brightly_lit

Supernatural Summergen is a gen fanworks exchange I've taken part in every summer since 2013. Spring comes and I start looking forward to it, every year. But, well, the show's been off the air for a long time now, and the fandom's been in decline ever since, especially the lj fandom that spawned this exchange. (Although about 70 fics for this fandom have been posted TODAY, and it's just after ten in the morning as I write this. !) For all that, there was still a lot of participation last year! But this year, the time when they usually announce it came and went. We were sure there wasn't going to be a summergen this year, because weeks passed beyond the time they usually announce it. My friend even asked the mods if it was happening this year and got no response ... but about a month after the usual time, they announced it's happening again this year!! I don't write for Supernatural anymore except for this exchange. It's not where my fannish heart lies anymore. But I'm not over this exchange! I would write fics for this forever. There's a core group of fans who've been there, participating in this thing together, for all this time. It's become a part of the fabric of my life. I'm so glad I don't have to give it up yet.

The seed company was upstanding and sent me replacement seeds for free. We concluded something must have happened to the seeds in transit. She encouraged me to still try planting the first set of seeds, noting that some seeds are more durable than others, so I did. To my delight, the sorghum seeds are coming up! I tried sorghum syrup for the first time recently, and it is indeed delicious. The other thing I considered growing in that bed was corn (which looks almost identical to sorghum, oddly, but apparently they don't cross-breed), but it was such a pain to get the kernels off the cobs to can them last summer, and grocery-story corn is so cheap and delicious, that I decided instead to plant the thing I've never grown before that's rare and expensive to purchase. So, until one of the apocalypses that seems to be headed our way necessitates my growing my own corn, I'll have a little fun with sorghum.

In the meantime, if you have any tips on how to more easily remove kernels from corn cobs, I'm all ears. Some people use a method of pushing them through the center of a bundt cake pan, which seemed like a brilliant miracle solution when I first heard it, but since then I've tried it myself, and watched videos of other people doing it, and ... I dunno, I guess the first person I heard about it from must have gotten lucky, because it turns out it's not generally an easy solution after all. I even bought an electric knife to try to help with it, which didn't work at all, so I just laboriously hacked the kernels off with a knife last year, which is both dangerous and hard on the hands and wrists. So I'm really hoping for a hack that makes it at least a little less dangerous and arduous.

I finally realized the next step in my journey as an author of original work is to make physical copies of all my books available. I've been working on that lately, and tearing my hair out at every stage. What should be minor technological issues easily overcome invariably end up being hours of maddening frustration. For example, I've always saved all my images as I worked on the covers at various stages of completion, and was extremely careful to save a copy before the layers were merged so I could go back and make changes later, only when I went to work on it this time, surprise! No files with layers. I looked up the problem and discovered my image editing software automatically overwrites the existing file with the new file of a different type! (!!!) (!!!! :-#) So all the unmerged files I saved as the filetype specific to the editing program right before trying to ALSO save a .png or what-have-you were erased. I've never before used a program that didn't keep files of every type you saved it as! Well, extremely frustrating lesson learned, I guess. I'll be saving them under different names, on different drives -- everything I can think of to make it so they can't overwrite them! But in the meantime, I'll have to start from scratch with all too many of these covers.

When I was a kid dreaming of being an author, I thought making the covers would be the funnest part! Instead, once I've finished a book, I've just been so excited to publish it, bogged down by all these difficulties that I seem to encounter every time I try to make a cover. It's like trudging through sand, every step of the way -- not least because every time I release a book and make a cover, I always have to learn a bunch of stuff about the image-editing program I use, which is powerful but not intuitive, which I then forget by the next time I release a book, lol. Also because for some reason I always end up deciding I need to use some complex effect that requires hours of research, watching YouTube videos, and then accounting for more recent changes in the software that make the videos out of date, etc. etc. Maybe it can be fun, if I just stop being impatient to get the words out there and put the effort into delivering it in as appealing a cover as possible, because what's the point in publishing the book if you don't end up with a product that looks appealing enough to attract readers?

I remember in high school, I and everyone I knew who submitted stuff to the school literary magazine were always writing untitled poems and stories. Coming up with a title seemed kind of pretentious and like a lot of effort -- sometimes more effort than writing the poem! We felt like, the poem's good! Just read it. But the literary magazine required every submission to have a title, so we'd labor over what to call it, and usually just end up throwing some half-assed title on there. Now, though, I get it. Yes, the poem is good. The book is good. Good enough to deserve whatever must go into its presentation. It still seems kind of pretentious, or slick, to put so much effort into sales when you just want to think about art. A cover that's both commercially appealing and art is even more challenging. But it's worth it.

One not-fun thing that's happened with my original work is that though at first I received only four- and five-star ratings, lately three of my books have fallen below four stars overall, two on Goodreads and one on Amazon, and I'm afraid people who might actually like those books will no longer give them a chance -- or give any of my books a chance.

The first of my books to fall below four stars was Restraint. It had five stars -- people really liked it -- then out of nowhere, someone gave it a one-star rating (just a rating without a review). This was when antis were at their height. The book is about a teen male prostitute. He's eighteen when the book begins, but the book does reference that he's been at it since he was fourteen. On Kindle, you can tell when someone's read your book. They might just buy it, or if you've made it part of Kindle Unlimited (which I always do), you get paid according to how many pages they read, and you can see how many have been read recently of any given book. There had been no action on that book in years, neither purchases nor page reads (yes, I'm very popular lol), and then out of nowhere comes this one-star rating, so I don't know what else to assume except that they read the description (and maybe one of the two reviews on Goodreads, which inaccurately says he's seventeen at the start of the book), decided any book on such a topic is Pure Evil, and gave it the one-star rating.

