(hopefully)
We seem to be having quite a mansplainy week, kinda. Or at least, I've been talking a lot about male psychology as a perspective on gender issues. I've tried not to make excuses or suggest that any of the explanations I've offered make the behaviour I'm explaining forgivable.
Today, to round everything off, I present my grand unified theory of masculinity. I'm going to reduce the whole social construction of the male gender to its simplest, most basic point.
Actually, it's not my theory, really. I got it from David Willis. For those of you not clicking the link (or not generally familiar with classic webcomics from ten years ago), that's a comic in which the female lead had recently been turned into a man by an evil alien's gender-swapping ray gun or virus bomb or something. Asked what it's like being a guy, she opines that it's 'Like keeping a little dog around that barks at everything.'
And that is very much the truth. We can refine the metaphor a little bit - being a man is like taking the dog out for a walk just late enough in the evening that someone might object if it barks, and then the dog has a barking fit, and you're not sure if anyone's noticed or cares, but you know that if they have, you're in for a lot of shame and disgust.
There's only one other thing that needs to be added. The social construction of gender is such that men are told constantly that sexual arousal - the dog's barking - is the only good guide to what we like. And since the dog barks at even the slightest provocation, we're told we're indiscriminate and simple, easily pleased and easily led.
Now, I don't want to come over all 'Oh, woe is modern man, all denigrated and shamed'. We still have it pretty good. But being male doesn't actually free you from oppression by the patriarchy. The power that the patriarchy - our concept of masculinity - holds is not a power of individual men (or at least, not most individual men - a few insane Republican senators and clothing company moguls seem to do alright). It's a power of the role of 'man'.
We are only empowered so long as we play the role that has been set out for us - a role, basically, of this poor guy (watch with sound). This is the reason why we can't - much as an increasing number of us would like to - snap our fingers and fix the patriarchal bias of society. It's the reason why each individual man who tries to do something different seems (and feels) so ineffectual and powerless.
The thing is, the power of the patriarchy is inertial. Very, very few people of either gender actually want this. But as long as it is hard to fight, individual steps taken to fight it will seem ineffectual. That doesn't mean they are. They add up, over time. Progress is made, however slowly. The desperate extremes of rape culture and the anti-abortion movement in the modern age are the signs of a fading memeplex.
More and more men are coming to understand that much of the problem is not the weakness of women but the weakness of men. Progress is not inevitable, but it does generally breed more progress. The braver we are, the more we seek to make the path easier for those behind us, the easier the path will become for us as well.
These are platitudes, in a way, but there are no easy answers. It's easy to say that we shouldn't let patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes go unchallenged, but much harder to challenge them, and even sometimes to spot them. It's easy to say that we should learn to not think of what the proverbial dog barks at as something we actually want, but harder to ignore it (not, of course, that one should necessarily ignore it all the time - just don't let yourself be ruled by errant, atavistic biology).
Be something more than the guy in the Fenton video. It's surprisingly liberating.
Friday, 17 May 2013
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
What 'shy guys' are really saying...
This came up on my facebook stream yesterday:
It came in for a round of entirely deserved derision from both genders - 'the shy kid who met a girl that changed his life' is a supercilious, smug, patronising douchebag who deserves everything he gets. Particularly for that horrible, skin-crawly, almost certainly outright false line about being great in bed.
Thing is, I'm pretty sure it was only non-shy people providing the derision. The shy people looking on (by which I mean me) were busy staving off panic attacks caused by the rush of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I dread. If I'd had Facebook when I was seventeen, my entire output would have been like this. I still get that feeling of 'Why won't you notice how wonderful I am?' sometimes.
But I'm older and wiser than I was at seventeen. I may still get the feeling, but I recognise it for the distorted view of reality that it is. I feel I'm qualified to translate the above message into non-distorted world-doesn't-revolve-around-me-speak. It goes something like this:
Dear Ladies,
None of us have any idea what we're doing.
(Creepy) love,
Thing is, I'm pretty sure it was only non-shy people providing the derision. The shy people looking on (by which I mean me) were busy staving off panic attacks caused by the rush of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I dread. If I'd had Facebook when I was seventeen, my entire output would have been like this. I still get that feeling of 'Why won't you notice how wonderful I am?' sometimes.
But I'm older and wiser than I was at seventeen. I may still get the feeling, but I recognise it for the distorted view of reality that it is. I feel I'm qualified to translate the above message into non-distorted world-doesn't-revolve-around-me-speak. It goes something like this:
Dear Ladies,
None of us have any idea what we're doing.
(Creepy) love,
Monday, 13 May 2013
Where does rape culture come from?
Let's start with a definition. Rape culture is a form of victim-blaming. It's saying 'If a woman is raped, it's her fault for not preventing it, for dressing or acting provocatively, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time'. The implicit corollary to this is that a man will rape unless prevented from doing so, and that he has a right to act this way unless explicitly denied consent (this, as I understand it, was the actual defence used in court by the Steubenville rapists).
When you put it like that, it's an obviously, almost comically, repugnant position. It's so absurd that a Scooby Doo villain would be ashamed of it. The problem is that it's everywhere. It's a deeply ingrained cultural ideology ('memeplex', I guess?). And I believe that whenever a culture adopts a principle this absurd, there is an explanation of how it came to do so.
