Guest Post: SFWA Changes Entry Criteria for Membership

Here at 101 Reasons, we pride ourselves on bringing you news and opinion about the world of writing, especially the stuff you don't want but have to know. Today we bring you breaking news of particular importance to science fiction writers whose publishing credits are less than stellar. (This is the news that Revolution Science Fiction didn't have the guts to print.)

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SFWA Changes Entry Criteria for Membership
by Edgar Harris

Chesterton, Maryland -- The Science Fiction Writers of America, the long-running organization for professional science fiction and fantasy writers, announced today that it was making drastic changes to how it accepted new members, not to mention how it kept older members within the fold.

"The basic requirements for SFWA membership previously required that a writer have three short stories or one full-length fiction book or a dramatic script appear through professional paying markets," said Caroline Crawford, SFWA spokeswoman. "However, over the late Eighties and early Nineties, we found the organization flooded with members who received their accreditation through sales to Writers of the Future or Pulphouse magazine, and although they never managed to get published again, they had lifetime membership so long as they paid their membership dues.

"So we find ourselves flooded with members who do nothing more than put 'Member, SFWA' on their letterhead and throw tantrums if they don’t get guest badges at local conventions, and voting in SFWA elections against any provisions to remove members unpublished in a decade or more. We had to go to further extremes to enliven the organization and clear out the dead wood."

Those "further extremes" consist of talent competitions completely unrelated to writing. "Simply put," said Ms. Crawford, "any current or incipient member of SFWA must be able to impersonate a cartoon character to the satisfaction of an independently selected jury. No exceptions."

According to the new bylaws of SFWA, each member must be able to impersonate the voice of a particular character in an animated TV show or film, and each character belongs to that author until the author dies or is beaten in impersonation combat.

"Effectively, each fiction writer qualifies for one impersonation. Nonfiction writers get two, and any professional editor gets one to add to his or her total,", said Crawford. "This means that James Arce-Stevens gets one character, while Mike Resnick, being a fiction writer and a pro editor, gets two." Initially, the characters selected would be done on a first-come, first-served basis, but two writers selecting the same character may compete in an arena for that impersonation: the winner remains with SFWA, while the loser has to leave the SF genre entirely unless they have an alternative. "Nonfiction writers get two solely because we can use as many as we can get."

Many extant and former SFWA members jumped on the new rules, with varying results. Harlan Ellison, due to his singular origins (see Harlan Ellison: The Ultimate Literary Warrior Robot), promptly claimed three characters: The Iron Giant, GIR from the Nickelodeon series Invader ZIM, and Bender from Futurama. Said Crawford, "Everybody knows that Harlan goes running around his house on Friday nights impersonating GIR anyway, so this wasn’t too much of a stretch."

Others had more of an effort. "[Former SFWA President] Norman Spinrad and James P. Hogan had a hard time of it, seeing as how they both do an exemplary Olive Oyl, and we needed judges after about three hours. They just wouldn’t break character. Jim finally managed to win, but Mr. Spinrad managed to get back into the game with a Boomhauer impersonation that left us with tears in our eyes. It was just beautiful. It was almost as stunning as Pat Cadigan’s Snow White or Emily Devenport’s Stimpy."

Some new and established writers, unfortunately, found themselves out of SFWA. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, unaware that silent cartoon characters were ineligible for consideration, was quoted as saying "Wait, wait...okay, I’m Odie on Garfield. ...No? Okay, how about Maggie Simpson? Um. How about Claude Cat? Uh, okay, how about Taarna in Heavy Metal? No? Oh, poop." Others found themselves at a decided advantage under the new rules: former Weird Tales editor Darrell Schweitzer expressed his opposition to the plan at last year’s World Fantasy Convention, and was allowed in due to his impassioned and incessant cries of "Timmah!"

Other characters were retired without consideration due to the authors’ reputation. "Fritz Leiber used to do an impeccable Fleischer-era Superman, and ever since he died, everyone else left it alone out of respect for him and his work," said Crawford. Other characters were left alone due to the nasty reputation of the author. "Even though he has no interest in joining SFWA, and we wouldn’t take him if he asked, Paul T. Riddell is known for his Beavis, Zorak [from Space Ghost: Coast To Coast], and Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo. And they’re right up his alley, so he can have them."

Likewise, some non-American members of SFWA are understandably aggrieved that some of their cultural icons may be appropriated by Americans, and others feel that the battle for impersonations should cross international barriers. On the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, one angry commentator wrote "I don’t have any problems with Brian Aldiss and Andrew Dennis getting Dangermouse and Penfold, respectively, but why does Robert Sawyer get both Terrance and Phillip? What if I can do a better Phillip?" The particulars on the competition, and whether impersonations worked alone or in conjunction with automatic weapons, was not available at press time.

