Writing

B Is for Blogs & Bookstores

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 7 Comments

Some letters are friendlier to the Blogging from A to Z Challenge than others. Which is to say I could get through the month on maybe eight letters and never run short of topics. Other letters, however . . . On my brainstorm list I’ve got no shortage of Cs, Fs, and Ss but blanks for K, L, N, O, U, V, X, Y, and Z. Not to worry: one thing you learn and keep relearning as a writer to trust the process and don’t panic. The muses will come through if you let them.

I came to blogging rather late in the game, like early in 2011. My first blog was From the Seasonally Occupied Territories, about being a longtime year-round resident of Martha’s Vineyard. Most widely circulated writing about the Vineyard is done by people who haven’t spent enough time here to know what they don’t know, so I wanted to do my bit to correct the imbalance.

Maybe three years later I started this blog, Write Through It. Since 1997 I’d been an active contributor to online editors’ groups, first Copyediting-L and eventually the Editors’ Association of Earth groups on Facebook. It dawned on me that not only was I learning a lot from these ongoing discussions — they’re great continuing education for freelancers — I’d been editing and writing long enough to have a lot to offer my colleagues. Why not put some of it in a blog?

The cataclysmic U.S. election year of 2016 redirected my energies in a big way. My blogging output is way down, I’m not actively following nearly as many blogs as I used to, and most of the people who’ve subscribed to mine in the last few years have no apparent connection with the subjects. But it’s still a pretty good way to get your words out there and maybe start developing an audience.

As a matter of fact, a little over a month ago I started a new blog: The T-Shirt Chronicles. My more than 190 T-shirts span my life back to 1976, so I’m using them to organize a sort of memoir. Perhaps it’ll eventually turn out to be the rough draft for a book, but for now it’s a work in its own right.

The T-Shirt Chronicles haven’t gotten to Lammas yet, but they will.

During the first half of the 1980s I was the book buyer at Lammas, D.C.’s feminist bookstore. Bookstores testify to the the power of the written word. I had a personal relationship with every book on the shelves. It was there because I’d ordered it, and like as not I’d unpacked it, logged it into inventory, and shelved it. Whether I’d read it or not, I knew enough about it to point customers toward it if they might be interested in the subject or the author.

And almost every day I got to listen to customers talk about how a particular book or story had affected them, or even changed their life

Though I left both the job and D.C. in 1985, and though the store — like so many feminist and other independent bookstores — no longer exists, it’s my experience there that gets me through the times when my faith falters and I’m sure that writing doesn’t matter. If you’re lucky enough to live within reach of a real live bookstore, you probably already know the feeling. Clicking through the options at Mega Online Retailer doesn’t come close.

A Is for Audience

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / Leave a comment

OK, it’s day 1 of the 2021 Blogging from A to Z Challenge. 🙂 My theme is Getting the Words Out, and since I’m both a writer and an editor, I’m going to be approaching this from several directions:

  • Getting the words out of your head and onto paper or screen
  • Getting those words into places where other people can see them

So here goes . . .

Listen to musicians, actors, public speakers, and almost anyone who performs in front of live audiences and they’ll often tell you that their performance is affected by how that audience is being affected by them.

In face-to-face conversations or discussions (remember those?), we consciously or subconsciously respond to how our listeners are responding to us. Are they nodding in agreement or are they starting to fidget? Are they itching to interrupt? We adjust our words, tone, and/or body language to engage them or keep them from blowing up or walking away.

Most of the time when we’re writing, there’s no one else around. (We may have had to shut a door or two to get ourselves a little peace and quiet.)

But we’ve still got an audience, and it’s not limited to the people we hope at some future date will read or hear whatever we’re working on. Someone’s paying attention from inside our head. Whether we’re aware of them or not, they’re influencing the words that appear on paper or screen.

Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, a character or a person you’re writing about may have interrupted to say, No, it didn’t happen that way or That doesn’t sound like me.

A poet friend, once asked who she wrote for, replied, “I write for the woman who told me my poems make her work so hard but it’s always worth it.”

The word audience comes from the present participle of the Latin verb audīre, to hear. Think audio and audible. Your audience is whoever’s listening, and whoever you want to listen.

When I write reviews, or essays, or, come to think of it, blog posts like this one, I’m usually trying to figure out what I think about some topic that interests me. I’ll stick to it till I’m satisfied. Sometimes that’s enough. Other times I want to communicate knowledge I think is important or persuade others to consider a different perspective. In those cases I’ll often have a specific person or two in mind. Ideally that person is willing to put some effort into it.

