rynling | Entries tagged with the book

My proposal for a book about The Wind Waker is good. I mean, it's really good. Not only is it well-written and well-organized, but it's clear that I'm 100% prepared to write about this game and 100% onboard with the format of the Boss Fight Books series. I'm active Twitter mutuals with a few of the people involved with the press, and I've published professional reviews of both individual books in the series and the series as a whole. I have been preparing to write a book about The Wind Waker for this specific press for years, and I think it shows.

At the same time, I need to accept that my proposal probably won't be picked up. The press has to make money, and I'm just... not famous. Not famous on Twitter, not famous on the internet, and not famous in real life. I wish that a good idea and a solid background were all it takes to write a book, but I don't think anyone is going to get excited about opening the door for a quiet shut-in college professor who isn't particularly photogenic.

There's also a gender bias. I don't think it's overtly WE HATE WOMEN (or WE HATE NONBINARIES or whatever), but rather a more general attitude that the concerns of communities that aren't primarily men are not worth reading or writing about. To give an example, speedrunning fandom is absolutely worth multiple articles and even entire books, but something like the ongoing (mega ultra popular) Linked Universe fancomic will never even have an article written about it for Kotaku despite being a genuine subcultural phenomenon.

It was good to write the proposal, and it was good to submit it. But I need to move forward under the assumption that I'm not going to receive a positive response. Or any response at all, in all likelihood.

What I'd therefore like to do is write the book anyway. I'll write it a bit at a time while posting segments on Tumblr - they're really interesting and well-suited to social media, I think! Once I have all the words, I can then figure out what to do with them. There are so many good venues for writing about games these days that I think I can probably find a good home for a few essays. And then, if I'm feeling ambitious, maybe I can Kickstart my own modest publishing project.

Sorry, I'm not done yet.

For a good long while, it was my academic project to try to look at popular media created by and for women in a way that didn't take a male gaze for granted. To give an example, many highly respected North American scholars used to insist on seeing Sailor Moon as child pornography for adult men. Which is absurd. So I wrote an article unpacking this sort of discourse and argued that it makes much more practical sense to read Sailor Moon with a female gaze in mind.

I thought I was saying something obvious, but people HATED that I said it. Like, I've had famous scholars come up to me at conferences and tell me that I should be ashamed of myself. Because of the blog posts I wrote while I was thinking through the material for the article, I even became a minor target of Gamergate, of all things.

And then I was pressured to write an entire book on the subject, and... yeah. Don't get me started.

So when I see these incredibly virulent accusations leveled against My Favorite Murder (or the first season of Serial, for that matter), I'm just like, Bro you mad????

I just accepted an invitation to give my first (virtual) book talk. I've been holding off on doing this partially because I was concerned about time management (as I am fairly useless right now) and partially because of the psychological baggage I have regarding the labored publication of this book.

Like, what if the book is genuinely really bad?

But then I picked it up off the shelf yesterday, and I was like, actually you know what.

It's a cute little book. It has a cute little introduction and six cute little chapters, each of which begins with a cute little story. Every chapter has multiple cute little illustrations. The cover is cute, and the paper smells nice.

In terms of first books, my book is not horrible. I'm not a bad writer, and my argument is not unreasonable. As an added bonus, the book is also short (65k words), and the chapters are all roughly the same (8.5k word) length. I went through a lot of trouble to keep the citations and footnotes manageable, but I referenced a good range of material. People tend not to think about this when it comes to media criticism, but I'm studying a lot of rare but valuable texts, not to mention drawing on a lot of original-language Japanese material that required an extraordinary amount of textual archaeology to find and understand.

My first book may not be a staggering work of overwhelming genius, but that's okay. It's accessible and fairly easy to read, and it's a neat physical object that looks good on my shelf.

My publisher didn't do the best job of supporting or promoting me, but that's okay too. This is only my first book, and its main job is to be a key that unlocks the door to other opportunities.

