I should first mention that the very first appearance of
Aunt Edna was in a long phone conversation with my old, great friend Jerry Oltion, and he sent me a
quick email on the subject of her:
Hmm. It's an
insightful and possibly more accurate analogy when extended like this, but I
confess to a fondness for the original one in which Aunt Edna was locked in the
attic and only fed when she produced the magical thing that only she knew how
to do (that must be just like the last one, only blue this time). Then
Edna realizes she can just climb out the window and go sell her magical
creations in a craft fair, and the rest of the family collapses in an orgy of
cannibalism.
But that's probably
because I identify with Edna.
Actually, I don’t remember that version at all but Jerry and
I both make stuff up all the time – it’s what fiction writers do. The thing I suppose I would most
emphasize is that Aunt Edna has a tough row to hoe because she’s been kept in
the dark for a long time, but also because she has really, really liked her
dependency – and frankly, that dependency was a pretty good deal for a lot of
us in the old days, roughly 1840-1999, when the commercial pro fiction was the
only real game.
Being a dependent gave you a certain freedom and a certain
stability. In the old days, now
and then you might do a project for love – One
for the Morning Glory was one such for
me, and there were some other “Edmunds”
as well – and have to beg and plead and have your agent resubmit and
resubmit to the same editors, over and over, to get it into print (the noble
Patrick Nielsen Hayden bought three of my Edmunds over the years), but once you
succeeded, you got at least a modest advance and it didn’t pay that much worse
than any other book – the risk associated with doing a book for love, once
you had secured an Aunt Edna like
position, was only that it might be a while to recoup the time invested. In our new, modern, self-marketing
world, Aunt Edna might make her wonderful beaded necklace that takes hours and
hours, and never get paid. The rewards for guessing right are much
higher but the penalty for guessing wrong is much steeper.
Too, in those long ago days, sometimes an editor or agent
would do something or other to keep you alive, i.e. cut you a check before you
actually did the work or prior to
the final approval that was supposed to trigger the payment. Yes, later on it sucked to have to do
work without having anything come for it, and you couldn’t abuse that privilege
too much or someone would notice and make your editor stop abetting your petty
fraud/float, but there wasn’t nearly as much risk of ending up with your
furniture on the sidewalk and your butt at the Salvation Army as there is in
our more real-capitalist real-business world of today.
And the fact is that a lot of us writers are Aunt-Edna-like
not just in having been locked up and abused, but in not really wanting to take care of ourselves, look
out for our own interests, or have any genuine responsibility. Mike Stackpole did a moderately
bitter piece about “just wanting to write” and I think he nailed a big part
of it, though less sympathetically than I would.
Many people become writers because we’re easily stressed out
by human contact, and the idea of spending the rest of our lives in an attic
full of books, tea, and cats (or a hunting lodge with books, guns, beer, and
room for plenty of dogs), getting money dribbled to us by a mysterious source
that just wants us to keep writing, seems pretty well glorious even if there’s
not much meat in the gruel.
Sucking up to exploitive patrons for subsistence may be the very
definition of life in the demimonde, but it’s explicable and human in a way
that playing directly to a big audience – and operating a small business – is
just not.
So Aunt Edna, bless her, has a pretty bad case of PTSD,
maybe a big dose of survivor guilt, and many of the mental habits of a
dependent – i.e. rather than looking to please customers on the average, she
tends to look to do exactly what a patron tells her to. The thought crosses her mind all the
time that if things could only go back to the way they were, when sometimes
they brought her hot chocolate or a new kitty, she could be so happy, and when
there’s real trouble, she really feels how much she wishes Cousin Ted would
just turn up and fix everything.
She is not particularly brave and independent, and she doesn’t mentally
have a band playing behind her; she’s a scared old lady doing what she has to
do because events drove her out of the house (and that’s where I really
disagree with Jerry; most of the independent self-pub types I know, even the
very successful ones, were driven to it much more than they boldly seized the
opportunity to carve out a living on the new frontier.)
Back before he became famous as the
longshoreman-philosopher, during the Great Depression while he was a migratory
farm worker who survived the winters in public libraries, Eric Hoffer became
interested in the 49ers because of a hunch, and asked the oldest native
Californians (at the time) he could find: did you know any of the people who
came out during the Gold Rush?