Note: I said explanation, not excuse. It's not my intention to defend any of this, or to excuse or forgive the Steubenville or any other rapists (or for that matter the defenders of rapists). But I believe that we cannot hope to change our culture without understanding how it has come to operate in such a poisonous way. I hope that in analysing the genesis of rape culture I can find a weak link, a belief that we may be able to change or disprove, on which the whole culture depends.
In essence, I think it comes down to three great cultural myths;
1) The myth of virile masculinity. This is probably the most obviously problematic of the three; the myth that if a man, particularly a young man, is not sexually active then he is a failure. This is a myth that every man feels the pressure of, and it comes from somewhere very deep and primal in our idea of masculinity. We throw it around perhaps more, or at least more viciously, in the modern age than ever before, in everything from soap operas to deodorant adverts and back again.
2) The myth of Mars and Venus. Whether you think this one is a problem or not probably depends on who you most often hear it from. Sometimes it takes obviously dangerous forms, like when lads say to each other 'Oh, women never say what they mean. She might be saying no, but she's just playing hard to get', but sometimes it's more subtle. I was the shy, introverted, endlessly-heartbroken kind of adolescent, and some of the best role models I've ever had - teachers, my father etc. - consoled me with 'Don't worry, it's not just you - no man ever understood women'. It's the same myth, that men and women are in some way so fundamentally different that clear and accurate communication between them is impossible.
3) The myth of a just universe. I don't want to sound cynical - I do believe justice is possible in many, perhaps even most, cases. However, where there is justice, it's something human beings have to consciously create. The universe isn't just, it doesn't care about being fair to individuals. If the universe is even-handed at all, it's only as an average over a near-infinite number of objects, an averaging so vast that any quantity of individual suffering is rendered statistically insignificant. But all of us, I think, still expect fairness in our own cases. If we have bad days, we seek explanations - I must have been a bad person yesterday, or in a past life, or I'm saving up karma to have a good day at a later date - that rely on the idea that our own lives will even out of their own accord.
How do we get from all this to rape culture? Via a surprisingly short sequence of steps.
First, you have to understand that (3) includes the belief that no-one should be doomed to failure. In a just universe, heartfelt and sincere effort will always be rewarded.
This has an obvious consequence when linked with (1) - if it's failure for a man not to be sexually active, then society must be such that all men can be sexually active.
Of course, society doesn't prevent men being sexually active, it just requires that to be sexually active, a man must have consent from those he wishes to act sexually with. And this is where the problem comes in, because if (2) is taken to heart, then it's impossible to get consent, because if as a man you believe you'll never understand women, you'll never be sure that you have consent.
For the fairness requirement set by (1) and (3) to be met, then, the requirement for consent must be removed. And that's rape culture in a nutshell - consent is either assumed or treated as irrelevant, because otherwise it's not fair.
Now, I'm not saying that this is a conscious process that any rapist actually reasons through. I do think that most men feel there's something unfair about sexual politics - you can see this personified in the desperation of the Jason Biggs character in 'American Pie' (playing very much to the myth of virile masculinity), or in pretty much every Hugh Grant film ever (playing more on the myth of Mars and Venus). What I'm suggesting is that this is a subconscious process, perhaps even a process that works mainly in the collective cultural subconscious.
Can we stop it? Perhaps. While (1) is obviously problematic in a whole range of ways, it's also very deeply rooted in our culture. It also seems to be a very effective marketing tool, which means there's a lot of money invested in it. That in turn means it's going to be very hard to shift (though I dearly wish we could shift it - more on that in a moment). (3) is similar - in fact, (3) is rooted so deeply that I think most of us don't even notice or believe that we believe it.
The thing is, (2) may be the myth that plays the key role here. And while there's a grain of truth to it - all human communication is a bit flawed, so of course men and women will never perfectly understand each other, but then neither will men and men or women and women; gay couples run into all the same communication difficulties, I'm sure, as straight couples - I think it's probably also the easiest of the myths to overturn.
Sure, on all sorts of things, and particularly when there's any kind of romance or lust in the air, human communication is an awkward, unclear thing. But in my experience, consent is an exception to this rule. Now, I'm a virgin (it's complicated), so my experience is limited, but on the couple of occasions where I have received sexual consent (really not kidding about the 'complicated'), it's been very clear, and so have any conditions that were applied. I have no reason to think that either case was exceptional in that respect, or to believe that I'm in some way more empathic than other men.
It may be true that women sometimes play mind games in romance, or play hard to get, or say things they don't mean. But when it comes to saying important stuff, women are as straightforward (perhaps even more so, though I'm sceptical of drawing generalisations about women that aren't also generalisations about humans) as men. And, heck, the person I communicate with best and most clearly in all the world is a woman, so communication can't be that hard.
When you put it like that, it's an obviously, almost comically, repugnant position. It's so absurd that a Scooby Doo villain would be ashamed of it. The problem is that it's everywhere. It's a deeply ingrained cultural ideology ('memeplex', I guess?). And I believe that whenever a culture adopts a principle this absurd, there is an explanation of how it came to do so.
Note: I said explanation, not excuse. It's not my intention to defend any of this, or to excuse or forgive the Steubenville or any other rapists (or for that matter the defenders of rapists). But I believe that we cannot hope to change our culture without understanding how it has come to operate in such a poisonous way. I hope that in analysing the genesis of rape culture I can find a weak link, a belief that we may be able to change or disprove, on which the whole culture depends.
