TSFAQ (Time-Sensitive Frequently Asked Questions)

Hey Megan, where are you right now?
Glad you asked! Right now, on this fifth of September 2013 at nine hours post-meridiem, I am in my hotel room in Lincoln, Nebraska.

What on earth are you going there? Don’t you live in Milwaukee or some place?
Well, until this morning, I did live in Milwaukee. I'm now in the process of moving to Davis, California, and Lincoln is the first stop on my itinerary. I'll be arriving in Davis on Sunday evening.

Why are you moving? Was it the weather? I bet it was the weather.
It was not the weather. I'm entering the Ph.D. in English Literature program at UC Davis. In the unlikely event that you know me personally and this is the first you're hearing of it...well, surprise!

Grad school, huh? What are your research interests?
Victorian literature (especially ghost stories and works with supernatural elements), Gothic literature, and Queer Theory.

Okay, that sounds cool, I guess. How's the writing going?
Much better than it was going last semester. I'm aiming to have five new stories in submission by the end of this quarter. At one time, that would have been a modest goal, but considering the approximately fifty thousand things that have complicated my life over the last year, it now seems positively ambitious.

Oh, and "Sister Philomela Heard the Voices of Angels" placed third in the short poem category in this year's Rhysling Awards, which was pretty cool. So writing is going well.

How's the editing?
Mirror Dance is going well - we just put out a new issue on Sunday. We also have Facebook Page now because all the cool kids are doing it. Watch for updates about Lacuna in early October. (Read: Lacuna is still in e-zine limbo.)

Hey, what did you do to your website?
Sorry, still playing with the formatting. I'm trying to find a template where the main column is wide enough to hold a full line of text in my bibliography, but not so wide that story excerpts become hard to read. I also realize that I never finished my biography page, so that should happen once I finish moving.

Anything else you should update us on?
I got nothing. But check out the the brilliant theme for an upcoming special issue of Lightspeed magazine!

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Thursday, September 05, 2013

editing, grad school, Lightspeed, Mirror Dance, my English major is showing, preaching to the invisible choir, Rhysling, the writer in its natural habitat, travel, updates, writing

Editorese to English, Lesson I

When an editor (i.e. me) says "not quite what I'm looking for," she may mean:

• This is so poorly proofread I can't believe you thought it was ready for publication.
• I'm underwhelmed.
• I didn't get it. Was that supposed to be a pun at the end?
• I'm underwhelmed.
• This isn't even the right genre what the heck people it's in the magazine's URL/header!
• I'm underwhelmed.
• This is a perfectly good story. However, I know what I want for my magazine and I know this isn't it, though I can't give a specific reason why or how.

What I've learned today while reading slush:

• A lot of recent submissions to Mirror Dance and Lacuna have been underwhelming.
• There is no polite way to say that someone's writing is underwhelming.

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Monday, August 06, 2012

editing, honesty, preaching to the invisible choir

The Summer King

The Summer King is now live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Hooray for my longest published story! Not the longest I've written, alas, as there were...incidents...when I was a sophomore in high school. They are still available online. You are warned.

Anyway...How this story came about. In January 2009, I'm sitting on the chair in front of the TV and I see an advertisement for the oh-my-god-that-can't-be-but-it-really-is-a-modern-reimagining-of-King-David-squee! TV show Kings. Now, the show didn't quite live up to my expectations, but it had some lovely moments, and that is all completely beside the point, because the show hadn't even begun in January 2009. All I knew about it was the title and the huge orange banner with a butterfly on it.

And I was thinking about how simply epic that title was. I jotted it down in my little idea-notebook: The ______ King. After all, I thought, who doesn't like kings?

Two answers in quick succession. 1) The French, circa 1789. 2) The Americans, circa anytime. But, because I was in American History Class (R) that semester, the specific Americans I thought of were...ward bosses.

