.
Instant Message No. 903 (March 2, 2014) and No. 904 (April 16, 2014), twice monthly newsletter of the New England Science Fiction Association, with news, meeting minutes, convention information, etc. Information: NESFA Clubhouse, 504 Medford Street, Somerville MA 02145; phone: (617) 625-2311; fax: (617) 776-3243; e-mail:
The NASFA Shuttle Vol. 34 No. 4 (April 2014), monthly newsletter of the North Alabama Science Fiction Association. NASFA news, reviews, etc. Single copy: $2.00. Membership: $25/year, subscription only: $15/year. Information: NASFA, Inc., PO Box 4857, Huntsville AL 35815-4857.
Prometheus Vol. 32 No. 1 (Fall 2013) and Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter 2014), quarterly newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society with news, reviews, letters, classifieds, etc. Non-member subscriptions: $20.00 per year, $25.00 international. Information: Libertarian Futurist Society, 650 Castro St. Suite 120-433, Mountain View CA 94041; e-mail:
P.S.F.S. News (April 2014 and May 2014), newsletter of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society with news, meeting minutes, calendar, convention information, etc. Information: PSFS Secretary, Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, PO Box 8303, Philadelphia PA 19101-8303; e-mail:
The SFWA Bulletin Vol. 47 No. 4 (Winter 2014), journal of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, published quarterly, with articles, news, dialogues, market reports, etc. Free to members; for others, $10.00 per issue, $40.00 per year. Write SFWA, Inc., PO Box 3238, Enfield CT 06083-3238; e-mail:
STAR*LINE No. 37.2 (Spring 2014), journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, published quarterly. Subscription rates: 4 issues/year: $10 PDF + Dwarf Stars; 1 issue: $2.50 PDF, $5 print + $2 sh. Information: F.J. Bergmann, W5679 State Road 60, Poynette WI 53955-8564; e-mail:
Vector No. 275 (Spring 2014), the critical journal of the BSFA, with articles, interviews, reviews, etc. Single copy: £4.00. Information: Martin Potts, 61 Ivy Croft Road, Warton, Nr. Tamworth, B79 0JJ, UK; e-mail:
CATALOGS RECEIVED
DreamHaven Books, 2301 E. 38th Street, Minneapolis MN 55406; phone: (612) 823-6161; e-mail:
Wrigley Cross Books, PMB 455, 2870 NE Hogan Rd., Ste E, Gresham OR 97030; phone: (503) 667-0807; toll free: (877) 694-1467; e-mail:
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KAMERON HURLEY: BUSTING DOWN THE ROMANTIC MYTH OF WRITING FICTION, AND MITIGATING AUTHOR BURNOUT
One of the most interesting parts of working toward being a career novelist is watching how many of your peers stay in the game. My first real brush with the death of the dream was after I attended Clarion in 2001. By the end of the workshop, we already had several folks who’d come into it with the expectation that they were ready to be career novelists, but who decided that no, actually, this slog wasn’t for them at all.
You might think that meant Clarion was a waste of time for them, but let’s put it this way: imagine how valuable it’d be to realize you didn’t really want to pursue a career, hobby, or passion that hogged all your time and headspace. Imagine having the freedom to put that energy somewhere else. For those folks, just knowing that writing novels for a living wasn’t at all what they thought they wanted was just as valuable as having the workshop experience validate their initial choice.
Kameron Hurley
We’re raised on romantic writer myths. We learn this gig is all about toiling alone in a cabin in the woods, drinking and smoking too much, battling depression and insomnia and squeezing words onto the page like blood from a stone. It’s a solitary, transformative act. I see media perpetuate this myth quite a lot – there are obsessions over the writing ‘‘process’’ and writing ‘‘quirks,’’ trying to get every author to dish on how drinking a bottle of aloe juice while doing jumping jacks on top of a car is the only way they can kickstart their creativity in the morning.
