And that we did. I am nervous to look at our credit bill. To summarize, I can recommend the following places with great enthusiasm:

• The Commander’s Palace
• The Sazerac Bar
• Muriel’s on Jackson Square
• The Palace Café
• The Camellia Grill
• The Erin Rose (and Killer Poboys in the back)
• The Carousel Bar

And less so these places:

• Galatoire’s. It fucking breaks my heart to say this, because my grandparents were frequent patrons of this restaurant, but the food there was extremely disappointing. I ate there all the time as a kid. I guess the years haven’t been kind to it.
• The Napoleon House. My polite Canadian friend asked if she could get a Hurricane – a faux pas, but she didn’t know – and after that it was almost impossible to flag down our waiter. The drinks weren’t hugely impressive, but the building and bar itself is quite nice.

Places I didn’t get to go to, but intend to visit the next time:

• Adolfo’s
• The Green Goddess (for the Neil Gaiman special, which I think is a soup made out of his hair cuttings? No one was sure)

The reading I gave went quite nicely. The room’s ceiling was very low, so I look like a giant in all the pictures. And I gave away all my copies of American Elsewhere at the mass signing that night. (Which, by the way, received a very kind review from Weird Fiction Review.)

(As a note, I’m finding it increasingly expensive to do mailing giveaways on my books. I enjoy it a lot more when I get to go to conventions and put books in people’s hands. Everyone is always so stunned I’m giving them away for free, I always find it amusing. I think I’ll probably start doing that more in the future.)

I had a great panel on Genre Mashups, which gave me tons of food for thought for future blog posts. I think I’ve made it clear that I consider genre less and less these days. Go down the rabbit hole far  enough, and categorizing fiction starts to feel like filing your taxes.

And I also got to while away the hours into the new morning with the likes of Robert McCammon, Michael Slade, and my friend Joe McKinney (a pity he didn’t win Best Novel, but I’ve no doubt he’ll be a frequent nominee in the future). We actually managed to close out the Café du Mond, having consumed numerous Sazeracs beforehand. I think it was a pretty good New Orleans experience, overall.

And, to finish, I genuinely cannot resist posting this picture: 

In other words, if you demand zero terrorism deaths, you probably shouldn’t be surprised at what it takes to accomplish that.

Of course, the real concern is exactly who decides what we’re being protected from. So much of this is barred from public knowledge that, at this point, the vague deciding bodies could say, “Okay, terrorism is no longer an issue. What do we need to go after now?” and the answer could be quite frightening.

So, yes. I work for an association, I’ve worked with other associations, I know a lot of people who work in associations, and I’ve seen the way associations in general work.

So when I saw people getting very upset over the Bulletin issue, and then going on to decry the SFWA, I do feel a need to add my perspective on the matter, not because I am a member of that particular association, but because I’ve lived in the guts of associations long enough to have a somewhat good idea on how this might have happened.

Associations are, by nature, hugely uncoordinated, very messy, self-contradictory, and poorly organized. This is because they are lots and lots of people wanting lots and lots of different things. These people are also usually hard-working professionals who wish to see something get accomplished for their industry, but they have to volunteer their own time to do this, which is precious enough as it is.

This all means that it is not only hard to decide what to do, but it is hard to actually do it. Ever tried to put together a meeting or vacation with your friends and family? Try it with anywhere from 10 to 30 people who generally put your priorities on the low end of the totem pole, and remember that plenty of them won’t live anywhere near one another. How do you get them all in a room? Or do you try it by conference call (the sound of 30 people with their phone on mute) or email (ridiculously time-consuming) or by skype (good luck getting everyone to install it properly)?

So coordinating this vast morass of people with varying ideologies is tough. What happens is that 90% of the work done by associations is done by 5% or less (almost certainly less) of the members. They’re the Energizer Bunnies, the volunteers who truly care and have the time to care, who can take a year or two off of their jobs to be an officer, to chair a committee, to serve on the board. Whoever they are, the association will always ask more of them, more and more, because there’s always more to do. So they’ll be overworked, overstressed, hearing comments and questions and requests from the thousand-plus people out there who Want The Association To Do This, as if associations are an endless wellspring of time and money.