WTF? I know. See, I had misunderstood bosses a little bit. Okay, a lot of bit. I was picturing Robin Hood instead of Boss Tweed's machinery. So the whole gig sounded pretty cool--ruling the city from the streets up. As opposed to a king, ruling from the palace down. Throw in a National Convention--I've mentioned my obsession with French Revolutionary politics, yes?--and there's the political situation of "The Summer King."

I don't know where "summer" came from, incidentally. It was January. I was probably just longing for green grass and strawberries.

So now I had a title and a political situation. My main character, Boss Livy, showed up quite unexpectedly from American Literature Class (R), where I was reading (okay, suffering through) the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, I'm not Twain's biggest fan, but I like what he does with voice. (This shouldn't be a surprise--my favorite book series is Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths, where Mildmay 'speaks' in gorgeous vernacular.) And I guess it rubbed off, because all of a sudden, I was hearing something like a female Huck Finn with better grammar and a lot more profanity. (The profanity is probably courtesy of Monette's Mildmay, who did more than any other character to increase my comfort with swearing in fiction.)

So now I had a title and a political situation and a viewpoint character. And I just started writing. And writing. And writing. I had no idea where this thing was going to end.

Where it did end, finally, was with me in a bathrobe at the foot of my bed, frantically scribbling through the climax and the closing paragraph, while my impeccably dressed significant other waited for me to put on my gosh-dang dress so we could go out to eat already.

The writer's life is one of unparalleled grace and elegance.

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Thursday, December 30, 2010

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, first person POV, preaching to the invisible choir, the writer in its natural habitat, writing

Epiphawhatnow?

I just experienced two epiphanies in rapid succession.

1. Concerns objects petits a in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and thus could not possibly be of interest to anyone but myself.

2. Relates to stories #3, #10, and #17 on Monday's list, which have all jumped on me at once and insisted they were siblings, or at least college room-mates.

If these stories are doing what they think they're doing, I now have not one but two projects that are either a) highly episodic novels or b) collections of interconnected short stories that c) share a common setting that happens to be a city whose name starts with the letter A. One, which I've been working on since writing this a year and a half ago, is called Argentorat, while today's fresh creation calls itself Andvarsuveld. Considering that I've already confused such dissimilar WIPs as "Juggernaut" and Jaquemart, I see great confusion for myself and my beta readers on the horizon.

Yes, 2. also could not possibly be of interest to anyone but myself. Bet you wish I'd spent a post rambling about Earth Mothers and the imaginary order now, don't you?

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Thursday, October 28, 2010

my English major is showing, NaNoWriMo, preaching to the invisible choir, writing

The Emphasis of Dorian Gray

A few caveats. First, this post contains slight spoilers for Oliver Parker’s 2009 movie Dorian Gray and, by extension, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Read on at your own risk. (And if you haven’t read the novel, leave this blog right now and find it on Project Gutenberg. Right now.)

Second, this post is me self-indulgently musing on my viewing experience, not a review. If it was a review, I would be morally obliged to give equal time to the many, many things this movie did wonderfully—for example, the casting of Ben Barnes as our eponymous antihero. If I mentioned this, I would also have to digress on whether the important aspect of Dorian’s looks is his youth or his beauty, and if I entered that argument, I would then have to back it up with lengthy textual evidence, which would itself require context…so this is not a review.

Let the debauchery begin.



My theory: the writers locked the script in an attic and went out with the book to have a good time. When they returned, they noticed a small change in the script…

So I’m in love with The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’ve read it at least eighteen times (all the way through—I’m not sure how many times I’ve flipped it open simply to browse). I own three or four copies and have memorized the introductory matter to each. True, I have nothing on Mr. Dorian Gray himself…

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than five large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colors, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic temperament and the scientific temperament were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XI.)

…but this shows a limitation in available shelf space rather than ardor. I own an Oscar Wilde action figure and an Oscar Wilde plush toy. On the stranger end of things, I own a picture of myself dressed as Oscar Wilde and my significant other dressed as Dorian Gray. Friends assure me this is odd.

