Getting paid to work

Ever since I was about six years old, I've wanted to be 'a writer'.  On my eighteenth birthday, I brought myself a bottle of Champaign which I planned to open and drink when I got my first book deal.

What it means to be 'a writer' is a question that's kept me tossing and turning in my sleep for the past twenty years or so.  Is it when I get my first book published?  When I earn the majority of my income from writing?  When other people start calling me a writer?

By the time I was nineteen, I'd written two novels.  They were high fantasy and probably not great, but it took dedication and inspiration.  Those are the two things that have keep me plugging away at this whole 'writer' thing and kept me convinced this was the path I'm at home on.

I started writing short stories because that's where people like Asimov and Bradbury started (at least, that was my understanding at the time).  In the last few years, I've realised that science-fiction and fantasy short stories are not just an art to themselves but a whole world to themselves. 

Always with an eye on that bottle of Champaign (when I can call myself 'a writer'), I've been following this whole, 'pay rates fail' thing which has been blowing around the blogs at the moment.  How much should writers been paid, and when a writer can call themselves a professional?

The Steampunk Soiree was, financially, a bit of a disaster.  Everybody who attended had a great time and would love to come again, but everybody who attended isn't going to come close to paying for all the bands.  Less professional, and more farce.  A very fun farce, but a farce non-the-less.  We're yet to do the sums, but if we can pay people's expenses it's going to be a miracle of some description (hey, we have our hopes up--it's Christmas, after all!)  Effectively, the artists had to pay to work.

Issue #6 of Steampunk Magazine was, financially, a bit of a disaster too.  It was a lot longer than normal and there wasn't enough money in the kitty to cover expenses.  It was supposed to be my first ever payment for something I'd written, but I waived it and have already happily foregone any payment for anything I write for Issue #7.  And, of course, SPM is released under Creative Commons non-profit accreditation licence, so someone can take Of Mice and Journeymen, reprint it and re-write it as much as they like.

So, let's say a reasonable pro pay rate for a short story is 5 cents a word.  £1 is $1.1211 at the moment, so 1p is 1.1211c.  So, for every word I'd get 4.4599p.  I need about £900 a month to survive.  That means I'd have to sell 20,180 words (or there abouts).  Assuming an average story of mine is 7,000 words, that's three pro-sales a month.   That's also assuming there's no cap on pay and magazines don't mind paying me $350 for a story.  (Of course, this doesn't take into account charges for changing currency which is something that's yet to come up in the Great Pay Debate.)

There's three immediate problems I can see with this:
1) If I quit my day job, I could probably rely on writing one 'as good as I can write' story a month.  A good month could produce three, if it was a really good month;
2) Selling three pro-rate stories a month would mean an awful lot of socialising and networking for me, and people scare me;
3)  After 36 stories in the first year, people are going to get pretty damned sick of me.

There's non-fiction--which is apparently even harder than short story writing to make money out of--and workshops--which runs into 2)--which could top up my earnings.  Maybe there's other avenues I'm not aware of at the moment.  For the moment, though, I've not really got any qualms about ruling out making a living from my writing.

As a result of the pay debate, I've decided to start sending my work to pro- and semi-pro markets.  Maybe I'm not good enough yet, but I'll keep striving to get better.  Am I doing it for the money?  Well, a couple hundred quid would be more than welcome but the short answer is, 'no'.  I'm doing it because the slush pile at those magazines is huge and you've got to really shine to be picked out.  And, probably more importantly, because the people whose work I love reading sometimes read those magazines. 

When one of my stories appears in Interzone along side Jason Sanford, maybe then I'll crack open that bottle.  Or maybe I'll wait until John Reppion says, 'hey Foxie, loved the story--it gave me an amazing idea!'.  Of course, my snarky side wants to wait until one of my stories triggers its own xyz-fail shit storm.

The money=good thing is something deeply embedded in my psyche by a middle-class upbringing (I gave my Dad a copy of 'Mind Games' to read, because I thought he might like to see what his son was doing with his life, and his first question was, 'how much money did this make you then?').  Hanging around with Steampunks is really making me challenge and question that, and more and more I'm convinced that's wrong.  Is playing to a crowd of 40 at a loss better than playing to a crowd of 200 with a nice paycheck?  You can't make a habit out of it, but if those 40 people are inspired and those 200 are just drunk then, well, it probably is.