Handwriting sample, or Why I write first drafts in longhand

It doesn’t help if that person is hyper- and often prematurely critical. For me a big challenge of being both a writer and an editor is not letting the editor mess with early-draft writing. I get around this by doing much of my first-drafting in pen and ink. My handwriting is messy enough that my internal editor has a hard time reading it. Crisp, perfectly formed letters on the computer screen, on the other hand, expose every typo and grammar gaffe.

Having an editor on call who works pro bono is a huge asset when the time comes, but timing is everything. Ideally she comes when called but not until then.

If you decide to make public what you’ve written, you’ll be making conscious decisions about audience: Who is my audience, and how do I reach them? In publishing, this is what marketing and distribution are all about, but publishing isn’t the only way to get your words out. This will come up again in subsequent posts. Watch this space.

As an editor who edits writing by other people, I let the intended audience guide my decisions about what vocabulary is appropriate and what ideas need how much explanation. A primarily academic audience specializing in a particular subject will not need as much historical background as the general audience for a book on that same subject. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and romance (etc.) each has its own tropes and conventions that don’t need explaining. A novel intended to cross over into a more general audience will have to navigate the middle ground between explaining too little and explaining too much. We’ll come back to this, I promise.

Theme Reveal: #atozchallenge

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 8 Comments

I really want to wake this blog up, and I figure a surefire way to do it is to take part in the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge. I did it with Write Through It in 2017 and in From the Seasonally Occupied Territories in 2018.

The idea is to blog every day for the month of April, starting with A on April 1, B on April 2, and so on. You get Sundays off because April has more days than there are letters in the alphabet.

My theme for the month: Getting the Words Out

That includes both getting them out of your head and getting them out into the world so they can get into other people’s heads.

Come along for the ride!

It’s a Bouncing Baby Blog!

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / Leave a comment

I just launched my long-fantasized-and-procrastinated-about blog about my ridiculously large T-shirt collection!! Which keeps growing despite my repeated attempts to put a cap on it.

You can find it at https://the-t-shirt-chronicles.com/. Please let me know what you think, because it’s very much a work in progress.

And yes, I realize that I haven’t posted to Write Through It in more than two years. The longer it goes, the more embarrassed I get, and the more embarrassed I get, the more reluctant I am to post. Anyway, it’s been an eventful couple of years, and the last year has probably been the strangest of my life. Yours too, I bet?

I’m one of the lucky ones who’s been able to work pretty normally despite the pandemic. Since I’d been working full-time from home for two decades already, in some ways not much changed. In other ways — well, if you’d told me on 1 January 2020 that by mid-March I’d be living on Zoom, I wouldn’t have had a clue what you were talking about. So I’m back, I will be posting here again, but meanwhile, do check out the new blog.

Back to Wolfie World

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 2 Comments

OK, I’m back — I think.

This morning I got back to Wolfie.

Postcard from Mary Likes Postcards. Check out her Etsy shop — lots of good stuff!

Word, which never lies (though it rarely tells the whole truth either), told me that I’d last opened the file on October 2. That sounds about right. That’s when I pushed it aside to focus on doing my bit for the Blue Wave while completing enough paid work to buy groceries, pay the rent, and rationalize the campaign contributions I was putting on my credit card.

Despite some high-profile disappointments, the Blue Wave was pretty spectacular. How spectacular wasn’t immediately obvious, but it was looking pretty good when I gave my “Post-Election Pep Talk” a couple days after the election.

In November I busted my butt to meet deadlines that wouldn’t have been so pressing if I’d done more work and less politicking in October. Now the deadlines are mostly met, accounts receivable are up, and the political outlook is brighter than it’s been in two years, so it’s all good. At the beginning of the month I swore off buying beer till I’d paid down my campaign-related credit card debt. I didn’t miss the beer as much as I thought I would; the campaign-related credit card debt is, if not quite liquidated, then well under control; so that’s pretty good too.

So this morning I finally got back to Wolfie. I didn’t do any writing — after two months away I had to get reacquainted first. I’m maybe two scenes away from finishing draft 3, which was a dangerous place to leave off. Drafts 1 and 2 didn’t go through to the end because until I was well into draft 3 I didn’t know how it was going to work out. Well, that’s not quite true: I had a good idea of how I hoped it would work out, but I didn’t know how my characters were going to get there.

Before I put Wolfie aside to devote more time and creative energy to politics, a promising path had appeared. Whenever I thought of getting back to it, a seductively sensible inner voice said, “Why bother? Your characters have figured it out, you know what’s going to happen, why waste your time writing it?”

Compounding that — well, with the country in desperate straits, how could I possibly justify spending hours upon hours upon hours on completing a novel that only a handful of people will ever read?

