Why men don't promote women

Some truths there but it's bullshit. Women don't get the same reaction or reward, on the whole, for being pushy or aggressive or promoting themselves.

I'm fine with trying, but there are good reasons more women don't do this, it's because often there are negative consequences and hostility and more exclusion when we do.

Gotta love Google Alerts.

Pulled up this article from Savvy Gal.

Funny, I don't remember writing or selling this article. But a quick trawl through my Contracts folder shows that yes, I did write that article and I did generate an invoice.

Huh. How on earth did I forget about that?

And that reminds me, I really absolutely must update my web site. I've neglected it for over a year and it's looking pretty shoddy.

Chalk up yet another project for the Christmas season.

Michael Arnzen will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey workshop. He has been publishing outrageous horror fiction, SF, poetry, literary criticism, instructional essays on writing, and offbeat humor since 1989. Across his career, Arnzen has won four Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, and several "Year's Best Horror Story" accolades and reprints. His novels include Play Dead and Grave Markings. The best of his short stories and poems are collected in Proverbs for Monsters, which won the Bram Stoker Award in 2007. Always the experimentalist, his writing has appeared on Palm Pilots and postcards, short art films ("Exquisite Corpse") and creepy online animation. His novel Play Dead even inspired a deck of custom-designed playing cards.

When he's not writing, Arnzen teaches suspense and horror writing fulltime in the MFA degree program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University, near Pittsburgh, PA. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon, where he studied "the uncanny" in popular culture, as well as an M.A. in English from the University of Idaho, where he wrote his second novel. Arnzen sits on the editorial board for two literary journals associated with genre fiction (Paradoxa and Dissections) and has edited college literary magazines and more. He is presently working on a guidebook for authors, a book of literary criticism, and several horror titles.

Arnzen taught humor in fantasy at Odyssey in 2007 and students had a lot of laughs. Look for "Stripping Away the Mask"—his essay on crafting horrifying scenes in fiction—in the recently published book, The Writer's Workshop of Horror (Woodland Press, 2009).

Once you started writing seriously, how long did it take you to sell your first piece? What were you doing wrong in your writing in those early days?

I started taking my writing seriously when I was in college, I think, because whenever I wrote for my teachers, they started taking it seriously and that surprised me. I always just told stories and wrote poems because I enjoyed splashing around in the kiddie pool of language. But teachers were rewarding me with praise and healthy comments about how I could improve, and it made me sit up and take notice: hey, I thought, maybe I really can do this just like all those people I have been reading all these years!

But I think we make a mistake just calling ourselves "writers." What really happens -- though this is metaphorical -- is that we join the larger conversation that our genre is having with ideas. We start to talk back to books, through books. We join a "groupthink" tank called genre fiction. And so if I was doing anything wrong in the very early part of my career, it was thinking that writing was all about me. My sales took off once I started realizing that I wasn't just writing for myself: my audience's needs mattered just as much -- if not more -- than my own. And you have to earn it. You can't just walk up to a group at a cocktail party and start yapping; you sort of have to respond to someone first, or fill a silence. That's what getting started is sort of like in this business. It isn't so much that we have to take our writing seriously: it's that we have to take our reader seriously.

Why do you think your work began to sell?

I think editors have this intuition when they read manuscripts: they don't analyze stories as much as we think they do (on the first read anyway): they just listen to the author and trust their gut reactions to the author's voice: does it sound genuine? does it read like already published work? is this writer someone the average reader will really trust to tell a good story?

Most people would say it takes "talent" to produce writing that sounds that genuine, to have a voice that crafts stories instinctively into mature vistas that sweep readers off their feet. I think it takes a combination of good luck and hard work to produce that talent.