That said, I do not allow my obsession to blind me to the limitations of form. One simply cannot make a movie of Oscar Wilde’s book; it’s too big, too dense, too full of things that don’t translate well onto the screen (Chapter XI, I’m looking at you). Dorian Gray needed to cut something. My interest is in what it added.

Let’s start with the obvious. Dorian Gray is much more explicit than its ink-and-paper predecessor. And no, I’m not referring to the sexual content—that merits a discussion of its own, and one I’m not all that interested in, to tell the truth. I mean that several conclusions the reader was left to draw in The Picture of Dorian Gray were served beautifully on a platter in the movie.

Basil’s romance with Dorian, for example. To be fair, no one was in danger of getting jailed for homosexual content in the movie *mumblemumbleanti-sodomylawsmumblebullshitmumble*, but as in all romances, subtlety has its place. Now, in my reading of the book (which is a) certainly not the only one and b) based on both the 1890 and the 1891 texts), the fact that Basil is in love with Dorian is non-negotiable.

"You don't mean to say that Basil has got any passion or any romance in him?"

"I don't know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has romance," said Lord Henry, with an amused look in his eyes. "Has he never let you know that?" (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890, Chapter III.)

Strangely, Basil’s attraction is less obvious in the movie—probably because it is never discussed, certainly not at length as it is in the book—at the one scene towards the beginning that should make it obvious really doesn’t. Dorian is changing clothes after standing for his portrait; Basil gets a glimpse of him through the curtains; instead of betraying jaw-dropped lust (look, what you have to understand is that Ben Barnes is really really pretty) or aesthetic appreciation, Basil looks mildly confused. As in, “Why are you naked in my living room?”

Now, that can be a perfectly valid interpretation of Basil. But sometime before the movie’s halfway point, Dorian realizes that Basil is in love with him—beats me how, but I’m guessing he read the book—and uses it to manipulate Basil out of borrowing the picture. Mental whiplash, with obvious attractions, ensues.

This underplay/overplay thing happens again with Dorian’s tragic past. For those of you who missed it, it’s in Chapter III of the 1891 edition; his father was killed in a duel and his mother died of grief and his grandfather raised him and was generally an ass. The movie does away with much of this, killing off Dorian’s mother in childbirth and his father from fever, and making Dorian’s grandfather not only creepy but abusive as well. Yes, our beautiful Dorian has scars on his back (I screamed Felix! in the middle of the Sybil scene, actually.). Dorian’s tragic past goes from not present to glaringly explicit in fifteen minutes.

Not that I’m complaining about either of the above examples. As suggested by my linked reference above, M/M and abusive pasts are all right by me. But this next one rankles.

Let’s start at the end, with one of the [few] awesome lines in the movie. Awesome, because it’s what we wanted Book!Dorian to say to Book!Henry all through Chapter XIX.

I am what you made me! I lived the life that you preached but never dared practice. I am everything that you were too afraid to be.

The problem is, so far as the audience has seen, Movie!Henry indulges in exactly the same opium-induced, sex-filled madness as Dorian.

I think this could be played well. A closer comparison of Dorian and Henry could really highlight the effects of Dorian’s eternal youth, which would presumably mean different consequences for Henry and Dorian. But the movie doesn’t even seem to notice this. It changes Henry from a talker to a doer—changes, in terms of the novel, Henry’s form of Art—but leaves his character otherwise unaltered. So why don’t Henry’s sins torment him the way Dorian’s do? Or why do Dorian’s torment him so much? To a large extent, the movie has let the air out of the plot.

If everything before this point hasn’t been a heap of subjective blathering, it’s becoming one now.

In addition to a strange set of vices, Movie!Henry also has a daughter. This daughter is pretty much an elaborate stand-in for Hetty Merton, the country girl Dorian heroically abstains from eloping with in Chapter XIX. No sweat; plenty of Dorian Gray adaptations add or inflate (depending on your point of view) the role of this redeeming woman.

