hotel_jewelweed:
I know I have said this before, but now it is time for business: I am back to blogging after a year of writing, making art, riding, taking art classes, and micro-blogging about it all on facebook.

My motivation: Tomorrow is the opening reception for my first ever group show as a visual artist, and I feel like it is time for me to stop being all hermitlike and start getting more Out There. I am nervous as hell-- the gallery is wonderful and the curator has been a dream to work with. I am in awe of the other artists, and am already feel that topsy-turvy feeling. It is time to get out of my shell. Also, I have missed you guys!

The exhibit is at Brickbottom Gallery. If anyone local wishes to come to the opening, check out the gallery website for info-- I will feed you baklava and champagne and dance around you when you arrive! If you can't make it tomorrow, we are having a free early music concert at the gallery on December 12th!

Here is one of my mixed-media pieces (pages from an altered book) which I've mounted in a dark shadowbox frame:

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/05/the-train-is-perfectly-hamster-sized/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=36100

frederic:

By Richard Youngstrom (Jamaica Plain, MA),
bought at the Somerville Museum's mosaic show.

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/05/the-amazing-flying-foxes/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=36039

s00j:

So now the Brothers are reunited at the oft mentioned Great Gig in the Sky...I know I'm crossing genres there, but I bet you'll forgive me.
Please, those of you with the energy to go out and sing in the streets tonight, or tomorrow night, in honor of Liam Clancy, with a pint in your hand if possible....do so. And don't slip and fall if the streets are wet, as they are here in New Orleans tonight. Sing out.

dali_muse:





"Become a better goth"
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA ETC

Oh, last year, I had to back my punk up. (sounds dirty)

dali_muse:

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/04/worst-janitorial-staff-ever/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35948

yuki_onna:

John Scalzi, Duke of the Internet (I think the hierarchy behaves much like a court where the monarch is perpetually away), posted an entry about what he gets paid for short fiction, and his thoughts on same.

Now, I'm not on Scalzi's level as an author--I don't make his sales or his money. But I'm fairly safely mid-career these days (average career length being five years I'm actually in the mature career category, but I look at it more as: I've progressed, I'm growing up, but I'm not living up to my potential yet, report card wise). Anyway, I find his post interesting because it's the opposite of how I think of short fiction.

See, I write a lot of short fiction. At any given time I'm committed to 3-5 pieces for a number of publications. Only once since I started writing short stories have I ever had a clean slate--that is, no requests for material, and free to write for any market I liked. This is why I haven't been published in the Big Three, or Strange Horizons, or Tor.com, or a number of other places. I never get to write anything that isn't immediately promised to someone else. It's a crazy world I live in, and Not Normal, I know, in the world where many bemoan the idea that one can't make a living on short fiction, but that's the situation.

The other part of the situation is that novel advances are few and far between. Especially given that I couldn't sell a book in 2008. I have to wait months for any major check. So short fiction is actually how I make a goodly chunk of my income--especially when you figure in the Omikuji Project, which is a short story per month as long as people keep wanting them. Short fiction, for me, pays the bills.

So it's funny--Scalzi talks about how little one gets paid for fiction per word and posted his per word rates, which are almost all higher than I've ever been paid for anything.

I've made 25 cents a word a couple of times. Once I got paid $1 a word for a textbook contribution (still fiction, a retelling of a Greek myth). But for the most part, I work for page-mine rates. 5 cents a word. I'm thrilled if I get 7 cents, ecstatic if it's 10. And occasionally, if I'm friends with the editor or it's for charity, I work for less than 5 cents a word. But for a long time, my policy has been: if it pays pro rate, I'll do it.

Because I couldn't afford not to. Still can't, really. I'm fighting to hollow out recovery time in between the 5 stories I owe various markets right now.

But look--5 cents a word, with my average short story being 5000 words or so, comes out to about $250 for a short story. Is that a ton of money? No. Is it a couple of bills paid, or a half tank of heating oil, or a third of my rent? Yes, it is. And it adds up. I write fast. It rarely takes me more than a day or two to write a short story, once I have it in my head (it's the getting of it in my head that takes time, grasping the idea, smoothing it out in my brain, coaxing it, but mainly getting the idea at all) and if the story's good enough it might make a Year's Best anthology for another $100, or maybe another $30, depending on the anthology. But all those small numbers add up, and if I write two short stories a month, which I usually do, plus Omikuji and whatever other freelancing things I'm up to at the moment...well, that's how you live from day to day.

Without short fiction, I'd have had to quit this gig a long time ago.

I can't even imagine getting 50 cents a word for anything I'd write. I've had two short fiction gigs lately that paid about 25 cents a word and I was over the moon about it. When it comes to short fiction, I almost always say yes, as long as it comes with a deadline and isn't a vague "send us a story sometime." It's a massive part of my working life--even though I never set out to be a short fiction writer and had to learn the hard way how to do it--just by doing it, over and over, until I didn't hate everything I wrote.