Studious research and making a lot of happy mistakes through trial and tribulation -- and having the stamina to keep stumbling forward -- is the key to success when you're getting started. Research is probably where most new writers fail, because it takes a lot of time. You have to research not only the background of your stories -- but the whole literary landscape. It takes a full immersion in the culture you hope to address as a writer to join the wider literary conversation of our world. You have to go to the library and read everything. Take college classes in literature if you can, or download a booklist and force yourself to read through all the classics. Rent every movie you can with your genre's markings on it, even if you can't stomach it, and force yourself to understand what it is that makes your genre what it is. Talk with as many writers as you can, through conventions and workshops like Odyssey. You have to absorb the "groupthink" I was talking about before, and this is the only way to really get the "deep structure" of storytelling, genre, and the marketplace. Once you do that, you pick up on literary strategies more naturally, and you adopt the voice of the writer -- a voice that is at once your own, and yet also an echo of the other wise voices you've listened to over the years.

What's the biggest weakness in your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?

I'm too prone to substitute fiction for facts. If I don't know something I'll make it up rather than research it. This is not so much laziness as it is a time-saver. I should know better. I cope with it by letting my manuscripts cool down for a few days after I write them. Then I scrutinize them, playing the role of "skeptical reader" and anything that sounds like b.s., I will mark and try to flesh out with more research to see if my b.s. holds water or not. What inevitably happens is that I get excited about what I discover during my research, which starts giving me more and more ideas I can put into my fiction, and it makes the revision process as much fun as the writing process was the first time.

Your CD, Audiovile, is an hour-long spoken-word performance of 16 short stories and poems set to dark and quirky music. Where did this idea come from? How do you encourage writers to express themselves in other ways besides with pen and paper?

Shortly after my book of flash fiction, 100 Jolts, came out, a few readers inquired about whether or not there was an audiobook version available. My publisher -- the great folks at Raw Dog Screaming Press -- had seen me read stories at conventions, and asked if I would be willing to narrate some of the short stories. I immediately realized that if I did that, I would want to avoid doing it the way most audiobooks are done, because I frankly feel they are sort of boring. So I jazzed the stories up with background music (relying on some old instruments my wife and I had gathered over the years). And the more I experimented with audio, the more the background music moved into the foreground. I started rehearsing the stories to the beat and using some of the lines like a chorus in a song. And something really unique came out of this process.

I won't say it's better than Led Zeppelin, but anyone who has listened to Audiovile has responded with enthusiasm over how quirky it is. The harshest critique I heard was from my dad, who grinningly said "It sounds like you're having too much fun."

But that's my goal! I could have bombed and made a complete idiot out of myself, and maybe some people think I'm nuts for doing something so over-the-top in the first place, but I think writers need to take these kinds of risks, and to push themselves into trying out different artistic forms. Writing is art, even when you're expressly doing it for professional pay, and you need to cultivate the artist inside of you. It might lead to finding a new or unique audience, too. You have to think of yourself as a genre entertainer to some degree, while also earning merit in the eyes of your audience. But experimenting with different arts -- even if they take the form of doodles in a notebook margin or poems you scratch out on cocktail napkins -- are all forms of expressed dreamwork and it will always pay back in your writing on some level. Creating Audiovile made me work my brain in ways I never had to before, and now I'm far more conscious of the cadence of my prose and the sound of my "voice" and the structure of my stories than I ever dreamed possible. And it renewed my love of performing at readings, which I always try to enjoy. I got into this business because it's fun for me, and Audiovile was a sheer creative burst of experiment that really renewed me. It took me a year of hard work to cobble together something of quality, but it was joy all the way. And it renewed my love for music, something that was waning in my life, along the way, making me a happier person.

With works like Rigormarole: Zombie Poems and Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems, how do you fuse horror and humor in only a few words?

This is a really difficult question. Part of it is just instinct. Horror and humor both have to feel spontaneous to work. But another part of it is really loading your language so that the assumptions and meanings and implications are all doing the work -- so that what's not on the page matters as much as what is there. I could go on and on about this, but your interview would wind up reading like a dissertation on death, the implosion of the universe, and everything.

Your e-mail newsletter “The Goreletter” actually won a Bram Stoker Award for Alternative Forms. What are your thoughts about having a Web presence? Do you feel it’s necessary for a writer to maintain a Web site and/or blog? Are there advantages and/or disadvantages?