Word, which never lies, tells me I’ve so far spent 14,988 minutes on Wolfie since the file was created on March 20, 2017. That’s about 250 hours. Once again, however, Word isn’t telling the whole truth because I’ve been working on Wolfie for considerably longer than that. I started draft 3 on March 20, 2017. I could open the hibernating files for draft 1 and draft 2 and learn how many minutes I spent on each, but no, thanks anyway, I’d rather not.

So this morning I took a deep breath, opened draft3.doc, and jumped in about a hundred pages from the end. Within minutes I was back in Wolfie world, reading critically enough to be trimming words here and there but mostly remembering why for something like four years now I’ve been determined to do justice to these characters and their stories.

Last week on impulse I ordered not one, not two, but three new fountain pens. I already have too many fountain pens — like eleven. Fountain pens are for first-drafting. With Wolfie I’m deep in revise-and-rewrite mode, except when I’m brainstorming in longhand to get through a stuck place: then the fountain pens come out. But three new fountain pens? It’s almost as if the muses are sure that there’s another project coming after Wolfie and they want me to be ready.

Ink blot #1

Ink blot #2

Group(s) Work

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 1 Comment

Allison Williams’s post about organizing a writers group for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, in which writers aim to complete the first draft of a novel in one month) has useful tips for starting writers groups in general. Note especially that in her NaNoWriMo group not everybody is working on a novel, but one guideline is “Set a big goal” — something you’ll have to stretch to complete in a month. Write on!

Allison K Williams's avatarThe Brevity Blog

We’re gonna write…ya wanna make something of it?

Remember that class where the teacher put people in groups and everyone shared a grade? How there was always that one person who slacked and drove everyone else crazy, and someone (possibly you) who worked double overtime to get the project done so you didn’t all fail?

Yeah, groups can really suck. Even writing groups, where we’re all there voluntarily…but so is That Writer. Plus the people who read too long, or ask for professional-level editorial feedback for free, or are all at wildly different levels.

But writing groups can also be great. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), in which writers all over the world shoot for 50000 words, from scratch(ish). I was on the fence about whether to participate: I’m really more of a memoirist…it’s a big commitment…my mom’s coming to town and I want to take her…

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Mini-Interview with Leslie Pietrzyk

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 3 Comments

This caught my eye on Facebook because I’m intrigued by flash fiction and tempted to try it. A new member of my writers’ group writes it, and I’m finding it challenging as a reader — in very good ways.

Tommy Dean's avatarTommy Dean

headshot, serious.jpgWhy do you write flash? What makes it different for you?

I don’t think of myself as a natural flash writer; I generally write novels and long short stories. I couldn’t write a poem if my life depended on it. But six-ish years ago, I started thinking about flash when I was working on THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST, a book of stories that plays around with form. I challenged myself to write something short, to tell a complete and harrowing story in as few words as possible. (Here’s the result.) Now, I love the compression and the gut-punch of a successful piece of flash, that sense of illumination like a firework ripping through a dark sky. I like the power of what’s missing, of the ripples of what is suggested and implied and hidden. I explore the role of silence a lot in my fiction, whether real or…

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Decluttering

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 3 Comments

Any writer worth her salt has dozens of creative procrastination techniques in her repertoire. My favorites include dusting, vacuuming, and washing whatever dishes there are in the sink. Playing Spider solitaire is also right up there.

Procrastinator’s toolkit

Most writers worth their salt have at least some idea what they’re up to when, say, the blue-gray carpet suddenly seems so white with dog fur that it has to be vacuumed right now. The dog fur didn’t get there overnight, after all.

So when the towering pile of paper next to my work chair suddenly seemed too out of control to be borne, I was suspicious. I was closing in on the end of Wolfie, draft 3. I’d just completed a scene that had been giving me trouble, and I had no idea what happens next: exactly the sort of scenario that makes procrastination such a compelling option.

However . . .

I’d several times brushed past The Pile and knocked a cascade of papers to the floor. Papers that then had to be picked up and re-piled. Picking up papers delayed my getting back to work — perhaps this was a form of procrastination?

Aside: Writers know how sneaky Procrastination can be. Some of us have been known to use writing to avoid writing.

Aha! Down at the bottom of the pile I spied three yellow pads with plenty of blank sheets on them. When I don’t know what happens next in a work in progress, the surefire way to find out is to write in longhand, and to write in longhand blank paper is needed. Excavating The Pile wasn’t procrastination — surely it was a necessary step in the process?

Carefully I removed The Pile from table to floor, sat down next to it, and started sorting it into three piles: Keep, Put Somewhere Else, and Toss.