What happens is that it’s very easy for things to go rogue. The leadership structures in associations are frequently vague – everyone is kind of in charge, there are just some people who are more in charge – and things get “siloed off” very easily, where people can be working right next to one another and never know what the other person is doing. Duplicating work and hitting up the same people repeatedly (for money, for membership, for volunteer work) is very frequent – there’s a small pool of contributors for associations of any kind, so they tend to get overworked.

And communications are always a sensitive spot. What’s going out into the wide, wide world? What’s getting emailed, posted on Facebook, or tweeted by the dozens of people working for the association? You just assume that there’s a gatekeeper, a transmitter, but can you imagine that job? Boy howdy, if you can find someone who’s willing not only to monitor all the things already going out, but also to keep an ear to the ground in case some member says ,“Gosh I sure would like to make a Facebook page for this!” and then run out and STOP them, then damn, hold onto that person like grim death – and it will be death, because that sort of job is murderous.

An association is thousands of people talking at once. Thousands of very, very different people. Remember – most associations won’t turn down a member if they want to pay dues. Associations desperately, desperately need dues to function, so they’ll happily admit anyone – they might not ask them to serve on a committee or on the board, but they’ll take their money and give them the member benefits.

And last of all, Jesus, I can’t imagine a profession more fucked up and buckwild than writers. I’d rather work for the CPAs and the trial attorneys in a heartbeat – those guys are guaranteed to be at least a little professional. But writers? Who the hell knows. You’ve got to be out of your goddamn mind to try and be a writer in the first place! This is a job where most of the work occurs in your head, where you can do it naked, if you like. Writers can’t even coordinate their own damn thoughts, so can you imagine trying to get them to coordinate with each other?

So the real question is – why don’t associations screw up more? The answer is, because there are committed members keeping it from happening.

If you’re mad at your association, the first question you need to ask yourself is – when’s the last time you were at a meeting? When’s the last time you checked in with your committee? When’s the last time you volunteered? You want it to do This Thing, but just writing a check isn’t actually doing anything. If you don’t have the time, then you’re not actually doing anything at all.

So if you’re in that sort of situation – where you’ve given dues, but no time – then ending your membership is not the answer. If you’re a member who sees something going wrong, get involved and try and fix it. And if you try, and the committee and the leadership and just the whole setup just seems like shit, and you waste your volunteer time and genuinely, genuinely don’t think there’s any sliver of light in the clouds, then it’s perfectly reasonable to end your membership.

But don’t just write a check and assume you’re buying a bill of goods – you’re not. You’re buying the opportunity to speak on behalf of and support your profession (or whatever it is).

So as I said in the last post, yeah, I’ll totally consider being a SWFA member in the future. There seem to be some good people working there who have done the right thing with the situation. I’m currently an HWA member, because that kind of fits me more, and also because Joe McKinney is a friend, and the treasurer, and he’s also a cop and he probably has a gun around whenever I see him. But the very first thing I did when I signed up to be an HWA member was look at opportunities to volunteer. Because volunteering is the lifeblood of everything an association does.

This is for a lot of reasons. I’m not an SFWA member (though I’ve considered it, and will consider it in the future despite this, for reasons I will explain at a hazy time in the future). Another is that some people have already done a really eloquent job of expressing some basic common sense on this issue. I also don’t think I can consider myself a full-on SF writer, nor do I think many other people see me that way. And I’m also not female, but that’s another issue entirely.

This is not a post about the Bulletin. The problem is, I don’t think I have it in me to make a post about the Bulletin. I’m not sure if I have anything to say that could matter. I’d like to think that the issue is that other people are better at fighting this fight.

But I know the real problem is Shithead Fatigue.

Shithead Fatigue is when a specific breed of blatant shitheaddery feels like it becomes so prominent, so unavoidable, so ubiquitous, that getting outraged over it is like getting angry over rain: this is what happens, you say, you do what you can about it, you get a little wet, maybe, and you move on. There are, it feels, anointed people who are here to fight this battle. Nod along, agree that you, too, dislike the rain, and be a passive participant.