In essence, I think it comes down to three great cultural myths;
1) The myth of virile masculinity. This is probably the most obviously problematic of the three; the myth that if a man, particularly a young man, is not sexually active then he is a failure. This is a myth that every man feels the pressure of, and it comes from somewhere very deep and primal in our idea of masculinity. We throw it around perhaps more, or at least more viciously, in the modern age than ever before, in everything from soap operas to deodorant adverts and back again.
2) The myth of Mars and Venus. Whether you think this one is a problem or not probably depends on who you most often hear it from. Sometimes it takes obviously dangerous forms, like when lads say to each other 'Oh, women never say what they mean. She might be saying no, but she's just playing hard to get', but sometimes it's more subtle. I was the shy, introverted, endlessly-heartbroken kind of adolescent, and some of the best role models I've ever had - teachers, my father etc. - consoled me with 'Don't worry, it's not just you - no man ever understood women'. It's the same myth, that men and women are in some way so fundamentally different that clear and accurate communication between them is impossible.
3) The myth of a just universe. I don't want to sound cynical - I do believe justice is possible in many, perhaps even most, cases. However, where there is justice, it's something human beings have to consciously create. The universe isn't just, it doesn't care about being fair to individuals. If the universe is even-handed at all, it's only as an average over a near-infinite number of objects, an averaging so vast that any quantity of individual suffering is rendered statistically insignificant. But all of us, I think, still expect fairness in our own cases. If we have bad days, we seek explanations - I must have been a bad person yesterday, or in a past life, or I'm saving up karma to have a good day at a later date - that rely on the idea that our own lives will even out of their own accord.
How do we get from all this to rape culture? Via a surprisingly short sequence of steps.
First, you have to understand that (3) includes the belief that no-one should be doomed to failure. In a just universe, heartfelt and sincere effort will always be rewarded.
This has an obvious consequence when linked with (1) - if it's failure for a man not to be sexually active, then society must be such that all men can be sexually active.
Of course, society doesn't prevent men being sexually active, it just requires that to be sexually active, a man must have consent from those he wishes to act sexually with. And this is where the problem comes in, because if (2) is taken to heart, then it's impossible to get consent, because if as a man you believe you'll never understand women, you'll never be sure that you have consent.
For the fairness requirement set by (1) and (3) to be met, then, the requirement for consent must be removed. And that's rape culture in a nutshell - consent is either assumed or treated as irrelevant, because otherwise it's not fair.
Now, I'm not saying that this is a conscious process that any rapist actually reasons through. I do think that most men feel there's something unfair about sexual politics - you can see this personified in the desperation of the Jason Biggs character in 'American Pie' (playing very much to the myth of virile masculinity), or in pretty much every Hugh Grant film ever (playing more on the myth of Mars and Venus). What I'm suggesting is that this is a subconscious process, perhaps even a process that works mainly in the collective cultural subconscious.
Can we stop it? Perhaps. While (1) is obviously problematic in a whole range of ways, it's also very deeply rooted in our culture. It also seems to be a very effective marketing tool, which means there's a lot of money invested in it. That in turn means it's going to be very hard to shift (though I dearly wish we could shift it - more on that in a moment). (3) is similar - in fact, (3) is rooted so deeply that I think most of us don't even notice or believe that we believe it.
The thing is, (2) may be the myth that plays the key role here. And while there's a grain of truth to it - all human communication is a bit flawed, so of course men and women will never perfectly understand each other, but then neither will men and men or women and women; gay couples run into all the same communication difficulties, I'm sure, as straight couples - I think it's probably also the easiest of the myths to overturn.
Sure, on all sorts of things, and particularly when there's any kind of romance or lust in the air, human communication is an awkward, unclear thing. But in my experience, consent is an exception to this rule. Now, I'm a virgin (it's complicated), so my experience is limited, but on the couple of occasions where I have received sexual consent (really not kidding about the 'complicated'), it's been very clear, and so have any conditions that were applied. I have no reason to think that either case was exceptional in that respect, or to believe that I'm in some way more empathic than other men.
It may be true that women sometimes play mind games in romance, or play hard to get, or say things they don't mean. But when it comes to saying important stuff, women are as straightforward (perhaps even more so, though I'm sceptical of drawing generalisations about women that aren't also generalisations about humans) as men. And, heck, the person I communicate with best and most clearly in all the world is a woman, so communication can't be that hard.
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Happiness is Not a Noun
Keeping with this week's theme of things I've learned from the last year or two, here's something a bit more personal.
I'm a lot happier than I was two years ago. There are a few reasons for this - I'm better off, I'm socialising more, my PhD is closer to being over - but I think the main one is that I've come to understand happiness a bit better than I used to.
Happiness isn't a thing or set of things to you try to acquire. It's not something you possess. It's a thing you do, or better yet a property of (some) things you do; it's an adverb ('I happily play piano and guitar', 'I write happily' etc.).
I think I've said before (and if not here then at least elsewhere) that my PhD is on what's called phenomenalistic idealism, the metaphysical/ontological position that the universe is ultimately composed of experiences. The details of the position aren't important for now. I bring it up because I'm starting to find phenomenalism really useful outside of metaphysics as well (it makes for a great literary technique, too, but that's a topic for another time).
For present purposes, the key point is this: happiness is a kind of experience, or perhaps a property of some kinds of experience. Even if your idea of happiness is lazing in the sun and not doing anything, it's still your experience of that which actually brings you happiness.