Whatever happens, most members of SFWA agreed that it’s high time for the membership rules change. One SFWA member, who wished to remain unnamed, said: "The way things were going, just about anyone who wrote for a Buffy fanzine could get in, and some people were talking about a cull. You know, Thunderdome. This is better, though, because everyone knows I do a better Daffy Duck than anyone else alive. And since H.P. Lovecraft isn’t here any more to challenge me, that means I’m set."

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Edgar Harris is the former Sports Editor of Science Fiction Age magazine. He now writes a regular column on carnivorous plants for the leading alternative gardening magazine, Mondo Horto.

Guest Posts

[This post will be updated as new Guest Posts are published.]

The burden of convincing a population of ambitious ostriches that every word they write is but another grain of sand weighing down their buried heads, is too great for any one man to bear. A lone individual is easily dismissed as a scoundrel and a lunatic; but two men who stand together, shoulder to shoulder against the tide of opposition and denial, is a Revolution.

Thus it was that Paul Riddell came to 101 Reasons, and the Stop Writing movement was born.

Paul's special brand of Reality chili, served with complex analogy salsa and wrapped in a tortilla of painfully honest anecdotes, is the perfect alternative when you find my own brand of Give Up Your Hopeless Dreams (with a side of You Suck) is too sweet and easily digested.

Paul Riddell's Guest Posts:

1. Slushpile Freakonomics -- "That's not to say that the enterprising wannabe can't set himself up for a career of incredible bitterness or unrelenting fantasy in freelance writing. The problem here is the timing."
    
2. The Aspie Dilemma -- "For a group that prides itself on self-diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome, wannabe writers sure have a problem with spotting patterns."
    
3. Turds, Remainders and Other End-Products -- "Just as no high matches that of the first byline spotting, nothing works better at crushing unjustified hubris than making a quick trip to the remainder bin."
    
4. The Savings That Matter -- "One business report after another makes much hay out of how smoking costs $X million in lost hours every year in the US, but nobody takes the time to research how many man-hours are lost every year to wannabe writers."
    
5. Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? -- "It's not just enough to encourage the idea that the life work of most 'writers' are so foul that their work automatically gets dumped into a furnace somewhere: we should all encourage the idea that the torching will be a public event."

These posts should at the very least dissuade you from ever introducing yourself as a writer, in case the person you've just met is Paul.

Guest Post: Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? by Paul Riddell

International Slushpile Bonfire Day is over, for another year. The ashes are cold, the gin pail is dry, and for most editors and agents, the slushpiles are already starting to build up.

In this article, Paul explains the origins of ISBD, for those of you who can stand the metafiction.

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Five years ago -- about a month before I finally snapped, saw reason for the first time in twenty years, and stopped deluding myself that writing for science fiction publications was anything approximating a career -- I had a bit of fun. At the time, I was writing regular articles for the Webzine Revolution Science Fiction on various subjects, and I was also letting my id run wild under the name of "Edgar Harris". Edgar came from a rather large extended family of writers, and counted Raoul Duke, Cordwainer Bird, and Kilgore Trout as uncles and inspirations. As such, he proceeded to write all sorts of articles (until RevSF was taken over by the sort of people who think that winning a Writers of the Future competition actually means something) on such diverse subjects as: Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth being hospitalized for hate mail addiction; George Lucas suing to have the US ballistic missile defense system renamed "Star Wars"; Harlan Ellison as an extremely sophisticated literary warrior robot; and the saga of the official Jar-Jar Binks urinal cake.

However, the one that got any notice outside of the science fiction community was the coverage of International Slushpile Bonfire Day.

Having been a nonfiction writer, save for occasional forays into attempts at humor, I was never asked the question "Where do you get your ideas?" the way fiction writers are apparently asked. (I was regularly asked if my parents' divorce proceedings would still leave them brother and sister, but that was to be expected.) However, I was regularly asked, mostly by editors and beginning writers who couldn't believe that I'd dare write something that inflammatory, "So where did you get the idea for that?"

By "that", they meant "anything that crushed the dreams of the tens of wannabe writers who came across it". Never mind that most wannabe writers, and many published ones, are completely delusional about their place in the universe and completely ignore any and all hints that they're regularly mocked, in the same way that most English majors are delusional that their chosen degree is anything other than part of a plot to prevent wage inflation at Borders and Barnes & Noble chain bookstores. Precious few people actually noticed, for the same reasons why even pepper gas and tasers won't prevent your friendly neighborhood Cat Piss Man from continuing to submit Doctor Who/The Red Green Show fanfiction to every venue in sight.

