Cecilia Tan's web journal, entries from 1998
November 11, 1998 Phew, just got back from a ten day trip to San Francisco
and I am beat. corwin and I celebrated our seventh anniversary with a shopping
spree at Mr. S Leather and lots of dinners out around town while there.
I had worried that our vacation, sandwiched between the World Fantasy Con
one weekend and the San Francisco Book Festival the next, was underplanned
and we migh get bored or feel we'd wasted the trip. As it was, I never
even cracked open the laptop I'd brought with me, and I didn't come close
to finishing the book I'd brought to read. I think I need to rethink what
this word "vacation" means... next time maybe we should go somewhere dull
so we can catch up on sleep, unread books, and unwatched movies. Yeah,
like a hospital. (The last time I felt "caught up" was in 1990 when I had
abdominal surgery and spent six weeks with bed rest and recuperation...)
I really should go to the Bay Area more often, because there are so
many people there I know and want to see, it isn't possible to eat a meal
with each of them on every trip. But that requires the two things I need
more of in my life: money and time. As it was, though, this trip I managed
to see more peeple that I haven't seen in like 10+ years that a kind of
deja-vu theme began to emerge on the trip. Even at the Book Festival I
ran into people I knew at Brown who I hadn't seen since my freshman or
sophomore year there. One of my closest friends from when I was 17-18 yrs
old is also out there--she hasn't aged a day to look at her so it's mind
boggling to realize she's an M.D. Another current M.D. I knew at Brown
is now corwin's primary care physician. Small world. Small world.
September 21, 1998
Man, I keep trying to write this journal entry about the current state
of me, and I just can't. Things are good and bad. I'm too old to think
this won't pass--I'm too old to think that it won't require some drastic
changes on my part to get it to do so. So instead of saying something about
my state of mind directly, I'll say something brief on the topic of fantasy.
We need fantasy. Our over-evolved brains have a consciousness that wants
to be busy. Like the subject of a sensory deprivation experiment whose
brain invents non-existent sights and sounds, we crave adventure, challenege,
risk, difference, stimulation. Of course, other survival mechanisms at
work inure us to stability, habit, balance and stasis. So the stimulation
comes from our own ability to empathize and fantasize.
These days, so much of what pop culture gives us to feed on is hooked
into that vein of empathy rather than fantasy. Watch real live police chases
on television, see movies made from true scandalous lives. If anything
the perfect drug for our fevered need is a combination of the two, the
real life story into which we can inject ourselves. It could have happened
to anyone... it's true, but we fantasize about it. What would it have been
like to be there, in Nazi Germany, on SwissAir Flight 111, or in the stands
in St. Louis last week?
Not all info-tainment events are tragic or horrifying, of course, but
they do tend to make more sensational, more compelling copy.
But I was going to say something in defense of fantasy for fantasy's
sake. We who are story tellers, we fantasize professionally. We take our
dreams and our obsessions and our points of view, and we craft them into
a piece of communication and send it out to the world. Sometimes we hit
a nerve or tongue the zeitgeist. Sometimes we don't reach anyone who empathizes,
or we don't craft our personal sh** well enough to create empathy for the
imaginary. But we have to try. For us it isn't enough to fantasize. We
have to share the fantasy, too. And fortunately, there are always people
out there who want to.
Why are "genre" fictions, including historical fiction, murder mysteries,
science fiction, etc... considered of less literary value than other fiction?
As fiction, as source for fantasy, I would think them of higher value,
no? What is the purpose of fiction? Of Art? Is it to feed our need for
imagination-center stimulus? Writers, artists, we like to think that we
are making statements about the human condition and contributing to the
human race's knowledge of itself. But me, this week anyway, I think all
that comes after the fact. For today anyway, I will happily create fiction,
consume movies and pop music, (Even participate in a Rennaissance Faire)
for the sake of fantasy itself. That's good enough for me.
August 26, 1998
Alright, it's been months, and I've traveled all over and I've beaten
a bunch of deadlines, and I've worked myself half to death (if the current
state of my body is any indication...). But, a finally have had a few weeks
of
placid productivity. Write, write, write. On Sunday I wrote eight straight
hours at my desk on a project I hadn't expected to really knuckle down
to for another few months. But I was on fire to do it. And the past two
days have been fairly intense, also. This is when I am happiest and feel
the most fulfilled. Of course the problem is, when I get into hyper-productive
writing mode, everything else disappears from my head. Other work, social
commitments, house cleaning, it goes ker-poof. Looked at another way, though,
I always have one of these hyperactive productivity periods as soon as
everything else slows down just enough... So maybe it is less my writing
forcing me to neglect everything else as much as it is finally getting
a chance to grab the wheel and drive for a while, now that all the other
passengers are taking a rest. Oh yeah, stretch that metaphor until it breaks...
July 26, 1998
Gods, I could have sworn I updated this page at the beginning of the
month, but apparently I hadn't. SO a short July it will be. I've spent
much of the month traveling around, doing readings, and interviews, and
all that sort of thing. The bad part of all this is, of course, that I'm
too busy to write, and my soul gets very fidgety and unhappy when I don't
write. I don't know at this moment how I'm going to make it. I need to
do more paying work, I might even need to go out and get another real job,
and leave Circlet Press for a weekend project until sales pick up. I sincerely
hope not since I know all that will happen is I'll end up writing even
less, and seeing my friends even less, and chances are I still won't be
out of debt because publishing jobs still don't pay all that well! No,
no, clearly the only solution is to write some really huge bestselling
books... if only I had the time.
