But back to my annoyance.
Editing works that are already out is something that happens. We see it most commonly with comics, where collected volumes will have extras: these are mostly to get you to buy the same material again, plus bonus sketch or story or worldbuilding. This is established practice, which is evident particularly in popular series such as The Sandman, which has the individual issues, the collected editions, the absolute editions, and the annotated editions. One gets something new and slightly different out of each edition. One needs to buy the whole series four times to get that full experience.
It is also fairly established practice in textbooks, where new information requires rewrites.
But in novels, there have traditionally been few differences between editions: some will have particular illustrations, some will not, and the page count may vary between the hardcover and the pocketbook, but it is essentially the same content. In the case of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, there are two cover variants, but the contents remain the same. The cover variants are entertaining when next to each other (all of my copies have been of the black cover: my best friend has one with the white cover), but the contents are the same.
Take, for example, American Gods (yes, it is apparently Neil Gaiman day on Author’s Refuge). It recently had a tenth anniversary edition! The tenth anniversary edition has an additional twenty thousand words on the original. Twenty thousand. It is also the author’s preferred text.
I find this maddening, as it’s a larger echo of something I see a lot in indie publishing. I need to buy it again to get the whole experience – to get the experience the author wants me to have, even. This is okay for me with American Gods, as my paperback has gone missing somewhere in the last two countries, and I adore the story.
In indie publishing, I’ve seen a few authors scrambling to fix typos or plot holes pointed out by first readers – meaning that people who buy the book on the first, second, and third days are generally all buying slightly different books. This is amateurish, and frankly quite terrible: your book should be the best it can be before you publish it. Often, the best it can be requires an editor.
I am firmly of the opinion that, when you learn something new about writing, something that changes the way you write, it is the better part of valor to take that and apply it to something new instead of re-writing something old. Produce new and better things and send them forth into the world, and then produce more that are even better.
But I’m caught – it’s been ten years, and it’s twenty thousand words. It’s a celebration, not a cover-up. I may end up buying the hardcover.
That’s where this is from. It was written in the winter of 2007 or 2008: I’m not sure which. I only uploaded everything to Google Docs in 2010, because I didn’t want to lose all of the writing I’d done for the writing group I was part of in high school.
So this is how far I’ve come as a writer in the last five years, and contrasts with last week when I posted something just barely finished. It’s also an experiment in how far I’ve come as a person able to objectively critique my own work and not just go hide under a rock.
Apparently this was based on a dream I had. Oh! And I think it was around New Year’s in 2008, as I drew this:
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| Apparently these are the characters? |
I’m beginning to re-think my position.
A friend of mine recently submitted poetry to the New Yorker (as of writing, we are both waiting to hear back). She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to submit under her name or a pen name. I told her to use the pen name. She works with children, in the mental health field. Having her name on poetry can’t help her professionalism, particularly as my favourite collection of her poetry revolves around (unnamed, unspecified) children and the medications that they’re on and how the medications change things dramatically. I think they are fantastic, and show compassion and depth of feeling. Parents of children sending them to her in a professional capacity might not feel the same.
Anonymity is never absolute, but a pseudonym seemed the smartest way to go in my friend’s case.
Another friend writes both futuristic thrillers and erotica. She publishes the erotica under a pen name. It makes some sense to me to publish such different genres under different imprints, and the easiest way for an indie writer to differentiate is with pseudonyms. I don’t necessarily agree with the reasons she chose to publish the erotica under a pen name: she did so partly out of embarrassment at writing the genre at all and fear of family finding out and being embarrassed. I, obviously, have no such compunction.
But it occurred to me that, since I want to write both YA and romance, a pseudonym might at some point become useful. Even though I know that as a teenager, I myself was alternating YA-designated things with Laurell K Hamilton and filthy smut on the Internet, as were most of my friends, school librarians might not agree with my assessment that teenagers probably won’t mind searching for another title by their favourite author and picking up something significantly less family-friendly.