If I wanted to make money, I'd have followed my brother's lead and become an accountant.  If I want to make money from writing, I'll follow James Patterson and top my bank balance up writing whargarble for the Murdoch press.  I'm not saying these things are easy, but that's where the money is.

If I get myself in the pro markets, maybe in twenty years time someone will offer me a T.V. show.  Maybe by the time we've gone through the sixth Soiree, we'll be able to make a profit, I'll enjoy socialising and people will be saying, 'talk to Foxie, he'll make it happen for you'.  Perhaps people will be thinking, 'I need an opinion on this, what's Foxie thinking?'.  Five years down the line, yeah I'll probably still be in the day job.  Ten years, maybe.  Twenty years?  Thirty years?  I don't know.  Money is nice, but transitory.  Reputation is permanent, and it takes decades to build up one of those.  I've been at this twenty-five years already and maybe I won't be opening that bottle for another twenty-five.  I'm okay with that.  I'm a writer.  As sure as some people are homosexual or Olympic athletes, that's who I am.  That's who I'm going to be until the day I die, so I'm okay going slow and steady because I've got the time.  Hell, that's really all I've got to do with my life.

Writers should be paid a fair wage for their work, but that's never going to happen when there's so many of us.  Unless your name comes out the cosmic lottery machine, you're never going to make a living from just writing fiction.  (Oh, people win every week but you'd be daft to count on paying your mortgage with a lottery ticket.)  The underlying problem which no amount of e-ink can change is that there is not the audience to support SF/F writers.  Even with the success of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek:  Reboot, the general public don't particularly want to read thought-provoking, innovative SF/F short stories.  They want Opera and Will Smith.  They want to give their money to franchises they can trust, actors they know and authors who entertain without challenging.  It takes a degree of imagination and intelligence to gain something from the SF/F short story world as it is at the moment, and the general public are increasingly wanting to just dumbly consume. 

So if you're arguing that writers should be able to make a living from their work, you've lost before you've begun.  There's not enough interest to generate enough money to make that position viable.  It's not the fault of the magazines or the writers or the advertisers.  What we produce simply isn't what the masses--the paying public--wants. 

We publish to talk to each other, to inspire each other.  A story in a pro magazine means that an editor with a towering slush pile has decided this piece has something to say.  That's why I'll read and think about everything in Interzone, regardless of how much I personally enjoy the story.  I don't think I'm the only one who thinks like that, either.  5c a word is the honey which brings in the bees, and the editors need to fulfil their end of the bargain by picking the diamonds out the slush.  That's their reputation and track record.  The currency itself becomes a value, a number in part of a larger equation and independent of what goods and services it can be exchanged for.

But that's just me.  If the majority of writers in the SF/F world agreed, John Scalzi and everyone else wouldn't have batted at eyelid at Black Matrix, instead just deciding that the number the equation came out with was too low and passing on to other things.

A Bridge's Tale

Let me tell you a story.

Like many people who write, I keep a note book. I use it both to note down ideas, and to develop them.


(^my notebook^)

Yes, this story has pictures. That’s the kind of story it is. (They were taken on my camera phone, though, so the quality isn't great. Sorry about that...)

Angeline of the Woods started off as a doodle I made at the Asylum while waiting for other people to show up for the creative writing workshop. A couple weeks after getting back, I put the few ideas I’d had into my notebook and began to poke them to see how they’d grow. After a couple of pages of thought-association, I hit a wall. So, I doodled a picture of the town the story is set in:



I drew the river. Then the town and the woods the titular Angeline would be Of. Towards the top of the woods, I marked an area ‘fuel allotments’ because I grew up within walking distance of a fair few acres of fuel allotments, and they were very special to me when I was young. I drew in some trees, some houses, some roads, a little picture of Angeline…

And you see that bridge? I put that in last, because I figured that the people in town would need a way to get to the fuel allotments. Then I noticed that the river flowed from north to south, and the bridge was north of the town. That meant that the ships would have to be able to fit under the bridge. As the town was just above sea level, that meant the bridge would have to be pretty large, and significantly raised above the level of the town. People would still have to be able to get over the bridge--how else would they get their fuel from the allotments?--so that meant there would have to be ramps of some sort leading up to it.