Throughout my teens, I endured writing workshop after writing workshop where people talked about their passion for writing. It was a compulsion, a need, something they could not stop. That was all very well and good, I thought, but people are driven to compulsively drink alcohol, too. I was more interested in learning how to get better at writing than defending the passionate, unknowable mysticism of how the sausage got made.
What I’ve found over the years is that there are various checkpoints along the writing path that lead to a writer dropping out of the game – low sales, bad business experiences, health and personal issues, financial issues – but most of all, what leads people to quit is general burnout. It’s burnout on the whole thing: the rigorous deadlines, the disillusionment with publishing, the failed expectations, bad reviews, and constant criticism and self-doubt.
Sometime during the extensive rewriting of my fourth published novel, writing fiction ceased to be fun for me. Not just ‘‘not always fun,’’ but really, 24/7 not fun. It had become pure, unadulterated grind. I’m used to writing for a living – I’m in marketing and advertising, writing all the spam e-mail that clutters up your inbox and the junk mail you toss into the trash. I had no expectation that I’d be in love with writing those all the time. I expected to be burned out on writing marketing copy all the time. But not fiction. Because… romance?
The fantasy I sell with spam e-mail – easy money, an escape from 9-5 living, attractiveness to your preferred type of human (in four easy payments!), and insurance against impending apocalyptic disasters – isn’t something I have to be romantically passionate about to do well. I also came at it with the expectation that it wasn’t something I did all by myself in some mystical way. I worked with a team of folks – creative director, designer, production manager, account manager, marketing managers, product managers – to make great work. It wasn’t just me chugging back cocktails at midnight in the office like an episode of Mad Men, coming up with something brilliant. It was a process. It was work. And when the work got too suffocating, there were always my colleagues to commiserate with.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t until I transitioned from being a hobbyist writer to a book-a-year writer that I realized the different expectations I had for my fiction writing, compared to my marketing writing, were actually toxic to my career. I expected that writing fiction would always be fun – it was my passion, the one thing I’d always done. When it wasn’t fun anymore, I’d just stop, right? The ‘‘I’ll write when it’s fun’’ mantra is why my first published book took four or five years to write.
Enter deadlines, and you kind of have to throw that foolish idea out the window. Deadlines required that I come up with words even when they weren’t there (especially when they weren’t there), even when it wasn’t fun. So my second book took just 16 months, and the third 14 months. I rewrote my fourth from scratch in nine months, and I’ll have written my fifth in 11 months, if all goes as expected.
It’s hard to have a joyful, fun-making experience 100% of the time when you’re working at that pace and holding down a day job. I enjoy the writing I do for my day job, too, but I’ve learned to recognize over the years that there are two types of writing there: big, fun, challenging campaigns where I get to solve clients’ problems, and boring, nonsense, paint-by-numbers crap that pays the bills.
I’ve learned to expect it. I take the joy when I can.
Yet when I started to lose my joy in fiction this year, I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I feared burnout. I wondered, just as those folks must have at Clarion, if this was really the right thing to be do
ing in my spare time.
What I had to come to grips with is that writing novels wasn’t a magical merry-go-round of nonstop fun. More often than not, just like any other job, it was a mix of joy and grind, incompetence and compassion. What set me up for the burnout was the mythology we’ve created about the transcendent power of the written word, about writing for ‘‘passion’’ and about how loving what you do somehow means it’s no longer ‘‘work.’’
The most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is that writing novels shouldn’t feel like a job. It encourages younger and newer writers to work for little or no pay. It convinces those with a book or two under their belt that there’s something wrong with them when the writing is no longer fun all the time. Worst of all, when we hit bumps along the road, we’re convinced we’re the only ones to feel this type of burnout, and that there’s something wrong with us because of it.
One of the most powerful things I ever did for my career, and my continued sanity, was to get to know other writers facing the same challenges. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook, supplemented with the occasional convention, have connected me with incredible people willing to share their own fraught publishing journeys. What stunned me more than anything else is how each of us thought our experiences were entirely unique, when it turned out we shared many of the same fears and frustrations.
