The Bitter Quill

People tend to assume I have a problem with authority. (Maybe it’s the pink hair. Or the facial piercing. Or the tattoos. Or my “I Eat Babies” t-shirt.) In truth, I’m secretly a bit of a fan of rules. As I once told my old manager, “I don’t have a problem with authority unless it’s telling me to do something stupid.”

Which brings me to poetry. Free verse, you say? Folderol and balderdash, say I! Any depressed junior high school student can write free verse. Give me something with form! Let’s bring on villanelles, sestinas and sonnets. Even better are sonnet sequences, the concept albums of poetry. My favorite is “Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons,” by Marilyn Hacker. Here’s a sample (warning, lesbian poetry ahead):

I broke a glass, got bloodstains on the sheet:
hereafter, must I only write you chaste
connubial poems? Now that I have traced
a way from there to here across the sweet-
est morning, rose-blushed blonde, will measured feet
advance processionally, where before
they scuff-heeled flights of stairs, kicked at a door,
or danced in wing-tips to a dirty beat?
Or do I tell the world that I have got
rich quick, got lucky (got laid), got just what
the doctor ordered, more than I deserved?
This is the second morning I woke curved
around your dreaming. In one night, I’ve seen
moonset and sunrise in your lion’s mane.

And that’s not even one of the dirty ones.

From a writer’s standpoint, writing structured poetry is a great exercise. Something like a canzone or a sestina, where you have end-words instead of rhymes, are a great way to figure out how to really get your money’s worth out of a word. (Check out Canzone, also by Hacker.) Traditional forms of poetry can make you look at language in a whole new way. I consider myself an essayist, not a poet, but for me a villanelle is a little like a crossword puzzle. It’s not going to be art when I’m done with it, but if nothing else, it’s entertainment.

And of course, in the hands of actual poets, modern poetry in traditional forms can blow my mind. I like to introduce people to “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop by saying, “Read this villanelle. It will change your life:”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these things will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

-Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

What the hell are we doing here?

Presumably, if you’re reading this blog, you love to write, or at very least you have a passing infatuation with the written word. Great. So write! But why try to publish? Why not just write for fun, make photocopies of your stories and hand them around to your friends and family?

The writing industry — especially the world of fiction — is like a giant tank of flaming acid filled with editors and agents and your competition, and also chainsaw-wielding mutant barracudas. Sure, there may be treasure on the bottom of the tank, but is getting there really worth it? Why are we struggling against the stream (of flaming acid!) to (if we’re lucky!) get paid not very much for a lot of really painful, difficult work? It’s like trying to make it in Hollywood as an actor or actress, except the parties aren’t as much fun and it’s harder to sleep your way to the top.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not quitting. I’ve committed myself to this insane course of action with a vitriolic fervor. But then, I’m notorious for launching myself at ridiculously impractical projects with a mad gleam in my eye and froth on my lips. The mere specter of a chance of hope of success is enough to drive me, foaming and gibbering, at my target. But I know that the chances of victory are small, and the odds of being disappointed, again and again and again, are great.

OK, I’m crazy. So what’s your excuse?

I found it funny that the evil, mustachioed, get–your–post–in–on–time-or–we’ll– tie–you–to-the-tracks Bitter Quill Powers that Be (else wise known as “Mike”) described me as a “new-media writer” in the introduction to last week’s post. It’s not that the bulk of the writing I do for public consumption these days doesn’t fit that bill — it certainly does — it’s just that in describing the writing I do I’m more apt to use the less formal moniker, “blogger”, because I find the term “new-media” particularly silly (ED: Oi!). There’s nothing “new” about writing. It may not be as old as cave painting or sex or spoken word or dancing, but as methods of communication go, it’s been around a good long while.

What new media blogging has done for writers is create a more egalitarian market in which to flog our wordy-wares. No longer do we need to tie up our lovingly double-spaced bundle of words and count on an editor to recognize our genius. With a push of a button we can take our ground-breaking tales directly to the public at large. And, with additional commenting tools at our (I was going to say “ink-stained” – but that doesn’t really apply in this case…but “keyboard calloused” doesn’t really have the same aesthetic lyricism to it, does it?) fingertips, we can get instant feedback from our audience, so we can hone and tailor or work and give them exactly what they want – and as often as they want it.