Hey… I was beginning to think, this bridge is going to pretty much dominate the town. The town was built around the docks so the bridge couldn’t be an expansion of an older bridge (otherwise the ships wouldn’t be able to get in). Huge projects like that are prestige projects, built to make a statement more than anything else. Who would do that, I wondered?

I got distracted before I could figure that out. Would a bridge--with two huge arches like in my doodle--even be able to support itself or would physics be against it? Well, three hours of Google and Wikipedia later, I was satisfied physics would be kind to the bridge.

So, back to the question of who built it, and why. The ships coming into the town are the lost and deserted ships of all time and space. Those ships which disappear without a trace, those who end up in Davey Jones’ locker, those who sail into the mist and reappear years later… those are the ships which come through. Maybe one of these ships was carrying a Brunel-esque engineer, someone with the knowledge, vision and determination to see through a project of such magnitude.

He must, I decided, have done it to free the people of the town. To free them from whom? Well… before the bridge was built, the townspeople must have moved from one side to the other. The County Road is on the other side of the river, and that sounds like an important road. So, whoever controls travel across the river controls who gets fuel and when, and who gets through to the County Road and when. Our Brunelian engineer was enraged by this evil cartel of ferry operators and the absolute power they wielded, so he decided to free the town! Yay!

Obviously, he couldn’t rely on the ferry operators ferrying his stone from the County Road to his building site and he couldn’t just wait around and hope a ship would come in with the vast amount of stone he would need. So the stone would have to be local. From my previous time with Wikipedia and Google, I had discovered that a bridge of such magnitude would probably have to be built from granite if it was going to last.

But what the hell kind of forest would grow on a bedrock of granite, especially where there was enough at hand to blast out the ground and built a bridge of? Wikipedia failed me. I dropped all other quests, and focused. Search term after search term found themselves in my search bar to be sent scurrying across the web. Eventually, I gained enough XP to level up my Google-fu and found an answer.

(The Granite-Forest quest lead to another one about the sort of undergrowth which would grow in such a forest, but that’s another story.)

Armed with my notes

I started writing.

The bridge was only built two generations ago, so as well as dominating the town physically it’s also going to be pretty dominate psychologically. Everyone living in the town would have had a part to play in its story.

Nigel, the kind-hearted local lad Feathers recruits to help him, tells Feathers of his grandfather’s part:
“Grandfather helped to build the bridge,” Nigel said. “Happiest damned day of his life was when he took his family and walked across to t'other side…pushed his wife off the side, see. They hanged him from the scaffolding over the second arch. Told my girl he's ghost stays there, guards the county road as penance. Makes her proud, that. Great-grandfather guarding the whole town an' all.”

He’s proud of his grandfather, in an odd sort of way.

The bridge does restrict the traffic which can get to the town docks. Anything taller than a clipper would have trouble, for example. Luckily, Nigel knew the town’s ingenious solution:
“The bridgemen used to run this town,” Nigel said. “Grandfather used to say about these big platforms what used to float from one side of the river to t'other. Four bridgeman to move it, two to steer. Only way to get to the county road over the water was on the platform, so if you wanted anything--food, horses, wood, anything--you'd have to take a platform and pay the bridgemen. Then a man came along. On a big iron ship that moved God only knows how. Took one look at the bridgemen, and stood in the town square and told everyone he was going to build us a bridge. So he did. Everyone watched as he built up them banks on each side and as this thing slowly came to be. When it was finished, bridgemen went broke in a month. He was walking along the riverside, passed by a gang of bridgemen, fell in the water and drowned.”

Nigel shrugged as if that was all there was to the story. Feathers took his hands off the windowsill and linked them behind his back.

“What happened to the bridgemen?” he asked.

“One of the workers from the boat who'd built the bridge, he brought all the platforms and made them into the Grossanlegen. Everyone winds up happy.”

That’s all from the first draft. (Grossanlegen is a crude German translation for ‘Big Docks’.)

When editing, I strive to remove any ounce of fat I can find. You know how much of the bridge’s story has survived to the third draft?

