Online Writing for International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch Day 07
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Recently, SFWA VP Howard Hendrix posted an essay about online writing that a number of us take huge exception with. In response, Jo Walton came up with a great idea: International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch Day, which is Monday, April 23. Jo's initial idea was for people to use that as a day to share some of their writing online, but I also think it's a good day to add any kind of interesting project online. As next week is very busy for me, I'm putting up my contribution for the day online now, and will probably keep it up for a while thereafter (or, who knows, maybe permanently). I'm a mostly unpublished fiction writer, so why should I bother getting involved? Because the writer should determine to level to which s/he wants to share her/his work online. If they want to put up their work, either new or old, it should be up to them. The only other factor that should come into play is if the work has been sold, then the publisher may have a say as to what appears online, and whether it appears as a free item or as a pay item. And that's it. |
I've been writing online since 1988, spending the first six years as a USENET participant. But once the Web got going, I had the first collection of Hugo/Nebula winners online in HTML (years before anyone else ever did), put up some essays and just added other bits and pieces that I found interesting. Eventually, I took over curating Dead People Server. Without individuals volunteering to put material up on the Web for free, the Web would never have taken off the way it did. Yes, now commerce tends to drive the Web, but without free content, the Web would have died before it started.
While I've been writing fiction, on and off, for most of my life, I didn't put any of my fiction online until 2005, when I uploaded the first few chapters of the mainstream novel I'd been writing.
I started reading SF in 1973 and started submitting stories in 1974. I got piles of rejections over the next few years. I entered a few contests that would let you know how your story ranked, and I'd usually rank in the top half of the finishers, which was at least slightly encouraging. But, I fell into a writer's block, compounded by having a busy life (family, work, fandom, the usual).
In 1986, at Confederation, I served as Merle Insinga's agent so I spent an awful lot more time in the art show than usual. Over that weekend, I came up with the idea for the story that would become "Muse of Fire" (though the name changed many, many times). Another inspiration for the story was seeing a book cover. Another inspiration may have been hearing the title for a small, low-budget movie that came out that year. But, I spent some time writing an early draft of this story. Despite my tendency to read SF and mainstream, I wrote a horror story.
Two years later, I went to Nolacon. When I got home, I changed the setting of the story from Atlanta to New Orleans. During the late '80s, I got involved in some workshops where the story was evaluated by the other workshoppers. I took some of the suggestions, but some others made no sense. I think one problem with being an unpublished writer is the idea that workshopping will always improve a story. While I think workshopping generally does improve a story, it's important to remain true to your vision of what the story should be. In some instances, I was being told to write something I had no interest in writing.
I sent "Muse of Fire" around to the usual places where it got rejected.
I sent it to a very small market, a horror magazine I'd found and liked called Midnight Zoo.
In the spring of 1992, they bought it! I was completely thrilled. Yeah, sure, it was a tiny market and I only got a small check for it, but someone finally liked a piece of fiction enough that they bought it. They liked it so much that they also agreed to buy the prequel to this story, but the magazine folded not long after the first story appeared. The prequel was later bought by Triangulations, a small SF anthology some fans here in Pittsburgh edit.
And so, in honor of the first-ever International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch Day...here's "Muse of Fire".