My book has a strong title and a gorgeous cover, and it's about things like Sailor Moon and Steven Universe. There's no getting around the fact that it's an academic monograph written by a professor, but I tried to make it as accessible as possible. The chapter titles and subtitles are catchy, and it has a lot of gorgeous illustrations.

So people on social media are interested, which is great! I have decided, however, to no longer respond to anyone asking where they can get my book. The actual answer is simple:

(1) You can order it directly from the publisher. The link is right there in the tweet.

(2) You can order it from any major online retailer, from Amazon to IndieBound to Waterstones to Kinokuniya to Walmart. A quick Google search for the book title will fetch the relevant links.

(3) You can ask your local library to order a copy. Most libraries have simple request forms on their webpages, or you can send an email to the general reference desk.

(4) You can send a DM to me, the author, to (politely!!) ask if I can get you access to a discounted copy or a free promotional or review copy.

I mean, how do you get any book, right? This book in particular is tricky, because the hardcover costs $80. I know how that sounds, but that's just how academic publishing works. Most people don't understand how academic publishing works, because why would they, but that's just how it is. This is not a popular-audience book from a popular press; but, even if it were, hardcover books still cost money, and there's not much the author can do about that.

( Read more... )

By the end of the day, what I realized is that anyone who asks me a question like "Where do I get a copy of your book" probably:

(1) Doesn't know how links work
(2) Doesn't know how Google works
(3) Doesn't know how libraries work
(4) Doesn't know how to talk to an adult

And not to be elitist or anything, but a person like this probably isn't the target audience. What they want isn't the book itself, but the attention and emotional labor of me, the author.

So I guess the lesson I learned on Twitter yesterday is that, just like Tumblr, you just have to ignore the random children with anime avatars. It feels heartless not to respond to young people who are excited about my work, but there are only so many hours in the day - not to mention that I am depressed as shit right now and would rather be playing video games.

My first monograph was officially released yesterday, on April 1, 2020.

This doesn't mean much, unfortunately. Amazon currently has the book listed as "out of stock," and at the moment you can only get the digital version from the publisher's website.

Last weekend I was supposed to have been giving a high-profile panel, promoting my book, and talking to presses about my second book project at the big conference for my field. I was also scheduled to give a handful of talks at universities up and down the East Coast during April. I've been working for the past four years to make this happen, and now it's all just... gone.

This sounds like an inane thing to say during a global pandemic, but I can't help but be upset.

I keep thinking about Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which is about why certain groups of people seem to be magically successful while other equally worthy people can never seem to catch their big break. Gladwell's conclusion is basically this: Sometimes, you're just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes, entire generations are at the wrong place at the wrong time. And there's nothing that you or any one individual can do about it.

I'm feeling frustrated and useless right now, and I'm also haunted by a strong sense of being "the wrong type of doctor." I wish there were something I could do. Not about my stupid book about comics, but about the general state of the world. Given that my personal experience with the American university system has been so broken, I'm starting to think seriously about alternative routes to achieving broader and more accessible public education.

If nothing else, I guess I have time.

I’m not sure that my writing log will be weekly this year, but I’ll do my best to keep it updated. Here we go!

- I posted Chapter 23 and Chapter 24 of Malice.

- I posted a review of Riku Onda’s mystery novel The Aosawa Murders on my book review blog, as well as an abbreviated version on Goodreads.

- I sent my editor at Palgrave my book abstract and a set of chapter abstracts. This is the text that will go on the book’s webpage, so I spent a lot of time editing, refining, and polishing the abstracts I included with the initial prospectus. These abstracts are only about 1,200 words in total, but I’ve spent the past month working on this almost every day.

- I also wrote the “Acknowledgments” section of the book. I’ve been in a dark place for the past several months, so I wanted to wait until I was in the right state of mind to do this. I’d like to think the final draft is a good combination of sincere and concise.

- I also sent an essay abstract to an edited volume on JRPGs. I’m still playing with the title, but at the moment it’s “The Green Worlds of Studio Ghibli and The Legend of Zelda.” The essay is about how a postapocalyptic world is presented as something beautiful and full of potential in the Zelda series and how that worldview has been directly influenced by the work of Hayao Miyazaki. I’m scheduled to give a talk about this project at the University of Notre Dame in April, and I’m very excited!