And that makes me feel pretty shitty. Because I feel like I should say something, even when I can’t think of anything that would matter or be new. I feel guilty for being quiet, I suppose, but everything I could say has been said and is being said.

This is because, I think, outrage has a short lifespan, as far as action goes. Outrage induces a kneejerk reaction, uses up a lot of calories, occupies a lot of your thought. It takes work to be outraged. Outrage is overdrive, burning up your fuel.

The best comparison, as inspired by a brief chat with Seanen McGuire, would be the Democrats’ War on Women. I say it belongs to the Democrats, because it really does: the term has existed for a long dang while, but it wasn’t until March 2012 that it became a commonly-used phrase, chiefly, I imagine, as a campaign effort to increase fundraising – for the Democratic Party. (And if I recall, it was extremely successful. I don’t know how much, but it got me to donate.)

Now, just because this got used politically – to unify people, to generate donations – that doesn’t mean the intent behind it isn’t legitimate. After all, a huge, huge, huge bunch of horrible shit prompted it.

But it did get used. Used for good intent, probably, but it got used, used to keep people engaged, to keep them angry, to keep them willing to vote, and to keep them donating. This is how movements work: someone has to keep pushing, which means other people are getting pushed. So every time someone says something outraging, the people who are pushing for change must drag it out in front of you and shake it in your face to make sure you remember that you’re mad.

And this gets exhausting. It especially gets exhausting because it keeps happening, despite, it seems, everyone, even people theoretically “on the other side,” feeling wildly different about it.

So you keep hearing that you have to change things. And you hear that, yes, things are changing.

But it keeps happening. And you feel obliged to stay outraged, even if you don’t have it in you anymore.

I keep reminding myself of what Frederick Douglass told his grandson what the next step in black rights was. He said it was three words: “Agitate, agitate, agitate.” But how do you do it when shithead fatigue sets in around you?

Here is the thing I feel is the truth: rage is for sprints. Positivity is for marathons. And change is a marathon race.

When I feel like shit about stuff like this – because it’s happening, because I feel tired about it, because I content myself with well-meaning, weary silence – I try and remember something very basic, something very positive: that people are mad about this who, not many years ago, probably couldn’t speak up about anything at all.

I feel good because I am pretty sure that someday more people will have the opportunity to be people, fully people, to be themselves in ways that they never could before.

Then I come back, and try and do what I can, because I know that whenever someone realizes, “There’s no reason we can’t do this,” it can so often be a good thing. When they realize that what they can do is up to them.

Say, have a job. Fight in a war. Have a child. Build. Write. Or, I suppose, love. You know – things people do.

It is worth reminding one’s self, I think, not to be enraged because of what is denied, but to remember that what is being sought are very basic things. And that maybe one day people will wonder how these very basic, very easy, very simple things could have ever been denied to anyone.

This is for a lot of reasons – among them, whether I should care on a general level or on a personal, terrified, this-will-absolutely-affect-my-paycheck level – but mostly it’s because he’s evolved, somewhat, into the Author’s Bulldog On All Things, always ready to scrutinize any new announcement and decipher if this hurts or helps the author’s position.

Spoiler: it usually hurts. Including in this new Amazon Kindle Worlds thing, where Amazon will pay you for your fan fiction, but keep all of your rights for doing so.

From whatever:

[...] I suspect this is yet another attempt in a series of long-term attempts to fundamentally change the landscape for purchasing and controlling the work of writers in such a manner that ultimately limits how writers are compensated for their work, which ultimately is not to the benefit of the writer. This will have far-reaching consequences that none of us really understand yet.

Yep. Business as usual, then.

I don’t have a hugely strong position on Fan Fiction. I’m for it, mostly because I first got my taste for writing by composing (get ready) Warcraft 3 Fan Fiction in anticipation of when the game came out. And most first novels, whether someone knows it or not, are basically fan fiction, closely mimicking a beloved author’s style, putting on daddy and mommy’s clothes and posturing in the mirror.

