mouseworks

My youngest younger brother pointed out that I wrote more and better living with my parents and in rural Virginia and that came from having time to do the work more than location (Charlotte, NC, really never featured in any thing I've written but I did my first novel and short stories while living there).

We figured that between the various families and collections of furniture, I'd be able to re-furnish an apartment easily enough if I sold everything here, so I don't really need to ship any furniture down there (stuff's cheap there) and could get rid of everything, take a somewhat longer trial run, then come back and sell the car and ship the rest of the stuff that I couldn't buy down there easily (computer, what cameras I want to keep, etc., maybe even get a lap top as a second computer), the books I need to keep, the folding bookcases, put that in storage for three months, come back and make the final decision.

Here in in The Atlantic.

The comments are also interesting.

Still getting ready to go to Nicaragua, two more meds to pick up (anti-malarial and an antibiotic for bacterial dysentery) and a copy of my Synthroid prescription. I've been dithering over which pack to use, will probably use the RedWing since it actually can be cinched down and since word in the forums is that American Airlines isn't ferociously strict about stuff. I can carry the small camera bag as a purse, then transfer it to appropriate storage in the pack when I don't need to have the pack be nine inches flat or less.

One of the things about Nicaragua is that what I've been reading do make things seem more complex than the usual sound-bites. I think the distinguishing thing about conspiracy theories is that they try to make humans far more consistent than they prove to be if one is researching out a period in history or a contemporary place. One Nicaragua forum has been discussing why gringos get taken advantage of when they try to help others -- and it's that helping people feels so good (my cynical remark would be that helping also makes people feel so superior), yet the people being helped can see the help as a sign of naivete or condescension (or both), and excuse themselves for ripping off the helpers as much as possible. One person made the comment that extreme poverty corrupts as much as extreme power.

Nicaraguan saying: "each mind is a world of its own." "Shake with the hands and fuck with the elbows" is another.

A couple of Nicaraguans on the forum have made two points. One, Nicaraguan politics are not the business of ex-pats. Second, as people with sufficient pensions to be allowed into the country (over $600 a month), we're all on the wrong side of the class struggle.


I don't know if I can make a life in Nicaragua or not. But I don't think I'm going to have any illusions about fixing the place.

I get a bit concerned with women deciding not to do seriously. The thing that bothers me the most about fan fiction is that it's got a flavor of women dabbling, not doing the work intensely. The issues of publishing, not publishing, making a living at it, aside, I wish I didn't get the feeling that part of the value of this was being not one of those professionals, not risking losing the amateur status, not competing.

The focus on publishing and sales as validation tends to be quite warping, except that sales and money do give time to spend more time on working, and the professional world, even something like journalism, tends to cut through superficial excuses.

The vids appear to me to be better than the fan fic, but I don't know if that's because I'm not as familiar with art vids as I am with writing.

Not to say that having fun isn't a good thing, but the greatest fun I've had was working full out and wrestling with material. The peaks are rarer, but they are higher when they come.

Fan fic has a flavor to me of being "don't mind us; we're not taking this seriously." I get nervous about women, so many of them, undercutting their possibilities by not working intensely and as strongly as they can, of making a boundary between professional writers and themselves. This isn't to say that all people should try to be original, unique, artists. And writing fan fic is an improvement over trying to wedge oneself into a favorite writer's life.

I get the same feeling about women doing children's literature -- too much extension of the traditional female role of being the mom, not enough willingness to write as an adult for other adults.

If I had to choose between children's literature and the YA hustle or m/m erotica, I'd go with the slash (and did), but I'd also like to see women be more than the sexual specialists and managers of early childhood.

Most of the fan fic writers are in their lives much more than that, probably more successful at their lives than I've been at mine. While the hysteria around publishing in both academic and neo-pro circles is off-putting, some higher kinds of fun are available, not that anyone has to push for that.

There's supposed to be an even better program for $200, but this one was free. I've never had an official script writing program before so I can play with this. I suspect that exporting to other more professional script writing programs would be non-trivial, but so far so good.

We're debating a Oxfordian here.

Birthers, Shakespeare deniers, and people who believe that Queen Elizabeth I had five children, starting at 13 or 14, most of whom wrote Shakespreare's plays, as well as Golding's Metamorphosis.

I should know better than to take everything my siblings tell me as absolutely accurate. I do hope he recovers and lets my father die first, but won't go into reasons why. He'll need care, but there are already lots of his wife's people ready to do that (and he has a friend who can tell us which ones not to let in the house).

...had a massive heart attack and isn't supposed to live. He's 86 or close to it (birthday in June, two years younger than my father, who's now 88). He was the only one of the three brothers who stayed on the land, a farmer all his life, raising sorghum and making molasses last fall.