And experiences are always present. They're always what's happening now. A memory can only bring you happiness if you recall it - bring it back out of your past and into your present experience. And future experiences bring very little happiness at all. The pleasure of daydreaming of some future success is only ever a pale shadow of the happiness that actual success would bring.
The key to happiness, then, is to work out what kinds of experience make you happy. For me, at the moment, it's making music, telling stories, and good company. Those aren't the only options - perhaps yours might be sporting, or sexual, or familial - but they're the ones that matter to me. And I've learned to make decisions that maximise those activities.
Because my PhD is coming to an end, I'm having to start making decisions about the future (like the continuing, ever-harder decision not to attack all the people who ask me 'What can you do with that degree?' - take this as a warning. Please.), and making those decisions in experiential terms has been surprisingly liberating. I've realised that I need relatively little money in order to keep writing and making music, and the cost of good company comes in terms of time, not money, so I'm happy for the next year to keep working my sporadic and unpredictable part-time job and keep the rest of my time for other things. I don't want to stop working altogether because I don't want to face the experience of having to explain an employment gap to potential employers. I don't want to look at buying a house because I can't see anything that it would add to my experience (at least, right now) that I actually want.
So my recommendation is this: when you're making decisions of all kinds, ask yourself about the experiences that will result from your choices. If you decide to get a particular job, ask yourself what it will involve doing every day. If you're looking at buying stuff, buy experiences, not just objects (which doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't buy objects which enable you to have experiences you want - you may really want the experience of wearing fancy shoes or driving a fancy car, and that's fine, but remember it's the experience that counts).
And remember, too, that the costs of things are experiences, or have experiential consequences. If you have to give up one experience in order to afford another, balance the two. Don't think of money as a number - think of it as representative of experiences you're trading away. All through my childhood I failed to consider this angle, and as a result I ended up buying a mountain of crap toys that only brought about five minutes' enjoyment with them each. Growing up is in part a process of learning not to make that mistake.
I'm a lot happier than I was two years ago. There are a few reasons for this - I'm better off, I'm socialising more, my PhD is closer to being over - but I think the main one is that I've come to understand happiness a bit better than I used to.
Happiness isn't a thing or set of things to you try to acquire. It's not something you possess. It's a thing you do, or better yet a property of (some) things you do; it's an adverb ('I happily play piano and guitar', 'I write happily' etc.).
I think I've said before (and if not here then at least elsewhere) that my PhD is on what's called phenomenalistic idealism, the metaphysical/ontological position that the universe is ultimately composed of experiences. The details of the position aren't important for now. I bring it up because I'm starting to find phenomenalism really useful outside of metaphysics as well (it makes for a great literary technique, too, but that's a topic for another time).
For present purposes, the key point is this: happiness is a kind of experience, or perhaps a property of some kinds of experience. Even if your idea of happiness is lazing in the sun and not doing anything, it's still your experience of that which actually brings you happiness.
And experiences are always present. They're always what's happening now. A memory can only bring you happiness if you recall it - bring it back out of your past and into your present experience. And future experiences bring very little happiness at all. The pleasure of daydreaming of some future success is only ever a pale shadow of the happiness that actual success would bring.
The key to happiness, then, is to work out what kinds of experience make you happy. For me, at the moment, it's making music, telling stories, and good company. Those aren't the only options - perhaps yours might be sporting, or sexual, or familial - but they're the ones that matter to me. And I've learned to make decisions that maximise those activities.
Because my PhD is coming to an end, I'm having to start making decisions about the future (like the continuing, ever-harder decision not to attack all the people who ask me 'What can you do with that degree?' - take this as a warning. Please.), and making those decisions in experiential terms has been surprisingly liberating. I've realised that I need relatively little money in order to keep writing and making music, and the cost of good company comes in terms of time, not money, so I'm happy for the next year to keep working my sporadic and unpredictable part-time job and keep the rest of my time for other things. I don't want to stop working altogether because I don't want to face the experience of having to explain an employment gap to potential employers. I don't want to look at buying a house because I can't see anything that it would add to my experience (at least, right now) that I actually want.
So my recommendation is this: when you're making decisions of all kinds, ask yourself about the experiences that will result from your choices. If you decide to get a particular job, ask yourself what it will involve doing every day. If you're looking at buying stuff, buy experiences, not just objects (which doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't buy objects which enable you to have experiences you want - you may really want the experience of wearing fancy shoes or driving a fancy car, and that's fine, but remember it's the experience that counts).
And remember, too, that the costs of things are experiences, or have experiential consequences. If you have to give up one experience in order to afford another, balance the two. Don't think of money as a number - think of it as representative of experiences you're trading away. All through my childhood I failed to consider this angle, and as a result I ended up buying a mountain of crap toys that only brought about five minutes' enjoyment with them each. Growing up is in part a process of learning not to make that mistake.
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Blogger It
So, I mentioned in yesterday's recap of progress so far that there are things to be said about my blogging and this blog. Let's start with a quick apology for having been AWOL last week and inconsistent for a couple of weeks before that. I was simply extremely busy and struggling to keep up. Things have settled down now, and I'll be making up for lost time this week with at least a couple of extra posts, of which this is the first.