I know if I ever got to the point where fan fiction of my stuff appeared, and got read, I’d pop some champagne – because it’d mean I did a good enough job making up a world that people feel there are untold stories taking place in them.

But I don’t think I’d sign with a publishing house that would essentially allow people to play around in my house and get paid for it. For one thing, this feels like a scam, and for another, it completely fucks up the authority structure. Who’s in charge of the show? What’s legitimate, and what isn’t? Is there any defining voice owning and articulating the thing?

But, apropos of nothing, if you want my broad feelings on the eternal “internet/e-rights/how do I get paid for this/information wants to be free” mess that’s been ongoing for the past 15 years or so, here are my general, BigMcLargeHuge, perennial thoughts, broken down:

1. Markets are based on scarcity. The value of a thing is based on how unavailable it is.
2. The scarcity of art is wildly unclear. Theoretically, anyone could produce art. Therefore, it is impossible to assign a fixed market value to any art.
3. Because art has no fixed market value, the end user often projects the value onto it – “It should cost however much I say it costs!” While on the one hand, charging $11.99 or whatever for a paperback and $11.99 for an e-book doesn’t make sense from the scarcity-based approach (“It’s all just bits and bytes! This is ridiculous!”), from a producer/writer’s standpoint, when someone says an e-book shouldn’t cost the same as a paperback, the producer/writer is hearing, “The experience of your art is not worth $11.99.” In essence: “Me liking it should be enough for you!”
4. Two things will be forever at odds here: “Information/art wants to be free!” vs. “I sure like getting paid for work.” People, like water, are always looking for the more convenient option: as water flows downhill, people will always gravitate toward easier money, and more money. If a writer can exercise their creative muscles in a satisfactory way in a more lucrative industry – movie, TV, etc. – they will do that, and will stop writing books.

I’ve had a few other thoughts about how the new marketing models endanger a lot of artistic legitimacy, but those are my overall feelings on how this big huge mess is all shaking out right now. In the future, if someone asks me my thoughts on any future e-rights mess, I’ll likely refer them to the list.

We forget that this is a position of privilege – we have these things only because we can have them. And as more and more of the world moves online, more and more of the people who can’t afford the appropriate devices lose access to that world.

This is why, as Rita Meade aptly points out, libraries are actually more important than ever, and phasing them out or cutting their funding would be a remarkably horrible decision to make.

There are many, many people in the world who don’t spend all goddamn day on their phone because they can’t afford one - the device, the plan, or both. They don’t have the world in their pocket. They have very, very little, and taking away libraries would take away a big cut of the little that they have.

Monstrous inequality aside, hearing “Libraries should be cut BECAUSE INTERNET” makes as much sense as “Schools should be cut BECAUSE INTERNET.” I mean, it’s all information, right? Right, it’s all just data! So let’s keep your kid home, and he or she won’t go to college, and they can just google up a degree, download “COMMUNICATIONS MAJOR” into their brain like Neo, and be done with it, because that’s completely the same as having an in-person, tactile educational experience. Looking at youtube videos is exactly the same as attending lectures and spending a shitload of time in front of a book.

Even if libraries did no more than provide us with a quiet place to read, they would still be worthwhile.  Shit, I wish I was in the library right now.

However, after reading some interesting conversation over on Chuck Wendig’s twitter feed, I got a bit dragged into thinking about one of the thorniest writing questions out there:

To outline, or not to outline?

For those who don’t know, outlining is the process before a writer starts something when they essentially graph out everything that will happen in the book. It can be a summary, a chart, a timeline, however you want it, it’s basically an instruction kit for which part needs to go in which place at which time in order to Make The Book Go.

The benefits for outlining are several: for one, you know what happens. Each time you open up a blank page, you have a good idea of what should be on it. This is hugely valuable, and anyone who’s tried to write anything generally knows that.

For another, you will not forget necessary things. This is actually quite important: a book is a lot of moving parts, with plots surfacing during one point of the book and then submerging – still invisibly operating, unbeknownst to the reader – only to resurface at some incredibly crucial point down the line. There have been times when I’m rewriting something where I realize a character has received a piece of information from a source who has no business giving it; then I realize I had actually thought of a solution to this, and forgot to write it, which means I have to rewrite a lot more than I normally would have.