Yep. None.

I mean, it was great fun to explore the bridge’s history, to literally build it up and watch as it grew and the history of the town grew with it. It was gratifying to listen as Nigel made the bridge a real, tangible thing with its own past, memories and legends. But it didn’t add anything to the story of Angeline of the Woods. So it had to go.

There are no scared cows in the editing room. Editor Foxie is a cruel, cruel man.

A bit about writing

You know you’re in a bad place when the thought of reading through your own story fills you with a sense of dread. I’ve been getting that a lot recently, but writing is supposed to be a release, isn’t it?

Angeline of the Woods is now into a third draft and I had a moment this morning where it felt like everything came together. I dropped a few inconsequential words onto the page, there was a click, and suddenly the machine started to work. It needs a bit of tinkering, but it’s turning over and doing what it’s supposed to do.

The ‘sense of dread’ is something that’s been lingering over me since the car died. Every time I try and do something, there it is, blocking the way like some vast Internet slob, his Dorito-dusted gut lolloping over his keyboard.

Maybe I’m experiencing a temporary reprieve, or maybe it’s starting to pass. Either way, the Steampunk Soiree is this weekend and then Christmas shortly after. The Soiree, I’m reminding myself, is going to be fantastic--people I like, music I love, dancing, museums, markets… what else could I want? Christmas, well. I’m sure I saw tinsel in shops in August, but it’s almost over now. Just more three weeks of hated Christmas music in every single damned shop. I’m spending it with family this year, who at least have central heating. They’re lovely people and I’ve got no real complaints about them, I’m just not really a ‘Christmas’ person.

I have to get a move on with Symphonie Magnifique, too. Crossed Genres are putting together a ‘Steampunk’ issue, and of course I have to throw something in there. It’s about Frenchmen, and women, in space in 1869 (or maybe 1871). As well as Symphonie, I’m going to have a crack at writing an article--How Re-writing the Past is Going to Change the Future--about Steampunk culture, how the aesthetic translates to sustainable living, user-serviceable products, all that stuff.

And after being pointed to two very interesting articles there by Jason Sanford, I’ve started following Jeff van der Meer’s blog. He’s a man who knows his writing.

Property is theft. Theft is illegal. Break the law, you go to goal.

The good news from Pittsburgh is that is all changes against the Tortuga Twitter Two--good friends of Steampunk Magazine and freedom lovers everywhere--have been dropped.  Just a little bit of pressure, and the government drop the case quicker than a flaming, radioactive, Arab-looking potato.  I guess they wanted to make a statement and weren’t prepared for any sort of fighting back.

The bad news is that, not only are they not going to have their possessions returned in the near future, but the feds have been given the go-ahead to rummage through everything to see if there’s anything which takes their fancy.  They can make copies of any electronic data before returning their laptops, memory cards and other electronic gumpth.

The property was seized under a Grand Jury investigation, the purpose of which remains a mystery.  Of course, if they find evidence of other crimes during the searches, I’m sure they’ll be sure to prosecute. 

So it turns out that, if you live in the US and you do something the government don’t like, they can harass, bully and try to intimidate you, steal your possessions, invade your privacy, and search every aspect of your life to see if they can find a crime you’ve committed.  Whose freedoms are being protected here?

The idea that governments exist to protect freedom or protect people is of course a mis-conception.  Like any body with power, governments exist to protect their own power.  I guess it’s just kind of scary to see it so naked.  I guess it’s also scary because, although I believe in what the Professor was doing and I believe in the cause he’s fighting for, and although I’m in another country with another government… I’m scared that it might be me one day.  One day, I’ll be trying to do what I think is right, and it’ll be me sitting where he is.

If one good thing can come of this, it’s that they seized copies of Steampunk Magazine and a few more people out there might enjoy Of Mice and Journeymen.  Hey, if I can’t be selfish and glib, what have I got left?

In which Foxie discards a word

Things have been a bit tough lately.  The UK Steampunk Network--which I still think is a great idea--is pushing me in all my uncomfortable areas and, although they need to be banished, it ain't easy.  And then there's the trouble I'm in at work.  I may lose my job on Tuesday and for nothing more than some manager's ego trip. 