What were they like? Now,
he was fishing for an answer he wanted, and he was the only reporter of it, but
he claimed that almost every 80 or 90 year old Californian who had known some
actual Gold-Rushers would say, “Actually the ‘49ers were pretty much like the
Okies.”
I.e. people who had mostly lost poor existences, and went
where there was at least supposed to be work and a chance.
That’s Aunt Edna, or the commercial writers of today. And not surprisingly, we’re making
massive mistakes in all directions and some of us, to mix up our gold rushes
and our aunts, are going to freeze to death because we didn’t realize we were
building our fire under a snow-laden tree. Some will probably just give up and walk sadly away into
teaching or managing a supermarket.
Some will hang out at would-be writer gatherings talking about who they
used to be.
And some will pull it together, but the truth is, it won’t
be because we are uber-fit super-writers.
We’ll have some combination of circumstantial luck (landing in the right
place at the right time) and personal luck (happening to make some right
guesses, or avoid some big mistakes, early on).
So no, I root for Edna, with all my soul obviously, but I
don’t think it is at all a foregone conclusion that she will turn out
fine. Making a new life while
you’re still damaged from the old one is never easy, whether we’re talking
about the collapse of dreams, addictions, marriages, or industries.
With regard to that, the next correspondent I’m in debt to
is Charlie Petit, a
writer’s-lawyer among writer’s-lawyers, known to many of us as “Charlie the
Shark,” and generally cool guy,
who suggested a couple more members of the family, which also caused me to
think of a couple more. I’ve
revised Charlie’s enough so that I’ve renamed them, but the inspiration,
directly and indirectly, came from him.
So here’s a few more people around the house
•Uncle Larry, who is the accounting department. He spends all his time with Grandpa the
publisher, and some people think Larry is not allowed to talk to anyone else,
and some that he doesn’t want to.
He’s the one who goes to the bank every month to pick up Aunt Edna’s
bank statements, and then doesn’t let anyone, especially not Edna, see
them. He just tells Edna how much
to write each check for, and slips envelopes of cash into some people’s pockets. Even Grandpa sometimes seems to be afraid
of him, and no one is sure that he’s actually a relative but they don’t want to
make him mad. He may or may not
know where the money actually goes but it’s quite clear that what is really
important to him is making sure that no one else does.
•Cousin Brandon from California, who is some kind of distant
relation of Grandpa’s; he comes out once a year or so, wearing large shades and
a flat expression, tells everyone what they should be wearing, flaunts some
bling, and goes home before anyone thinks to ask him about anything. The day after he goes, the house is
ringing with Aunt Edna’s pathetic shrieks because she can’t find some of her
mother’s jewelry, Cousin Ted is trying to calm down Aunt Tilly because she just
bought six tons of organic rice and now Brandon won’t be here to eat it, and
Grandpa is asking everyone if they’d like to move to California.
•Sylvester, Aunt Edna’s beloved cat, and the representation
of the muse. Aunt Edna’s great
secret: every now and then, Sylvester talks, and when he does, it’s a great,
make-your-year kind of idea.
Mostly he sleeps and tries to look important, while Edna tries to get
him to eat and changes his box over and over (in the forlorn hope that this
time he won’t go on the floor). No
one but Edna believes that Sylvester talks (although Cousin Ted tries to humor
her about it). Whenever she’s
really desperate and miserable, Aunt Edna quietly asks Sylvester to come up
with something. Once in a very
great while he deigns to do so; mostly he leaves her standing there saying
“Good kitty, tell me what to do,” pretending to be asleep, while all the
cousins mock her.
And that’s pretty much a wrap for this follow-on. For those of you just joining in the
last couple of days (and a big shout out to Dean Wesley Smith who appears to
have started that ball rolling), this is the blog where I talk about a little
bit of everything. Next things up
are probably a link to a never-before-published story (and some thoughts about
its never-before-publishability and what makes science fiction identifiable), a
Christmas piece that I’ve been working on for a couple of days, and something
or other about global warming/climate change (as the author of Mother of Storms
and an inhabitant of this planet I feel like I should say something). In the somewhat more distant future,
I’ll be doing some blog-based projects on data massage (how to get results out
of crummy data, not how to rub Brent Spiner); book doctoring; maybe something
about the semiotics of the sales process; and other stuff, and those
projects/blogs will be announced here first. Thanks for coming by and I hope you’ll be by again!