This past week my editor at Palgrave sent me some lovely advance reader reports, a lovely clearance report, and an unironically enthusiastic request to reformat and index the entire manuscript by next Monday.

So I dropped everything and got to work on that.

And I'm not even done grading yet ~~someone please put me out of my misery~~.

This is a story about a guy who bullied me in college for writing fanfiction.

During college I put together a ton of scholarships and got to spend a year in Japan at a study abroad program, where I ended up in a relationship with a guy who went to a different school. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, but I was young and stupid and genuinely believed that I could fix things if only I could become a better person, which mostly entailed never saying anything when my feelings were hurt.

I worked three jobs during my senior year of college (on top of a full courseload, a senior thesis, and the grad school application process, fun times) in order to be able to fly to go see this boy at his university. I couldn’t afford a hotel room, so I would stay in his dorm, where he lived in a suite with two other boys.

One of these boys was really funny and smart and outgoing and talented, but he was also vaguely misogynistic in a way that young men at fancy colleges can be sometimes. He considered himself to be a writer, and one of his favorite topics to discuss when I was visiting seemed to be how much he hated fanfiction. Like, what’s more sad and pathetic, furries or the disgusting people who are too dumb to write anything other than fanfiction? Haha.

My charming boyfriend later told me that this guy knew that I wrote Pokémon fanfiction, and that he would sometimes perform readings from my LiveJournal in front of an audience for shits and giggles.

I don’t know if that’s true or not. What I do know is that this guy had a giant dildo suction-cupped to the wall above the television set in the dorm suite’s common room. The dildo’s name was "Dick Rambone." More than once I found myself sitting on the common room couch and slowly dying inside as this guy addressed his diatribes against fanfiction to Dick Rambone, as the dildo above the tv was presumably familiar with how horny and gross women and gay men are. Especially people who write Pokémon fanfiction, how sick is that?

So this is one of the guys who wrote the story and script for Detective Pikachu.

........

I actually discuss this in my book, how fanwork by women is often treated as amateurish and embarrassing while the exact same work done by men gets turned into Hollywood movies.

It’s weird – it’s so goddamn weird – that this ended up hitting so close to home.

I have anxiety, and it affected my ability to submit my book manuscript about female comic creators in a very real way. I put it off and put it off and put it off for months, mostly because I was afraid of the reception the manuscript would receive. Blind peer review is notoriously cruel and awful, and people in the field of Comics Studies tend to take the subject way too seriously (the irony of this is not lost on me, by the way). There's also the fact that the field is extremely male-dominated. This requires a lot of unpacking; but, to make a quick generalization, masculinist modes of scholarship view subjectivity and accessibility as weak and careless, and people who don't identify as male in a male-dominated field can have a tendency to justify their presence by overcompensating and "leaning in" to masculinist modes of scholarship even more than men do.

So I was afraid of what would happen once I submitted the manuscript; but, as I continued to work on it, I realized that it was actually good and important. Even though it wasn't perfect, I should submit it anyway. What's the worst that could happen?

( Read more... )

This isn't what I imagined when I tried to think about "the worst thing that could happen." This is actually worse, and it happened.

I've been trying to be more open about my experience of dealing with anxiety, and a lot of people have responded by saying something to the effect of, "But I could never tell! You seem to be doing fine!" I'm not doing fine, actually; it's just that I don't generally talk about things like this when they happen, despite the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time in academic publishing. I therefore think I'd like to talk openly and honestly about how broken academic publishing can be sometimes, as well as how anxiety-inducing subjecting yourself to the gauntlet of other people's egos in the form of anonymous "critique" can be.

But you know what? I believe in this project, and I can, in fact, work with this. Maybe this doesn't mean much coming from me, but this is a solid first book that deserves to be published! It's unfortunate that I encountered this small hiccup with the press, but they do good work, and I'm going to stick with them. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to devote myself entirely to getting this book published, and I'm going to put more effort into communicating with the press. Lord help me, I might even call people on the phone.