Anyway, I was at work the other day and I just needed to escape.  You know, get out of that headspace.  So, I put my expensive headphones and listened to Free's Fire and Water.  That album is one of my happy places.

So there I am, listening, eyes closed, world screened out.  Up pops Anne and I tell her I just needed some escapism. 

“Why are the good things in life 'escapism', and all the bad things, 'real'?” she asks.

Why is a good movie, a beautiful song or breath-taking work of fiction 'escapism'?  The implication is that we're escaping from something, and the usual assumption is that we're escaping from life.  That would assume all these wonderful things somehow exist outside of life.  That's clearly not true, because they are part of life.  They exist in the real world, were created by real people and are accessible by real people without any special preparation.  They exist within the real world, therefore within life.

How are they any less real than my disciplinary?  Or my psychological hang-ups?  They all exist in the same fabric of life.

So yeah, why are all the good things 'escapism' and the bad things 'real'?  Why do I 'escape' into a song that reminds me how beautiful life can be, and 'come back to reality' for a piece of paper which reminds me how shitty people--and the world--can be?

I've not found an alternative phraseology yet, but I'm not going to use 'escapism' any more.  It's just reinforcing the human propensity to focus on the negative and discount the positive.  The 'escapism' is just as much a valid part of life as anything else.  You're not 'escaping'.  You're just changing the glasses you use to look at reality through.

Steampunk may have its first political prisoner

Not in this country, but over in the States. It’s easy to say it’s got nothing to do with me, and maybe it doesn’t. Thing is, it never does until it’s too late. We all know that where the States lead, our government tries to follow and quite apart from that injustice is international. Something is happening that I believe is Wrong, so here’s my tiny fists shaking at the sky.

Here's a report from Pittsburg's local ink presses, and it makes for kind of scary reading. Lolcats have become evidence of criminal activity now? Justice... ur doin it wrong...

And, here’s a first-hand account of what happened and details of who to contact if you want to help:

On October 1st, 2009, at 6:00am, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (a
union of local police departments and the FBI), kicked out the front
door to our home—an anarchist collective house in Queens, NY,
affectionately known as Tortuga. The first crashes of the battering
ram were quickly followed by more upstairs, as the police broke in on
3 sleeping people, destroying bedroom doors that were unlocked.

Three more people, awoken by the most unpleasant means of bounding
footsteps, splintering wood, and shouting voices, waited in the
basement—their turn at drawn guns and blinding lights came quickly.

We put our hands out where they could see them. They ordered us out of
bed. They wouldn’t let us dress, but they did put a random assortment
of clothes on some people. We were handcuffed, and although the
upstairs and downstairs groups were kept separate initially, we were
soon all together, sitting in the living room, positioned like dolls
on the couches and chairs. We were in handcuffs for several hours, and
we were helpless as our little bird, a Finch we had rescued and were
rehabilitating, flew out the open door to certain death, after his
cage had been battered by the cops in their zeal to open the upstairs
bedroom doors by force. We shouted at them, but they stood there and
watched.

And they stood and watched us for hours and hours and hours. 16 hours
to be precise, 16 hours of the NYPD and FBI traipsing through our
house, confiscating our lives in a fishing expedition related to the
G20 protests of September 24th and 25th. The search warrant, when we
were finally allowed to read it, mentioned violation of federal
rioting laws and was vague enough to allow the entire house to be
searched. They kept repeating that we were not arrested, that we were
free to go. But being free meant being watched by the FBI, monitored
while using the bathroom, not allowed to make phone calls for hours or
to observe them ransacking our rooms. Being free meant they took two
of us away on bullshit summonses, and even though this was our house,
where we lived, if we left, we could not re-enter.

Three of us stayed to the bitter end. Three of us stayed to watch the
hazmat team come in to investigate a child’s chemistry set, to see
them search the garage on an additional warrant, to sign vouchers for
all the things they confiscated as “evidence”—Curious George plush
toys, artwork, correspondence with political prisoner Daniel McGowan,
birth certificates, passports, the entire video archive of a local
media collective, tax records, books, computers, storage devices, cell
phones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs, flags, banners, posters,
photographs and more than can be recounted here.

