Ever Wonder?

[lit_gal]

Okay, I need a bit of a break from writing, so we're doing something different. A lot of writers have been doing these wonderful little "DVD extra" type commentaries. Um, yeah, I know I'm not that interesting when writing about writing, so I figured I'd do it a little different. If you have a question about any of my stories, why I included certain points or how I write, ask here. I'll give an honest answer.

Comments

[kungfunurse.livejournal.com]

You read my original story Slave King... right? The publisher said it was predictable, just another retelling of Brer Rabbit, and that she didn't "buy" the world.

Now that you've talked about "Slave King" out in public, I feel free to beg for a sequel. Your story has been on my mind lately, but I didn't want to mention it until I knew the publishing status. If you like, we can make it a last minute Moonridge deal - you set what you consider to be a fair price and write me a slashy sequel! *G* (I'm quite serious about this - I really want more of that story. I'm fascinated by the world building and character creation you've done)

Now then, on to the Publisher's comments. Firstly you should know that I've never tried to publish anything. However I've got a lot of life experience with people putting me down, and this is what I've learned. The publisher is not there to publish the good stories. S/he is there to make the company money. The two don't always go together like they should. Also, as I understand it a LOT of political bull-shit starts coming into play in the publishing world. The people they're going to publish likely have ties in the writing world already, or are family members, or have something else going for them that has nothing to do with their stories.

Secondly, even if the review on your story made sense (which to my mind, it doesn't, because your story is about a lot more than a man tricking his attacker into throwing him into the brier patch), even if it made sense, So What?? What in the world would be wrong with a retelling of Brer Rabbit? That was a masterpiece of subtle humor and crafty intellectualism in defeating a bullying antagonist. There's a reason Aesop's fables are classics. If you'd chosen to rewrite Romeo and Juliet (for the 1,000,000,000,000th time) or some other more popular classic I bet they wouldn't have thought twice about it. Even if you HAD chosen to create an homage to Brier Rabbit, there wouldn't have been anything wrong with it. Again, I think that the publisher's rejection was based on a thousand issues that had nothing to do with the quality of your work.

And about your creative writing professors. (And I know that you're a teacher of some kind and I hope you know that none of the below comments are in any way directed to you) I've dated an English master's in the past, and I must say that he really opened my eyes about the type of folks who generally chose to become English professors. He was obsessed with James Joyce, and spent our entire relationship looking for me to inspire him into writing. He had a thousand excuses why his work never went anywhere, but he never actually sat down to write! My father was a Speech Therapist so I've grown up around teachers and am very supportive of the profession. But from the people I met through Leaf, I learned that the old adage of "Those who can't, teach" is more true about the English community than about any other.

Leaf, and his contemporaries, got off on feeling superior to people around them. They spent their time trash talking their students and slavishly worshiping the few classics they respected. They were close-minded, frightened men and women who were so bound by the "rules" that they were strangling the stories inside themselves. Now if you know English teaching folks who are nothing like this, again my apologies. This is just my experience - that you should never take to heart criticism like the kind you got from your teachers. It's their job to tell you the rules, and your job to learn them and then break them as you see fit. Oddly enough, that's called "creation".

And I agree that Recovery is a wonderful story. My guess as to why you've received fewer comments on it are that 1) it was your first story in a new fandom, so people didn't know yet how wonderful you are, and 2) that Jim and Blair spend a loooong time not having nookie, which is what a lot of folks who read slash fic are looking for. *G* Trust me, it's an incredible story and something to be very proud of, even if you weren't inundated with compliments.

So finally, I'm going to be a pest and point out that you never answered the underlying question... why DID you decide to write that piece as gen?

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all the kind words, and I really will try to keep them in mind. Truly. Part of me knows that rejection and flames are just part of the creative process, and then there's this other part of me that just wants to curl up in a corner, and I won't deny that it hurts.

I do know teachers who are like that, and so I won't deny that sort of attitude that the "greats" said everything there was to say and we have to follow their footsteps, or, ironically enough, "the greats" said their stuff perfectly so we can't do anything to replicate or imitate their voices. Whatever.

I do still think Slave King is a good story, so I won't be putting it on the web yet. It makes me sad when I go back and read Cindershadow's complaint that it gave her pain to not download that story because she had all my others saved. I'll miss her support and encouragement. However, I may play with it more, and if so, I'll give the group that read the original a link to any further chapters.

Okay, sorry about missing the core question there. I guess I divide all my stories into internal and external conflicts. If I'm writing about an external conflict (like with the first two episodes of Guidelines where the guys battled the USSP or Shadows of the Past where they battled Section or Unfortunately Right where Spike is the antagonist), I tend to write Gen. If I want to focus the conflict on a physical conflict, I don't want to "muddy" the waters with the emotional conflicts that inevitably come with a relationship (het or slash). This is one of the reasons why I struggle to write Guidelines chapters- this universe has developed into one where I have both external and internal conflicts (breaking my own rule), and that's just a bitch to handle. So I never meant Shadows of the Past to have slash because that would have distracted from the basic conflict of the piece and it would have taken me twice as long to get to the end. I suppose I could have just said "hey, they're in a relationship" and then had the same story, but I didn't think that was really needed.

Now on Second Verse or Beautiful Broken or Recovery Epic, the internal conflict IS the point. These stories focus on the internal stresses on the character's personalities, and since I'm doing introspection anyway, the sexual dynamic is more interesting. Heck, in Second Verse, the huge antagonist (Cassidy) get all of about five lines. Seriously! But it's not a matter of slash/no slash, it's really more "do I want to deal with a sexual relationship here". Mangled Spells (my one het, and it's still Spander), is one where the point is internal, so there's sex.