Browsed by Month January 2016

Do we count as real writers too aka that thing about Clarion that thing

January 20 2016

JY Yang

Before I begin I must preface that these are entirely my personal reflections based on my very specific personal circumstances and are not quite meant to be a wellreasoned commentary on larger things yet

Here I am dipping my toes into an ocean full of very large fish with equally large teeth to bite me with

I want to talk a bit about Neil Gaimans tweet

You know that one

Neil posted this a couple of days ago and within hours of the tweet hitting the surface of the Internet the SFF patch of the pond was boiling over The implication that attending Clarion or a similar workshop is a mandatory step on the path to successful writerhood predictably went down like a lead balloon

Many people rightfully pointed out that attending the Clarions with their sixweek fourfigure dollar commitment is not one many can afford Or are physically able to due to health and disability access issues I pointed out that this goes doubly hard for international applicants who have to work in often fourfigure plane tickets in addition to terrible exchange rates deal with international travel being in a different time zone culture etc in order to attend

Neil has since clarified that his tweet was meant obviously to be hyperbolic and obviously you dont need Clarion to become a writer And lots of people had come on to Twitter to exhort their credentials publications awards bestofs all achieved without the help of the workshops

I fully agree Said as someone who applied to Clarion West because Neil Gaiman was teaching that year Id never heard of it before that Youd be surprised by how few outside the prosemi pro SFF writing community know what it is Attend Clarion Clarion West Odyssey etc workshops is not even a feasible piece of advice Id give anyone asking how do I become a writer like you because its neither a helpful nor practical tip Id rather give them a list of markets to submit stories to and suggest they follow a ton of writers or writing blogs and also read a fuckton of stuff and learn from it

Yet

Completely honestly I know I would not be the writer I am today if not for Clarion West

This is not exaggeration

I know what Clarion West did for me Here Before I attended I had barely completed any short stories I had no idea about submitting to venues outside of Singapores tiny writing community I didnt have beta readers I could send stories to for critique or other SFF writers to talk to to bounce ideas off None of my friends was in the business of regularly writing or submitting short SFF to anyplace It was just me alone no idea what I was doing no idea that it was even a sort of lifestyle that other people might do on the regular

But because I attended Clarion West I found a community of friends to talk to about writing I joined a neopros forum Codex which taught me about submitting about rejectomancy helped me create new stories some of my bestreceived stories started off life as Codex contest stories Having a support group a group of excellent beta readers kept me writing and submitting enough that I began to sell stories And then started being asked to write them

Getting to know people in the community meant that I actually had reason to attend conventions and it also meant I was asked to be on the programming at conventions when it came out that I was attending them

Getting to know people in the community meant getting to know editors and agents And thats important if you want to be a writer

Without having attended Clarion West would I have been able to break into this SFF community that Im part of right now

Im really really not so sure No question Id still be writing but Im quite sure I wouldnt be writing as often Opportunities to have stories published in Singapore are a lot fewer and they tend to be for very very small print runs We dont really have much in the way of online zines

What would people see when they looked at me Ive never heard of any of these things youve been published in Are they even any good

Would they consider me a writer Eh What do you think

So Milliondollar question Am I saying Neils hyperbole was actually right

I want desperately to say no Of course not Thats such a terrible idea

But I feel that saying that would be lying to myself That for somebody like me living and working outside of the UK or US different culture different continent different context breaking into the SFF publishing scene getting people to actually sit up and notice you even getting better at your craft is extremely fucking difficult Selling one story or two or even five is not enough

For somebody like me attending a major workshop like Clarion is an instant way to break down that giant looming daunting barrier And that helps That helps so much

But as I said Id never give that advice to anyone who asked me for advice because IT IS TERRIBLE ADVICE Even if you could get the funds and the Singapore government is good with disbursing grants especially if you can convince them of how prestigious the workshop is its six fucking weeks and who can take six fucking weeks off work and family and life

I wouldnt say that I would say Go Write Submit And then pray Pray that the Nameless Deities of the realms of publishing smile upon you

The point of this post is not that workshops are necessary to become a serious writer The point is that for people who dont have easy access to a support system it feels like its necessary in order to break into the global SFF scene And it shouldnt be