And I cry shenanigans on all of them. Because damn it, Dorian Gray is not supposed to be redeemed.

I’m sure that doesn’t sit well with movie audiences. We come to love Dorian in spite of (or perhaps because of) what he is—and perhaps we simply can’t bear to see something pretty get broken. If so, that bears out Wilde’s point marvelously. But The Picture of Dorian Gray doesn’t give the audience what it wants—in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian Gray is not saved.

Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell?... No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now. (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XX.)

At the end of the novel, Dorian is ruined. There’s nothing good left in him—even his desire to be good is prompted by vanity, a desire that his soul not be ugly. And let’s be honest, Dorian never had a scrap of heroism in him—he’s called Prince Charming for his looks, not his actions. Dorian Gray lacks the capacity to be redeemed. If he didn’t, his picture would not be ugly.

The only reason to inflate Hetty Merton’s character is because you want her to be at least slightly effective (as Miss Wotton is in the movie). You want to show Dorian’s desire and ability to change. The problem is that none of this can be shown because none of it exists—it’s all dimensions of Dorian’s hypocrisy. Say it with me: Dorian is ruined, and redemption is impossible.

Wilde’s plot is tied up with his message and his message is tied up with the plot, like one massive daisy chain. You can’t just change part.

Uh-oh. Did I just say message?

I love the question “What is The Picture of Dorian Gray about?” because it says so much about its answerer. Some people say consequences, some say youth and beauty, some say it’s a novel about a murder (I don’t really like these people). My answer is that The Picture of Dorian Gray is about the influence of Art—specifically, about the way that Art is life.

Basil is his painting.
Sibyl is her acting.
Henry is his epigrams.
Dorian is…

Dorian is a connoisseur. Henry says that Dorian has made life his Art, which is literally true—think hard enough about the Picture as a collaboration between Dorian and Basil, and it will give you nightmares—but I think a major part of Dorian’s character is how he allows Art to become his life. Basil’s painting is his soul, Sibyl’s acting is his love, Henry’s epigrams and the yellow book are Dorian’s thoughts and actions. Dorian isn’t an artist himself—he’s an audience. When Basil speaks about the new mode of Art that Dorian suggests to him, this is what he means.

Does any of this come through in the movie? Don’t make me laugh. Sibyl’s acting has nothing to do with Dorian’s love. Whatever Dorian does to Basil’s painting, we can be sure Basil loves him for, ahem, different reasons. Henry is hardly a clever talker, and unlike anyone in the novel, he has a life—which is to say, Movie!Henry isn’t an artist at all.

So what is the movie about? What is the emphasis of Dorian Gray? Beauty? Youth? Consequences? Sin? Redemption? In all honesty, I draw a blank. This is a beautiful movie, but it reminds me

of those curious lines in some play—Hamlet, I think—how do they run?

 "'Like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart."

Yes: that is what it was like. (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XIX.)

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Saturday, February 20, 2010

blogging, Dorian Gray, literature, preaching to the invisible choir, review

Who let me on the opinion train?

This post called "Four Lies from the Mouth of God" "A beautifully written, truly awful story about the price women (and children) can pay for the political actions of men. Powerful reading, but I plan never to read it again."

My feelings are two.

1) Thank God someone appreciates the awfulness! I feared some things had lost their power to disgust.

2) Women paying for the actions of men? I thought this story was, if anything, about a man paying for the actions of a woman, children paying for the actions of that man, children paying for the actions of that woman, and finally the woman paying for her own actions. God save me from making a statement on gender--I am most horrendously unqualified.

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Friday, January 29, 2010

preaching to the invisible choir, reading, reviews, short fiction

Lacuna Review

Don Schneider has posted a wonderful review of Lacuna on his website--wonderful here having the dual meanings of thorough and complimentary.

