ALEXANDRA ERIN

Why don't you...?

 

I get a whole host of questions that all have the same answer, and that answer is "Because this takes time, because I am one person, because I have needs like food and sleep and solitude, because I have other physical and mental and emotional health issues, because I have to focus first on the work that pays my bills, because I have other obligations in life and there are only so many hours in a day."

 

So before you ask me a question, any question, you should ask yourself if the run-on sentence in quotes is by itself enough to explain it. Most questions that begin with "why don't you...?" or "why haven't you...?" have the same answer, and it's the one above. 

 

And the thing is, answering these questions are themselves a tremendous drain on my time and energy, because it always seems so obvious to me, and it always seems like the writer of the question is ignoring my essential humanity and limitations, no matter how apologetic they are about it. So the question I face is, how to answer this when the answer is so obvious?

 

I'd like to ask you to imagine that you work for someone who doesn't remember that you need to breathe, and who routinely asks you to do things that are difficult, hazardous, or even impossible for someone who needs to breathe.

 

That's pretty much what it's like to be a creator on the internet sometimes, dealing with an audience that has some members who don't realize that things take time and that we have multiple demands on our time, and other assorted needs. 

 

And it's not everyone who does it, and not everyone who does it is a flagrant jerk in particular. Some of you are downright nice about it!

 

But again, imagine you work for a boss who forgets you need to breathe. How much would it matter if they were always unfailingly polite about their unreasonable requests, after a while?

 

Of course, "boss" isn't the perfect metaphor here, because while it could be said that we're working for our audiences, we're not working for them, certainly not individual audience members. So instead say you're employed at a company where you perform an essential function, but everyone keeps randomly forgetting you breathe: customers, coworkers, higher-ups.

 

 

 

When will the next MU Omnibus come out? or 

Why does the Omnibus just stop at book n?

 

This is really a special case of "Why don't you...?", which I'm highlighting because it's the single question I get most often, in one form or another. It's a textbook example of people not realizing that things take time and I only have so much of it to go around.

 

Compiling the series into ebooks is an ongoing process. However much of the series that's collected righ now is not where I decided to stop, it's as far as the process has gotten so far. You know, even when the first one came out an was called Omnibus I, people right away were asking if I had plans to do any more of them or why I only included the first three books.

 

While it is possible to make an automated process for scraping the chapters off the website, the results would still have to be gone over manually and cleaned up, as many of them have stray announcements and fundraising pitches and other notes attached, as well as things like obsolete links. Given that I have to go through them one chapter at a time anyway, it just makes more sense to combine the task of compilation with incidental chapter-by-chapter clean-up of the website. It takes time to make a story that exists in blog form into an ebook, is what I'm saying. 

 

 

Why not just release the Omnibus as one ebook?

 

This actually wouldn't speed things up; it would just mean you'd have to wait as long as the whole series takes to get any of it. It would also be huge, somewhere right around 10,000 pages, probably. Also, there would be no economical way to price it. It would literally be the equivalent of dozens of books. The individual Omnibuses are pretty well value-priced for their sizes, and because the price for each one falls into the "sweet spot" prized by e-book retailers, I get a decent royalty from each sale. If readers had to buy them all at once, a lot fewer people would buy it, and I'd get less money from each person who did.

 

 

How many pages of MU do you write a week?

 

The shorter chapters of Tales of MU are around 2,000 words. My target is closer to 2,500. Some of them are upwards of 5,000. If these were printed up and bound as a traditional book, these chapters would range from 8 pages to 20. My target is around 2,500 to 3,000, so if we say that each chapter is about 10 pages and I publish 2 chapters a week, that's 20 pages. When I do 3 chapters in a week, that's 30. So when I'm in my best rhythm of every other work day (2.5 chapters a week), we could call it 25 pages a week, which isn't too shabby.

 

That's not counting bonus stories, or other things that I write.

 

 

What's your writing process for MU like?

 

Well, there are really three answers here: my ideal, the more common version, and my worst case scenario.

 

In the ideal, I write the bulk of a chapter in a day. For this to happen, Ic an't just sit down and start typing. I need to have a very clear idea of where to start and what needs to happen. I don't outline the chapter in advance (I don't do outlines, in general)... I more find a seed from which I can grow the thing. I then let this chapter body sit in a drafts folder until it's going to be published, and periodically think about it and look it over and polish it up a bit. Often, when I sit on a chapter for a while, I can find themes within it that can be brought to the forefront, improve dialogue, punch up the jokes, et cetera. Then on the day it's due to be published, I give it a final once-over. If i'm more than a week ahead of schedule with my drafting, it gets a second to last "deep cleaning" on Monday, when I'm getting things lined up for the week.