Frankly, it feels a bit like cheating to me. When you fantasize about you future writing career (wasting time which, I should like to point out, would have been better spent actually writing), do you dream about your photo on a dustjacket, attending book signings armed with a heavy pen and tweed blazer with leather elbow pads, of discovering your characters either changed someone’s life or featured heavily in their startlingly risqué fanfic (perhaps both), or about spending your time worrying about bloghits and site visitors and troll bashing and your Google Page Rank? Perhaps I’m a short-sighted luddite, unable to grasp that new-media is the wave of the future, or maybe I just give more emotional weight to words I can actually hold in my hand… but I, for one, feel as though I can’t count myself as successful until that byline is printed on paper.
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Happy birthday to our favourite pink-haired contributor, Cynthia Taylor. Enjoy this, your day of days!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jessica Haralson isn’t really a smut peddler, exactly. Or maybe she is — it depends on who you ask. In addition to co-founding (and publishing!) her very own Ivy League campus erotica magazine, Jessica is making her mark on the local blog scene with her own advice column at www.phillyist.com. And they say that youth is wasted on the young.

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Yo. I’m a college student idealist; currently living (and mooching) off the University of Pennsylvania’s Ivy League idyll. This means I get to major in English — Creative Writing, specifically — and ponder poetesses like Aphra Behn at the same time as pondering Bui’s vs. Hemo’s for lunch (Hemo’s is cheaper — and the Hemo’s guy is less likely to leer.) I’ve studied under some tres cool professors; Max Apple is one, Dick Polman, the Philadelphia Inquirer journalism-cum-luminary, is another. I’m amused to discover that Maury Povich is funding Penn’s nascent Journalism program. Povich, a Penn alum, seems to have used his education to educate the trash-talkin’ baby mommas of our country’s seamy underbelly.

I also have the free time to do crazy things, like starting controversial campus literary erotica publications, and writing a Love and Sex column for Phillyist.com. Who knew a nineteen-year old could be so darned kinky?

But seriously, forks, I’d like to use this space to branch beyond Quake. No doubt I’ve done some pretty cool shit — like meeting Dr. Drew of Loveline, fame for starters, and grilling Trojan Condoms on why it is that prophylactic salesmen are always so embarrassing and leery about the whole damn affair (ED: Why?). I’ve been profiled in Philadelphia Weekly and 34th Street Magazine, mostly as a pearl-clutching Southerner with an eye for shaking things up (I’m a Texan, not a Southerner, thank you very much, reporters!). I’ve been called a harlot by street corner prophets. I’ve received late night phone calls asking me for vibrator recommendations, first born children, and car insurance . But y’know what? I also wanna be a writer. And it’s easy to get pigeonholed when you produce for the literotica readin’, Nerve-enjoying set. Producing Quake has been fun, no doubt, but one doesn’t get Maureen Dowd-esque fame and the Pulitzer peeps knocking on your door by writing Phillyist columns on the best dildo joint in Old City.

I dallied a lot in short story writing before realizing that I have a Voice for non-fiction. I’ve always been fascinated by magazine journalism, ever since I stole away my mom’s Glamour in the third grade to read in the bathroom “for the perfume samples.” She didn’t believe me, and I didn’t believe myself either. I’d love to write in magazines for fun and profit. And with The Bitter Quill, I plan to chronicle my progress – searching for swanky internships, applying for writing gigs, writing proposals, checking mastheads, and screaming into the dark abyss in my sink faucet.

Let us hope I can avoid the inevitable alcoholism. Truman Capote would be rolling over in his grave.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Star Foster is what you might call a new-media writer. In addition to writing some pretty darn cool award-winning interactive fiction, she’s also a very prolific blogger, maintaining her personal weblog, Sarcasmo’s Corner, as well as writing for ShinyShiny and Phillyist. That’s right: She gets paid to blog. How cool is that? She’s also working on a super-secret computer game project, and if we’re lucky we’ll hear more on that anon.

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The brutal task-masters of the Bitter Quill have requested of me a small missive on Why I Write. Better to ask me why I breathe or have hazel eyes or prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate. These things can be explained – not by me, of course, but by people with a much stronger grasp of biology and science¹. But as to why I write… that is a more difficult question.

I have never not wanted to write, and since I’ve learned how to put ideas to paper, I have never not written. Look to the future autobiography I wrote in the 4th grade, and you’ll see that I had myself pegged as a Newberry Award winner by 30 (drat! Another deadline missed!) In high school I kept a journal whose covers were decorated in my tight, careless script by quotes that inspired me. I often prefer type over talk, and scribbling over superfluous speech.