It is necessary. It's like having a shelf in pubic to display your books -- only you're also displaying other things around those books too -- all of which serves to draw a reader's attention to your work. But I have to say: too many writers get sucked into this game of drawing attention, but never really having anything to say once the spotlight is really on them. You need to make your writing and storytelling central to your identity to be a writer, and if you're going to be using the web as a "platform" for your career, you have to provide writing on your website somehow -- whether in the shape of a free story, a giveaway book, whatever. I try to treat the web as a "sketchpad" and place to practice my creativity, since I would imagine that's what readers are really wanting from me, whether new to my work or old fans. I make "The Goreletter" the "takeaway" from my site because it helps me to think of my work on the web as generating an end product -- a newsletter that features the best of all those "sketches" I put in my blog and in my gallery and on twitter. Beyond that, your website is the doorway into your publishing history and your other books, so use it to display your titles (but don't be too arrogant about selling them).

As a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

I have two. The first is a mantra you should adopt: THERE ARE NO WASTED WORDS. Believe it. Everything you write makes you stronger. Even the garbage you wad up and toss in the trashcan.

The second bit of advice is at once quite simple, but more difficult to explain. But it is imperative, I think, to remember that writing needs to be genuinely creative. A genre allows you to take a certain degree of license -- a certain degree of freedom to experiment with things without fear of censorship or reader skepticism. In horror, it's license to get nasty. In fantasy, it's license to dream up settings or invent impossible forms of power called "magic." In science-fiction, that magic is called imaginary "technology." There's more to it than that, but those are just snappy examples. But my point is this: FLAUNT YOUR CREATIVE LICENSE. It's the only way to generate something truly original and unforgettable. Do not get too concerned with publishing or making the rest of the world happy with "correctness" when you're drafting. You can always edit it later. If you experiment and fail, well see advice #1 (there ARE no wasted words!). Even the most polished and perfect piece of genre writing will fail if it does not entertain, and if you do not let your genre freak flag fly you will never truly win over an audience. Try to write something no one else is doing in that genre; the sort of book you wish would be on the shelves, but isn't, and you'll be moving in the right direction. It takes courage to do new things like this, and it's risky, but your genre permits it. Readers pick up genre books because they want the writer to meet certain needs and one of those needs is originality of concept. You'll never be original if you don't take advantage of the freedom to experiment that your genre offers you!

What's next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

A new novel is always in progress, but I'm never comfortable discussing work in progress until it's close to publication, because I hate to giveaway surprises. I've got my writing fingers in lots of pies right now, though: short stories will be out in anthologies in the year ahead -- like Darkness on the Edge (tales inspired by Bruce Springsteen songs!) from PS Publishing, or Armageddon Lightshow (stories about lightning!) from Bloodletting Books, or the wonderful He is Legend, a Richard Matheson Tribute Anthology which was just picked up for mass distribution by Tor Books. You'll likely see my non-fiction project, The Popular Uncanny, out before too long.

I hope interested readers will drop by my website, http://www.gorelets.com, to see whatever I'm up to lately.

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For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

There are 30 amps on the circuit. Heaters and the toaster oven, and the crappy low-wattage microwave, are the biggest power eaters and most likely to flip the circuit breakers.

Warm up the bathroom before taking a shower in very cold weather!

Don't flush any toilet paper!

Soap and shampoo and dish soap etc. must be biodegradable. (That means any other products I use should be too which means I need new lotion... I didn't think of that)

The bits of the woodwork where there is a little bit of water damage are now visible to me. Water collects there -- for example the lower corner of the windowsill in the bathroom after you take a shower or if the window is open and it's raining -- so these are good places to wipe down with a rag.

The boat is not mildewy, but I need to test out some ecologically decent anti-mildew things to wipe down a few stained or clearly vulnerable spots on the walls and in the cabinets.

If you climb down into the engine room, shine a flashlight into the holding tank, and turn out the lights, you can see how much room the tank has for toilet flushing before the next twice-a-month pumpout.