I didn’t keep an inventory of what I found there — that would be serious procrastination — but I did uncover folders, notebooks, and random papers related to three major projects, two ongoing and one completed last March, including the marked-up printout of Wolfie, draft 2, which I hadn’t referred to in months. Luckily there were no unpaid bills, jury summonses, or anything that had to be dealt with ASAP last June.

The Pile is now one third its former height. It does not cascade to the floor when I brush carelessly past it. Virtually everything in it is related to Wolfie. (The marked-up copy of draft 2 is now in the recycle pile.) Now I can get back to work . . .

. . . as soon as I blog about taming The Pile.

The Pile, reduced to a third of its former self. It used to tower over the books at left. See? There really are usable yellow pads at the bottom.

 

Subversive Cookbookery

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 4 Comments

A cookbook I’ve got a recipe in was reprinted last year.

To realize how improbable this statement is, you have to know that I am so not a cook. My mother wasn’t a cook. Neither of my grandmothers were cooks. Somehow I managed to get by on fast food; easy stuff like hamburgers, scrambled eggs, and canned soup; and the kindness of roommates until I moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985.

On Martha’s Vineyard there were (and are) no fast-food joints, I lived alone, and the disconnect between restaurant prices and my income made even takeout a non-option except on special occasions (or when someone else was paying). So I taught myself to cook stuff that I like to eat, in quantities such that I can reheat meal-size portions and call it fast food.

I am, however, and have been since the winter of 1975–76, a baker, primarily of bread. So my inclusion in The Bakery Men Don’t See maybe isn’t so surprising? Thing is, my inclusion has less to do with the excellence of my breads (which are pretty good) than with my luck at being, for once in my life, in the right place at the right time.

The time was March 1991; the place was on the fringes of Madison, Wisconsin, specifically WisCon 15, the feminist science fiction convention. I discovered WisCon, and f/sf cons in general while promoting my three women’s f/sf anthologies, which came out from Crossing Press in 1989 (Memories & Visions), 1990 (The Women Who Walk Through Fire), and 1991 (Tales of Magic Realism by Women: Dreams in a Minor Key). Pat Murphy and Pamela Sargent were the guests of honor at WisCon 15.

At the end of her GoH speech, Pat announced the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award.

And so I would like to announce the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, to be presented annually to a fictional work that explores and expands the roles of women and men. We’re still in the planning stages, but we plan to appoint a panel of five judges and we plan to finance the award — and this is another stroke of genius on Karen’s [co-conspirator Karen Joy Fowler] part — through bake sakes. (If you want to volunteer to run a bake sale, talk to me after the speech.)

Now I know that people are going to say that science fiction has enough awards. I know people are going to say, “Pat, why do we need another award?” And all I can say is — if you ask me why we need this award, then you haven’t been listening.

My copy of the first edition, liberally grease-stained from 25+ years of use.

No sooner had Pat finished speaking than the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award began to take shape, thanks to the astonishing creative energy of the WisCon crew. It was indeed financed by bake sales — and eventually also by uproariously funny auctions, T-shirt sales, two cookbooks, and other means. Within a few months The Bakery Men Don’t See had been compiled and published. (Its title riffs on Tiptree’s probably best-known story, “The Women Men Don’t See.”) It was even nominated for a Hugo!

The Tiptree Award survived and thrived. So did WisCon, which before long had moved into the Concourse in downtown Madison on Memorial Day weekend, which is where and when you will find it today. And so did feminist f/sf — the work being published these days is daunting in its quality and quantity, but if you’re looking for a place to start, you can’t do better than the winners and honor lists for previous Tiptree Awards.

The spiffy design and production values of the new edition of The Bakery Men Don’t See reflect this growth and vitality. It includes the original introductions by co-editors Diane Martin and Jeanne Gomoll (if you know WisCon, you’ll recognize both names) and the GoH speeches by Pamela Sargent and Pat Murphy. It all holds up well, and none of it feels as dated as one might wish.

I’m not about to retire my first edition, however. Its grease stains testify to how well-used it is, plus it contains the contributors’ signatures I collected, high-school-yearbook style, at WisCon 16 in 1992.

On the other hand — flipping through the pristine new edition, I keep noticing recipes I’ve never tried and had almost forgotten, and rereading the stories that go with them. My family has no culinary tradition worth writing about, but other contributors have wonderful stories to tell about where their recipes came from.