These inconsistencies may not matter terribly much, though. I've now been tracking the performance of The Second Realm at Smashwords for almost a year, and a quick analysis of available data shows no clear correlation between activity of any kind on this blog and Second Realm traffic. To whit:
The top graph shows pageviews on this blog (apologies for the scaling - Blogger's stat tracker isn't terribly good at graphs); the bottom graph shows downloads of The Second Realm each week (the blue line), plus four- (red) and twelve-week (green) rolling averages. They don't match up perfectly, but the big spike on the bottom graph is for the end of August 2012, so they're lined up pretty well.
The big spike on the top graph is for March, and represents the peak of an assault by Swedish spambots which is also responsible for a big chunk of January and February traffic. The total drop-off at the end is a bit of an illusion because while April was at about the same level as February, when this screencap was taken, May was only three and a half days old and is actually on-course to outdo April by a small margin. The red line represents a rough guesstimate of what the non-spambot traffic has done.
If blogging (or at least, my blogging) was an effective way of marketing fiction, we would expect the bottom graph to resemble the top one, or at least not show the slight downward trend that it appears to show. If you squint hard at the green line, it does look like there might be the beginnings of an up-turn, maybe, but it doesn't look terribly significant compared to the big rise in blog traffic.
I have another graph which plots my activity (in terms of posts per week) on here against the blue line measure of Second Realm figures, but there's such a severe lack of correlation on it that it's almost illegible, so there's little point my sharing it.
So the bad news is that this blog doesn't appear to be doing much to help the performance of my fiction. I'm sure that's not the case for all blogs, but I suspect that my growing focus on non-writing-related issues, and possibly the way I write, are not attracting people who are looking for the kind of fiction that I write.
That said, there is a definite rise going on in blog traffic since I started blogging regularly and carefully again. It remains to be seen whether the dip in activity over the last couple of weeks will have produced a visible dip in pageviews (or indeed, whether this week's burst of extra will produce a spike), but there's no denying that since late December and my New Year's resolution to put out at least a hundred blog posts this year, there's a clear upward trend.
Blogging, it seems, is a pretty good way to promote a blog at least. It's been good for me in other ways, too - good discipline, good writing practice, good thinking practice while I've been too busy with day-jobs to work on my thesis and so on. It's also pushed me to engage more with the world at large, and I can't discount the effect of the positive feedback I keep getting either.
So whether or not my blogging here is effective promotion (and I'll check in again on this later in the year, just in case that green line is on an upward trend), I'm going to keep blogging. I enjoy it and it's both a useful habit and a useful outlet. If you're looking to use blogging to promote your fiction, though, it might be better to use me as a 'what not to do' than a 'what to do' guide.
If you have any suggestions about how I could strengthen the link between my blogging and my fiction, by the way, I'd love to hear them ;).
These inconsistencies may not matter terribly much, though. I've now been tracking the performance of The Second Realm at Smashwords for almost a year, and a quick analysis of available data shows no clear correlation between activity of any kind on this blog and Second Realm traffic. To whit:
The big spike on the top graph is for March, and represents the peak of an assault by Swedish spambots which is also responsible for a big chunk of January and February traffic. The total drop-off at the end is a bit of an illusion because while April was at about the same level as February, when this screencap was taken, May was only three and a half days old and is actually on-course to outdo April by a small margin. The red line represents a rough guesstimate of what the non-spambot traffic has done.
If blogging (or at least, my blogging) was an effective way of marketing fiction, we would expect the bottom graph to resemble the top one, or at least not show the slight downward trend that it appears to show. If you squint hard at the green line, it does look like there might be the beginnings of an up-turn, maybe, but it doesn't look terribly significant compared to the big rise in blog traffic.
I have another graph which plots my activity (in terms of posts per week) on here against the blue line measure of Second Realm figures, but there's such a severe lack of correlation on it that it's almost illegible, so there's little point my sharing it.
So the bad news is that this blog doesn't appear to be doing much to help the performance of my fiction. I'm sure that's not the case for all blogs, but I suspect that my growing focus on non-writing-related issues, and possibly the way I write, are not attracting people who are looking for the kind of fiction that I write.
That said, there is a definite rise going on in blog traffic since I started blogging regularly and carefully again. It remains to be seen whether the dip in activity over the last couple of weeks will have produced a visible dip in pageviews (or indeed, whether this week's burst of extra will produce a spike), but there's no denying that since late December and my New Year's resolution to put out at least a hundred blog posts this year, there's a clear upward trend.
Blogging, it seems, is a pretty good way to promote a blog at least. It's been good for me in other ways, too - good discipline, good writing practice, good thinking practice while I've been too busy with day-jobs to work on my thesis and so on. It's also pushed me to engage more with the world at large, and I can't discount the effect of the positive feedback I keep getting either.
So whether or not my blogging here is effective promotion (and I'll check in again on this later in the year, just in case that green line is on an upward trend), I'm going to keep blogging. I enjoy it and it's both a useful habit and a useful outlet. If you're looking to use blogging to promote your fiction, though, it might be better to use me as a 'what not to do' than a 'what to do' guide.
If you have any suggestions about how I could strengthen the link between my blogging and my fiction, by the way, I'd love to hear them ;).
Monday, 6 May 2013
Two Years On
It's a little bit over two years since I decided (arbitrarily and with little experience to inform the decision) that self-publishing is the writerly route for me. It was an unwise decision, in the sense that it was made with little wisdom, but it seems to have been a fortuitous one all the same. I certainly wouldn't retract it. Anyway, as I did last year, this seems a good moment for a little analysis.