The concept was quite simple, and it tied directly into the same level of denial I've seen in other aspects of entertainment. We all know the crazed Trekkie, the one trying to get her ears bobbed so she can pass for Vulcan, who laughs and laughs about the famed William Shatner "Get a life" speech, because she knows someone else who's a little too addicted to Star Trek. When the Robert Altman adaptation of Michael Tolkin's book The Player first came out, everyone on Hollywood was talking about how they knew someone else who was as amoral and thoughtless as the fictional Gordon Mill. (What was particularly funny at that time was that I was working for the editor of a movie magazine who related all sorts of horror tales about similar treatment of writers by producers, and how it was just a matter of time before the writers struck back, all without realizing that he'd already cultivated such a reputation for fucking over writers that the only sound at his funeral would be the sound of hundreds of screwed-over freelancers and staffers shitting on his corpse.)

Likewise, editors can pull out huge stacks of the sort of swill that regularly infects the mailbox at science fiction magazines and read them to huge crowds of laughing fans as examples of what they get every damn day, but the worst offenders go home smirking about how they're the exception. They don't see themselves as the problem, and they simply refuse to do so.

And that's what set off the story of International Slushpile Bonfire Day.

The difference between base cruelty and cultivated sadism is knowing the right words to cause the most damage. For various horrible reasons, I found myself on the bulletin board for an online "resource" for science fiction writers ("resource" meaning "place to hide when the real world tells you that getting stories accepted at nonpaying online venues doesn't make you famous, no more than having Fat Elvis's gut, Buddy Holly's glasses, and Phil Collins's hair makes you a rock star"). When one of the regulars started whining about how he had such problems with getting responses to his submissions that he wondered if editors called HAZMAT teams when they saw his return address on manuscript envelopes, I didn't tell him directly that at least one editor I knew visibly shuddered whenever one of his literary cowpies arrived, complete with the notice "Member, SFWA" on the cover letter, with the bills and junk mail. Naw, that would have been mean.

Instead, that little whimper built up nacre, combining with my own writing and editorial experiences, merging with the faces of the innumerable idiots who learn NOTHING when wasting their time at writer's workshops and "How To Get Published" panels at conventions, and what crawled out was a new and much-needed holiday. Oh, and the howls of "I didn't think that was funny at all" and "That was in extremely bad taste" echoed across the publishing community.

Five years later, I look back upon the vast majority of my published works with nothing but fear and loathing. The Alex Winter short film "Entering Texas" was the source for the best description of my or anyone else's career in science fiction: after watching Butthole Surfers lead singer Gibby Haynes masturbate into a frying pan, one of the characters says "He's just greasing the pan, dear. It's special grease." However, I still have a bit of pride in the tale of International Slushpile Bonfire Day: whenever I get thoroughly tired of dolts telling me "You need to go back to writing," I look back upon that little missive and smile. It's not just enough to encourage the idea that the life work of most "writers" are so foul that their work automatically gets dumped into a furnace somewhere: we should all encourage the idea that the torching will be a public event. To paraphrase a bumper sticker given to me by a friend fifteen years ago, "Slushpiles don't burn by themselves. You need to help. Learn to burn."

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The only way Paul Riddell is returning to writing, particularly anything involving science fiction, is if that work is immediately followed by a large-caliber bullet in his brain. Robert E. Howard, H. Beam Piper, Ernest Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson had the right idea.

I'd like to thank Paul Riddell for so generously allowing me to resurrect and run with his concept. Perhaps someday I will.

Guest Post: The Savings That Matter, by Paul Riddell

Paul Riddell is coming up on five years since he quit writing on a professional basis, and celebrates that he can actually save money since doing so. He claims essays written for 101 Reasons aren’t relapses: he refers to them as “shitting in the well” should someone have otherwise considered asking him to return. As if that was going to happen anyway.

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Here at 101 Reasons To Stop Writing, we can never come up with too many answers to the question “Why should I stop?” Lots of other authorities will argue the ethical (“Think of the children”), moral (“Your fanfic makes Baby Elvis cry”), and social (“Your stories make me pray for a global extinction event”) merits for shutting down the computer, and stepping away, but nobody ever talks about the economic merits of quitting.

Back when I was a kid, any effort in the US to get people to conserve, recycle, or otherwise stop wasting couldn’t be put into social or ethical terms, mostly because too many hippies had poisoned that well a decade earlier. In order to make aluminum recycling effective, instead of murmuring “Well, like, you save lots of energy otherwise used for aluminum refining by recycling your old beer cans, you know?”, the effective method to get recycling proponents was to offer cash incentives for those cans. I made quite a bit of money in my early adolescence by cashing in on typical Texans’ capacity for crap beer and inability to clean up after themselves. Likewise, I didn’t need to be shown lots and lots of pictures of cancerous lungs and nicotine-stained teeth to convince me that smoking was bad: all I needed to do was observe that my friends who smoke (or drank, or both) never had any money for anything else because they were smoking their disposable income. The biggest revelation I ever had was the realization that I’d have saved money by switching writing for black tar heroin … and then quitting heroin. The question isn’t “Can I afford to become a full-time writer?” It’s “Can I afford not to quit?”