I do agree, absolutely, that as writers we must be paid for what we do unless we choose to forgo payment for reasons that seem right to the individual author. And as someone progresses in their career, what they can afford to write changes. It's only in the last year that I've even started to limit myself to pro rates--though I would never have accepted the fifth of a cent rate that started this whole debate. But for me, pro rate is a good, solid rate, nothing great, nothing spectacular, but solid enough to count on, and I work for it regularly. It's the bedrock of my ability to write full-time. Not as exciting as a novel sale, but without it, I'd be in freefall.

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/04/battle-of-the-googlies/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35958

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/04/dear-dr-lipschwitz/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35946

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/04/the-sloths-go-to-disney-world/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35997

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/04/friday-haiku-froggy-phone-home/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35951

eudaimonia:
Ooohh. I like this. A lot. It reminds me a bit of Wondermark too.

yuki_onna:
I post this without comment, because no comment could equal the awesome I am about to report:

Peaks Island is not famed in history or song. The poet has not sung of its beauties and the historian has passed it by, but it has its history and its beauties are acknowledged by all.

The earliest voyagers found Casco Bay adapted for a playground and a summer resort. Christopher Levitt, in 1623, said that there was good fishing and much fowl. He found plenty of salmon and other good fish in Fore River.

Michael Mitton told Josselyn of seeing a merman who came and laid his hands on the side of his canoe and that he chopped off one of his hands and that he then sank, dyeing the water with his purple blood.

--A History of Peaks Island and Its People

yuki_onna:
Yesterday, babymonkey and I went walking down to the other cemetery on the island. The first cemetery is right near our house, and bears the awesome signage: Ye Olde Towne Burial Ground. Pass At Ye Own Risk.

But that cemetery is mostly small graves worn down by time into indistinguishable grey. The one we went to, on the oceans's edge, is small but lovely, full of white stones and long green grass and bittersweet. The graves have astonishing engravings and poetry on them--I'll be taking my camera next time, no fear. Beautiful suns and moons and weeping willows, and dates going back to the mid-1700s. Since shipping a body to shore is prohibitively expensive, most everyone who dies here gets buried here. (Especially if your name is Brackett--they're like the Borgias of Peaks Island. Or, em. I mean, I'm sure without any poisonings.)

One of the things I love about old graveyards is the names. I always notice them, and sometimes they're Sarah and Anna. But sometimes they're amazing.

There was Thankful A. Griffin, a young woman who died in her thirties, and I cannot express how fanastic that name is--first for being named Thankful, and second for the image of a thankful griffin. There was also Paryntha Salter, which I will definitely be using in one book or another.

Even more than usual it strikes me that these were people who lived on this island--who must have loved it, because it could never have been easy to live here, it's not even easy now, and we have a ferry, and stores and restaurants. (Though an odd fact of this place is that in the late 1800s and early 1900s this was actually a more bustling and populous place than it is now, as it was a summer theater resort where the Barrymores played. John Ford was once the honorary mayor of Peaks Island. And in fact there used to be many stores, one for each neighborhood. In a lot of ways island life has shrunk.)

But they lived here, named their children Thankful and Paryntha, and walked all the same paths I do. They thought and loved and weathered the winter--all cities are palimpsests, but it feels like little really dies here.

Over Thanksgiving we brought flashlights and explored the rooms in Battery Steele, the WWII fort here that most of those buried would never have seen. It is a truly bizarre and wonderful place, a maze of dark corridors and hidden rooms, abandoned, lightless, half-flooded. It is so very much like the Barrens in It, you could believe something awful lives there--but you could believe the Turtle lives there, too. We shone our lights, our flashlights, our headlamps, our cell phones--and there was a room covered in paintings of the same elfin face, drawn over and over, at different distances, small and large and close and far. Another one with wasps stenciled in neat lines over the walls, as though crawling in a line. In one giant antechamber, flooded and dripping, there was a hold gouged in the wall. Someone had painted the word destiny below it, and an arrow pointing into the hole. Of course, there were plenty of Van Halen sigils and Nick Was Here! June '83! and high school team booster slogans, but there was also, in a small stone room, a square of red paint with neat white letters written on it, reading: He Will Strike Your Head and You Will Strike His Heel. On the opposite wall, in the same white on red print, it said: Perelandra. Malacandra. Earth. Elwin Ransom, Philologist. (A reference to Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis--which just floors me, that such a thing can be written in the dark on this island.)

Of course, generations of kids have gone to the fort to light fires and drink and have sex and do drugs, and all those things are there too--a bench, a chair, a tin of potted meat in the corner. Relics of old and new childhoods, of life after the war, of paradise lost and gained, the terrible innocence of Perelandra, all there in the shadows, the inky black. Shine a light on them, how they glow.

There are so many secret lives here, so many secrets. Buried, hidden, drowned.

dali_muse:

Happy Belated Birthday (Monday) to morval!

Tuesday, Belated Birthday wishes to zombaby, miamadness15, and indecenthamtard.

Yesterday, Happy Birthday to stubbornson. I even made crack dip for Saturday night's party! Stupid work.

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/03/if-john-hughes-had-cast-the-frog-and-lab/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35923

cuteoverload:

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/03/not-the-type-of-head-shot-she-had-in-mind/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35905

dali_muse:

Guess what TravelZoo sent to me in email today!

A brand new Cirque Du Soleil show in Vegas, Viva Elvis!

This is going to be the best wedding reception ever!