The angle I want to take is considering what might have happened had I decided differently - this seems to me the best way of evaluating the decision I actually made. I hope that in doing so I can get a little closer to pinning down exactly why this route is right for me, and why it might (or might not) be right for you.
Let's start with where I'm at in reality. The Second Realm is approaching 3,000 total downloads at Smashwords, and presumably there are also some people reading it on this blog (though it's hard to estimate how many). This has been achieved with very little in the way of promotion - nothing more than a handful of tweets around the release of each new episode, plus this blog (on which more tomorrow) - but the downside to that is that it hasn't made very much money. Immortal Remains has made a few bob with even less promotion, but generated very little persistent interest - an average of 2 'sales' and 5-6 samples per month.
In some ways, it's a bleak, penurious picture - whether or not there's any money in writing, there doesn't seem to be any in how I'm doing it. On the other hand, some of those 3,000-odd downloads represent actual people actually reading my writing (I know this because very occasionally one of them will tell me so, and it always makes my day). Remember this, because it will be important later on.
Now let's turn the clock back to March 27th, 2011, and the start of this blog (no, I'm not going to link to the first ever post - I daren't even look at it for fear of how terrible and naive it probably is...). And let's pretend that I ignored, dismissed or lacked the guts to follow up on the Konrath/Eisler dialogue 'Be the Monkey' which put me on this path.
At that time, I had two novels drafted, one unmarketably bad (The Death of John Collins, a.k.a. the death of physical description) and the other unmarketably weird (Bad Romance, a.k.a. the one about stalking Lady Gaga). I had no platform to speak of and very little awareness of the flaws in my portfolio.
There was some light just around the corner, though; about a month later, I started work on Heaven Can Wait, which is probably the first publishable thing I ever wrote. Still, the first draft was bad enough that I've now done seven redrafts of varying levels of severity, as I've learned and grown as a writer. The book is currently on submission to a smallish new publisher whose business model I like the look of.
We'll go with a 'best plausible case' scenario. I decide on the strength of initial feedback to start shopping Heaven Can Wait to agents. I get lucky; someone takes an interest in the first six months despite the first draft's bloated first act and helps me chop the whole thing into shape (and has the patience to deal with my inevitable temper tantrum when confronted with the weaknesses of my writing). We spend six months on this part of the process, that being the least amount of time I can imagine three or four harsh editing passes taking.
Duly whipped into shape, the manuscript goes on submission and gets lucky again - it lands on the right editor's desk on the right day, the beginning grabs them and I come away with a sale. Say another six months. A standard advance (about $5,000?). By this point, it's coming up to Christmas of last year. If the publisher takes the standard year or two to get round to actually publishing my book, it might be out for Christmas 2013.
All of this, of course, assumes that I don't get fleeced, scammed or ripped off anywhere along the line, and all the relevant businesses manage not to collapse. It also assumes that no part of the process is so stressful that I give up (I have some anxiety issues which would probably have made contacting and dealing with agents hellish).
Right now, in May 2013, I'd have some money in my pocket (though how much, I have no idea), but no published writing. The only people who'd have read any of my work would be beta readers, agents and editors. The publisher would be expecting me to start building my platform, but probably giving me very little support to do so.
And I'd still be between six and eighteen months away from having anything published. On a best plausible case. It could easily be several years more. I'm not saying that makes the indie route better all round, but it's definitely better for me. I think if I felt it likely that I'd have to wait five years to show anyone my stuff, I probably wouldn't bother trying. My writing would just go in a desk drawer. I suspect I'm a lot freer to write and do what I want - and to learn at my own pace - than I would be on other models.
So yeah, self-publishing might have been a decision made with little wisdom, but it was definitely the right one. Not that I haven't made some mistakes along the way, but that's a post for another time.
The angle I want to take is considering what might have happened had I decided differently - this seems to me the best way of evaluating the decision I actually made. I hope that in doing so I can get a little closer to pinning down exactly why this route is right for me, and why it might (or might not) be right for you.
Let's start with where I'm at in reality. The Second Realm is approaching 3,000 total downloads at Smashwords, and presumably there are also some people reading it on this blog (though it's hard to estimate how many). This has been achieved with very little in the way of promotion - nothing more than a handful of tweets around the release of each new episode, plus this blog (on which more tomorrow) - but the downside to that is that it hasn't made very much money. Immortal Remains has made a few bob with even less promotion, but generated very little persistent interest - an average of 2 'sales' and 5-6 samples per month.
In some ways, it's a bleak, penurious picture - whether or not there's any money in writing, there doesn't seem to be any in how I'm doing it. On the other hand, some of those 3,000-odd downloads represent actual people actually reading my writing (I know this because very occasionally one of them will tell me so, and it always makes my day). Remember this, because it will be important later on.
Now let's turn the clock back to March 27th, 2011, and the start of this blog (no, I'm not going to link to the first ever post - I daren't even look at it for fear of how terrible and naive it probably is...). And let's pretend that I ignored, dismissed or lacked the guts to follow up on the Konrath/Eisler dialogue 'Be the Monkey' which put me on this path.
At that time, I had two novels drafted, one unmarketably bad (The Death of John Collins, a.k.a. the death of physical description) and the other unmarketably weird (Bad Romance, a.k.a. the one about stalking Lady Gaga). I had no platform to speak of and very little awareness of the flaws in my portfolio.