First, let’s discount the costs of the “writer’s lifestyle” and the idea that absorbing enough nicotine, alcohol, and THC to scare the shit out of Hunter S. Thompson somehow opens the gateways of creativity, and take a look at actual income. One business report after another makes much hay out of how smoking costs $X million in lost hours every year in the US, but nobody takes the time to research how many man-hours are lost every year to wannabe writers. If you haven’t succumbed, you know the friend or family member who has: “I’m calling in sick so I can finish that article or story.” When they’re at work, they’re whining about how the story ideas are coming out faster than they can scribble them down, but when they’re at home, the ideas just evaporate away and that day is wasted on surfing porn or playing with the cat. Combine that lost time with the threats of disciplinary action when the wannabe gets caught writing at work, the lost income from too many absences, and the drain on national unemployment insurance when the now “liberated” darlings decide to spend the next six months pretending to work on that novel instead of trying to find gainful employment, and having a workforce full of smokers suddenly doesn’t sound so bad. I won’t even start on the shitheads who work contract positions, call in “sick” at least one day a week to work on projects with a ridiculously low return on their energy investments, and then figure “Well, I’ll just hit up everyone on my blog to send me money via PayPal to cover rent.” [There goes that idea – Ed.]

Secondly, let’s look at overhead. Lots of wannabes listen to the advice given by established writers about “reading everything you can and then read some more,” but they’re doing it for all of the wrong reasons. Are they buying that science fiction magazine because they’re interested in the subject matter or because they’re a fan of one of the authors therein? Hell, no: they’re buying it for a submission address or because an author they hate is published therein. You’d be amazed at how many book and magazine sales for mediocre or flat-out bad writers are due to jealousy from even worse wannabes who look forward to snubbing that mediocre writer at awards ceremonies or at the mall.

Are they buying novels because they want to learn from the craft? Nope: they’re seeing what the publishing house is buying in the hope of selling something just like the current editor’s flavor of the month, or to smirk about the editor’s obvious lack of taste before returning to their own bad Tolkien/Howard/Moorcock ripoff. Put another way, if anyone finds a purchaser of a Robert Jordan novel who doesn’t have delusions of being a writer some day, have that purchaser stuffed and mounted as an obvious freak of nature. In a slightly different revenue drain, look at the number of really bad books you bought that were written by friends or people who smiled at you at a book signing and ask yourself how much you’d save if you didn’t succumb to the guilt.

Let’s also go after “research costs”. Besides the books and magazines, let’s cut out the really shitty movies and TV programs you feel obligated to watch because an editor might call you up for an article on them. Do the same for trips to the comic shop. Cut out the trips to the toy store for more tsochkes for your writing desk. Suddenly free up a few hundred dollars a month in disposable income, not counting switching to bare-bones basic cable or turning off the cable entirely? Good for you: you’re catching on.

Also in overhead, let’s cut out the other costs:

• High-speed Internet access? Well, since you aren’t going to be “researching” all day and all night, then you can cut back on access speed because you won’t need such quick response for publisher’s forum flame wars.
• Postage, copying, and packaging? If you aren’t writing, you aren’t blowing whole paychecks on paper for manuscripts, envelopes for replies, and postage to shuttle manuscripts and rejections back and forth, not to mention all of the manuscripts you mail to yourself to protect your fanfiction with “the poor man’s copyright.”
• Writer’s magazines and resources? If you haven’t learned everything you’re going to get from a subscription to Writer’s Digest or Locus from the first issue (namely, if you aren’t a good-looking woman with a nice rack, you stand no chance in Hell of getting noticed by either publication unless you’ve written at least five bestsellers), then cutting out subscriptions to both save you another $60 a year. I’d bring up canceling the subscriptions to magazines that you plan to write for “one of these days”, but we all know that wannabes scream about being asked to subscribe and then cry about how “yet another market” just went under due to financial difficulties, so that’s one cost you’ve already saved.

Even Christmas and birthdays figure in: as soon as you quit, a lot of writer and editor “friends” suddenly have no reason to associate with you, so your gift and Christmas card expenditures get cut in half or more. Oh, and only the sort of dweeb whose entire self-esteem revolves around being a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America or the Horror Writers of America would waste money on membership in the first place, so why continue to pay dues when sanity intervenes and you quit writing?