He didn't approve of me all that much because I didn't play the typical female roles, but he was a wonderful story teller and much of what became "Alien Bootlegger" and SLOW FUNERAL came from his stories. People said of him that he really loved farming, unlike so many who did the work to eat rather than because they had a great fascination for the work. If he'd sold his land when the land prices were high, he could have lived on the investments, but, as he put it, he wouldn't have had anything to do. His curiosity was local, not about the world, not even about what happened in Richmond. I'm not even sure how much attention he paid to Roanoke. Martinsville was the city.

He knew all the country skills, could get us moonshine, ground malt for bootleggers, hired people to kill his hogs and sent his cattle off to slaughterhouses. Like my friend who raised sheep, he didn't kill his own stock.

He wondered what was wrong with growing a little weed and had some familiarity with how shitaake mushrooms were grown and had obviously considered whether that would have fit in with his other farm endeavors: cattle, hogs, molasses, vegetable gardening. He grew tobacco until he had a cancer scare (turned out to be his gall bladder) and then stopped growing it, never said why precisely, but tobacco is a hard crop.

In his thirties, he married for the first time, a woman older than he was, a mill worker with grown children and failing healthy. For almost the rest of her life, he took care of her until he couldn't and her children put her in a nursing home.

When he's gone, I have no more blood connection to that world.

The various issues everyone is bringing up -- poor old lost ideas. I can't imagine anyone who writes s.f. not having to bail on at least one project because other people did it and the market for that particular thing is saturated (women living in cities, men roving the countryside hunting anyone). OMG, move on to another project already.

The other thing is that for the women, the usual ways of being taught now that classical languages aren't tend to come with some gotchas. Male creative writing instructors often don't take women as students as seriously, or take them more seriously if they're beautiful. The women instructors can be useful (Wakowski wasn't a feminist in the modern sense, but her proportion of women students getting attention was high at St. Marks) or they can be eager to prove they're not like those other women.

Right now, it looks to me like the fan fiction writers are being treated like "those other women."

The other thing about academic programs is that publish or perish is built into the bones of them, and combining that with a young writer's need for validation and income for just being able to spend time writing, the pressure generally produces a few who continue and a majority who give up writing completely.

Wakowski's advice was that all this was about the audience: building one, working up from the small press chapbooks, the coterie magazines. The commercial publishers especially can't give a poet an audience. Commercial publishers may be more helpful for genre fiction where the audience is addicted as Joyce Carol Oates points out in her article on H.P. Lovecraft.

(Oates's comments on the difference between "literary" fiction and genre, which don't privilege one over the other, are the best I've ever seen, but Oates has been quite widely published both in and out of genre).

The prevailing drive in this culture is making a living from what you do, and if a person is a writer, making a living from some form of that. For many people, getting published in the right places or making a commercial sale is what validates them, even if they're lost among the bigger names in a small press magazine or if they're one of the 90 plus percent who never sell more than one novel.

But I think that the cultures with less of a dividing line between writers and audiences, where every gentleman facing hanging could write a good death poem, tended to have higher peaks than our more desperately competitive culture where a handful win and the rest, even the ones who probably were kid poets from grade school on, quit.

1. By reading and transcribing the classics. To have a manuscript of your own, you had to make a copy or pay someone to make a copy of the original. Copying errors happened.

2. By translating classics. This was most common in Europe (including the UK) from circa Chaucer to present, though somewhat deprecated in the present for various reasons. Rita Mae Brown and Ron Silliman still see translation (or learning Latin) as the thing that divides wannabes from real poets (I know people who I think Silliman would consider real enough poets who don't do this).

The advantage of translating classics is that it gets the authorial narcissism out of the way. You take text A in some other language and re-write it into English, French, German, Russian, whatever, and learn from this how your language works and how another language works, and what elements can be brought from one language to another -- pacing, plot, character, POV.

3. By taking creative writing workshops. This tends to be very uneven, but appeals to authorial narcissism by making this about the individual student's work and how to make it better. It doesn't work if the various members of the workshop don't really know how writing is constructed. Unlike the translation method, which tends to be instructor independent absent a real dunce, this one tends to be highly instructor dependent.

4. By reading and writing criticism. This seems to not work as well as might be hoped, as criticism tends to look at meta-issues within a work and not as much with the way various things are structured (Kinneavy's Universe of Discourse and Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction are more useful than a lot of academic criticism). Very instructor dependent and most instructors are going from their college notes.


Writing fan fic seems to have become a possible 5th way. It's an engagement more precisely focused on the structural issues within fiction than in meta issues about fiction. We'll find out in the next 10 years whether it's better than translation, which at this point, looks labor intensive but more useful than many other ways of teaching creative writing.

I had a fellow but male graduate student, who thirty or so years later never amounted to much (Google is so wonderful in vindications). He thought at the time that he was one of the best writers of his generation and tried push me for more emotion (dark erotic emotions) in my work. I didn't have the nerve then to say that "Judging from your own work, I don't think you're capable to giving advice I'd want to follow," though that was what I was thinking.

I've probably brought this one up before -- I'm still pissed at myself for not saying that then, but I thought I could be wrong, and he might have been angry.