Writing is hardwired into my make-up. It is how I think best, how I express myself most eloquently, and how I question and explore my world. It is the unwanted, emotionally abusive lover I will make every effort to deny (sometimes even stooping to housework as an avoidance technique when the muse calls) only to end up back in it’s deliciously sinister embrace; exhausted, exhilarated, and anxiously looking for “le seul mot juste” for a monkey on one’s back that is constantly disparaged and yet continually fed for fear it will leave. I write because I want to, because I have to, because I can’t stop myself from constantly wondering “what if,” then from trying to discover the answer. I Write. For me, the “why?” has never really been a consideration.

Now, will I publish? And more importantly, will my work be read? These are the universe’s Greater Mysteries; and ones hopefully The Bitter Quill will help me unravel. And, if not – hey, at least it’s a by-line.

A far more compelling question is, I think, why writers don’t write. Why do we hem and haw and stare at the blank page or blinking cursor and then find something, anything else to do with our time? I’m not talking about the dreaded ‘Writer’s Block’ either – I’m talking about having the ideas and the words at the ready, and yet falling in our duty to pour those out on to the page. We might claim family obligations, or the sudden need for social interaction or that the dishes need doing or the fact that the game is on. Is there any other passion in the world, any itch so easily scratched, any other burning desire so ardently avoided by the desirer? For me, it’s not in the wanting, but in the doing that lies the mystery of this vocation.

¹ Well, except the chocolate bit. I can explain that: It just plain tastes better. You’ll notice “white chocolate” enters nowhere into that equation. That is because it is not chocolate at all, but rather a misnamed aberration. I realize that our language is a wonderful, fluid thing; but there are some words I am simply unwilling to budge on. Chocolate is one of them.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Well, what can I say about Michelle Klein? She is a roiling mass of intelligence, creativity and class, and her son is lucky to have her as a mother. Michelle has a couple of fantasy writing and gaming credits to her name, and she’s got an exciting comic book project in the works. Her strange attraction to Jaime Lannister (from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series) nonwithstanding, we’re very pleased to have her contributing to The Bitter Quill.

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Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who lived in a castle with his mother, the Lady of the Ink-Stained Hands. She posted her tale upon the Bitter Quill, and so it follows.

I’m getting to the point in my life where I can combine my greatest loves – literature and my child. I have the opportunity to watch him learn not only to read others’ words, but to tell his own stories and to come up with creative ideas. It’s fascinating to experience the fruits of a developing mind. Children have no boundaries. They don’t know all of the ‘rules’ that adults know – they don’t know they can’t fly or won’t be able to fly someday. They don’t know that they all won’t be rock stars or astronauts or firemen or presidents or monster-slaying heroes. Children are the most creative speculative fiction authors you’ll ever find.

So, how does one raise a writer? How does one encourage a child to tell the stories that live in his or her heart and mind? The stories are in there, even if the child can barely verbalize them. My father did it by telling me stories constantly. “When Daddy was a little girl and Mommy was a little boy and we rode on dinosaurs …” he would begin. He generated two results that way – one, I was always making up stories and either writing them down or telling them to the people around me, and two, I never believed that anything he said was true. The moon is not made of Gouda cheese and Prince Charming’s real name is not Irving Schwartz. How do I know? Mom told me.

When I wasn’t verifying things with Mom, however, I was writing. Stories, songs, poems, plays, journals. Now I’m starting to get my stories out into the world, but also I am telling them at home to my three year old son. It started as a method of parenting – it’s easier to get a reluctant child to do just about anything if you make up a story about it. If shampooing his hair will give him the magical powers to kill a dragon, suddenly he’s all for it, even if he normally despises getting his head wet. The more verbal he got, however, the more he asked me for “the story about the …”. At first he asked for stories I’d already told, then he’d just think of random objects and ask me to tell stories about them. An insistent three-year old demanding stories on the spot is a great stimulus for the creative process.

One day he asked me for “the story about the candle”. “I don’t know that one,” I said. “You tell it.” So he did. I had to prompt him with “then what happened?” a number of times, but he told his own story at three years old. He started it with ‘Once upon a time’ and ended it with ‘and they lived happily ever after. The End’. As much as I would like to chalk it up to the amazing prodigy that is my son, the truth is that all kids have the ability to write fiction and the more you encourage storytelling, the more they’ll do it. All they need is a listening ear and a sense of what a story is, which they’ll get from having stories told to them and read to them.

Read to them, tell them stories, ask them for the stories in their heads - that is my advice on the raising of writers. My own writing process currently is a dual exploration – my own creativity and my son’s. We inspire each other. We checked it out with Grandmom, so we know the moon is not made of Gouda cheese … but we pretend that it is anyway.