Then there’s conventions. To hear the writers and wannabes who plead poverty because they have to hit six or seven writer’s conferences or conventions a year, you’d almost feel sorry for them if they were actually getting some possible return for their time and money in the far future. However they may have started, and no matter the genre being covered, conventions for writers exist for one and only one reason: to get free stuff from others while trying to convince them to pay for yours. The con staff expects due obeisance for deigning to set up a convention in a fleabag hotel in the industry’s slow periods (holding a convention in the middle of August in central Texas, for instance, because “the hotel’s a little cheaper” a week before students return to college than a month later), with the nearest restaurant serving anything edible at least ten kilometers away. The big writers show up to demand homage while getting freebies from lesser lights who hope to ride some coattails. The fans show up to demand deep discounts in the dealer’s room and try to wheedle books or magazines from the guests “for meeeeeee?” when they aren’t demanding guest badges because “I’m a pro writer! I wrote for a Beauty and the Beast fanzine back in 1989!”

The only reason editors show up is because a convention environment is the only place where they can stomp into the middle of a discussion and bray “You, of course, know who I am, don’t you?” without getting stomped, and only at a con can an allegedly professional editor intone in public “You know, I refer to my penis as ‘Mel Gibson’” and get bits of nervous laughter instead of howls of “YOU MEAN ‘MEL BROOKS, YOU BLOATED SACK OF SHIT!” The costs of plane fare and plane rental, hotel space, and subsequent decontamination and delousing after the con’s over, not to mention the cost of antidepressants and counseling after you realize “My good Elvis, I actually want to associate with these people?”, versus an occasional bag of remainders and advertising tossed to you for attending if the con staff deigns to do so: cut out the writing, and you cut out the shame and humiliation as well as the financial hemorrhage.

Another benefit to quitting the conventions involves Significant Others and their expenses. If your SO has no interest in your particular writing specialty, they’ll expect to come along with you to the convention, but they’ll also expect extra funds to distract themselves while you’re looking for a train station toilet to lick clean to get the taste from your mouth after kissing that editor’s ass. If your SO is in the Industry, then you can say “Fine, but you’re using your money while I stay home and do laundry. I want to accomplish something of import this weekend.” Best of all, if you were unfortunate enough to get involved with an egomaniac who goes into full “rock-star wife” mode and throws temper tantrums every time s/he doesn’t get preferential treatment because s/he’s married to “one of the STARS!”, then quitting writing not only spares you yet another weekend of crying jags and screaming matches because s/he didn’t get a super-special discount in the dealer’s room, but your very own Nancy Spungen or Kevin Federline will probably pack up and leave for good, or at least not press the issue of reconciliation if the divorce is in process. After all, why would they want to hang around with someone who isn’t on his/her way to “being famous”, even by the pathetic standards of science fiction literature?

Let’s take a final look. Tally all the money you spent on upgrading your computer or buying a new one, not to mention recording media, printer ink, and new peripherals that you “need”. Don’t forget the added expenses of “needing your own writing office” or other special areas for mainlining those creative juices. Add the money you spent on “research material” and medical bills from shooting up that “research material”. Toss on “promotional costs”, as well as the time and money spent on arguing with tax agents and bankruptcy court judges, and then subtract the actual money you made from writing in the last five years. Considering the odds against you of actually becoming a successful full-time writer, wouldn’t it be easier, cheaper, and more productive to take the money you’re burning on this dubious career and roll it into lottery tickets?

Guest Post: Turds, Remainders, And Other End-Products, by Paul Riddell

This the final article in Paul Riddell's A Farewell to Writing trilogy, and a fitting eulogy to his writing career (see his previous articles, Slushpile Freakonomics and The Aspie Dilemma). The memory of his literary achievements will live on, though, at least for the next few weeks until 101 Reasons runs out of steam, or the Paul Riddell who writes for The Scotsman decides to write a book.

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If you take the time to ask a wannabe writer why it's so important to keep on plugging away, don't believe any reason other than the important one. It’s not about telling a good story or changing the world: it's all about getting one's byline on a cover. If the wannabe is slogging away on a NaNoWriMo atrocity, it's because s/he wants to walk into the local bookstore and see a stack of books with his/her name (and maybe a severely Photoshopped picture, with all of the string warts and lamprey scars removed, as well) on the cover. If the wannabe is trying to break into magazines or newspapers, it's to see that byline on the front cover. It's every writer's real motivation: if it weren't, then why do established writers get so angry when their names are missing or misspelled?

I've suspected for years that the real reason why so many writers get drawn into drink or drugs isn't because they're weak: it's because nothing offers the high of seeing that byline. It almost compensates for the incessant "So how does it feel to be published for the first time?" from neighbors and co-workers when you've been slaving under that addiction for the last decade, and it almost compensates for the boss seeing your work for the first time and laying you off because "you have something to fall back on." Every writer is writing for some form of attention, and the likelihood of even a ghostwriting novelist telling a reporter "I don't want an interview! I already got my pay, and I don't want the extra attention!" is right up there with Whitley Strieber's "Deliverance: The Next Generation" anal rape fantasies becoming required reading at NASA. Why else do you see Star Wars novelists screaming about how "Nobody can take away the fact that I'm a New York Times bestselling author!" as if it means something?

