Got a call a little while ago from Swinburne, where I'm due to go back to do the last subject for my PR/Business qualification next semester. Because I already have a higher degree, my fees for this one subject are charged at a higher rate, and so that's more than $600 for one night per week of classes for one subject so I can get a formalised qualification for something I've already done 11/12s of and am already doing professionally! Yay!

Not to mention that I have to drop my hours at work back a bit to fit classes in without collapsing into a heap of overexertedness, so that's less income to cover increased expenses. It sure is a good thing I like school, I'm just saying.

Money stress is also a completely crap added complication to put atop my horrible writing hand-wringing, by the way, because it makes it much harder to be indie and punk rock and ~*~in it for the art~*~ like I genuinely want to be, like I always want to be. I don't want to write safe books about safe things, I want to write things with serrated edges and strange shadows for the people who don't like safe books about safe things. I don't mean this in a pretentious way, I swear, even though I know it sounds pretty much like that. I want my writing to be the punk rock mix tape a friend gives you that's not much like the pop stars on the radio.

But then I hear about writer X selling Y number of copies of her latest novel or whatever and fuck, even if I'm not willing (and never will be willing) to write safe, straight, whitewashed, conservative stories, sometimes it's really hard not to wish I was a pop star, you know?

Ugh, I'm rambling. Hullo. My brain is broken and full of nonsense, but yesterday I had a long conversation with former-babysitting-charge-who-is-now-a-tween about "Monster High" and the relative merits of being a vampire versus other kinds of monsters, and that was pretty cool.

Comments

[ilthit]

I saw a piece of advice from a writer today that said, basically, "when you feel like your work is shit, don't worry, it's not shit, it's just your conscious mind not being able to trust that your subconscious knows what it's doing". Good luck with the novel!

And sorry about the expenses...

It's not just the safe stories that sell. The Twilight series had that birth scene I heard about. Wow. And how did Robert Anton Wilson ever sell that book with the LSD trips and giant apple sex in it? I can only imagine it's down to what the summary makes the book sound like, at least at first.

[mary]

Yeah, I know that's a simplification of the situation -- Stephen King is a magnificent writer and he fills his books with massively fucked-up shit. But if I phrase it like I did in the entry, I can pretend my lack of success is due to my ~themes and not due to general crapness, haha.

[ilthit]

I don't think sales are even down to quality, it's more down to whatever the publisher thinks will sell and the reader thinks looks interesting judging by the summary on the back. And advertising, of course.

Considering the Wolf House PDF is free for download, well, you may be losing some sales there... I bought the e-versions some time back, but I recently also downloaded the PDF because I managed to lose the purchased books from my PC - they now only exist on my e-reader. Ads on webcomic sites might boost sales, but not while the books are free to download. Have you had booth sales in cons?

But, you probably don't have resources to do that sort of thing right now, time-wise or money-wise, and also I don't actually know what I'm talking about. Sorry, you've probably already thought of all this.

[scy]

Writing is hard, and I have so much appreciation for the fact that what you write is *not* safe and 'clean'. Because, you write stories that should be told and that are interesting, and we need that.

But yes, I understand what you mean that it would be nice to be able to sell more stuff, definitely.

I am trying not to think about First Novel and finishing edits and rewrites. That way lies madness.