Now, to make a small journey through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole...I have an odd reaction to reviews of my work. Not so much my editing work--honestly, opinion on that seems generally favorable, which makes me giggle and blush like a schoolgirl. Either that, or my critics don't care enough to be vocal.

This, fortunately for my critically oversized ego, is not the case with my fiction. You may (but probably don't) remember my reaction to a disapproving French review of "Winterblood" back in January. Unless you know me personally, or heard the WTF went 'round the world, you don't know my reaction to the reviewer who called "Winterblood" erotica--but I'm sure you can imagine it. The point is, I react to bad reviews. I over-react. I throw tantrums and call reviewers bad names and write nasty letters. I do all of this in the privacy of my own head, of course, or I'd be getting some bad reviews from law enforcement. But I still do it, and I accept the bad reviews as criticism--valid or otherwise--from experts.

And with good reviews? I...don't. I don't dissect them on this blog (though you may be certain I know and care what Midori Snyder said about "The Fawn Prince" and what Erin M. Kinch said about "Grown from Man to Dragon" and my flash fiction in general). Actually, with the two examples above, I barely even consider them reviews, just positive comments...but if they were negative comments, you can bet I would be calling them reviews, and throwing tantrums over them. So why all this attention to the bad and not to the good? Is it because I'm so insecure that I automatically consider any praise for my work to be superficial or uninformed? Or because I'm so egotistical that I take the praise for granted?

Yes, darling, I know I'm brilliant. Tell me again how much you love my style.

Hopefully I fall somewhere between the extremes, accepting compliments graciously, as neither something to take for granted nor my one source of validation. Let's face it, writers, we do think we're brilliant. If we didn't, we wouldn't dare offer our work for publication. At the same time, we do need to know--and, yes, want to know--what we're doing right. It's an erroneous assumption I frequently make when writing rejections, that writers believe they are doing everything perfectly until informed otherwise--but it simply isn't true, and that's why good reviews (and encouraging rejections) are important.

We also need to know what we're doing wrong, and maybe that's why I obsess over bad reviews, airing them everywhere and to everyone. I want to know what I'm doing wrong, and I'm hoping someone will walk up to me and say "This, this and this are what made "Winterblood" feel like erotica," because I sure don't know what did. This brings us back to the "critics as experts" thing. I feel like people who dislike my stories know something I don't, and are refusing to share it with me.

Wow, that was whiny and immature. I'm going to blame it on the cold medicine, okay?

Out of the rabbit-hole again, none of the previous has anything to do with Schneider's review of Lacuna. That told me exactly what I want to know--what works, what needs refining, and what makes people hear Lacuna and think Paradox*. Why don't you check it out, along with the other great reviews on his site?


*Funny story. Since I changed the date of my Lacuna guidelines post to reflect the day Lacuna opened to submissions (June 1)--not the day it was created (March 3)--it appears to many people that I created Lacuna in reaction to Paradox's unfortunate demise. My real reasons were not quite so fitting, so noble, or so egotistical. (Set myself up as the next Chris Cevasco? Blasphemy!) When I created Lacuna, Paradox was alive and well, and Lacuna was no more intended to compete with Paradox than Mirror Dance was with Fantasy Magazine. I expected it to be a side effort to Mirror Dance, perhaps a second chance for stories rejected by Paradox or Solander.

That's not to say I never planned for Lacuna to be as great as I could make it. Simply that I never expected, nor intended, to draw comparisons to Paradox, and I am not in any way seeking to imitate Paradox in my selection of stories or art. I am following my own judgements; if they seem to coincide with those of the late Paradox's editors, fine and dandy, but I am not trying to be Chris Cevasco. No one (least of all Mr. Schneider above) has explicity accused me of doing so, but I can't help the feeling that underneath the many comparisons I have read in blogs and cover letters(!), there is someone wondering just what I'm playing at.

Finally, and most basically, if I was trying to recreate Paradox, I would not have the brass to offer less than half their pay rate. Just saying.

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

editing, Lacuna, preaching to the invisible choir, review, writing