There was some light just around the corner, though; about a month later, I started work on Heaven Can Wait, which is probably the first publishable thing I ever wrote. Still, the first draft was bad enough that I've now done seven redrafts of varying levels of severity, as I've learned and grown as a writer. The book is currently on submission to a smallish new publisher whose business model I like the look of.
We'll go with a 'best plausible case' scenario. I decide on the strength of initial feedback to start shopping Heaven Can Wait to agents. I get lucky; someone takes an interest in the first six months despite the first draft's bloated first act and helps me chop the whole thing into shape (and has the patience to deal with my inevitable temper tantrum when confronted with the weaknesses of my writing). We spend six months on this part of the process, that being the least amount of time I can imagine three or four harsh editing passes taking.
Duly whipped into shape, the manuscript goes on submission and gets lucky again - it lands on the right editor's desk on the right day, the beginning grabs them and I come away with a sale. Say another six months. A standard advance (about $5,000?). By this point, it's coming up to Christmas of last year. If the publisher takes the standard year or two to get round to actually publishing my book, it might be out for Christmas 2013.
All of this, of course, assumes that I don't get fleeced, scammed or ripped off anywhere along the line, and all the relevant businesses manage not to collapse. It also assumes that no part of the process is so stressful that I give up (I have some anxiety issues which would probably have made contacting and dealing with agents hellish).
Right now, in May 2013, I'd have some money in my pocket (though how much, I have no idea), but no published writing. The only people who'd have read any of my work would be beta readers, agents and editors. The publisher would be expecting me to start building my platform, but probably giving me very little support to do so.
And I'd still be between six and eighteen months away from having anything published. On a best plausible case. It could easily be several years more. I'm not saying that makes the indie route better all round, but it's definitely better for me. I think if I felt it likely that I'd have to wait five years to show anyone my stuff, I probably wouldn't bother trying. My writing would just go in a desk drawer. I suspect I'm a lot freer to write and do what I want - and to learn at my own pace - than I would be on other models.
So yeah, self-publishing might have been a decision made with little wisdom, but it was definitely the right one. Not that I haven't made some mistakes along the way, but that's a post for another time.
Sunday, 28 April 2013
My Uncle's Thumb
A few years back, my uncle (who reads this blog, so my apologies if I'm getting the details of the story wrong) got a bad infection in his thumb (or finger?), bad enough that the medical professionals involved in the decision advocated amputating the thumb. My uncle is a keen (and excellent) guitarist and pianist, and the loss of a finger was a horrible prospect for him. Fortunately, a better solution was found, the infection dealt with and the finger saved.
My point? Not every solution to a problem is necessarily a good thing.
Some friends of mine (some of whom also read this blog - Hi Andy!) are going to a public debate titled 'Was Thatcherism Good for Britain?' this week. I won't be joining them, partly because it's at an inconvenient time, partly because in this city it seems very likely to devolve into a shouting match, and partly because I think they're asking the wrong question, for several reasons. I felt it probably worth saying something, then, even though I'm not going to the debate.
First off, the use of the past tense here is pretty inappropriate. Commentators seem to be more or less in agreement that David Cameron is a Thatcherite. It's pretty rare to find anyone who strongly objects to calling Tony Blair a Thatcherite, and even Gordon Brown is semi-regularly accused of Thatcherism. So it's wrong to suggest that Thatcherism is 'over', a thing of the past. The details and effects of Thatcherism may be different these days, but the ideology is still going. But OK, perhaps we can read the question as 'were the policies of Thatcher's premiership, insofar as they represented a consistent ideology, good for Britain?'
(It's worth noting that the question of whether Thatcherism is even an ideology at all is a loaded one, but I think we can worry about that some other time.)
A bigger worry from the present perspective is that there are at least three things 'Thatcherism' could refer to. The first is Thatcher's nostalgia-driven, oppressive social policy, the second is her brutal, authoritarian leadership style, and the third is her laissez-faire economic policy. Since the first gave us Section 28 and all it stood for (among other things, I'm sure, but Section 28 is the one I'm most familiar with), and the second, if nothing else, created the precedent for Tony Blair's wars and war crimes, I think it's fair to say that the suggestion that either might have been good for Britain is in exceptionally poor taste.
That leaves Thatcher's economic policies. Apart from mentioning this, I'm not going to tackle the arguments put forward by right-wing ideologues in favour of free-market capitalism (I don't really have the level of understanding I'd like, and I don't have good sources at my fingertips), but I do want to do a quick 'my uncle's thumb' argument here.
The problem that Thatcherism is supposed to have solved, economically, is the unmanageable power of the British trades unions in the 1970s. I'm not going to deny there was a problem there, although it's arguable whether the problem was the power of the unions or their failure to cooperate effectively and take a long-term view. My point is simply this; what we have now is rather the opposite - ungovernable, tax-dodging, media-controlling corporations. There's no question that the union problem has been dispensed with - the last time a strike affected me, its net effect was to spare me an exam I might otherwise have done rather poorly in.
The power of the unions, remember, was the power of the British people. The immense, overwhelming problem we have these days is a feeling of disenfranchisement and hopelessness, the feeling that nothing we can do can change public policy or wrest back control of our government from corporate interests. The unions of the 70s were an infected thumb, but are we better off without them, or did they just need a good course of antibiotics?