The apparent impetus for this raid came over a week ago, when two
members of our household were arrested, once again at gunpoint, in the
suburbs of Pittsburgh. They are accused of being devious masterminds,
of “directing” the rollicking G-20 protests, of using technology such
as Twitter to “hinder apprehension” of protesters. The two were held
on bail, one fetching the ridiculous amount of $30,000 cash, and
released 36 hours later after the bond was posted. As of this moment,
no additional charges have been levied against the two, nor against
any other housemates in the aftermath of the raid.

As anarchists, we are under no illusions about what the State is
capable of. We are not the first anarchists to have our house raided,
and unfortunately as long as the State remains, we will not be the
last. We are, along with other targeted individuals like David
Japenga, the outlets for the impotent rage the authorities feel when
they lose control, as they did during the G-20 in Pittsburgh. We, that
beautiful we, that include Tortuga House and all who find affinity
with us, refuse the rigid forms the authorities try and cram a world
bursting with infinite possibilities into—He is not a leader, she did
not act alone, they are not being directed. Repression is a strategy
that the state uses to put us on the defensive, to divert our energies
from being a proactive force and instead deal with the terms it has
set. We will not lie and say this has not left us reeling, but as time
and our dizziness pass, we know that friends surround us. Our resolve
is strengthened by this solidarity, and we will not be deterred by
this state aggression.

We wish to thank all of our friends and comrades who have stood by us
in these difficult few days. Our lawyer filed an injunction on the
raid the next morning (October 2nd) that was surprisingly granted- it
forbids the authorities from fishing through our belongings until we
head back to court on the 16th. In the weeks and months to come we
will do our best to share developments as they occur. If you want to
keep in touch or find out how you can help please email us at: tortugadefense@gmail.com

A Cup of Coffee and a Quick Chat

I’m supposing that people blogging about not posting in their blogs is about as tiresome as writers writing about writing.

So, here’s a bunch of things I should have written about, crammed into one post:

I have a new car.  Her name is Ann, and she’s a silver 1.4 Renault Clio.  I had to drive two hours to Manchester to view her, because there are no used car dealers in North Wales which deal in my price range.  I picked up her for £1,100 from a father and son team who prove that stereotypes do, actually, exist in the real world.  Picture father and son used car dealers in Greater Manchester, and you’re there.  She needs a few things fixing, but nothing major.  She also has remote central locking, which is a great pleasure for me.  I still grin like a schoolboy every time I press the switch.  I grew up in the eighties, and, well, remote central locking ranks up there with the Porch 911s with the whale-tail spoilers on the back.  Soon as I’m famous, I’m going to get me one of those, too.

Because I brought a new car, it transpired that Allegra and I were locked out after a night out with friends from work.  The house keys got left in Stevie (our old car) when we left him in Manchester for the tender touch of the scrapper, so we’d been  using the spare keys for the last week or so.  I didn’t pick up the spare key before leaving the house.  Normally, we leave the back door open.  However, we’d just come back from Lincoln, and not unlocked the door yet.  We normally have a Velux window open, but having just come back from Lincoln we’d shut them all tight.  Did you know there’s only one locksmith in our area?  We do, now.     After a half-hour trying to find some to let us in at midnight, we crashed on ngaio’s floor--which was especially kind of her, considering she had her in-laws staying at the time.  The morning was spent ringing around until £65 later we went to bed at half mid-day.  We now have several spare keys, ngaio looking after one of them for us.

Allegra has arranged an amazing gig in Oxford on the 14th December, with Sunday Driver, Ghostfire and The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing all on the same bill.  Lady Spagthorpe will be giving dancing classed during the day.  As we will be too busy organising during the day to attend, we will be traveling to Lady Spagthorpe’s place in York for some private tuition. 

I have two Feathers stories in my head which need writing, Stormy Weather is where I left it last time we talked, and I still have a story in my notebook from Scotland which needs attention.  And that’s before we mention Bambi.  I’m becoming a very bad writer, and I’m feeling the shame.

I can’t tell you the reason why I’m neglecting my duties, in true Wil Wheaton style.  It’s a super-special project I’ve been working on and feeding all my time to.  I should be able to show you next week, if all goes well.