Which of course makes you ask – do I outline?

No. No, I don’t.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all being that, when I commit to a book, I usually do so knowing the start point and the end point. (I definitely know the end point – the start point often takes some readjusting.)

I know the image or feeling the book should end on; I know what I want the book to explore; I know the feeling and the ambiance and the color of the book; and so on, and so on, and so on…

So I have a very general trajectory. I know what I want to do. I just don’t quite know how I want to do it.

And that’s exactly what I want. I don’t want to know at all. The reason for this being that I am not actually in charge of anything I’m writing, or at least it feels that way. Books are their own things, their own identities, their own beings. Sometimes when I stumble on something that really, really works in a book, it doesn’t feel like I wrote it – it feels like it was always there, and I was just fortunate enough to unearth it.

I know it’s not always exactly quite like that, of course: books aren’t set in stone at the start. But they are organic: they grow and change and shape themselves. They know what they want to be, they have their own momentum, and my primary job is often just to get the hell out of the way.

More to the point, when a book or a character surprises me, that’s when I know it’s really going well. When something surprises the author, then it probably surprises the reader, and that’s good. Anything that throws off the audience but keeps them on the hook is a very, very good thing: the phrase, “That was exactly what I expected,” is not a positive thing to hear after someone reads your book.

A story must have room to breathe, and room to grow, I think. If I didn’t have that when I was writing, it’d take a lot of fun out of it.

But the question lurking in all this is… since you don’t outline, can’t that cause logistical problems?

And the answer is: oh my goodness gracious, yes.

I’ve had times in a book where a character didn’t really become themselves until the final third. I realize then, at that point in writing it, that they should have been this person from the start, so I have to go back and rewrite all their scenes to make them that person. This is actually extremely normal for me – it’s almost my default mode of writing characters. Find out who they are when it really matters, then go back and make them that person when it matters just a little bit less.

And there have been times when I’m writing a book when I think the book is looking at one thing, but towards the end I realize it isn’t, and I have to go back and adjust the path of the entire book until it rolls along and comes to the point where it examines the thing it’s supposed to. (This is less normal – knowing this is what makes me want to write the book. But it has happened.)

Are these really problems? I don’t think so. There are a lot of philosophies about writing, but one I subscribe to most is: writing is rewriting. Hindsight has 20/20 vision, and that’s even truer when it comes to writing. I rarely know what a book really, really is (or was supposed to be, I suppose) until I’m almost done with it. That’s when I have to go back and even it out, provide supports, make sure it’s paced properly – in other words, to use a coder term, to see if it properly compiles.

And I have tried outlining before (to a very loose degree), and in each case it didn’t turn out well. I had a fixed, outlined ending for characters in two different books, but when I was actually writing that book and writing their story, I could feel those endings changing, nudging me to different places… Yet because It Was Outlined, I felt obliged to keep it that way, and I violated their momentum by forcing their arc.

I didn’t keep the final stories in either case. I wound up having to rewrite them all anyway.

So my feeling is… since I usually have to rewrite outlined stories anyway, wouldn’t it be better to not outline at all, and give them the space to breathe and grow and become, well, more of themselves, as the saying goes?

You’re welcome.

It is a little amusing that I’m primarily cited for Mr. Shivers, the book I wrote when I was 22, which seems so long ago and so absurd that someone thought a 22 year old could do anything of worth that it practically makes my brain hurt.

Old novels are like old photographs to their authors: you recognize that this was you, once, but it seems so alien that you used to be this thing that you can hardly understand it. You primarily see your failures and regrets, the things you didn’t know that you know now: for real life, you see how to talk to the opposite sex, how to behave professionally, how to do laundry, etc.; for writers, you see how this sentence was clunky, this idea was poorly articulated, all this here should have been cut, etc. I know I’m not alone in thinking this: I’ve heard of other authors revisiting their mega-hit works 10 years later with a distinct sense of unease.