 

What happens more frequently is that I wind up writing on a day-by-day basis. When something happens to interrupt the flow of my writing process, I wind up doing half or more of the major writing on a chapter the day it goes up. These chapters are often mnoticeably more raw than the ones that got to marinate in the drafts folder for a while, though they're still complete. I can usually tell the difference, but I've often been told that it's not as noticeable to others as it feels to me. Still, the story is better when I'm able to work ahead, so that's always the goa I strive for.

 

Both of the above depend on me having a clear handle on the story and sufficient mental and physical energy for the task of writing. This is not always the case. While some people assume that a writer can simply produce a story by sitting in front of a keyboard and pushing buttons until the thing is done, creative work requires creative effort, and the spark isn't always there. When I'm at my worst, a chapter might takes days of laborious, tedious, and painstakingly slow writing. Where I normally can turn out a couple thousand words of relatively clean prose in a few hours a day, on these days I might spend six to eight hours on five hundred to a thousand words of forced, bland, and mistake-riddled text.

 

This is why when I'm encountering difficulties, I'll often cancel a post rather than force it. I've never regretted holding a chapter back to scrap it and start over when I'm feeling it, but I have regretted chapters I posted just to have something posted.

 

 

What's your writing process for other things?

 

Pretty similar to my best case MU scenario. Writing Tales of MU is my main job, since it's what pays my bills. If I'm writing something else, it generally means that I have something very clear in mind, some idea that's too powerful to be ignored. I'll spend some time letting it bounce around in my brain, and then when I'm at the point where it feels like I can't not write it, I'll sit down and often it will just sort of pour out of me.  It's not unusual for me to write 5,000 to 12,000 words in a single day when I have a solid idea.

 

On the other hand, I also do a certain amount of what I call random writing, which is where I just sit in front of a minimalist text editor (or increasingly, the website ilys.com) and write whatever pops into my head. this usually results in something like poetry or flash fiction, though sometimes I've had short stories start this way.

 

 

Should I assume from _______ that you've abandoned all work on _______?

 

I put this one on here because I realized that since the website is not yet complete, people would be reading between the lines about what does and doesn't have a link or write-up on it yet. If you're wondering why I'd launch a website that doesn't cover everything, go read the top of the FAQ.

 

But the reason I was sure that people would ask me if the things that are missing are therefore dead is because this is another question I get all the time. And it is discouraging as all get out, let me tell you. 

 

The thing is that I have a lot of ideas. I have more ideas than I have time and energy. I move from project to project based on priorities that make sense to me, but often the thing that makes the biggest difference is something hard to describe, but which can best be described as "am I feeling this right now?" It's what artists mean when they talk about inspiration. If I have four or five different story ideas, it's not a matter of picking one of them and then performing the mechanical act of writing until it's done. The spark has got to be there, and if it's not, I'll do something else.

 

People who can't see what it's like in my life or inside my head trying to divine the pattern from outside often seek more information or make leaps or turn into prophets, and while I understand where you're coming from, I have to say that answering these kinds of questions invariably makes me feel guilty and inadequate, and nothing makes it harder for me to write than a feeling of shame associated with it. A barrage of people trying to figure out if I've decided to give up working on something is the quickest way for what might have been a fruitful period of hibernation to turn into a funeral. 

 

Even the idea that it's a decision is pretty far-off, most of the time. 

 

The thing you have to understand is that a lot of what I do is experimental, and not all experiments pan out. One thing that really helps them to succeed is a supportive audience. One way to be supportive is to understand that creativity requires a lot more than a decision to create.

 

 

Why should people give you money?

 

I'm just going to say: if you have to ask this, then don't worry about it. Nobody has to give me money. Crowdfunding sometimes leaves people confused or angry because it's not the way things normally are normally done, but it's the same basic idea as any kind of commerce: the market decides what something is worth. In this case, that something is my creative work, the vast majority of which I make available for people to read for free.

 

The principal reasons you would give me money is that you got enough enjoyment out of Tales of MU or my other free work for it to be worth money to you, you would like to reward me for my efforts, or you would like to help ensure I am able to continue writing.
 

As a final note, while some of the people who ask this question don't enjoy my work at all and are more criticizing the perceived arrogance of my asking people to give money for it, I've also encountered people who genuinely enjoy it and genuinely think it's worth something, but who for whatever reason can't wrap their heads around the idea of paying money for something that was given to them for free. I've been told point blank by people I'd call genuine fans that they'd have no problem giving me something as a gift or buying something from me, but they couldn't countenance the idea of donating money for a free story. So, I started selling ebooks, and I made an Amazon wishlist.