Three grocery bags crammed full of laundry is 16 pounds, which with pickup and delivery the next day, is $27.50 for wash and fold. Handy!

For people to find my boat I should think about rigging up some kind of easily identifiable flag.


I've always liked the history of the port in my town and been vaguely aware of the controversies about the houseboat neighborhoods. There is the harbor I'm at, then a much sketchier harbor (that I totally love for its funky vibe) next to the jail, then a new, upscale rather sterile-looking one I didn't know about, next to the fancy office buildings out past the deepwater port, and one which was built in 2003 after being voted down in 2001, from the IAC (evil overlords of southern CA Development) with no live-aboard docks.

My marina needs a little convenience store! If I owned the restaurant I'd run it as a nice community center, little store for food and marine supplies, warm laundromat-cafe-bookstore and brunch hangout with music venue/bar at night. As it is now, it's wasted space and I don't know how they manage to pay the property taxes.

Thanks to mikandra, I just remembered that I'm also a ham astronomer, and have been for the past thirty years.

How could I have forgotten something I love so much?

What else have I forgotten?

Poor cassiphone is having issues over whether or not to tell her children about Santa Claus. And she's not alone.

This is a question nearly every parent who lives in Western Christian-descended cultures must deal with.

I headed that issue off at the pass.

So... does one perpetuate the rather inaccurate image of some immortal guy flying about the sky and leaving gifts to all good children of the world, and risk shattering the offsprings' faith when they discover the lie, or does one blatantly come right out and pull a Virginia, thus ruining any magical hope and excitement a young child would experience during this season?

Me, I chose the third option.

When it comes to things of faith and tradition, it's best to go to the source instead of relying on heresay.

So, from the beginning, I've told my daughters about Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. My daughters understand what a modern bishop is, and his role (ie, taking care of the parish/ward,seeing that others do not go for want).

I've told them the (possibly historically inaccurate, but accurate enough for my needs) story of how Saint Nicholas provided the dowry for three sisters so they could get married, and how he did it anonymously. There are other stories of how Saint Nicholas was behind a large number of other anonymous gifts to the poor.

Thus, I explain to my daughters, we celebrate the spirit of Saint Nicholas by giving gifts to others. Also, there are gifts given anonymously. We don't get to know who gave them. It's supposed to be a secret, and so we say, "Santa Claus gave them!" (And thus, everyone can be Santa Claus.)

(Yes, I have explained the entymology of the name "Santa Claus" (Sinterklaas, San Niklaus, Saint Nicholas).)

So every Christmas eve, my daughters are filled with excitement as they hang the Christmas stocking on the sliding door (alas, no fireplace in Oz) in hopes that some kind, anonymous person will favour them with gifts for Christmas day. It's magical. They'll even leave them cookies.

And for the rest of their lives they shall never lose that magic. They shall never uncover a lie and have their hopes dashed. But they shall always keep with them the spirit of generosity and the thrill of giving anonymously.

So what if it wasn't some "jolly old elf"? They know better than that. What will matter most to them is knowing that someone cares enough about them to become "Santa Claus" for one night and spread joy.

(And the next day it's always Grandma, and she brings cool stuff.)

...but just as short.


1. Christmas is a mad time of year, n'est ce pas?

2. We saw the Google Earth car drive around our neighborhood this week!

3. I saw the Mikado on Saturday and it was soo good!

4. I went to Hogsbreath Cafe last night and had the bestest steak ever.

5. I got a royalty report today. I earned a whole 73 cents US.

6. I am pretty much all done with my Christmas shopping and am ready for Christmas. Bring it on!

7. I wonder if the Fremantle Arts Centre will let me use their exterior as scenery in my daughters' film?

8. I have pumpkin pie!

9. Egg nog at Christmas time is still the best, even if I can get it year'round in Australia.

10. This is the blog I get paid for to update at work: http://RockinghamILS.blogspot.com Feel free to suggest content or comment.

When you're walking in the dark, and the sidewalks might be uneven, watch where your feet are going.

