The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
WARNING: Unsightly whining coming up.
Great googly-moogly*, I know that Saturdays are always my worst days for traffic around here — so much so that I take a lot of Saturdays off from posting entirely — but less than thirty hits yesterday?! That’s just cruel!
* Where does the phrase “Great googly-moogly” come from, anyway?
Frustration is getting your novel outline done, printing it out with the first three chapters, printing out the cover letter, getting the whole package nice and ready…and then discovering that your large manila envelopes aren’t big enough for all that stuff. Gah!
So it’s off to OfficeMax today to grab a set of bigger envelopes, and then tomorrow, this thing’s out the door. It’s a moderately strange feeling, actually sending out something that I started noodling with nearly seven years ago (and whose central story idea came to me several years before that). But it’s not as strange a feeling as I might have expected, since I’ve already moved on to other things.
Apparently there was a recent fracas of sorts at the Odyssey Fantasy Writers Workshop recently: fantasist and SF-writer extraordinaire Gene Wolfe apparently gave some fairly caustic criticism to a few stories, and the resulting brouhaha led to Wolfe’s bowing out of the workshop. Wolfe wrote his side of the story in LOCUS Magazine, and John Scalzi has a long missive on the subject on his blog.
I’ve never even considered going to Clarion or Odyssey or anything like it. Not because I’m arrogant and think I have nothing to learn; were that the truth, I’d have something other than a drawer full of rejections to show for my efforts. And not because I’m timid about my writing; I send it out, after all, and occasionally I post pieces of my fiction here, if I decide they’ve “expired” (i.e., I’ve decided that they’re simply not salable, and I don’t just want them sitting in a drawer with their rejections). I don’t do the writers’ group/workshop thing because they strike me as fairly neurotic. I decided a long time ago that the main way I would measure myself as a writer was by selling my work, and not by seeking camaraderie with other unpublished writers. I guess that, for some, this could mean that I’m a shill who’s only in it for the money. So be it, really. Time spent sitting around talking sagely about someone else’s stories is time I’m not spending writing my own stories (blog posts and GMR reviews aside), but that’s not even the main problem. For me, the weight of producing something on a deadline simply so it can be criticized by a bunch of peers would be the death-knell for my writing. I don’t need that. I’ve got death-knells aplenty, thank you very much.
It’s not that I’m afraid of being told that my work is crap, because it seems to me that any writer of any worth at all will be convinced, all on his own, that his work is crap. I don’t need someone else to confirm that for me.
As for Mr. Wolfe, I’ve only read a few of his stories and I am now working my way through the first novel of his I’ve ever read (Latro in the Mist, actually two novels bound as one). But I know that he is held in very high regard in literary circles and that he has years of teaching experience. A Usenet poster today said, “If Gene Wolfe told me a story of mine was crap, I’d say, ‘Thank you sir! May I have another’?” I’m inclined to agree, although if Mr. Wolfe told me he didn’t understand my story and I was feeling mischievous, I’d say, “Back at ya, pal.”
(And in case there’s any doubt that these students could have encountered someone meaner than Mr. Wolfe, there’s always Harlan Ellison. Yow!)
I forgot to link them before it began, and I didn’t do any posting yesterday except to update an already-published post, so I’m probably remiss here. But two people on my blogroll, Mickey and Jesse, took part in this year’s Blogathon. Had I any extra money I would have sponsored each. Instead, I’ll just pipe up a day late to point my readers to these fellows’ sudden explosion of content. (Check out Mickey’s laser-shining-through-ice-cubes picture, and Jesse’s eerie channeling of Peggy Noonan. Aieee!)
Oh, GAK!
As I’m writing this, the TV is on in the background (only because I didn’t turn it off yet), and “Inside Edition” or “Access Hollywood” or some such thing is on. They’re talking about some young author whose book has just been made into a movie with Reese Witherspoon (I think), and the person doing the story just said: “She was even able to stand out to the publishers by submitting her manuscript on pink paper!”
Huh-whuh??!!
Everything I’ve ever read says NOT to try things like this. Some even go so far as to say that manuscripts submitted on funky papers are not even read. What’s the deal, here? (I didn’t catch the name of the author, but I surmise it can’t be too hard to figure out. If I’m bored tomorrow, maybe I’ll dig further into this.)
In a response to this post, Shiela recommends me to a Jack-the-Ripper movie with which I’m unfamiliar. Sounds cool, and I might as well plug a favorite Ripper movie of my own: Time After Time, a wonderful film in which Malcolm MacDowell plays H.G. Wells in 1890s London, who has built a prototype time machine. One of his friends, played by the always dependable David Warner, turns out to be the Ripper, and uses the machine to flee Scotland Yard to 1979 San Francisco. Wells goes after him, and so doing meets and falls in love with Mary Steenburgen. The whole “fish out of water” thing common to time travel stories is in evidence, of course, but it takes on a more pleasing subtext by way of Wells’s status as a Utopian who believed that the Twentieth Century would see the final blossoming of human society. Man….I gotta go rent that one sometime….