But the thing is, my book doesn't treat it as a cool, sexy thing that he's a prostitute; he has a troubled past and suffers from addiction. It's angst and pathos; he's meant to be a tragic character (though I can never resist writing as happy an ending as may be). The book is the story of his journey through it. There are inevitably a lot of sex scenes, but it's about as inexplicit as a book that goes along with a prostitute on dozens of his appointments can be, because I'm just not comfortable writing explicit stuff (thus, writing a book about a prostitute that's fifty percent sex scenes was a challenge, I can tell you, lol). ( spoiler ) So even Mr. or Ms. One Star, had they bothered to read the book, probably would have been satisfied with where things ended up.

The next to go below four stars was The Book of Jonah, and ... yeah, I knew that one was going to be controversial, to say the least. A teen throuple, one of whom proves to be a prophet, with a story that delves deeply into mental illness, religion, bullying, suicide ... okay. I get it. I expected that with that one, and even Restraint, since it's also about a very controversial topic.

But then there's X, which, goddamnit, is the one book I had that I believed was above reproach, if only because it's so beautifully written. I think people have decided it's supposed to be an M/M novel, because it involves a gay romance, but I didn't write it with that in mind; to me it was just romantic literary fiction that happened to revolve around a gay couple. I know M/M is a huge genre on Kindle right now, and the fact that it's a romantic story about a gay couple plus the (awesome, wonderful!!) first review someone did leave also gave that impression, but it doesn't contain what people are looking for in M/M; there's all but no sex, and what little is there is very inexplicit. It just wouldn't have been relevant to the story I was trying to tell to put more sex in there.

I can't help but think there's a little bit of "This book ain't that great" in response to the glowing review that one reviewer left (the only reviewer who ever really "got" one of my books, except for my friend who kindly wrote a review for most of my books on Goodreads), a backlash. Also, on Goodreads people do challenges to do things like "read a book that starts with every letter of the alphabet." Books that start with the letter X are hard to find, so I think that's how most people are finding it (that's how that one reviewer says she found it), and if you're just reading a book to check a box, yeah, there's no reason to think you'll like it, so that could be why so many of them are rating it three stars. But I guess I'll never really know, since they don't bother to leave a review! Maybe you don't like the story, but come on, it's a good book! Also though, again, I know some of the people leaving those ratings aren't actually reading it, and people who haven't actually read a book, I've found, do tend to give it three stars. (Whyyyy rate a book you haven't read???)

I feel a bit better just for having gotten all this off my chest, but it is still very very frustrating. I know sometimes I do write about controversial or challenging topics. For some reason, those are the books that more people seem interested in?? I really don't care if someone hates one of my books. Go ahead, leave a review, and say WHY you hated it. Because when I want to buy something, I always read the lowest reviews, because they give as much insight into whether you actually want to buy this thing as the five-star ones. One person's poison is another person's pleasure. But just rating it down, especially for an author who has so few ratings or reviews to begin with, does no one any good (except maybe the person who gave me the one-star review; I'm guessing that gave them a lot of satisfaction >:-#).

Like, how do you get original fiction to the people who want to see it?? I know how to do it with fanfic: put it on AO3! They search for what they want to see and they'll find your work. Even if you're writing genre fiction, there are groups where you can advertise, although people seem distrustful of anyone who's selling something, afraid their intentions are impure. But it's just really hard to make that connection for literary fiction. I would be most grateful for any ideas anyone has.

I haven't been around for a while. I lost the thread here; I couldn't figure out what to talk about or what to say.

I think I have indeed finally found it, and that is, in addition to all the other things I like to blog about (fandom, anime, YouTube, gardening), to talk about my original fiction. In my writers group, I've spent most of the time working on figuring out how to let the people who might like my work know it exists! I don't usually write genre fiction, so though I feel like I write the type of fiction that was far and away the most common in my youth, nowadays it's hard to figure out where are the people who still read that, especially my specific brand of it.

I finally realized that the best thing I can do is blog about my work! For the first time ever. I was raised to be quiet and humble, but damnit, I made all these beautiful works I'm so proud of, and I want to talk about them! In fandom spaces, since my original fiction is very like my fanfic, inasmuch as I've always loved fandom tropes, and all that stuff is the same kind of thing I write about in my original fiction.

Because that's another problem with finding its audience: I've gotten the impression that some of it is hard to find a way into, so I've thought maybe talking about my inspirations and intentions here might help. Also, I have a looooot to say about my original fiction that I've never written anywhere!

Also, I've really missed blogging and participating in a fandom space. I've thought often of that long list of excellent shows in my sticky post that I got to watch that year, as anime has been in a dreadful isekai-only drought ever since. (Is this Sword Art Online's fault?? Did every anime studio instantly book nothing but isekai shows when it was so popular, and only now have most of them finally been released so they can start making other kinds of shows?) Every time a batch of new anime came out, I thought surely the nothing-but-isekai phase would have to finally be over, but after years of that, this time I gave up ... and suddenly there's a bunch of good new shows! Can A Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? is pretty good. Witch Watch is fun. We've got a new season of Windbreaker, a My Hero prequel, a new season of Andor that I'm equal parts anticipating and dreading, Our Love Has Always Been 10 Centimeters Apart and Mob Psycho 100 are older shows I just discovered and am quite enjoying, and To Be Hero X, which so far is AMAZING!!! Finally, some good stuff to watch!! What a relief. Because we'd resorted to rewatching old favorites when we simply could not find anything new to enjoy, and I was getting scared tastes had changed so much that there would never be anything new that appealed to me ever again. It's still really hard to find anything live-action we enjoy. I'd love to hear any recommendations you might have.