I very, very rarely reread anything I’ve written once it’s in its final form. I certainly don’t want to reread Mr. Shivers or any of the rest anytime soon, chiefly because I’m afraid I’ll see all the things I know I can do better now. (I flipped through Mr. S a few times, and I could definitely tell a 22 year old wrote it – but this might be more in my head than it is in the text.) But this is part of doing anything, in that you must make mistakes in order to learn how to do better, and just because you made a mistake in a work, and learned from it, doesn’t necessarily mean that the work is bad. It just means you know more now.

And as a note, I am the sort of person who tends to believe that the thing he’s currently working on is The Best Thing Ever, and everything he’s ever done before was Obviously Just a Warm Up for The Best Thing Ever. Then, when I finish The Best Thing Ever, it immediately becomes another Warm Up. So I guess I’m saying I’m a pretty shitty judge of these things.

It’s an interesting idea, to me. Writing is a highly individualistic process – it’s one of the few jobs you can do entirely alone, inside your head. (Getting it published and read, however, is a huge team effort.)  And it’s an extraordinarily complicated process as well, brimming with conscious and subconscious associations, connections, ambiances, tones, many abstracts that one can hardly articulate – an odd quality for a process that is, in essence, articulation.

I will say this: the actual articulation portion, for me, and I think for many writers, occurs when I’m faced with a blank page. When I say “articulation,” I mean the actual putting words behind one another, finding a way to make the events and people in my head manifest on the page. This is the actual work of writing, and – for me – it’s not unlike a salesperson who’s gone out and made a lot of deals having to come back to the office and log all those deals in the company database.

This is probably a hugely reductive metaphor, one that does a disservice to the actual manufacture of prose. A lot of incredibly important gears engage when you sit down and start to parse out sentences – and that’s the only time they engage. But in some ways the metaphor is correct, because the punching of keys and arrangement of prose is not the whole of writing.

For me, writing occurs almost as much off the page as it does on. Writing is a thing I never stop doing: some portion of my brain, in some respect, is always writing. Sometimes it’s a very negligible percentage – 1%, maybe 2% – and sometimes it’s very, very large, 80% or 90%. But there’s a lot of middle ground, when I’m mowing or folding laundry or driving or waiting to fall asleep when my brain is writing at about a 30% to 40% capacity, when I am pushing big blocks of ideas around and seeing what fits where. (My wife notes that there are times when she’s telling me something important, and I’m not meeting her eyes but my lips are moving like I’m whispering – and that’s when I’m probably figuring out a piece of dialogue in my brain. Before you ask, yes, she absolutely hates this. Don’t ever ask me to get something from the store – I am wildly unreliable.)

I get a lot of work done this way. I come up with an idea, take out my phone, and shoot myself an email that’s sometimes just a snippet of dialogue or an order myself to cut this or add that. My gmail is currently at 60% capacity, using 6.1 GB of my 10.1 GB, and I’d guess that a good 10% to 15% of that are emails from myself to myself – they don’t have huge memory requirements, because they’re just 5 to 10 words, but there’s so many that I’m sure they make a dent.

But I’m not always writing the book I’m currently concerned with: there are a lot of pet projects I mentally compose, usually something akin to fan fiction or movie scripts. Many times when I fold laundry I’m mentally preparing myself for the time when everyone forgets about the M. Night Shamylan movies and I can have a go at writing the Avatar: the Last Airbender movie scripts myself. Or, I’m dreaming of the day when I get a deal from FX and can make a serialized Batman cartoon myself, a slightly more grown up version of The Animated Adventures, a show that’s zippy and fun but has all the complicated institutional interplay of something like The Wire.

This isn’t probably productive work, but it’s hugely necessary nonetheless: writing is a mental state you have to be able to slip into and slip out of easily. It’s something you need to learn how to activate and catalyze as much as you can. It’s both a muscle and a meditative state, a part of yourself you need to go to whenever you’re able. So even if what you’re writing isn’t something you plan to sit down and, well, write, it’s still important to mentally flesh things out, develop a feel for what’s working and what isn’t, and…

Well. You never know. Those good scenes in the silly little projects you dream up might wind up working exceptionally well in a big, important project much later.