I think it might be useful to document the process of getting this book published here on this blog, so stay tuned. If nothing else, I have a lot to say about this whole "'female' is not a valid ontological category" nonsense.

I submitted my book manuscript this morning. It's a week after I told myself I would do this (not to mention three weeks after the actual deadline), but better late than never.

What I ended up doing two weekends ago was sitting down with the manuscript and making a list of about a hundred small things that needed to be done. My reasoning was that, if I did a dozen of these things every day, I could be done in a week. It took about an hour to do a dozen things; so, by spending an hour a day on the manuscript for eight days, I was able to get the work done. For the record, I hated every single second of this process.

The manuscript is 52,000 words long. This breaks down to five chapters of about 9,000 words each, a 6,000 word introduction, and about 1,000 words of front and back matter (meaning the table of contents, the list of works referenced, and so on).

This is on the short side for an academic manuscript. For comparison, my dissertation was 83,000 words long. Many people turn their dissertation into their first book, but I wasn't able to do this. To make a long story short, the academic job market is shit; and, to be granted a campus interview for a full-time entry-level job, you essentially have to present a search committee with the CV and portfolio of someone who has already been working in that job for at least five years. What this means is that I had to turn my dissertation into a series of articles and book chapters while I was on the job market, which in turn meant that I had to write my actual first book from scratch. To make matters even more dire, I had to write this book while still publishing a sufficient amount of additional material to pass my yearly state-mandated performance evaluation.

So the manuscript isn't good. But that's okay, I think? If it's rejected, I already have inquires from four other academic publishers, one of which (Bloomsbury) had already drawn up an advance contract for this project before I decided on my current publisher (Palgrave). In a worst-case scenario, I may have to delay my tenure case.

In a best-case scenario, I leave academia entirely. I think about this every day, not gonna lie.

I tend to have a “bird by bird” approach to projects, meaning that I force myself to do a little every day until I attain a critical mass where the sheer momentum drives me forward.

The problem I’m having with the book I’m working on is that I’ve never been able to reach a place where I’m excited about the work and motivated to finish it. I keep going, bird by bird by bird, but I am so fucking sick of birds.

I hate my book project, and it’s making me hate myself. This has been going on for almost two years now, and it’s depressing. The worst thing is that I’m at a point where, if I just sit down and put in a solid eight hours of work, I will have a not-entirely-awful draft. I feel bad because I’ve been plugging away at this for so long, but I think I need to give myself permission to half-ass the rest of job and just go ahead and send in a mediocre manuscript.

On Monday morning. I am going to send in whatever I have on Monday morning.

Yesterday afternoon, while driving down to Georgia, I finally found the entryway I needed for my book about women and comics. Instead of approaching the topic through its broader context of history or something resembling a literature review, I'm going to describe my process of writing the book as a personal narrative, with each chapter of the text approximating a chapter of my life. I know this sounds narcissistic – and it is! – but my project aims to draw connections that I don't think most people writing about popular culture have made yet, primarily because most people writing about popular culture don't have my generational experience.

How exactly did we get from Sailor Moon to Steven Universe? I know exactly how that story goes, because it's essentially the story of my life. Each chapter in the manuscript draws on a ton of research, but I want the introduction to be more personal; I want to engage the reader while showing her exactly how everything fits together within a lived experience.

It's a lovely 70° at 10:00 in the morning, which is perfect for taking a long walk and then sitting outside with some iced tea. The South may be a racist and homophobic dystopian hellhole, but at least the weather is nice.

I'm supposed to be writing a book about women and comics, and in fact I have been writing it. Now that I am already well past the deadline for the submission of my manuscript, I need to edit the material and tie everything together with an introduction so that the work stands as a cohesive whole with a strong underlying narrative. I've been dragging my feet on the introduction especially, and I think it's worth writing about what's been going on inside my head in an effort to twist myself away from the doldrums of my anxiety.