What will keep me writing far longer than I expected is not, necessarily, my passion, my talent, or the romantic story of how stringing together words will help me transcend the mortal plane. No, the deeper I get into the publishing game, the more I realize that what will keep me going when everything crumbles around me is the incredible support, advice, and commiseration I’ve gotten from other writers. It’s that camaraderie we should be celebrating, and talking more about, instead of doubling down on the myth of the lone wolf writer who conquers the world with pen in one hand and whiskey bottle in the other.
I may often run around my house with pens and whiskey bottles, but writers are not sustained by whiskey and romantic myths alone.
We’re sustained by one another, and our fantastically true stories of the oftentimes funny – and sobering – reality of our chosen profession.
–Kameron Hurley
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INTERNATIONAL REPORT FROM INDIA
POPULARIZING SCIENCE WRITING AND CELEBRATING SCIENCE FICTION: A REPORT OF THE 14TH SCIENCE FICTION CONFERENCE IN INDIA by M.H. Srinarahari
The Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies (IASFS) organized the 14th science fiction conference in collaboration with the Department of English of St. Teresa’s College in Kochi, February 14-16, 2014 at Kerala State in India. The state has the highest literacy in the country, with Malayalam as the spoken language. It is astonishing to note that no remarkable contribution has yet been made by Keralites to the SF genre. IASFS hoped to create a platform for the younger generation to be exposed to SF through the world conference.
During the inaugural session, in his annual report on IASFS, General Secretary M.H. Srinarahari mentioned that in 1988 the magazine 2001 from New Delhi ran an interview conducted via satellite with Isaac Asimov in the US. The interview was carried out by the team of Mukul Sharma (Editor, 2001), Chandan Mitra (coordinator), and The Times of India assistant editor Jug Suraiya. That interview marked the beginning of the second wave of the World Science Fiction movement in India.
Seated: N.D. Ramakrishnan, Dominic Alessio, C.G. Ramachandra Nair, A.P. Helen, T.P. Srinivasan, Rajashekharan Pillai, K.S. Purushothaman, Frank Roger, Krishnan Kutty, Arvind Mishra, M.H. Srinarahari
Exactly a decade later, the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies was established, on January 2, not only Asimov’s birthday but also the centennial of the publication of Indian SF work ‘‘Agosh’’ by scientist Jagadishchandra Bose. IASFS promotes research work in the field of SF. It has organized 11 National conferences, at Chennai, Gandhigram, Pondicherry, Aurangabad, Bangalore, and Mysore. The three world conferences were held consecutively at Coimbatore, Pune, and Kochi.
After the traditional invocation, former Ambassador, vice-chairman, and executive head of Kerala State Higher Education Council T.P. Srinivasan lit a lamp symbolizing the inauguration of the conference. In his speech he imagined how scientific progress would progress in the next 50 years. In his Gedenken Experiment he predicted highly sophisticated vehicles which would transport him to the venue of the conference without the present traffic jams, and indicated that on his arrival at the venue, his thoughts would have been transformed into a written speech in any desired language. He also foresaw that the passage between the real and the virtual worlds would be narrowed.
The executive vice president and ex-officio principal secretary of Kerala State Council of Science & Technology Education Rajashekaran Pillai delivered the presidential address narrating how the state government programs have been successful in popularizing science writing.
In his keynote address, Dr. Ramachandran Nair not only tried to define SF but also went back to 500 BC, when Yoga Basista made attempts to introduce SF elements in his creations. He acknowledged the works of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond Jones, John Christopher, Frederic Brown, John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein, Daniel Keyes, Tom Godwin, Clifford Simak, Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and Jayanth Narlikar, and spoke about the contribution of British and American SFwritings in the growth of the genre. He drew the conclusion how SF has moved from possibility to plausibility.
IASFS President Purushothaman highlighted the gradual increase in the number of participants from the first conference until today.
Malayalam science writer Krishnan Kutty and SF writer Arvind Mishra were honored on this occasion. Speaking on the occasion, Mishra appreciated the years of efforts of IASFS in bringing all the SF aspirants together in the country.