The stated intention of Thatcherite economics and all similar capitalist models is to give corporations more freedom - more power - so it's not like we can argue that Thatcher wasn't trying to create the current situation. Is the current situation better than it was thirty years ago? (Actually, in some ways - notably communications technology - it is, but I don't think most of those ways can be traced to Thatcher's policies, and certainly not to her ideology).
Which of course, finally, brings us to the question of what 'good for Britain' means. If we mean purely GDP, well, that fell for the first half of Thatcher's reign, but then improved sharply. If income inequality is a better measure, Thatcher oversaw the most significant rise seen in this country in the modern era (p.9 offers an overview). Thatcherites will of course prefer a GDP-based judgement; Thatcher's critics will argue that low inequality tends to better reflect quality of life. There's the question of whether 'Britain' means the British crown, the ~62 million British citizens and residents, or something more abstract.
Ultimately, while it's good to have a public discourse (possibly not face to face, given what I've said before about the effects of anger in public contexts) about political issues, there are so many weaknesses with the question offered that I can't see this particular debate being much use. I don't have time or space to give a detailed argument, but a better question might be 'Thatcher's economic policies had the explicit intent of reducing restrictions on the behaviour of corporations. Have these policies been successful, and if so what was their effect on the quality of life of the British public?' Wordier, I know, but that's the price of clarity.
My point? Not every solution to a problem is necessarily a good thing.
Some friends of mine (some of whom also read this blog - Hi Andy!) are going to a public debate titled 'Was Thatcherism Good for Britain?' this week. I won't be joining them, partly because it's at an inconvenient time, partly because in this city it seems very likely to devolve into a shouting match, and partly because I think they're asking the wrong question, for several reasons. I felt it probably worth saying something, then, even though I'm not going to the debate.
First off, the use of the past tense here is pretty inappropriate. Commentators seem to be more or less in agreement that David Cameron is a Thatcherite. It's pretty rare to find anyone who strongly objects to calling Tony Blair a Thatcherite, and even Gordon Brown is semi-regularly accused of Thatcherism. So it's wrong to suggest that Thatcherism is 'over', a thing of the past. The details and effects of Thatcherism may be different these days, but the ideology is still going. But OK, perhaps we can read the question as 'were the policies of Thatcher's premiership, insofar as they represented a consistent ideology, good for Britain?'
(It's worth noting that the question of whether Thatcherism is even an ideology at all is a loaded one, but I think we can worry about that some other time.)
A bigger worry from the present perspective is that there are at least three things 'Thatcherism' could refer to. The first is Thatcher's nostalgia-driven, oppressive social policy, the second is her brutal, authoritarian leadership style, and the third is her laissez-faire economic policy. Since the first gave us Section 28 and all it stood for (among other things, I'm sure, but Section 28 is the one I'm most familiar with), and the second, if nothing else, created the precedent for Tony Blair's wars and war crimes, I think it's fair to say that the suggestion that either might have been good for Britain is in exceptionally poor taste.
That leaves Thatcher's economic policies. Apart from mentioning this, I'm not going to tackle the arguments put forward by right-wing ideologues in favour of free-market capitalism (I don't really have the level of understanding I'd like, and I don't have good sources at my fingertips), but I do want to do a quick 'my uncle's thumb' argument here.
The problem that Thatcherism is supposed to have solved, economically, is the unmanageable power of the British trades unions in the 1970s. I'm not going to deny there was a problem there, although it's arguable whether the problem was the power of the unions or their failure to cooperate effectively and take a long-term view. My point is simply this; what we have now is rather the opposite - ungovernable, tax-dodging, media-controlling corporations. There's no question that the union problem has been dispensed with - the last time a strike affected me, its net effect was to spare me an exam I might otherwise have done rather poorly in.
The power of the unions, remember, was the power of the British people. The immense, overwhelming problem we have these days is a feeling of disenfranchisement and hopelessness, the feeling that nothing we can do can change public policy or wrest back control of our government from corporate interests. The unions of the 70s were an infected thumb, but are we better off without them, or did they just need a good course of antibiotics?
The stated intention of Thatcherite economics and all similar capitalist models is to give corporations more freedom - more power - so it's not like we can argue that Thatcher wasn't trying to create the current situation. Is the current situation better than it was thirty years ago? (Actually, in some ways - notably communications technology - it is, but I don't think most of those ways can be traced to Thatcher's policies, and certainly not to her ideology).
Which of course, finally, brings us to the question of what 'good for Britain' means. If we mean purely GDP, well, that fell for the first half of Thatcher's reign, but then improved sharply. If income inequality is a better measure, Thatcher oversaw the most significant rise seen in this country in the modern era (p.9 offers an overview). Thatcherites will of course prefer a GDP-based judgement; Thatcher's critics will argue that low inequality tends to better reflect quality of life. There's the question of whether 'Britain' means the British crown, the ~62 million British citizens and residents, or something more abstract.
Ultimately, while it's good to have a public discourse (possibly not face to face, given what I've said before about the effects of anger in public contexts) about political issues, there are so many weaknesses with the question offered that I can't see this particular debate being much use. I don't have time or space to give a detailed argument, but a better question might be 'Thatcher's economic policies had the explicit intent of reducing restrictions on the behaviour of corporations. Have these policies been successful, and if so what was their effect on the quality of life of the British public?' Wordier, I know, but that's the price of clarity.
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