Essentially, I'm worried about the reception I will receive. It's highly likely that I will receive no reception at all, because not everyone can be a beautiful shining star. If people do pay attention to my writing, however, I'm worried that there will be backlash from three groups of people:

(1) the patriarchy, who will say that gender isn't worth talking about,
(2) feminist scholars, who will say that I don't engage deeply enough with theory, and
(3) self-identified feminist fans, who will say that I am an outsider to fandom or doing fandom wrong.

Honestly, at this point, I'm less worried about the patriarchy (which is unfortunately very real and manifests itself in very concrete ways) than I am about my fellow feminists, especially subcultures of feminists who have positioned embittered critique as the only valid mode of discussion regarding popular culture.

An acquaintance of mine from college works on the staff of the Smithsonian magazine, so I called him and asked if he could let me into the American History museum and give me a tour of the offices and archives. He was game, so off I go.

I have a new boss, and so far he seems more equanimous about my selfish bullshit than my old boss. I told him I needed to take the morning off to do research for a novel, and he was like, "Okie dokie, knock yourself out." It probably doesn't hurt that he's a novelist himself. I hope we can be friends.

I think the best way to approach my "fanfic as novel pilot" plan is to try to write a chapter every weekend. This gives me a month to figure out whether the story is worth dropping out of fandom and doing the actual work of becoming a writer.

Meanwhile I still haven't submitted the manuscript for the actual book I have under actual contract, because why pursue real-world success when you can build imaginary castles in the sky, I mean honestly.

ETA: My behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian was amazing, holy fuck. That was such a good idea. Everyone I met was brilliant and encouraging, and I was so energized and inspired that I ended up writing almost 5,000 words after I got home that afternoon. I could really get used to this whole "being a writer" thing.

Now that I'm writing a book, I'm having trouble caring about my professional blog. I didn't update it at all last month; I couldn't be bothered.

I've been having all manner of crazy thoughts concerning what to do with my contract advance (like scheduling an intake appointment for cosmetic surgery - no, seriously!), but I think the best use of the money might be to pay people to write for me. I would solicit guest writers and then compensate them fairly for their labor, basically.

The problem is that most of the writers I know in real life are neurotic. Like, I love them, but they are all different types of crazy. I am already an editor in my day job, but my institution lends me authority. If I become an editor on my own blog, it will just be me being a dick to my friends, many of whom are already a few cards short of a full deck (which is why I love them and, let's be honest, why we became friends to begin with). Also, if I start paying the people I drink with, obviously our relationships are going to change.

Still, I think it's worth trying. Since it's just a blog, I wouldn't be under any obligation to do anything with any degree of regularity, or to continue anything that isn't working for me. No one else on the internet or in print is doing anything remotely like what I'm doing, and it would be cool to turn this project into A Real Thing.

My plan for today is to (a) start drinking early, (b) send out the first batch of emails before I start doubting myself, (c) leave work after lunch to continue drinking, and then (d) put together a simple set of practical guidelines for guest writers. This is how professionals do things, right?

Yesterday I signed a book contract.

The book is about women and comics. My main argument is that women are not a subculture.

Since I had nothing to lose, I went to the biggest, shiniest editor at the biggest, shiniest press I could think of. She got really excited and started using words I didn't understand, like "fax" and "certified check."

It's a sad commentary on the state of writing about comics that I was able to sell the idea for a book that essentially states "women exist." I'm actually planning on being quiet about this on my social networks, because I've already gotten aggressive pushback against the idea that there are just as many women as men making comics. A lot of people hate comics that aren't about superheroes, a lot of people hate comics that aren't written in English, a lot of people hate Tumblr, and a lot of people hate women.

In any case, my contract specifies the deadline for submission of the full manuscript as August 31 of this year. Seven months doesn't seem like a lot of time, and I seriously doubt that I have the strength of character to see a project like this all the way through. I will do my best, I guess.

To celebrate I bought myself a leather jacket and a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses so I can pretend to be a badass bitch instead of a scared and pasty nerd who has suddenly found herself at the deep end of a shark tank.