Fall Goals

[rynling]

I accomplished none of the goals I set for myself this summer. Life is hard, what can you do.

I have two goals for the fall.

My first goal is to hire a professional photographer to do a few headshots. I'm at the point in my career where people keep asking for them, and I'm still using the one I had a friend take with my old phone almost exactly two years ago. I'm going to try to get a photographer who specializes in weddings, because I vastly prefer bright filters and natural settings (I'm thinking the garden behind the Omni Hotel will do nicely) to the sorts of awkward poses with muted lighting that dominate the bizarre genre of "the professional headshot." It's probably going to cost several hundred dollars more than it should not to look like I'm already forty, but that's just the magic of attaching the word "wedding" to anything, including photographers.

My second goal is to commission a cover illustration of "The Modern History of Zelda." I've been trying to do this off and on for the past seven months, but it turns out that no one is particularly interested in having anything to do with an entire fucking novel about Zelda. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT. I'm going to try to contact a few more people who operate within fandom circles, but if I continue to be unsuccessful then I will use brute force and start cashing in favors with my connections at Small Press Expo to find a professional illustrator. It's difficult to explain succinctly, but that first novel (silly shipfic though it may be) means a lot to me, and I need some sort of validation and encouragement to keep writing.

Essentially, I'm planning on spending a lot of money to make myself look good. I get the feeling that my level of narcissism is approaching that of a Colombian drug lord, but one of the convenient side effects of being so vain is that I don't care.

(Actually I do care. I care a lot. If neither of these things works out for me I will be devastated.)

Comments

[lassarina]

There's nothing wrong with spending money on things that please you, for whatever reason they please you, as long as you aren't hurting anyone (including yourself; I'm taking for granted that this is money you have free to spend.)

go on with your awesome self. ♥

[rynling]

Thank you! (•́⌄•́๑)૭✧

I never in my life thought I'd say this, but money is not an issue. Rather, this is part of my ongoing quest to be taken seriously. It's difficult!

Yesterday afternoon I sat down with a comic writer buddy of mine who happened to be in town, and he said that a lot of people who write for comics got started by commissioning fan art from people to try to establish a professional relationship. Apparently big-name comics editors do this all the time too. So it seems that, for my second goal at least, I'm in good company.

Interestingly enough, he added that he's noticed that there's a gendered component to the willingness of artists to accept large commission jobs. Many female artists, who have internalized the stigmas of what he (somewhat uncharitably) called "the unpaid fandom ghetto," will balk at the offer of real money, or they'll accept the fee but never return the work because they obsess over whether it's "good enough." Meanwhile, most male artists will take the money and do the thing. I've never tried to work with a male artist, so I don't have any points of comparison, but I can't help but wonder whether there's some truth to this...?

[lassarina]

Hmmm. I can't speak to the money-and-run thing, but I have a lot of experience watching female friends drastically underprice themselves for commissions and also watching other friends wail because they want to pay a fanartist what her work is worth and are having a lot of trouble with that. Some of it is probably the tension of accepting money for fanworks (even if the commissions in this case are for original characters/etc.) - that tends to be a thing that makes people twitchy, in my experience (and it's one of the things I'm watching at Imzy with fascination because I am deeply curious how the tipping mechanic and fandom will interact.)

But I bet a lot of it is related to the fact that women's work is in fandom because that is where women's work is welcome--our work is inherently devalued, in the capitalist sense, by the fact that we do it for free in fandom. Then again, we do it for free in fandom because capitalism doesn't want us, so there's probably some substantial chicken-and-egg happening there.

[rynling]

Then again, we do it for free in fandom because capitalism doesn't want us, so there's probably some substantial chicken-and-egg happening there.

THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP.

For what it's worth, I just nudged an artist who's working on a commission project to accept another $100 because I felt so damn guilty for underpaying her for her work. That sort of thing is so awkward, and I'm so glad she accepted.

Thank you for the link, by the way. I have Thoughts And Feelings about K.C. Alexander, who I discovered several months ago in the process of following people's bookmarks on AO3. The short version is that, while I would never deny that the publishing industry in the United States is horribly and overtly sexist (and racist, and classist, etc), I think Alexander is also struggling with being a true pioneer in bridging the gap between fanfic and profic. I mean, there have been plenty of men and women (like Diane Duane, my hero) who have gone from writing what is essentially licensed fanfic to getting their own original stories published, but I think Alexander is doing something special and unique in refusing to edit out the sensibilities of contemporary fanfic in her profic. Diagetic gender roles are a large part of this, of course, but she's also breaking many strongly established genre conventions with tone and structure, which I think - based on my own experience as an editor - the editors she's complaining about are reacting to much more strongly than they would be to any sort of entrenched distrust of Strong Female Protagonists. Editors and agents are not bad people, but it takes time for the market to evolve. Thank goodness that someone like Alexander, who seems to be filled with enough energy to power a small island nation, is out there fighting the good fight for change and recognition, because I would very much like to follow in her footsteps.

[lassarina]

Ah, that's a lot of context I didn't have! Thank you very much for all of that. (I picked up a lot on the romance aspect of what she was talking about; as a romance fan and maybe someday published writer, I'm pretty sensitive to the genre ghetto of romance specifically, and the ways it interacts with cultural gender and race factors in particular.)