June 3, 1998
Just returned from the mondo-huge trade show of the book industry,
and I'm still feeling that thing akin to jet lag that happens when I am
forced to get up early every day for several days. It's only 1am right
now (not even close to my usual sleep time) and my eyelids feel like lead.
There's also the exhaustion that comes from the four solid days of being
"on." B-b-b-b-b-b-b. I think I coined a new term for the glaze/daze that
overcomes one a few hours into the schmooze-fest: CDD or Convention Deficit
Disorder. It's the thing that makes you unable to finish any sentence other
than the ones in your patter... Actually, as trade shows went, I spent
much less time in the booth than in past years. Almost one whole day I
was out and about as a Harper author, autographing BLACK FEATHERS and attending
a very swanky luncheon with the likes of Tony Hillerman, Wally Lamb, Rebecca
Wells.
This is all veeeeery exciting. I didn't expect, I guess, for much to
change as a result of my publishing a major book, other than my debt level
going down... but something has palpably changed, even if I can't quite
put my finger on it. I don't feel internally different, I guess in the
way that I didn't feel significantly different on the first day of my 21st
year than on the last day of my 20th, despite the legal differences between
the two. Perhaps this is exactly because most of the difference comes in
the way others think of me, not in the way I think of myself.
The rewrite of the still-untitled rock and roll coming of age novel
is in its final stage now. Then I have the Velderet to finish and polish.
And then... we'll have to wait and see.
Yes, updated on May 14, 1998 BLACK FEATHERS is out! It's stacked up
in every bookstore I've been in in Chicago and Boston (thus far), often
on the "New Fiction Paperbacks" table, which blows my mind. Now, fingers
crossed that people actually buy the book... I'm touring Boston and New
York, and generally fretting like I'm sure all authors do, about how it
will be received by reviewers, the public, my family members... Here I
am, sexuality advocate and all that, but still, I worry just a tad that
old high school teachers or distant relatives or whoever will pick up the
book, which *is* rather extremely graphic and sexual in nature, and be
freaked. Well, it's just a possibility I have to live with. Ha! The one
bad review it's gotten so far was the opposite--from a reviewer who believes
that sex is only interesting and erotic only arousing, if the sex is considered
dirty or sinful. (Jeez, what kind of sex has *that* guy been having?) So,
I probably worry too much.
April 1, 1998
I pruned my roses this weekend. It was eighty degrees outside. As with
last year, one week we were having snow, and the next week, whammo, it's
summer. I'm suddenly motivated to lose my winter fat, start getting up
earlier in the morning (or, well, in the afternoon. The past ten days or
so I've actually gotten up late, that is, 1:30pm, every day. Terrible,
I know. But that's what happens when you stay up all night alternately
working and hand-wringing that all the work is for naught. I'm, shall we
say, a little anxious about how "Black Feathers" will do in the commercial
marketplace. I willingly and actively take part in the commerce of writing,
and the very real prospect of failure (or success) in this regard looms.
In some ways this is harder for the creative mind to deal with than the
writing itself because at least in the writing process we are in control
(or have the illusion of being in control) of everything. Now it is in
the hands of a lot of other people and I'm trying to be sanguine about
it. So I'm pruning my roses, making my plans, eating right, working on
healing my persistent back injury... and worrying.
March 3, 1998
It's time for another growing spurt--I can feel it. This one will be
a mental one, perhaps one of writing craft (I can hope) or one of internal
philosophy. Not sure what it will be yet, but whatever it is I'm sure it
will be reflected in my next book. Then again maybe I'm only so keen on
mental pursuits right now because I'm damn tired of trying to put my body
back together, bad knees, weak back, eyesight getting worse all the time...
today I have a severe weird pain in my arm that might be RSI-related. This
is the worst of tham all because if I can't type or hold a pen I am really
and truly hosed. I keep telling myself I probably just wrenched it in standing
bondage on Saturday night at a wild S/M party I went to (yes, I had great
fun, thanks)--a little tendon strain is all. I can hope.
Meanwhile, I'm doing a lot of thinking, thinking, thinking. I always
do, I know, but lately I've been thinking about the thinking itself. Does
everyone keep up this ongoing monologue all the time, or is it just me?
Maybe it's a writer thing. As soon as I stop talking or listening to someone
else, this voice in my head starts going like a play by play announcer.
I think it has always been there, but I never was so conscious (or self-conscious)
of it, until I started to doubt the believability of my narrator, Daron,
in whose novel he basically keeps up an interior monologue for 225,000
words. And at some point that seemed impossible, ludicrous, incredulous...
but using myself as the only example I can, it's actually more realistic
than I would have otherwise given credit for.
February 5, 1998
There's a "nor'easter" going on out there right now, with wind-driven
sleet and fun things like that. I can feel the draft blowing right through
my storm windows. Suddenly, I've had enough of winter! Jeez. It's like
there's a refrigerator door open right next to me. Those of you in other
parts of the world reading this, hope the weather's better where you are!
I don't want to talk about the weather anymore. I want to go to bed and
curl up with the cats. So I will.
January 3, 1998
New Year, new year. It's only three days into the new year and I'm
already feeling, what, like it's been here for a while already? Maybe that's
because I'm in the middle of so many things, I don't have time to start
something "new." It looks like it will be an exciting year, a productive
year, another year of steps and inches. I'd say more, but I've got to turn
my lamb roast now before I forget.
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