Well, let's look at the other side. Just as no high matches that of the first byline spotting, nothing works better at crushing unjustified hubris than making a quick trip to the remainder bin.

For this trick, you'll have to go to a big bookstore at first. I'm not talking about the local hole-in-the-wall run by that mousy fiftysomething who snarls at customers who ask her questions when she could be Websurfing, but a big store. It can be an indie, like Powell's City of Books up in Portland, Oregon, or it could be your neighborhood Borders or Barnes & Noble. For a concentrated dose of humility, find one of those "75 Percent Off Books" outlets. Either way, you're looking for the "Bargain Books" sections, where the store bought huge pallets of books that publishers didn't sell and they've marked down to ridiculous prices.

The Bargain Books section is the Land of Misfit Books. If you really want to understand how the publishing industry works, take some time to go digging through all of the discards. You won’t see many paperbacks: generally, the final fate of a standard paperback if it doesn't sell is that it ends up at a recycling plant. (Appropriately enough, those paperbacks generally get chopped up and pressed into industrial-grade toilet paper; those specks of color in gas station or fast-food restaurant teepee are probably the back covers of Robert Jordan or Piers Anthony novels.) However, you'll see lots of hardcovers and trade paperbacks, and wandering for a while will make you ask one question: "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"

See, it's not just a matter of quality. Good books end up in the Bargain Books because they came out at a particularly bad time, or because the publisher went under before they could be distributed. Crap books end up there not because they didn't sell, but because the publisher figured that doing ten printings would work for a book that only sold through three. You'll see ill-advised books by television comedians that were nothing but ego projects instigated by social-climbing editors, books attempting to capture a buying niche that never existed (between trying to remind GenXers of past glories and the latest attempts to harness "Harry Potter Fever", you'd think that these publishers would just run their money through a tree mulcher and save themselves the embarrassment), and lots of masturbatory volumes by television journalists who assume that anybody cares about how they market the news. Flash-in-the-pan bestsellers and utter flops, they all have one thing in common: they didn't sell, so the publishers sold them in lots, usually for pennies on the dollar, to anyone willing to pay to haul them away.

Now that you're done getting hit with the sight of your favorite and most hated authors being one in literary death, go back to Frumpy Fiftysomething's Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporium. Here's where you'll really get a good dose of publishing reality. Since most of these little stores are started with the same motivation as comic shops (namely, "I buy a lot of books, and I know I'd be just as good at selling romance novels as I am at buying them"), they're usually financed by a windfall inheritance or a divorce settlement, so they're dependent upon people bringing in new inventory because they don't have the money for new books. This means that they get the real WTF books: six copies of the same PublishAmerica novel because the author lives down the street, and his co-workers took the autographed copies he gave them and traded them in for something readable. Thirty years of Star Trek novels, still wrapped in plastic bags to "protect their value", dumped there by the sibling of the shut-in whose cat finally took natural selection into his paws and ate her face. The vanity-press published chrestomathy of the local weekly newspaper "humor" columnist, published as a favor by his favorite strip club because they wanted to reward one of their best customers. Lots and lots of poetry chapbooks that couldn't be given away with the promise of free beer but that continue to be hawked by senile hippies so "the truth can get out there". If it was of any value, it would have been snapped up years ago, and some of the stuff coming through the door was so foul that the owner left it in a box outside for people to grab for free. Even then, a lot of that ends up in a dumpster at the end of the day, because there's only so much crap you can read.

The important thing to remember is that this is every author’s ultimate fate. No matter how successful, no matter how profound, no matter how "important", any author who starts writing will ultimately find his/her work on its way to being composted. It may be seeing that novel in fat stacks in the Bargain Bin section when nobody could find it when it was in print. It may be seeing that newspaper cover story that required a year of research being used to housebreak puppies. Either way, it's all on its way to becoming soil, and any hope of living on in literary immortality has to deal with the promise of mildew, silverfish, and the occasional bored toddler. Every beginner talks about what s/he plans to do once that new novel becomes a bestseller, but is that author really ready for having to pay back the piddling advance, getting tapped by Inland Revenue or the IRS for deductions for promoting a book that went nowhere, and then seeing his/her face staring back from the "Free to a good home" box at the next garage sale?

Guest Post: The Aspie Dilemma, by Paul Riddell

Paul Riddell sent long another contribution to the Stop Writing debate (see his first, Slushpile Freakonomics, if you missed it), while completely undercutting his argument by continuing to write. Just imagine that guy at the end of the bar, throwing back shot after shot while opining to no-one in particular, "I'll tell you another reason you should stop drinking," and claiming that "Next one's the last, I swear."