The question is then how committed are we to diversity if we rest so much of a persons legitimacy as a writer on the same old systems that are skewed if everything that we consider SFF is still largely tied to the Western Anglophone publishing sphere Where do writers from backgrounds like mine belong unless we break into that system

Do I have good answers to this Fuck no Im just some schlub who has no idea what shes doing But Id like people to think about this at least Because we are here We exist And Id like to think we count as real writers too

2015 the year I quit writing

January 11 2016

JY Yang

aka I am a wreck of a human being and you should not attempt to be my friend ever

This is an attempt to do one of those yearend summaries that people have been doing in the middle of January because I am a fuckup with little to no time management skills and have just spent the last two weeks writing 13000 words worth of fiction for submission to various things which is basically the only way I ever get writing done anymore with the threat of shame from breaking deadlines looming over my worthless head

2015 in many ways has been a watershed year for me both good and bad more bad than good in my estimation The major change was that I secured an Arts Council scholarship to fund my MA MFA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich So I started grad school

That entailed me selling or giving away 90 of my material possessions all my books art supplies almost all my clothes and every last one of my musical instruments packing what little I had left into two and a half suitcases and flying halfway across the globe to the United Kingdom My crowning achievement in 2015 was that I purged the numbers of my belongings enough that I managed to include my PS3 and its 23inch TV monitor in the 35kg baggage allowance my airline gave me At this point I outweigh the sum total of all the things I own

Being in the UK has been its own trial Norwich is small and vaguely provincial food and transport are hideously expensive and I have no friends here Im a deeply introverted and solitary person I dont make friends easily When I have neither the time nor disposable income to socialise I dont make friends at all Yes the weather is amazing and the campus I live on is beautiful but I can literally go weeks without any form of meaningful human contact whatsoever

Great J you say The fewer friends you have the more you can focus on writing

Which is a great sentiment Except that I also havent been writing

2014 was a pretty great year for me Beginning March that year I sold an average of one story a month to a propaying venue I had a couple of pretty good stories come out that people responded very well to People put me on their yearend lists I managed to eke onto the Campbell longlist based on the strength of those two stories I was a writer to watch For the first time in my life I felt like my writing career might actually be heading somewhere

Spoiler alert Its downhill

The majority of stories that I sold in 2014 came out in 2015 And those stories when published were met with a resounding chorus of fuckall

What I had run into was the inevitable mathematics of publishing Its hard enough to get a story accepted by a good market Hard Hideously hard But the struggle doesnt end there Once a story is out it has to compete for attention with the literal hundreds which come out every month And most stories just wont gather that sort of traction

I got pretty lucky with my first two short stories I did weird things with voice and structure which made them stand out The stories I write tend to be a lot more runofthemill than that Im not a genius

So I got discouraged I got intimidated by the successes of others I got oh god Ive peaked in my career and Im never going to write another good story and Ill let down everyone who thought that I was a new writer with great potential

And let me tell you all these things hit you harder when youre outside of the US Western SFF community You cant attend cons or readings or kaffeklatches because you live on another continent entirely Youre in a different time zone Your daytoday lives dont have the uniting factor of shared culture or politics Its difficult to make inroads or meaningful connections just through social media alone

The only thing you have are your stories Which are drowning in a tide of other stories struggling to be noticed Publish or die but even after publishing die anyway

Faced with these impossibilities I chickened out It wasnt even a conscious decision to stop writing I just found other things to do

I havent written a new story for the slushpiles since March 2015 Writing for solicited pieces or school deadlines for that matter has been like siphoning marrow from bone I havent sent anything out to the markets since I have no idea actually

So thats where Ive been writingwise for pretty much most of 2015 I have one new story slated to come out in 2016 which is in Lightspeeds January issue Thats it

This is a state of the J post just in case anyone wonders why I stop having stories out in 2016 Sometimes I feel like Ive let down all the people who were rooting for me to succeed in 2015 Sorry guys

It was good to get this off my chest Ive been feeling this way for the greater part of 2015 but I didnt have the courage to say any of it out loud because as writers were not supposed to display our insecurities and weaknesses

I say fuck that Now you know