Anthrocon last weekend was a blast and a half. Full credit to an amazing group of writers who were wonderful to hang out with and staffed a really impressive slate of panels that were as well-informed as they were well-attended.
For me it also provoked a question. NightEyes DaySpring mentioned the radio silence that the fandom’s myriad anthologies tend to produce. There are a lot of them, and a lot of really great stories in them! But reviews are sporadic, the content is sometimes thin, and whole stories occasionally go completely unmentioned. For an author, it’s possible to wonder whether anyone is reading your work at all.
I think there’s a related topic. There seems to be little overlap between those authors who are prolific online and those authors who are prolific in print. Is it a problem, and if so what can we do about it? And where does it come from? Perhaps once upon a time it was a logical consequence of gatekeeping, and by median quality there’s no doubt still a difference. But I’d put the best of what’s online in furry up against what I see in furry print.
I suspect it’s largely personal preference: most people tend to choose one or the other, because the demands of both are exhausting. Many of the print authors I know are constantly working on prepping submissions — how many do they have out at a time? Two? Four? Ten? Similarly many of the online authors I know are constantly working on prepping submissions. Novel content draws readership. The way to keep your online readers happy is to constantly be posting new stuff, and that consistency of output is also hard to maintain.
A couple of people asked me at AC why I don’t submit to more furry pubs, and this is part of it. It comes down to a fundamental question of what I expect to get out of writing. I enjoy writing, and want to get better at it. You get better at something by practice, and by reacting to feedback, and by learning from others. Reading, and talking to the authors I know through the Guild and elsewhere, solves for the latter. Writing copiously solves for the former. What about the middle?
A few months back I posted a story, “The Odds,” to SoFurry. Fairly representative. It’s not a great story, and won’t set the world on fire, but it did alright by SF standards: 3,500 views, 149 favs; comments by 35 unique individuals in the discussion thread. In other words, I know not just that a hundred and fifty people read it and kind of liked it, but that thirty-five read it and cared enough to say something about it, which is about thirty more than I can say for the story I have in print.
It’s easy to sniffily dismiss these comments as fluff — “5/5 a+++ would read again” — but I don’t entirely buy that. I neither appreciate, nor concede to, the implied insult to the furry reading community — the same readers that we must engage, that we must cater to, and that we implicitly require to be eventual purchasers of content if we expect to sustain a culture of professional writing. It ain’t exactly like every Flayrah review is professional-grade curation, either.
So I kind of want to say that, for me, that’s the bar you need to reach. To the extent that feedback is critical to self-improvement; to the extent that it’s desirable at all, this is the minimum that print publication needs to offer. Give me thirty-plus people commenting on a story in an anthology, and the value exchange starts to become worth it. Otherwise, what does it offer?
One answer is the feedback of other writers. If that’s true, though, then do those print circles, and the feedback they offer, remain more or less the province of coffeehouse stammtisches amongst like-minded professional authors? A resource of useful, insightful, intimate, intensely valuable feedback… that nonetheless is pretty similar to the same sort of beta reading that authors are already doing with each other?
I suspect that negotiating this difficulty is one reason why there is such a divide and others in my position don’t feel compelled to bridge it. But it goes both ways: the readers are online, and if you’re looking for a consistent finger on the pulse of how your writing is being received that’s where to find it. The question that this seems to suggest is: what to make of that? And how do we close that gap? Perhaps it doesn’t bear closing, and perhaps that topic is outside our remit. Perhaps it isn’t a problem at all? At the same time, the desire to boost the number of anthology reviews, and the desire to launch a curated online publication that comes up perennially, seem to speak to a latent tension.
One reason I’m so active in boosting SoFurry, and online writing in general, at writing panels and conventions — and in talking with other authors about it in venues like this — is because I want there to be a voice in loftier circles for “that shadowy place beyond our borders” that the light doesn’t touch. So I feel that tension, too, but I don’t have an answer. Is this unique to us? Does it exist outside the fandom, too? What is this like in music? In art? Surely. Have they dealt with it?
Or is it simply the natural order of things, that East is East, and West is West? What would be the best of both worlds for you?
For the first generation of furry readers I might well have been the equivalent of Kyell Gold. I was the guest of honor at the first Anthrocon; more than one furry told me that “A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood” was seminal in showing them what furry stories can do. (The chairman of Eurofurence was one of them; Uncle Kage is also a long-time fan.) I’ve done professional editing, both of the proofing and the developmental kind, and I’ve worked with moderately big name people on both sides of the editing divide. The furry magazine I edited and published, Mythagoras, was an inspiration for Sofawolf Press.