It is not anonymity. It will never be anonymity. But it would be a way for readers to know what they were in for before opening the book.
He told me to write a fairy tale, and that it couldn’t be a retelling.
After like an hour reading about Aarne-Thompson classifications and other components of fairy tales and nagging people for prompts and a failed first draft that involved Spivak pronouns and arguments and some really overcomplicated stuff with AI and gender, this happened.
The central idea was that the Devil always gets his due, and Orphne would lose in some way that didn’t actually involve being triumphed over (thus, cheating at cards).
Then somehow the seven deadly sins?
I wanted to have all of them, with the kind of double thing that the Devil, whose initial sin was pride, would be caught up in lust, and the nymph, who is generally associated with lust and deals mostly in that, would have a mistake of pride.
It came out really well, I think. I don’t even know. Next week: something I pull from the depths of the archives, and lengthy and embarrassed meta.
Edit: I won the contest! Wooooooo!
Like this one: I really like it. I have written portions of stories that were inspired by it, as I find lots of bass and a steady beat good for reminding me of an atmosphere of adventure, and ‘I just want to turn the lights on in these volatile times’ seems like really good motivation to go and do something really stupid.
Songs can be useful reminders of an atmosphere one is trying to evoke, particularly for those of us who have a tabbed browsing problem (currently open: Tumblr, blogger, two Youtube tabs, a wikipedia article, a knowyourmeme.com article, three writing projects, two stories I am supposed to be critiquing, a forum thread, and two stories I’d like to read). If I get drawn in to other things and disrupted from the mood I was writing, a song can remind me of what it was I was trying to do with the scene. Video game and movie soundtracks are integral to the mood of a piece, and the music Stephanie Meyer listened to while writing Twilight became a sort of soundtrack as well, so popular music relating to other media is not a new concept. Society is a story machine, and they leak out all over, and each tastes of the others.
But songs can take on other roles in stories, like the fanfiction My Immortal drawing its title, chapter titles, and tone primarily from Evanescence and My Chemical Romance songs. There also exists songfic, which involves weaving lyrics into plot.
One of the neatest approaches to songfic I’ve ever read was Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. It follows the plot of the Scottish ballad of the same name, and the full text of the ballad was included in the back of the book I read. The text itself is full of broad and witty references to literature, and a portion of its charm stems from the fact that it is in many ways a book about stories.
Object Perspective
Your assignment for this round is to write a story or poem from the perspective of a kitchen sponge, broom, towel or fork. Yup, that’s what I said. Have fun.
I hated this prompt. I hated it so much. I don’t particularly like writing anthropomorphism, and I’ve grown to dislike reading it, too. I read Silverwing and loved it and thought it was amazing, and I watched parts of the Redwall series as a kid. I read Animorphs and The Ship Who Sang and more werewolf stories than you can shake a stick at, so I was familiar with the more direct way of applying human characteristics to non-human things, too. But at some point I stopped liking it when human characteristics are applied to inhuman things. I like when the alien is alien and written as such. I like well-done xenobiology and earnest tries at xenopsychology and machine intelligences that are machine and uninterested in becoming human.
A lot of times, anthropomorphic objects are presented that way in children’s literature. In children’s literature, it can be a way to raise awareness of consideration for objects or the environment, or a way to present values in a way that is stripped of a lot of other societal constructs (the Little Engine That Could didn’t have to deal with systemic oppression or privilege, just trying his hardest).
But part of all writing is writing to your audience, and Adam is the audience for this contest, and he is not a child. Writing it as a children’s story wouldn’t have worked, either for him as the audience or for me as a writer.
Honestly I think I spent nearly as much time complaining about this as writing it.
That is not to imply that it was rushed, but that I complained a lot and have several people I should apologize to.
What I hate most about the prompt is that I really like the story and have no real problems with it or areas I think definitely need improvement.
In a piece of irony, I put a silver plate in the dishwasher very late one night after working on this.
Eileen Young 