A couple of late-night notes from the job-hunt front:
:: As things are now entering the “Any port in a storm” phase, I am now deciding to re-enter food service. Sigh. At least it will be nice to have a job interview or two where I’m not saying things like, “No, I don’t have any direct experience in your field, but let me show you how my skills and ability to learn will benefit you…” (Of course, one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life is leaving food service before I was ready to do so a few years back. But still….)
:: My Employed Overlord has some thoughts. I’ve been unlucky in a number of ways that he mentions. First, the majority of my working life has been spent in small towns in the Southern Tier of New York State (that’s the region to the south of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, immediately north of the Pennsylvania line), in the restaurant business. This means that my exposure to tech fields during the big boom was minimal, so I’ll still be behind that particular curve when things heat up again. This also has the effect of limiting to an absurd degree my networking. Basically, what network I have is online these days, which may help in terms of locating freelance writing work (thanks, Greg!), won’t be of much help in the immediate task of securing a job in Buffalo. Spending six months in Syracuse didn’t help matters, either. That was good for my wife’s career, because it moved her along in her company’s career path, and I did do some crystalizing of my goals and thoughts on just where the hell I’m trying to go. But in terms of actually grabbing a job, well — ick. And had I been hired someplace there, I would have had to quit just months later, anyhow.
:: I agree with my Grudging Overlord that people who can’t or won’t apply for an IT job online are suspicious. I can think of a few extreme examples in which that might not be the case, but on the whole, they should be applying using the tools of their trade. I will note, however, that if a company assumes this but does not spell it out — or even does something like specify a snail-mail address on the company Website, thus implying that resumes sent there are considered — they could be open for legal problems. (I have no idea if My Overlord’s company does this or not. I’m just sayin’.)
:: The Imperious Pooh-Bah also takes me to task again for not learning another skill on the side. Well, I have picked up a good deal of HTML — I’m not competent enough to actually bill myself as a Web designer, but I’m comfortable enough to simply cite my familiarity with it on my resume. (One of these days I plan to set up a site just for my copywriting business, but I have a large number of other priorities right now.) I would point out that I consider by broadening of my writing interests in the last year or two to be learning a skill. Until just a short while ago, I only wanted to write fiction. The idea of writing articles of different types for different publications never much entered my mind, and the whole copywriting field was something I knew nothing about until, about a year ago, I happened to spot this book in the library, the reading of which I followed with this book. This is another area where moving to Syracuse messed things up, because I figure I missed out on a good six to eight months of marketing and developing my skills along that regard. I do agree with the King of Prussia that learning additional skills is advisable. I’ve tried to do that.
:: Another thought about going back to restaurants: I am willing to do this not because I like the idea of doing that again, but because the other big industry in Buffalo that is always hiring is one that I find pretty damned nauseating: telemarketing. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I spent a year and a half in my last job in telesales, and I pretty much hated it. The people were nice, and the actual work was fairly painless — it was business-to-business calling, in which we actually worked the same customers over a long period, as opposed to the “Call someone at dinner and then you’ll never speak to them again” robotic stuff that takes place in most call centers. There are two big telemarketing shops here that have ads in the classifieds every week, and have done so for as long as I can remember, and they’re always advertising on-the-spot interviews. Going into a field with the kind of turnover that makes such recruiting practices necessary really gives me pause, especially when I had the following conversation with one of their recruiters on the phone on Wednesday:
Me: Hi, this is Herbert Walker, returning your call.
Recruiter: Hi, I was looking at your resume, and I was wondering if you would be interested in an interview. Are you available after 3:00 pm tomorrow [Thursday]?
Me: Actually, that’s bad. My wife works the evening shift, so I’m pretty much unavailable for an interview after 1:00. Is there any way we can do a morning interview?
Recruiter: Hmmm. All our morning slots are filled up already.
Me: Damnation and a pox on my house, for not calling earlier! [Not really, but that’s what I thought.] Oh, OK. How about Friday morning?
Recruiter: No, unfortunately I am in an offsite meeting Friday. So we’d have to wait until next week.
Me: Oh, that’s fine, I suppose. I am free at any time on Monday or Tuesday. Name the time, and I’ll be there fifteen minutes early, with all documentation.
Recruiter: Oh. But we don’t schedule interviews that far ahead. We typically only schedule interviews for the same day.
Me: “That far ahead”? Three business days is “That far ahead”? Especially for a company that, from what I can tell by the classifieds, is always interviewing? Are you insane? Just turn the pages of your day-planner until the top line says “MONDAY”. There you go! Not hard at all, was it? [No, not really. But that’s what I thought.]
And it can’t be a good sign when I ask the question “What do your positions pay?”, and then hear the actual flipping of pages as the recruiter, who must hear this question a lot, nevertheless flips to that page in her recruiting script. Hoo-boy….
