Memories are dear this year, and passions bare this spring

Awhile ago, during Hurricane Irene, I had an unexpected and wonderful guest in my house. Author Jo Walton, whom I had not met previous to us giving her a ride to Troy from Pi Con, wound up being stuck staying with us during the post-storm floods, when the trains and busses in New York were all playing Silly-Buggers.

She was a fantastic guest to have, and despite her frustration with being stranded so close to home, and being stuck in a house with creatures that triggered her asthma, she kept us in fascinating chat and anecdotes the whole time she was here.

She also drew my attention to something I hadn't really properly realized before; something that really makes a lot of sense when I look at my life, and the relatively meagre level of success my work has brought me, and helps to mitigate the self-blame I've often struggled with for not being a better agent for myself, for not already having two or three novels out by now, and so on. She pointed out that it makes sense that my career would grow slowly, because I'm not just building one career. Because I'm not just a writer.

I paint too, and not just hobbyist painting, I paint like someone who once made her living with a brush and paper -- because I did. Right up until Dubya the Gubna flushed the Texas economy down the shitter and put Underhill Arts out of business (luxuries like art are always the first to go when the layoffs start and people have to tighten the strings.) I spent much of my twenties painting-and. (-and all the business chores that came along with painting, and selling one's paintings, which are frankly too numerous and tedious to re-list here.) Just like I've spent most of my thirties and early fourties writing-and.

I sing, play the guitar, and write and arrange songs too. Again, not like a hobbyist, but like someone who once played for pay. Because I did. This was another -and that took up a lot of my twenties. (If I add the jobs of booking agent-and, treasurer-and, manager-and, and arranger-and into it, it was a lot more than just the one -and, really.) Acting, directing, and costuming for street theatre were still another set of -ands. So that makes five categories of -ands that were happening in my twenties and early thirties. No, my math's not off, because during that time I was also the primary homemaker for not just myself and my husband, but for most of my friends as well. Wait... my math's not off, but my count is. I forgot to add Priestess and Tarot counselor into those jobs. Now none of those jobs were full time, but I did them all more or less together. And I wrote on top of it all, when I could fit time in, and dredge up the inspiration. And I somehow managed to get a novel done in that environment, too. When I look at that, it's kind of a miracle, really.

And it cost me a lot of spoons as well. Which is why when I moved out to New York, I stopped with a whole lot of the -ands, and just wrote. Now that's a bit of an oversimplification, I'll admit, and there were a lot of reactionary justifications to why I put away my art supplies, and let my guitar languish in its case for so long after I moved. And to be fair, I was still processing my grief at losing Ravens, and I was still radically averse to the hoop jumping carny-barking, dignity-shrivelling ballyhoo that came along with trying to sell art for a living, and perforce the Priestess job went away when there was no more coven at hand in need of me. But really the first thing that New York did for me was give me space to let the -ands drop, and just write for awhile.

Which is what I did. I wrote like a fiend, and though I couldn't legally sell a page of it, to this day I can't regret any of the work. I pulled out my art supplies only as it pleased myself to do so, just like I took out my guitar when the rare impulse to play it came on, and at no other time. But overall, I just focused my attention and will on putting the words onto the page, and the 'career' I built thereby was a pretty damned good one by any measure.

But things like that don't last for me. The fandom spark began to nag me into less fannish directions, and as though invoked by the spring rains, the -ands began to spring up like weeds. And like weeds that have wintered the snow in thick earth, they've come back hardier than before. My poetry is better now, my songwriting too. My art turned a definite corner while I was drawing primarily for fannish entertainment, and it's better now than it ever was when I was painting in Tim's shadow. My playing is maturing as well, now I don't have a web of voices to hide it under -- not quickly, as I've never been more than an adequate guitarist, who only learned to play in order to accompany her own voice, but still. And all just in time to interfere with the actual Writing-For-Pay career that I'm trying to get off the ground.

I read things online about how selling your own work is just part of the job, paying your dues, just the proving ground, and if you can't do that then you don't deserve to be published. How if you're not 'willing' to sleuth out which editor buys what kind of work from which agent, who represents which kind of writers, who reads for which editor at which house, who's moved jobs, houses, or careers lately, and what are their readerly tastes, and do they ever take manuscripts over the transom at all, then you're really just a hobbyist who should keep the day job. And that's all incredibly demoralizing. Because that's another -and added into the mix, and it's an ugly -and as well. It's a lot like the aforementioned hoop jumping carny-barking, dignity-shrivelling ballyhoo that made the profession of artist ache like a bad tooth sometimes. Because damn it, I want to WRITE, not dance the hoochycooch so some editor might come along and give me thirty seconds to pitch my work while ze's sticking a dollar in my G-string.