The Bakery Men Don’t See is available for $12 from Lulu.com, as is other cool Tiptree-related stuff. Bakery‘s equally wonderful sequel, Her Smoke Rose Up from Supper, covers — you guessed it — entrées and other kinds of food you’re likely to eat before dessert. Unless, of course, you observe one of the Tiptree Award’s mottos: “Life is uncertain — eat dessert first.” I’m in that one too. It’s available in its original edition for $10 from the Tiptree Award store.

Adventures in Copyright

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 4 Comments

As a longtime editor and writer I knew the basics about copyright:

  • I own the copyright in any original work that’s fixed in some tangible medium. IOW, if I print out copies of a novel chapter for my writers’ group, it’s copyrighted. I don’t have to put “© 2018 by Susanna J. Sturgis” on it. However . . .
  • If I want to defend my copyright against possible infringement, it needs to be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
  • You can’t copyright an idea.

Then things got complicated. I was offered an honorarium to develop a script from 1854 . . . a folk opera, a concept left behind by one Jack Schimmelman when he died in 2015. This concept included some inspired ideas but few distinctive characters, no story, and no usable dialogue. It was a stretch for me: I’m basically a nonfiction writer with a minor in fiction, but I’ve also got some theater background, my three one-act plays have all been staged, and I’m good at dialogue. As a longtime editor, I’m also pretty good at recognizing the potential threads in a big pile of carded wool.

Aside: For some background on the work, see “Fundraiser for 1854,” written by me for another blog I manage.

I took the gig. I read and reread works about and written in the 1850s.  The project absorbed most of my writing energies through last fall and into the winter.

After a few writer friends read it and an informal read-through was held in April, I knew I had something. I cut some characters (it’s still got a big cast) and did some trimming. It was still a work in progress, but it was ready for further testing.

By then, however, my alarm bells were starting to ring. An advisory committee had been formed to produce something stageworthy from this concept. It was led by the principal in the one-man nonprofit that owned the copyright on the original concept — the person who hired me to develop the script. Its members had even less theater experience than I did.  It was seriously suggested that, since resources were lacking to produce the whole work in 2018, half of it be produced this year and half of it next. I suggested instead that a staged reading be held this year, to refine the script and create some buzz, and a full production in 2019. This suggestion was adopted.

The alarm bells, however, were ringing louder and louder. At fundraisers and in PR, the work was identified as 1854 . . . a folk opera, by Jack Schimmelman. My play wasn’t an opera — the original concept wasn’t either; at most it was a blueprint from which an opera could be developed — and Jack Schimmelman didn’t write it.

I could see the day coming when I might have to defend my rights in this script. In other words, I had to register the copyright. First, though, I had to find out what my rights were. I wanted to give Jack Schimmelman credit for his work, but I didn’t want him getting credit for mine.

I engaged an attorney who specializes in copyright, including theater and performing arts law. In a series of emails I explained the situation and he walked me through it. At the outset, he confirmed my belief that my script wasn’t a “work made for hire.” It wasn’t “a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment.” The fact that I’d been hired and paid to do it made it a commissioned work, but it fulfilled none of the conditions that might have made it work for hire. Even if it had, we had never “expressly agree[d] in a written instrument signed by [the parties] that the
work shall be considered a work made for hire.”

The next question was whether it was a “derivative work” —  one “based on or derived from one or more already existing works.” In many instances, this is obvious: a movie is based on a novel, a work is translated from one language into another, a drawing is made from a photograph, and so on. Since ideas can’t be copyrighted, my case was trickier. The lawyer suggested at first that my script might not be derivative at all. I went through Schimmelman’s concept again, page by page. I’d used none of his original text, but I had borrowed his basic structure and some of his characters, one in particular. I pointed this out to the lawyer. He agreed — and reminded me that  the copyright owner of a derivative work holds all the rights to her original contribution.

Apart from two passages from Frederick Douglass, which are in the public domain, that meant the entire script. I had emails and a payment record to show that I’d had permission to develop a script from the copyrighted concept. Earlier this month, I registered my script electronically with the U.S. Copyright Office, forked over $55, and uploaded the most current copy of the work.

So last night 1854 had an unstaged reading. It was planned before I knew what my rights were, so (other than singing in the chorus) I had no hand in it. The good news is that we had a good audience, the audience was enthusiastic, and at the end the co-director announced that I had written the script. The not-so-good news is that the cover of the program identified the work as “1854 . . . a folk opera,” by Jack Schimmelman, my credit as playwright was buried on the back cover, and my annotated notes about the characters were included in the program with no attribution whatsoever.

I am, in other words, very glad that I engaged a lawyer, ascertained my rights, and registered my copyright. Now 1854 cannot be produced or recorded without my permission, which I’ll be happy to give as long as the title of the work is 1854 (no more “folk opera”) and I’m identified as the playwright.