And they lived happily ever after. The end.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I don’t know what exactly I can say about Cynthia Taylor, except that I urge you to visit www.pinkhairedgirl.com for more of everything Cyn-ful (Aha! I bet that’s the first time that pun has ever been made! Wokka wokka wokka!). Cyn is a full-time student and a part-time ranconteur, and yes, her hair really is that color.

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The mythology of writing tells us that Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry while living as a creepy recluse and completely shunning an audience. She instructed her sisters to burn her poems upon her death, wanting to insure that no one else read them. She was an artist, a poet writing only for herself and the love of words.

There is no way in hell I could ever work like that. Unlike Ms. Dickinson, I don’t see the point in writing without readers. (You also can’t sing all of my writing to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.) I’m a blogger, not a diarist. If a tree falls in a forest, who cares if it makes a sound? Modern scholarship suggests that the whole creepy recluse line may have been a load of hooey with regard to Emily, anyway.

When I was in college, getting a Creative Writing degree, making myself write was easy. I had assignments and deadlines and workshops to write for, and no job to stop me from sitting around in my dorm room and churning out short stories. (Not to mention an eighteen-year-old’s charmingly naive belief in the Importance of said short stories.) At Oberlin, there was a system designed to churn out writing and writers, and while there may be a lot of justified complaints about the workshop system, it did get words on the page.

I had big plans for my life post college. Computer programmer by day, fiction writer by night, I was going to take the world by storm. Instead, I sent out four or five short stories, received four or five rejection letters, and promptly stopped writing. It’s hard, this writing thing. Hard to make time for, hard to keep doing in the face of constant rejection, hard to believe in the importance of words arranged and rearranged on a page. It’s hard just to make a decent sentence. I don’t think the high incidence of alcoholism amongst writers is a coincidence.

(Ponder: The way some sentences spring forth fully fledged, full of truth and beauty, and others are doggedly and insistently awkward, fighting back against your efforts to rearrange them. One of my weaknesses is my inability to get rid of those first sentences, the beautiful ones. My short stories eddy around them, meandering at the expense of plot, because I cannot bear to cut something pretty. I am indulgent in this, and thus you must forgive me this paragraph.)

I have a question for you, my fellow writers. How the hell do you keep doing this? How does this reconcile with jobs, with careers? (I have another life in which I’m a computer science grad student, and I love it just as much.) How do you find the time, but more importantly, the will?

Welcome, one and all, to the official inaugural post of the Bitter Quill.

I started this blog because I love writing. That’s a little simplistic, maybe, but when you boil it down, I love to write. I love the initial heady rush of creativity as an idea takes shape in my mind. I love taking the raw material that my imagination provides, wrestling it down and smithing unrefined creativity into words and phrases in order to, like some English guy once wrote, giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. I love it when someone takes what I’ve written and reads it, and smiles. Good writing makes me happy, and I like to think that I can bring that to others. I love the whole process, from start to finish.

I also love a paycheck. I find that without one, my quality of life tends to plummet rather quickly. As long as I can remember, I’ve always dreamed of being able to combine these two great loves: Writing and getting paid. So far, I haven’t had much luck. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve had a couple of minor roleplaying game credits and some nice blogging opportunities, but those are my career highlights thus far — and they haven’t earned me a penny. Right now I have a job where I can write reviews of books and movies and get paid for it. But I get paid per review, and it’s not a lot. I certainly couldn’t make a living at it.

A while ago, I decided that I was going to make a serious go at establishing myself as a real-life, honest-to-Elvis professional writer. My chosen field: Genre fiction, though I’m also pursuing other opportunities, specifically food-and-drink writing and general reviewing. Now, I could do this by myself, clattering away at a keyboard in a dark basement, cloaked in obscurity, but instead I thought it might not be a bad idea to gather unto me a group of like-minded aspirants and write about what we’re going through. Hopefully some of you out there in blogland will be interested in reading about our experiences and ideas on “making it” in the wilderness of the writing scene.

Today, January 15th, 2006, I’m putting a story of mine, “Claude’s Diner”, in a big manila envelope and sending it off to Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is one of the six-hundred pound gorillas of the short-form genre fiction world. Now “Claude’s Diner” is good — in fact, in my extremely biased opinion it’s damn good. I only hope that it’s good enough to be picked up out of the slush pile at the F&SF editorial offices and given a real chance.

Today is the first day of the rest of my career. I’ll be letting you know how it goes.