And so, people also say, there's also the wonderful, blossoming world of E-Pub. Which makes me just cringe. Because if shilling myself to editors is another -and, publishing my own work is about sixteen -ands all in one place. Marketing exec-and; layout specialist-and; edtor-and; art editor-and; typesetter-and; cover artist-and; accountant-and; donation bell-ringer-and; shop clerk-and; writer-and; press agent-and. I'm sure the list goes on for much longer, but I've exhausted myself just rattling off those few. Those aren't small -ands. They don't leave a lot of room for the bigger, more deeply rooted -ands I already have going; the -ands that aren't going away anytime soon, because they are so very much a part of me that I would not know myself without them.

Jack of all Trades, goes the saying, Master of none. And I call your attention to the word "TRADES" here. Not Jack of all Arts, but Jack of all Trades. Because it's the trade that grinds you down, and takes your focus and fire and energy. It's the trade you have to fight for, and if you're fighting for trades in too many fields, there's only so much success you'll have the energy to win. I can think of another person who does essentially all the things I do, and who's achieved, in the last five years or so, some pretty wild reaches of success. I've met her agent. She's wonderful. I am, in dark moments, more jealous of that woman's having a talented agent to manage her business -ands than I've ever been of any of my husband's girlfriends. Because if you have the right support, you CAN master more than one trade. Alone? You can't master them for long. You run out of spoons, you collect too many asshat scars, you stumble at the wrong moment, and you drop everything. Balancing acts that go on too long usually do end that way.

So this balancing act stays close to the ground for now. That said, I am asking the universe for an agent like hers -- an ally like hers to take care of busking the crowd while I'm keeping all of MY -ands in the air and trying to fall off neither the tightrope nor the unicycle.

So no; I am not a particularly good agent on my own behalf. I'm not gifted in business. I'm not all that good at the shill and the ballyhoo. But I'm a damn good writer. And a damn good painter. And a damn good singer. And a damn good songwriter. And a damn good actress. And a damned good costume designer. And a damned good cook. And a damned good Tarologist. And a damned good dancer. And I'm even a fair carpenter on top of everything else, so I refuse to be shamed by writers who tell me that if I'm not a good agent then I don't deserve to be published.

Let them line up their -ands next to mine and we'll SEE who's bloody slacking!

"Bollocks, sir," she answered, all eyebrow.

I've been thinking a lot about 'purple prose' versus 'literary modernism' and 'efficient prose', and I find I'm with Mr. Fry on this topic.

The current literary style that calls for writers to go through their final draft and remove words like : that, really, great, just, a lot, interesting, wonderful, very, sure, often, usually, many, and most, because they 'are slimy and slippery and lack value,' just make me seethe. A lot.

It's true, if you can cut a word from a sentence and not change the meaning, then yes the word is superfluous, and you ought to consider whether to cut it... or not. But the error there lies in the author's execution, not in the inherent worthiness of the words themselves. Truth is that each and every word on that list has meaning, use, solidity, emphasis, and yes, dammit, VALUE, if it is used with joy, with heart, and with a love of the language in which it flows. And when it is used just where it belongs, by someone who has a love for, and a skill with the component parts of his language.

I will never be a fashionable writer, I think, and that's because I just love words too much. I won't cut them out and throw them away just because they're adverbs. I will wander by the orphaned adjectives that other writers hack off, pick them up, dust them off, and give them homes in my work, and offer apology to no editor over it. I'm willing to use synonyms of said where I feel they fit. I'm not scared of long sentences that don't conjugate out in a straight line. I find I rather like them, in fact.

Is my work descriptive? Is my work rich with emotional sensation, and sensory information? Is my work florid, purple, and overly wordy? Fuck if I know. Fuck, in fact, if I care overly, because it all depends on whom you ask -- ask my target audience, and they're happy to have someone who writes prose that doesn't feel like a cage on a hard concrete floor, populated with brittle people and sharp ideas. Ask MY readers, and they're happy to have phrases and passages stick with them like song lyrics long after they've finished the work. Ask MY readers, and some of them will even quote the stories they loved.

Ask the readers who are decidedly not in my target audience, and they're disgusted at having to read more words than they like to in order to get the story's plot. They're scornful of my descriptors, bored with knowing the details I've given, amused by my adjectives, annoyed by my compound sentences, and dismissive of my shameless love affair with words. And frankly, I'd RATHER that they didn't read my work. Because there are other writers out there who are entirely set up to make their modernist tastes happy, and there's no need for someone who prefers Bauhaus to endure Baroque. But neither is there any need to force an Art Nouveau writer to practice Cubist Abstraction prose in order to grant her work any merit.

I am not a modernist writer. I write to the audible, if you will. I write with half an ear turned toward saying the words out loud, to reading them out and shaping them on my tongue to a room full of ears. Maybe this is born of my innate talent for performing, or maybe this is just the way I experience the act of writing, but to me, if it sounds empty, constipated and sparse, I cannot find it to my liking. Give me a story with comfortable curves, so that the sharp angles and narrow turns will be the more harrowing in contrast. Give me rich colours to offset the bleak shadows that will creep across it. Give me depth of feeling, and the words that know their way around it -- I'm not scared of them.

Even if they are 'slimy and slippery and lack value', I can and will put them to good work.