Otherwise, you might be like me: I have a big cut on one cheek, a split lip, and two skinned knees. I haven't looked or felt like this since I was riding a bicycle regularly in junior high school. Nothing hurts a lot, but all of it hurts a little.

Fortunately, <user name="pokershaman"> was with me and dealt with the errand we were on. Now we're home and fed and everything will mend. I was lucky.

So Liz and I have separated. I'm still at the house, while she has now found her own apartment after staying with friends for two weeks.

I don't have a simple story about why, except lack of closeness. There was no catastrophic event. We aren't mad at each other. It's that we have been drifting apart, and we have not been comfortable together. The trend has been noticeable for a while. I had thought things were getting better or at least stable early in the year while I was stay-at-home fathering. However, I think that this may have made life more comfortable (at the expense of savings) but didn't really solve problems in the relationship.

It has been rough for me over the past two and a half weeks - which included my finals at Stanford, a temporary teaching placement, Thanksgiving, and our 12th anniversary. There've been a fair amount of drinks and tears, but I'm coming to a place where I can feel like there's an stable place ahead. I can tell myself that it's absolutely normal - about half of marriages end in divorce, and the median length is around ten years, and the most common reason is a vague "incompatibility." But that only goes so far.

Milo has been taking it well, though, and we've both put in an effort to keep things stable for him. He was very sad at first, and said that our speech was like a movie. But we sat together and watched Transformers with him for an hour, and I think he was satisfied that we were still a family. We've done Thanksgiving and the Hometown Holidays parade together since then, and he's been pretty cheerful. But then, he's an amazing kid.

**FINAL EDIT Thu Dec 10 02:15:47 UTC 2009**

So there is the final update... Over the past day we have processed around 11 million jobs out of the 12 million that were in queue at that time. Please bear in mind that over this past day, more jobs for notifications are also created. So while the queue has been dropping, we are still not fully caught up at this point, due to backlog and new jobs. We have roughly 3 million jobs still pending that involve the notification system in some manner. We had hoped we could have fully cleared the queue in a day, but unfortunately we can't clear it too quickly, since we need the rest of the site to operate normally. From our current perspective on the amount of jobs that are left in queue, and how many it has processed thus far, we believe it will take around another 8 - 12 hours to process everything.

And finally some answers to some questions:

( Read More and Get Some Answers... )

Podcast #32 is now available for download here.

Patricia Bray was a guest lecturer at Odyssey 2009, where she lectured about the uses of the sidekick in fiction. In this podcast, the second of two parts, Patricia explains how the sidekick's characteristics can balance those of the protagonist, or contrast with those of the protagonist. She discusses the requirements for a good sidekick, and describes how the sidekick's character arc can complement or contrast with the protagonist's character arc. She explains the difference between a sidekick/protagonist story and a story with multiple protagonists. She also lists some of the very useful purposes a sidekick can serve in a story, such as making your protagonist more believable, providing an embodiment of the protagonist's motivation, and serving as the external conscience of protagonist. She also reviews the various mistakes an author can make in creating a sidekick. Patricia discusses sidekicks in short stories as well as novels, and explains when you might want to use the sidekick's point of view. You can find part 1 of Patricia's discussion of sidekicks in Podcast #31.

Patricia Bray is the author of a dozen novels, including Devlin's Luck, which won the 2003 Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the field of science fiction or fantasy. A multi-genre author whose career spans both Regency romance and epic fantasy, Patricia has had her books translated into Russian, German, Hebrew and Portuguese. She is a two-time co-chair of the Southern Tier Writer's conference, and her articles on the writer's craft have appeared in numerous publications, including Broadsheet, Nink, STARbytes, and RWA's Keys to Success: A Professional Writer's Career Handbook.

Patricia lives in upstate New York, where she combines her writing with a full-time career as an I/T professional, ensuring that she is never more than a few feet away from a keyboard. Her latest novel is The Final Sacrifice, the concluding volume in The Chronicles of Josan, which was released by Bantam Spectra in July 2008.

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For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.