Frank Roger, a leading SF writer from Belgium, said that he had attended a number of conferences in North America, but this was his first in India. Alessio Dominic, a history professor & dean of international programs from Richmond American International University in London, expressed his happiness in finding the present conference to be unique compared to others.
Dr. Helen, the principal of the college, highlighted the achievements of the students during its 125 years of establishment. Dr. Celine welcomed the gathering, and Dr. Renuka gave the vote of thanks.
There were eight plenary sessions during the three-day conference. Professor Rangarajan spoke on ‘‘The Signs of Science Fiction and Nebulous Itineraries’’. In his speech he tried to trace the history of science from Homer’s Iliad.
Dr. C.G. Ramachandra Nair, former chairman, of the Science, Technology, Environment committee and ex-officio Secretary to the government of Kerala and former dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Kerala spoke on ‘‘The Enchanting Worlds of Modern Science Fiction’’.
The lamp is lit to inaugurate the conference.
Atanu Bhattacharya spoke on Bengali SF and explained how different the Indian atmosphere is in the development of SF compared to the West, as the English departments in Indian Universities are still skeptical in considering SF as a research topic.
The luminaries of the Malayalam SF sessions were Professor Babu Joseph, Professor S. Shivadas, Professor V.P.N. Namboodiri, Dr. Ambatt Vijayakumar, G.S. Unnikrishnan, and P.N. Krishnankutty. Professor Thomas Mathew chaired the session.
G.S. Unnikrishnan, a leading science writer in Malayalam, spoke on ‘‘Writing Science for Children of the New Age’’. He expressed the utmost importance of creating future scientists and scientific enthusiasts during this super-scientific age. Science literature in our country has to become better equipped to meet this challenge. He observed that since the children are already exposed to the media, media should cater to their needs. Science writers should shift to new ways and styles of writing rather than sticking to the traditional Chandamama style of writing. Being a science writer, Unnikrishnan thinks one should be choosy in selecting topics, and sho
uld make use of broad-based ideas, primary sources, focusing on a particular point, re-organizing the ideas, enjoying the research, and writing about what is interesting for the author. Sharing his personal experience, he suggested that different methods of writing fiction and non-fiction matter. In his lengthy speech, the agricultural official suggested that for successful writing one has to think like a child, play with words, bring conversations, and try unusual formats like turning the straight narrative into a mystery, a quiz, show, a puzzle, or some other innovative mode. While doing so, one has to link new information to something kids already know. He suggested using storytelling techniques, making use of reliable sources, and knowing one’s own market. Lastly, Unnikrishnan suggested that good science books need to be translated from English into the Indian vernacular languages. He has observed that translated works on topics like DNA, satellites, immunology, light, and planet Earth are liked by children.
Another science writer, Malayalam Shivadas, initially established how effective fiction writing is and called for writers to shift their writing from the traditional form to one which inspires, imparts lofty feelings, induces great ideas, and uplifts human mind. Citing the attempts made by P.T. Bhaskara Panicker and N.V. Krishna Warrier, the pioneers in establishing Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, he acknowledged the way they inspired authors to write for children. Speaking about the latest trends in science writing in the Malayalam language, Shivadas observed an increases in eco-spirituality and ecological ethics in stories.
Dominic Alessio presented a paper on ‘‘Re-thinking the History of Science Fiction, Space Exploration from a British Colonial Perspective: The Tale of New Zealand’s The Great Romance (1881)’’. The first volume accounts the 19th-century protagonist John Brenton Hope, who awakes after 193 years of deliberate chemical sleep and discovers a wonderful future society replete with mechanical marvels, immense orderly metropolises, and a beautiful young woman named Edith Weir. Though the second volume is a continuation of the journey, it describes the spaceship Star Climber, which helps colonize Venus. Alessio discovers that this is the first work in the history of science fiction which seriously deals with colonization and alien species in particular.
Locus, June 2014 Page 6