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For a group that prides itself on self-diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome, wannabe writers sure have a problem with spotting patterns. Your work lunchtime conversations consist of nothing other than bitching about how everybody else is slacking off and you're the only one dragging the company out of its inevitable slide to bankruptcy, and you wonder why you aren't invited out to the bar after work. Your diet consists of nothing but McDonald's Happy Meals and Doritos served in a 55-gallon drum, and you can't figure out why your ever-expanding ass is generating its own event horizon. You can't understand why that hot little number in Accounting won't respond to your repeated requests for a date when you send them on official Star Wars valentines. Five jobs in two years, and every last one ended with you receiving a card signed by your co-workers reading "Don’t let the gates of Hell smack you on the butt on your way in." The temps you're overseeing quit within days of meeting you, and the few that remain talk about getting together to play a little game of "Let's frag the lieutenant". Your parents preface Christmas calls with "Let us know if you're going to be in town, because we won't be here then." Your last three ex-boyfriends and your ex-husband promptly married someone else within six months of leaving you, and your ex-husband came very close at one point to leaving you for another man. Oh, and your short stories keep getting rejected by every venue that receives them, many times without the envelope being opened. Naw, it can't have anything to do with you, can it?

Kids, it’s time to not only to use Occam's Razor as a diagnostic tool, but to wave it over our heads, howling "Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!" at the tops of our lungs. The reason why you've been unable to exchange your dead-end job for the luxury of writing short stories and poetry on a full-time basis isn't because of some horrible conspiracy intended to keep you down. Riddell’s Law doesn't apply here, either: yes, a lot of editors demonstrate the Peter Principle every time they trip on the carpet pattern every day on their way into their offices, but those are only the ones who have their jobs because nobody else wants it. Yes, you'll see writers who might be getting contracts due to a particular ability to schmooze editors or raw sex appeal, but they're usually flavors-of-the-week that'll be back to working at Starbucks before you can say "Kristine Kathryn Rusch" when their books bomb.

The reason why your stories, articles, poems, and novels aren't selling is because you aren't offering anything that anyone is willing to exchange money to acquire, and the odds are pretty good that you will continue down that sad path for the rest of your writing career. All six months of it.

That's not to say that there aren't any editors or publishers who have it out for you, especially if you respond to every rejection with a 3000-word tirade written with green crayon on toilet paper and signed with a dead gopher. (When Harlan Ellison sent a dead gopher Fourth Class Mail to a publisher who was screwing him over, it was a foul but thoroughly understandable response to a situation that could have been resolved peaceably and equitably. When you do it because you read about his doing it, it just means that you get more familiarity with the words "restraining order", "harassment suit" and "biorecovery fees".) Ranting to editors about rejections is like arguing with your local Officer Barbrady when you get caught speeding in a school zone. The only thing you've achieved is to move yourself from the slush pile to the "Pull Out and Burn" file.

Now, I could give a lot of positive suggestions instead of continuing to belabor the point: I'm just as guilty of ignoring patterns as you. If you wanted to improve your and everyone else's odds of getting published, you could decide to subscribe to the publications whose slushpile you defile: if ten percent of the people who flood a magazine with unsolicited submissions actually bothered to subscribe, the magazine industry wouldn't be in such a mess, and you'd actually see what sort of stories the editor is accepting. (This implies that you'd actually read something in the publication other than the Submission Guidelines, but I'm building dream castles and measuring for drapes.) You could do more to get people to put down the TV remote and PlayStation and read. Volunteering at your local public library is a start, as is organizing reading programs at your local bookstores, but the best thing you can do is dispel some of the stereotypes of people who read for pleasure. (As it is, the worst sort of science fiction fans have so badly poisoned the well that getting caught by the boss with a complete collection of Anal Rampage or Chicks With Dicks is less of a career-killer than being caught with the latest Orson Scott Card or Gregory Benford.)

Or…you could break the pattern and stop writing. Right now. Or do you like getting the same response to the same action and getting upset because you’re expecting a different outcome?

Guest Post: Slushpile Freakonomics, by Paul Riddell

Paul T. Riddell had given up writing. For five years, he wrote nothing but paleontological research papers and the occasional blog post about paleontological research - which can hardly be considered writing, in the sense that he ever expected someone to read it. He had come to accept that his writing talents were moderate, his sense of humour was transient, his chosen genre (SF) was already hopelessly overpopulated with moderate talents, and his chances of building a successful career out of contributor's copies was non-existent. Five years later, even finding examples of his columns, from the fossilised traces of long-extinct SF rags, is an exercise in digital archaeology.

Until he found 101 Reasons, whereupon he felt compelled to dust off his academically-atrophied sarcasm and write, again.

Ye Gods, I've actually inspired someone to write.

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It's an unrelenting fantasy, along the lines of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series or George W. Bush demonstrating competence at anything other than turning water into urine. Whenever the economy goes sour, and companies demonstrate the main concerns of their management by laying off everyone within the organization who doesn't have an MBA, the willing victims of one of the most pervasive alternative employment scams get hit with the delusion: "Well, now that I don't have anything else to do with my time besides watching television, now I have the time to become a freelance science fiction writer!"

A lot of people benefit from that delusion, but not usually the wannabe writer. The dream usually lasts about six months, until the unemployment benefits run out, the savings run out, and "any day now, the checks will be pouring in" won't keep the landlord or the bank from releasing the dogs. In the meantime, Writer’s Digest has a big chunk of cash from sales of magazine subscriptions and those godawful guides on "how to write science fiction". The people who sell "story wheels" and other gadgets purporting to instill creativity into the hopeless have their money, as do any venues promising to sell accurate and methodical lists of open markets and those other wannabes who got caught in early layoffs who now teach "success in writing" night classes.

In the end, if the wannabe actually gets something completed, Publish America and XLibris will be glad to assist with filling in the blanks on "A (blank) and his (blank) soon are (blank)." Oh, and the post office gets its own "render unto Caesar" cut. The only people who lose out are the editors and slush pile readers at any publishing concern with a public address, because eight hours of reading unsolicited Absolutely Fabulous/Farscape crossover slashfic would leave anybody with the urge to relax that evening after work by grabbing a sniper rifle and shooting at school buses.

That's not to say that the enterprising wannabe can't set himself up for a career of incredible bitterness or unrelenting fantasy in freelance writing. The problem here is the timing.

See, at about the time most of the newly unemployed figure that they'd be much happier sitting at home writing instead of jobhunting or asking their parents "Have you already rented out my old room?", it's already too late. Magazine editors already have a nice fat pile of contacts for willing and dependable writers, and they're already bombarded by requests for favors from old college chums who can pay for heroin or rent but not both. Book editors are already switching over from paying someone to haul the slushpile to the dump to using the waste paper in the furnace to heat the offices. The only affiliations that will get a wannabe’s foot in the door are purely tribal, and plastering the words "Member, SFWA" all over a manuscript will only guarantee that International Slushpile Bonfire Day comes early. The trick here is to start writing when things start getting good, because that’s about the only chance for the mediocre to break in without college connections or serious bribes.

Here's the concept. Instead of waiting until the hammer of unemployment forces you into accepting that giving two-dollar blow jobs on a street corner is preferable to the humiliations inflicted by editors at Wired, wait until the economy starts looking up. That's when you start seeing unemployable writers with delusions of making an evolutionary leap start setting up publications of their own. The Cat Piss Man with fifteen years of desktop publishing experience and just as many years of story rejections has an income tax refund check burning a hole in his pocket, and it’s just enough to publish one issue. The fratboy who put together a neighborhood zine when he was eight realizes that he's getting far too old to continue with the title "trust fund brat", so he starts a weekly newspaper. The crank writer who constantly bitches about the state of science fiction gets a job that pays marginally more than his old insurance company mail room slot, and he figures that now's the time to edit an anthology "to show them all". All of them need content, and since real writers are now getting work at real publications, they’ll take anything they can get.

Waiting until things are good also works for promotion and presentation, too. In the science fiction field, good times in employment means that more computer programmers decide to take the disposable income normally assigned to action figure acquisition and use it to start a convention, and certain family-run organizations seeking a way to, erm, launder certain income streams are more than willing to chip into obvious losing propositions if they distract certain tax collection services. Either way, while nobody actually accomplishes a damn thing at a convention other than recycling beer, having spare fundage from a real job gives leverage that the otherwise penniless hordes of wannabes don't have. Whether it's financing a party with an aftermath cleanup that would have horrified Hunter S. Thompson, or buying a dress with a neckline so plunging that everyone can see your clitoral piercing, the idea is to get the front cover of Locus without actually having to write anything. That’ll come later.

Okay, so let's recap. Bad times means more writing competition. Bad times means Mom will yell at you if you spend your days writing instead of jobhunting. "Good times" means more venues, more resources, and more opportunities. "More opportunities" means that you’ll have a nice fat list of stories and/or articles to show off to editors when the economy goes to hell again in the future. Unfortunately for you, "good times" means more employment opportunities, and Mom will kick you out of the house if you don’t have a job by the time you turn 50. Does that mean that you’ll be back to working 60-hour weeks and you won’t have time to write? Well, sucks to be you.

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Don't encourage him. He'll just keep writing.