Matthew Yglesias provides links to a debate that might blossom as to the morality of the Administration’s various misrepresentations viz. the war in Iraq. For many on the left, the whole WMD issue is seeming like more and more of a giant lie that was foisted on the American public in order to drum up support for the war; for some on the right, it simply doesn’t matter if the claims regarding WMDs were factually true at all, because that was never the “real reason” for the war in the first place. This response strikes me as woefully inadequate.
First of all, it seems to me to boil down to “It’s OK that the Administration lied about WMDs, because that entire rationale was basically one giant lie anyway.” If I am to be assuaged by the fact that the lies were all just misdirection anyway, then I’m sorry to report that I am not assuaged at all. Rather the reverse, I’m afraid, because that means that the Administration decided to lie to me on two grounds, not just one: Not only did they trumpet a rationale for war that was itself not accurate, they didn’t even portray what (we are told) is the actual rationale. Basically, SDB tells us, it boils down to salesmanship. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair decided that they couldn’t sell a war on Iraq as an opening salvo in a long-term strategy designed to restructure the entire Islamo-Arabic world, so we got an amalgam of humanitarian concerns and half-baked WMD stuff. Now, I’m not sure I buy the whole “They didn’t say this because they knew they couldn’t sell it” defense, because quite frankly that rationale has been out there for some time, and not just by armchair generals but by actual Administration officials such as Paul Wolfowitz. It’s not like it was a carefully-concealed secret. But even then, I have other reasons for being troubled by what I now call the “Misdirection Rationale”.
First, it undermines the humanitarian argument that the pro-war factions have been flogging. I’ve found it problematic that Saddam’s horrible regime has been at the top of the list, where other horrible regimes around the globe are barely on the radar screen at all; surely, to say that we were obliged on humanitarian grounds to depose Saddam Hussein carries with it an implication that we’re also obliged to do something about the other brutal dictators who abound. It speaks volumes that we’re not doing so, and it leads me to wondering: if Saddam Hussein had come to power in, say, Tunisia and run precisely as brutal a regime there as he actually did in Iraq, and all other things were equal, would we have gone into Tunisia instead of Iraq? Probably not, given that with this strategy of confronting the dangers of the Islamo-Arabic world, we needed a good beachhead, and for various strategic reasons, Iraq was apparently to be that beachhead. Now, if that strategy actually is what we are doing, then Iraq makes sense as a beachhead, in pretty much the same way that Normandy made sense as a beachhead for the big Allied invasion of Nazi-overrun Europe in 1944. But then you lose, in large part, the whole moral claim to dealing with this particular regime. The moral justification becomes an a posteriori justification, used more to bludgeon liberals (“How could you oppose our ending of this?”) than a case for action in the first place.
Secondly, concealing the “real” rationale for war beneath a veneer of more emotionally-laden stuff seems to me a pretty cynical approach. It says, “For heaven’s sake, we can’t possibly tell the people what we’re actually doing. We need something big! Something that will grab them! Something that will scare the crap right out of them!” So we were told that Saddam Hussein’s regime had connections with Al Qaeda; it was strongly implied that Saddam was on the verge of making a nuclear bomb; and all the rest of it. It wasn’t a case of persuasion; it was a case of selling, which is not the same thing. It was like the beer commercials that make it sound like a party will erupt in your own backyard, complete with scantily-clad women, if only you’d drink Coors Light instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The whole thing smacks of distrust — of the American people, of the world, of their own case and their ability to argue for it.
And finally, the “Misdirection Rationale” stikes me as faulty because the Administration does not appear, quite frankly, to have done much planning for the steps after the initial war. No clamp-down or issuing of curfews, no anticipation of looting, the now-dawning realization that our armed forces might be lacking in sufficient manpower to pull it off. We’re in a post-war environment right now where the war doesn’t so much seem to be “post”, when we’re dependent on some guy walking in off the street to tell us where the bad guys are hiding, et cetera. I agree with SDB that we’re in Iraq to stay, but I’d be more confident of the end result if our planning to this point had reflected that from the beginning.
So that’s my current thinking on this subject.
(I can only hope that when I get a job or start doing something actually productive, I’ll be able to channel my thoughts into something other than politics. The past week or so notwithstanding, I’m really not trying to morph into a political blog here.)
UPDATE: Kevin Drum weighs in on this topic today (and also here), and I think he’s pretty much got the right of it. He concentrates, quite rightly, on the question of just why the President won’t say what our real reason for war is. War is a time for leadership, not salesmanship. I commented on this aspect a couple of months ago, as well.
As an unapologetic, unrepentant fan of the show Friends, I can only hope that this Joey spin-off turns out more like Frasier and less like After-MASH.
Via Oliver Willis, I see that Steven Den Beste has reworked another blog-post of his into a column for the Wall Street Journal. I don’t agree with the post and article, but I’m nevertheless keenly interested in how SDB has managed to parlay ideas developed in his blog into a paid piece of freelance writing. (I assume he’s been paid for the piece.) This strikes me as a potentially good way for freelancers to keep the pot simmering, so to speak.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer