C&Q Too Redux: on furry writing

[chipotle]

While I got some interesting comments on my post on the 13th, none of them were actually on the questions I posed. While I’m going to circle back to my own questions, I’m going to muse for a bit on furry fandom’s oldest lament, nobody appreciates the writers.

It’s true that illustrations get immediate responses and a wider audience. I’ve heard people explain this by going back into fannish history and relating how furry grew from anime and comics fandom, or with a somewhat more curt “furry is just a visual fandom.”

However, this has nothing to do with fandom. If someone puts a print by Michael Whelan or Jackson Pollock in front of you, you’ll make a value judgement within seconds. If I put a short story by Ursula LeGuin or William Faulkner in front of you, though, you can’t do that. Words require substantially more effort. It’s easier to watch a movie than read a book, and movies that are miserable commercial failures sold many more tickets than wildly successful novels sold copies. This certainly isn’t about furry fans, and while it’d be easy to blame it on illiterate modern youth, this has been true for as long as there have been movie theatres.

Some would still argue that furry fandom is uniquely hostile to the written word, but I’d strongly dispute that. While I can only arrogantly use myself as an example, among ConFurence attendees circa 1992, Revar the vampire bat, from my novella “A Gift of Fire, a Gift of Blood,” actually beat out Erma Felna for most popular furry character. I’m sorry, lamenting writers, but if furry fandom was completely illiterate, that just wouldn’t have happened. More people may know and love (or hate) Terrie Smith’s Chester the ringtail, but furry fans can, and do, read.

The problem is visibility.

Simply put, writers aren’t nearly as visible as artists. In part this can be blamed on, well, writers. Bluntly, most of us just don’t write very much. There are all sorts of good explanations, sensible reasons and pithy excuses, but the cold, hard truth is that if you’re not consistently getting stories out in places where people can go to see them, you’re not going to be seen very much. Yes, we’re amateur writers in the canonical sense of the term, but most of us don’t take our writing output nearly as seriously as amateur artists take theirs.

However, the flip side of that is having places where people can go to see them. In the “Gift of Fire” days, the go-to publication for writers (and to a large degree, even amateur artists and writers) was Yarf!, which put out a respectable 40-60 pages on an eight-times-a-year publishing schedule. But Yarf! has fallen on hard times—officially, it publishes four times a year now, but in practice barely an annual—and, as the fandom’s locus has moved online, some would say it’s become rather irrelevant.

The move to the net has been on balance beneficial to furry artists. Despite the eternal flap over art piracy, the fandom has expanded tenfold over the last decade, in part due to art archive sites. But there’s never been anything like the Yerf Archive for stories. The closest we ever saw was Miavir’s Index, but that wasn’t an archive, it was (as so named) an index of links to other locations—manually updated and over the years updated less and less. And, while it had a charming character from Miavir’s own editorial ratings, it wasn’t a selective index.

For the most part, writers just ended up slapping stories up on their own web sites and tried to advertise the links. This works to a degree—my stories still get seen—but there are obvious limits to it. Most of the hits I get are through search engines these days; I’ve gotten the occasional complimentary e-mail from completely non-furry readers who’ve stumbled across a story when they were looking for something else entirely.

And that’s important enough to repeat. Furry creations can catch and hold non-furry audiences. The best furry writing and art has the ability to reach audiences beyond the fandom’s boundaries.

Or, at least, it did. This has been the biggest frustration for me as I’ve watched furry fandom grow in the net era: it now functions as a closed ecosystem. There are artists who break out of this—and the ones who do are usually the ones who set “trends” in furry art rather than follow them—but many don’t. Amateur artists can make a side income, if not a living, without ever going beyond the fandom market. We are ten times greater in number now, and ten times more insular.

Despite the income opportunities, I don’t think this is a good thing for artists. It’s been no better for writers, and may have been worse. (Save for Sofawolf Press, there’s no paying market in the fandom for fiction I know of currently, so there’s not even that solace.) Furry stories, comics and illustrations incubate in an environment comprised primarily of other fan creations, an increasing number of which drew only on earlier fan creations for inspiration, and fandom cliché and jargon is as a consequence taken for granted. Characters call one another “furs,” foxes are promiscuous bubble-heads that wolves always want to top, “yiff” is used—God help us—without irony. Furry fandom has fallen victim to inbreeding of the imagination, and more and more of our muses are apparently sitting around trying to pick out “Dueling Banjos,” their single thick brows furrowed in concentration.

I don’t want to say that some of these stories aren’t enjoyable; some of them are well-written and show real talent. Yet that’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? No matter how good a “for furry fans only” story may be, it can’t draw someone into the fandom. It’s born flightless.

And the tragedy of that, to me, is that concepts we’d recognize as furry in stories and literature are incredibly broad. They range from the talking animals of The Wind in the Willows to the more mythic, adult treatment in The Blood Jaguar and China Mieville’s gritty King Rat, and in science fiction stories as disparate as The Pride of Chanur, Dean Koontz’s Watchers and the seminal Sirius. We even have mystery series whose detectives are cats.

To get from furry to beyond furry, there needs to be something that can function as a bridge. There are many things to complain about with DeviantArt, but despite its faults, it’s very easy for artists and viewers who aren’t “furry fans” to come across furry work there. It might not seem that a furry-only archive represents that much more of a barrier to casual entry, but “stumbling across” a piece by Kenket or Dark Natasha is pretty difficult. A furry fan might try to interest non-furries in visiting an archive to see a specific piece, but many of those archives are filled with things that — and I mean this in the kindest, gentlest way — suck. This is, of course, also true of DeviantArt, but it’s still at least one kind of bridge between furry and non-furry. The other kind of bridge would be, well, the kind of archive that a furry fan could interest a non-furry in without worrying too much about the suck.

For all of the whining about Yerf’s snobbery and editorial caprice, they were the only site I’m aware of that tried to compensate for Sturgeon’s Revelation. If 90% of everything is indeed crud (and some would say Sturgeon was an optimist), then any given subject, including furry, is best represented by the other 10%. (As someone commented in my post on this subject originally, Rosenberg’s Corollary to Sturgeon’s Revelation: “But oh, that ten!”)

This brings me around full circle to my comment that there’s never been anything like the Yerf Archive for writers. The only conscious effort I know of in progress right now to be a “bridge market” is Sofawolf; for all of the fandom’s internet-as-hub mindset, there’s never been an attempt to do such a thing online.

I’ll return to this in a followup.

Comments

[ja-ren.livejournal.com]

As always, your well thought out arguments are a joy to read, even on subjects which have no relevance to me. Though some points you raised are certainly relevant to anyone who cares about the nature of the fandom, as anyone who considers themselves a part of it should.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

Please realize that I'm commenting upon this as a person relatively new to the fandom, and that I can only speak out of my own personal experience, which should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

I have two small children, and I'm continually struck by how many children's stories and illustrations are filled with anthropomorphic animals. Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, nursery rhymes, and The Velveteen Rabbit are a few classic examples I can add offhand to the ones you've already mentioned.

I think that, generally speaking, what mainstream society objects to is the sexualizing of anthro animal characters, or even the rendering of them in more nonsexual but still modern ways. I don't know if this is related to the tendency to be alternately prudish and provocative outside of any furry contexts, or if it's related to (unnecessary, imo) concerns about pedophilia.

I think that's a flaw in the mainstream, not one with furries ourselves. Certainly there's nothing inherently wrong with having an inner fantasy life, and where else should we go when nurturing our creativity but back to its original inspiration, the stories of our childhood?

That said, for whatever reason, the furry fandom seems to have become both scapegoat for and victim of all that is negative within Internet culture. I don't know why. All I know is that I've seen it. I've been amazed at the number of webcommunities devoted solely to furry persecution, the number of people who define themselves solely by opposing the fandom, the number of folks in Philly who viewed people there for the con with open disbelief or derision.

I don't really understand why. I accept that society views the whole thing as generally weird, but I don't intellectually understand it. Still, there are many things about the mainstream that baffle me and the response to furries is just one drop in the proverbial ocean.

So, to address your question: yes, I think that anthropomorphized animals can and do have a place in fiction outside of the fandom, though I think that it's most likely to be successfully marketed to small children or to a certain genre of SF&F fans.

Apart from that, though, I think that the insularity to which you're referring may have developed as a necessary response to persecution. It's perhaps a chicken/egg phenomenon, but I too feel a bit protective of the fandom and my friends within it, not to mention myself, when I think of exposing all of our eccentricities and idiosyncrasies to the world at large. The world hasn't done such a great job with the little glances into our subculture that it's gotten thus far.

Another question is who is meant by 'the mainstream'. 'Mainstream' gamer/geek society is a bit different from mainstream society as a whole, and there are generational considerations to think about as well.

[toy-dragon.livejournal.com]

Furry "persecution" is, I feel, a very complex subject and this makes it hard to really get a grasp on. It's more complex I suspect, than either panic-prone furry apologists or rabid furry "haters" would have you believe, as well. The apologists might sneer that "they hate us because they're mean!" While the furry derisionist might sneer that "filthy furry freaks deserve it for being freaks!"

Questions that don't often get asked in a level headed manner, from either side, are ones like "and why are people supposedly meaner to furries than others?" or "and why does someone being different or even a freak deserve hatred and needless cruelty?"

Generally, I tend to think that it's a combination of many factors. Furry fandom has encouraged some isolationist behavior and attitudes that have goaded lots of fans to develop victimhood complexes and set themselves against "the mundanes". This is perhaps not too different than other subcultures, particularly geeky ones. In Furry's case, it just may be more extreme than typical. This has resulted in Furry fans exhibiting more abrasive and socially inept behavior over time; one reason cited as "justification" for some persecution of the fandom. While this may be so, the other side of the coin is that Furry appears to be a convergence of a lot of points which, when combined, create a whole that may be profoundly uncomfortable to a lot of demographics.

Now, in my view, this discomfort is more a sign of their own issues than something "wrong" with Furry's themes. Many people are disturbed and unsettled, even offended, by the mere idea of a person putting on a non-human persona to represent themselves. One can find surprising prejudices spring up - the "special" position humanity by default is given above all other creatures for example. This may almost sound religious in nature - and there have been a number of the religious who find Furry offensive by comparing "men to beasts", etc - but I've actually run into more who are offended by the thought of "adult" anthro animal creatures in secular terms. Humanity is still special, what with all of its shiny achievements and such, and to these folk, people "pretending to be animals" is at best foolish and a stupid waste of time, and at worst some nebulous offense to the "pride of humanity".

THere is still more; but the short of it is that Furry appears to be a nexus of many elements which, while on one hand potentially invigorating in the wild gestalt they can create, are also potentially offensive and disturbing to a great many people because they form an overall picture so different than what these folk have been conditioned and bred to expect to find as "normal, reasonable, moral, proper, and sane".

It can be very strange, and very unsettling, to realize that something you've gotten involved in just because you're you, and it's "one of your things", does in fact place you at odds with so many merely for the association. This is, however, one of the ways of the world.

It is, also, something that I feel can be changed. Must be, in time, for survival.

[(Anonymous)]

*nods slowly* I agree with much of what you've said here, but I'm curious about the conclusion that it must be changed. How do you see this change taking place?

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I don't think there really is an objection to furry stories from non-furry audiences. There's something of a perception problem, what you alluded to with the difficulty in relating to these characters in adult (not necessarily sexual) ways, but anthropomorphic animals show up in media with some regularity without audiences looking askance at them.

The perception problem furry fandom has is really a separate issue, I think, and it's one that really isn't going to go away except with time. I think it is going away, slowly, though. It's my feeling that a lot of the bad press we've received traces back to a small number of sources. Most of the mainstream media presentations of furry were inspired by an article in Vanity Fair some years ago, for instance. And, on the internet, a lot of the hostility goes back to Something Awful's decision to use furry fandom as a recurring target by finding the most extreme fringes of furrydom and highlighting them for humor value. (I have some friends who are SA goons who will object to this characterization--after all, SA was just finding the freaks who were already out there, right?--but there's some very bitter, genuine hatred toward furries which SA helped foster.)

What I meant by insularity is both more specific and more prosaic, though. You can see a rough parallel to what I'm thinking of in fantasy fiction. Tolkien drew on many old, archetypal sources for The Lord of the Rings, but authors who came after him largely drew on Tolkien's work. Fantasy role-playing games drew on Tolkien and his imitators in the late '70s; by the mid-'80s, there was a raft of fantasy novels that drew on those games. And, by and large, they were pretty tragic exercises. Furry fandom is old enough to have gone through a complete generation now, and a lot of the stories and art and characters I've seen created in the last 5-10 years have been created in an environment entirely influenced by other furry material. Words like fur and morph (and one I hear a lot at the Giants' Club, of course, macro) are utterly meaningless in their fannish contexts to anyone who isn't a fan; slap one in your story, and you're immediately announcing your story is only aimed at fans.

I used "non-furry" instead of "mainstream" because, as you noted, "mainstream" can mean different things in different contexts. That's not limited to fandom; the audience for "The Sopranos" and for "Touched by an Angel" probably has fairly limited crossover...

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

You're right; I latched on to the word 'insularity' without paying proper consideration to how you were using it in the post, I think. I'm sorry for that.

I agree with you on all counts as far as it relates to good writing. The line about 'yiff' being used without irony made me giggle when I read it the first time. I wonder if the phenomenon you've described here is part of what makes me want to shy away from 'fanfic' as a whole, both as reader and writer. However, it's certainly not limited to fanfic or fandom as a phenomenon either...I think that all genre novels, whether romance or mystery or horror, suffer from the problem you've described to a certain extent, some works obviously more than others.

That said, I've never considered furry writing 'fanfic,' even if it is coming from someone within the 'fandom,' because the universes and characters we create are our own. And I guess, when I think about writing a furry story, I just want to know that someone's going to read it. I don't care if that person is inside or outside the fandom; I just want to be read. And perhaps that's the blessing and the curse for all authors--the thrill of an audience when it happens, the emptiness when it doesn't and you're left staring at your own words. :-)

I think that C&Q provides (provided?) a valuable service by giving writers a venue in which to display their work while separating the wheat from chaff to a certain extent. As a reader, I was happy with the quality of the work that I saw there, which is why I offered to help with the project (& I'm still willing, if you ever want to pick it back up again).

I think that sometimes people hesitate to give writers comments because there's a sense of the words they use being 'not good enough.' When you think about it, no one has to draw a picture to acknowledge what they thought of someone's art, but everyone's expected to write to show what they think of someone's writing. I think it can be intimidating. I mean, I love writing, and sometimes I feel sufficiently intimidated to say 'Oh, I can't possibly express how I feel about this work, and why would the author care about what I have to say, anyway.' I imagine, for people who hate to write, crafting responses might be an even more daunting prospect.

I feel like I'm dancing around the question, but in the end, rather than income or marketing questions, what I most want as a writer is to be read.

[kereminde.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, but Disney was able to get away with making "anthropomorphic animals" without that stigma . . . and cartoons still get away with it now and then. I'm sure several people can list them; I can't.

On the main topic . . . well, I don't have much to add. I've looked at the same problem about writing "furry fiction" being a labor of love. And as the line goes: "There's some truth in your fiction and some fiction in your truth". Writers need to actually get their stories out there, but about ninety percent of the ones I talk with aren't willing to bite if they feel they won't be read . . . measuring that by comments made. Even simple "I like this" responses. Responses which really should be put onto stories you enjoyed; it's not really offering the same "empty praise" that many people don't want to give (yet, strangely enough, offer for art :) )

Ah well . . . are any of us writers seriously going to stop just because it's not appreciated as widely as we like? Or might not get paid for it? I know I can't really stop altogether. And at the very least, the technical aspects of my writing HAVE improved . . .

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Actually, I suspect the ratio of comments-to-reads on stories isn't substantially different than it is on art. In a completely unscientific study of Bigfurs' BFCC Art Gallery and Library pages I just did in the last 120 seconds, there's an average of 8.9 replies to story posts and 9.8 replies to art posts -- yet, there's an average of 121.2 views of stories and 203.2 views of illos. Story threads fairly often have chapters them, so the disparity isn't as high in favor of stories as the numbers suggest (and for the moment I'm not going to do the work necessary to adjust for that), but it's reasonable to assume that it's about the same ratio: 4-5% of the people viewing the material will comment on it.

And, as another anecdotal point, that's with the quasi-community sense web boards have. Arilin's web site has a view-to-comment ratio of under 1%. And, my stuff under my name very rarely gets comments, since people have to go to the trouble of e-mailing me rather than using a comment form. Claw & Quill in its previous incarnation got something like one comment total despite having a web board attached to it, yet one of the stories received an Ursa Major nomination--obviously, people were reading it.

So, anyway. The point I'm making is that compliments are honestly pretty rare everywhere. This isn't a unique indignity furry writers suffer.

The lack of pay is another point I may eventually touch on in another post, though.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

If your story is populated by anthropomorphic animals of various species, as most furry stories are, then you either have to explain and justify this setting, or you have to take it as given, and neither of these are very workable. Actually, I find the latter more workable. I find the former unworkable because it involves going through this painful elaboration of backstory which, to me at least, is usually pretty dull and only has a few resolutions, but my main problem is that it very soon becomes the bulk of the story. Like if they're genetically created, you have to explain the technique somewhat. Then you have to explain why it was done, for what purpose. And who did it, and explain their role in the setting, if any. And it has to make sense, it has to be something you'd believe would happen. With the latter approach, you say that there was genetic research, or that it's convergent evolution, or that the gods did it, end of story, and you sidestep the problem.

The difficulty with the latter approach, though, is that it doesn't provide a justification for why there are anthropomorphic characters in the story at all. I mean, this could be the root of the perception of furry fandom as a fetish... there often is no good story reason for there to be talking animals in place of humans, and if one tries to write a justification into the backstory it's often obvious as a mechanism created for that purpose.

Now, there are good structural reasons for substituting animals for humans, largely summed up by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics... the more nonspecific a character is, the easier it is to project one's self into its place, and it's often easier to grant emotional weight to a non-human character, which is why all those Disney movies work so well. And while I find the idea of ascribing particular traits or temperaments to species, on the basis on popular lore, to be pretty hackneyed, it's clear that a lot of readers buy into it.

But none of this is going to work if you don't have a good writer doing it. Meaning it has to be somebody who writes for its own sake, not only because they want to give life to their fetish or live in their fantasy world, which is why so much fan fiction and art is so bad. It has an agenda, one which has less to do with artistic or literary quality than you'd imagine. I'm not just talking about pornography; there's a lot of nonsexual fan art and fiction whose only purpose is to render these ideas so that they can be gawked at, and it's tailored to an audience which is similarly obsessed with particular concepts, to the detriment of readability and so forth. This is why furry art tends not to find a 'mainstream' audience even though the mainstream is saturated with anthropomorphic characters. It's not just the sex. As you say, so much of it is rendered in an inaccessible shorthand. If you want outsiders to be interested, you have to write to them. That's all there is to it. If you aren't capable of controlling your composition, I'm sorry, you're only going to reach the converted.

Weren't you going to do some web magazine which would showcase such fiction? What happened with that?

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Weren't you going to do some web magazine which would showcase such fiction? What happened with that?

That's always the $64K question with me, isn't it? I keep failing to recognize that I can't do something like that as a one-man show, and that just moving to the web from print doesn't suddenly fix that. If I get myself more organized this year, I think I can actually do it as a lead.. but I'm definitely going to get support.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Get a trio of us to do it, then. There is more than enough writing and computer experience available in this fandom. Personally, I'd like to see a place like Furrag take off with lots of writers and stories archived within. Something like Miavirs, with a group of editors and their "stars of approval" to go along with the story. We desperately need something like that.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

*raises hand* Me...me...pick me...!

*grins* Seriously, I can help with some of it. Just let me know.

[typographer.livejournal.com]

Well, we've been publishing an anthropomorphic science fiction zine for over 15 years now, hard copy, I know for a fact that a lot of my readers do NOT consider themselves furry fans. Heck, some of my contributors don't consider what we do furry, even though it's all anthropomorphic animals.

We don't pay cash for contributions, but we do give contributor copies. And, as I said above, still in the black, and large proportion of our readers aren't furry fans.

I'm not sure you could say we're a conscious attempt to be a bridge: but when we started, we didn't know there was a furry fandom out there, and our editing standards are make it good literature first.

I understand that because we print stuff only set in our own universe, this puts some people off, and we certainly aren't the equivalent of a giant archive. But...

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I think Tai-Pan meets what I was thinking of as a bridge in most respects, yes -- something a furry fan would see and think "that's obviously furry!" but something a non-furry would see and not think "that's pretty weird, man."

[walkyrje.livejournal.com]

One of the problems I'm having with the dead tree edition of Tails of the City is getting anyone to care. When I was posting it on the web, I was getting about four hundred hits each week, and sort of figured that I'd see about the same response for the DTE.

Unfortunately, though I have advertised it in the places I can think of where people might care, I've only sold about two dozen copies... and several of those were purchased by my mother. Oy.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Well, there's one big difference between the web and print editions of Tails of the City: the latter is something you have to pay for. While I'm not sure of a way to quantify what would really be good sales, the off-the-cuff statistics I found for commenting on forum-posted stories -- 1 comment for every 20 views or so -- might be a very rough milepost. In advertising, a conversion rate of 5% would be considered pretty good in most contexts. (Internet banner advertisements with a click-thru rate of just 1% are pretty much runaway successes.) So, basically, I don't think sales of two dozen copies so far is bad.

I'll note in passing, though, that I made an effort not to include any story readily available online in Why Coyotes Howl. While I'm thinking of releasing one of the stories for free sometime this year as an advertisement, I know from personal experience that once you've downloaded the whole album for free, you don't feel a lot of urgency to buy it at the CD store.

[joshuwain.livejournal.com]

It's funny; you and I both write and have made similar observations. However, I also wonder what effect this all has on the writers: does it cause them to wither and die? I only ask this because I've seen something similar in myself: even after I write a really good story (which is rare, these days ... writing anything, to be honest, is rare for me) I get so little feedback that I feel it as a disincentive to do more.

But then again, part of what allows me to write is the love of having someone tell me how cool the story was...

Does fandom, in general, provide a "stick" as opposed to a "carrot" by not providing feedback -any feedback- to writers?

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Yes, the invisibility has caused me to write much less.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

An amatuer artist can sit down in one hour and produce a finished work, ready for show. Typically an amatuer writer, going full tilt, can produce a couple of pages of text in that same time period. And since even short stories are usually longer than that, it takes more time to write than to draw.

For myself, the problem is that I'm laboring in a vaccuum. With the loss of fanzines and the disappearance of Miavir's site, few people know of my efforts. Folks have to actively look for my website and the stories within, so the only visitors are fans already. If that's true for other writers then we are all looking at a shrinking fanbase. It is difficult to put in the time and energy necessary to create an enjoyable story when you realize that few are going to know about it, fewer still will read it and practically no-one will share the story with their friends.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Sure, it absolutely does take more time to write than to draw. But it isn't lost on me that when I was a "recognized writer" in the fandom, I was publishing two or three stories a year in fairly well-established venues. And I suspect that two stories a year is probably a realistic _minimum_ if you want to actually have a presence. One story every two or three years, and you're likely to stay invisible, no matter where those stories are showing up.

The problem of where to display those stories is another matter entirely, of course.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I may be an exception. At least in my opinion, I get more impressive results from one or two hours of writing than the same amount of time drawing. And I'm allegedly a pretty good illustrator. But it doesn't seem like the writing gets as much admiration from others... it seems like viewers take the text for granted, compared to the images. It could just be that literate people are scarce.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

I'd like to say something meaningful, but I can't. Similiar to thoughts I've had, especially the inbreeding, and it's not just the art. The ideas in furry fandom are magnetic, once you're aware of them, it's hard to do something. If you get too close to an established stereotype, but have it just off slightly, people won't like it. So it creates islands, zones you have to work around to avoid being sucked in, which kills some story possibilities that could be done if the author was innocent. There was one floating about a year or so ago, sci-fi, about a human trying to seduce a feline using subliminal messages in music. It was, and could only be written by a non-furry, because too many elements were like FM, Taps, Furry Space. Sort of like the Generic Fantasyland, with Elves and Dwarves that dogs fantasy writing, there is a stock furryland, full of Cliche' Genericas that is hard to get beyond.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

The Generic Fantasy Land is something China Mieville (in)famously ranted against a few years ago, calling Tolkien "a wen on the arse of fantasy literature." While going after JRR earned him more than a few enemies, the point of his short diatribe was better captured with the line, "Given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes?" Many critics of that essay rather missed the forest for the trees. (Granted, Mieville brought that on himself by setting the trees on fire, but I digress.)

I don't think it's really that difficult to get past furry cliches, though -- you just need to be aware of them, and then to think of your setting on its own terms. I'm aware that one of my more popular older stories, "Travelling Music," was _already_ a furry cliche when it was written (average Joe guy meets a furry in contrived circumstances and gets romantically entangled), but I took it strictly in its own context without thinking about furry fandom at all. People who _weren't_ furry fans wouldn't think of that aspect as being cliched, of course, and people who were furry fans generally forgave me. (For the record, it probably owes more to the movie "Splash" than anything in furrydom!)

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

For the record, it probably owes more to the movie "Splash" than anything in furrydom!

You're very courageous to admit that. :)

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we could create an LJ community? I know it's a simplistic suggestion, and I'm not saying that it would solve the problem, but I think that at the very least we writers could make an effort to read each other's work and give constructive critiques.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I tried the whole "hey fandom, I'm a writer" thing, you know. I'm sure you watched.

I got more attention in SF/F. And money.

If furry fandom wants to attract more writers, it has to actually, you know, compensate them. You can make good hobby money selling art in the fandom. Writing for it? Oh no. Can't even buy yourself a cup of coffee.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

That's something I haven't touched on yet, but I've thought about it. I've made enough money writing in the fandom to buy not only a cup of coffee, but a fairly high-end coffee machine, but I recognize I'm a rare case.

I think furry fiction markets haven't developed in the fandom despite its growth less because furry fans are illiterate than because such a market tends to be more complex than the art market. Generally, artists in the fandom are selling directly to their purchasers; writers, though, usually sell to editors. So to get the market going, you need people who have the resources, skill and desire to be editors and publishers. (Not to mention money: as low-paying as C&Q was, it would have still been over $1K a year, and an at-the-time unemployed, highly-in-debt technical writer couldn't keep funding it out of pocket in the hopes that it would eventually break even.)

Furry artists do have the luxury of a bigger market completely in the fandom; I think furry writers have a smaller audience if they're writing just for that. On the flip side, I think it's quite easy to have stories that sit on the border: furry fans might embrace them as furry, but people who aren't in the fandom would still read and enjoy them. And I think that's probably the key here. Out of the artists who've come along in the last decade in the fandom and pushed con art show sales up dramatically, most of them regularly sell to non-furry audiences, I've noticed, although many of them noticeably segment their work and/or think of themselves as already working on that border. This is something many writers in the fandom don't position themselves for.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I guess the question I have is: why would anyone bother with a small, low-paying market in furry fandom (if one ever came up, besides Sofawolf, and stayed up) when one can get work with anthropomorphics easily published in more mainstream markets for more money?

If I can (and have) sold stories that have elements of talking animals in them to markets that will pay +3 cents a word, there's no incentive for me to give it away to a market that pays in copies or "exposure." And since there are plenty of people who will read talking animal stories that know nothing about furry fandom... well.

Why go into the small pond, which is (as stated above several times) already pretty insular and set in its ways, when you can reach a broader market that might have splash-back into the fandom?

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Why would anyone bother with a small, low-paying market in furry fandom when one can get work with anthropomorphics easily published in more mainstream markets for more money?

Um. I don't believe your experience has been one of whipping out stories with anthropomorphic elements in them and having each one "easily published," and you're arguably one of the best writers with even a vague association to furrydom. If you've made a personal choice that at this point in your writing life you're never going to be published for less than SFWA professional rates, that's fine, but a lot of aspiring writers aren't at that point. (And from what I've seen, a lot of writers have no problem sending stories they weren't able to sell to the high-paying markets to a lower-paying one. $250 is better than $25, but $25 is better than $0.)

Most of what I've been talking about here is the value of a venue that isn't inaccessible to non-furry readers. My not-so-secret agenda has always been expanding the literary bounds of "furry" and reaching a wider audience. Getting Lawrence Watt-Evans to write a furry story may be cool, but what I really want to do is bring a few of Watt-Evans' readers to Allen Kitchen's story. No one's disputing that it would it be best for Allen if he could do that by getting his story on the cover of Asimov's rather than on the cover of Anthrolations, but that fact doesn't render Anthrolations valueless.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Um. I don't believe your experience has been one of whipping out stories with anthropomorphic elements in them and having each one "easily published," and you're arguably one of the best writers with even a vague association to furrydom.

Maybe not, but you have only to read any of the big magazines or go through the SF/F shelf in a bookstore to see that it's easy to get writing with talking animals published. The theme isn't exactly ghettoized; it's everywhere in mainstream, and SF/F eats it up. I might not be selling scores of "furry" stories, but then I don't really write that much short fiction, which is where you get quick sales in the industry.

Thanks for the compliment, though. :)

You seem to want furry fandom to produce a source of reading material that non-furries will read. That's fine. I don't understand why it's necessary, though, when you can get plenty of furry stuff from outside the fandom. If you're just talking about adding one more market, that's great--no writer's ever going to object to having one more market. But I am not entirely sure what void you're trying to fill, that's all.

Anthrolations is (was?) a good thing, yes, but I wonder at its languishing. This is a pattern with furry semi-pro 'zines. Sofawolf's other ventures are doing better. One has to ask why, or or at least I do.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

The trouble is the highest 10% of both "anthro" writers and artists have gone on to make more money from thir works in primary markets than could ever be made in fandom. So focusing on higher eschelon fan writing, you're only getting the top 10% of the 90% crap.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

You're essentially arguing that there's no point in cultivating the minor leagues, because either someone's gonna go right to the Yankees' starting lineup or they're going to be playing whiffle ball forever.

Look, I just spent a while trying to respond to haikujaguar making a (somewhat) related assertion, and I'm beginning to get kind of frustrated with the "obviously anyone with any talent would be bypassing this all completely" attitude. Yes, people who are good enough to become professional will eventually, well, become professional. More power to 'em. But most people make stops along the way, and I'm really failing to see why the idea that such a stop could be a place whose goal is to give furry stories a fractionally wider audience is so incredibly far-fetched.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

So your goal, if I understand it correctly, is to offer a semi-pro venue for furry fiction.

Yes?

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

To give an infuriatingly Coyote answer: Maybe. :)

That's certainly something I've tried to do in the past, on several occasions, although I've generally approached it with a conscious tapdance around the word "furry." But everything post-Mythagoras was done with the intent of at least modest payment, and Bart and I intended to get the original Mythagoras to a point where it paid, too, although that probably wouldn't have happened before issue 5. (One could argue that it happened with issue 4, since for practical purposes that's what Zoomorphica was.)

This particular discussion, though, is fairly theoretical. I've been talking in comments more about 'zines, but in the original post, I was talking more about the idea of something like a Yerf archive for writers. The thesis I was riffing on is that the question, "What web site could I send someone who isn't a furry fan to that would be a good showcase of furry writing?" doesn't have a good answer. And that question isn't directly one of markets and compensation. It's one of visibility, both in general within the fandom, and specifically in a venue that's generally considered to have a standard of quality.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

The problem with a Yerf archive for writing is intrinsic to the art form. For artists, an internet archive is a form of advertising. The art itself is in a form useless for any purpose except viewing: no one's going to download a lossy 50K jpeg and print it for their collection. For artists who are trying to advertise and draw people to their work for the purpose of selling it, this is ideal. You get a ton of exposure for no cost.

Writing, on the other hand, is its own product. If you post a story, you've lost almost all your power to sell it. There are exceptions, but for the most part people aren't going to pay for something they can read for free.

Now I know your argument isn't about selling or not selling the writing or art. But to some writers (particularly those who are of good enough quality to survive a Yerf-like review board), the ability to market the work is going to be a factor in the decision. They're going to be weighing the possible exposure versus the loss of the story's marketability. If you want to attract people, you have to pile some incentive on the exposure side. Like, say, making it extremely easy for visitors to comment on the stories; maybe even let visitors have favorites and discussion boards about certain stories so that authors get significant ego-boost from the site. Ego-boost in tangible form is often significant enough to outweigh other issues.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'd started to write about what you're describing -- that art in an archive can be considered to be an advertisement for the artist, but stories in an archive don't have that function for writers -- in my earlier reply, but it was getting kind of rambling. :)

But, yes, the incentive issue is important. In addition to the egoboo-ish things you're suggesting (which are excellent), I've speculated on ways to hook payment into an archive. There's the idea of paying for "featured stories" every so often; having reader-driven awards or selections; having a virtual "tip jar"; and probably many others I'm not thinking about. All of those ideas lead to their own myriad of questions, from implementation details to basic viability. (For instance, while I philosophically love the idea of the "if you like this story, click here to send $1 to the author," practically I suspect it'd almost never be used unless there was a way to give the *reader* a tangible benefit beyond the story itself.)

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Well, there... that's an interesting goal, and no one's tried it yet. I think it would be an interesting experiment.

I'm not so sure the "$1 to the author" tip jar wouldn't get any use. People send money to godkin and they don't have to. :)

Tipjars and Micropayments

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

The only method that's ever come to my mind that hasn't smacked of naked commercialism—which itself isn't necessarily bad—has been one to take advantage of convenience or limited-time offers. "Sign up for our service, and you'll see what our people are writing today, as well as what they wrote in the past, or you can look at the publically-accessible archives and see what they wrote a month ago out to three months back. To get access to the current or ancient material, you'll have to subscribe." I know uComics does something like this, making a month of comics available for free, and further historical reading requiring a monthly subscription cost. However, text compresses so nicely that it's hard to imagine making such an archive in a fashion that people would be willing to subscribe for longer than it would take to download the entire back catalog and then quit.

Sadly, this conundrum, combined with continued angst over the size and scope of feedback, is one of the things that's shooting my own writing in the foot. I often feel like writing without any pictures is just wasting my time, and writing with pictures isn't getting people interested in the writing, just the pictures. Few are the furry webcomics that can have good writing, lousy art, and a large fanbase that will forgive them the poor illustrations because of the quality of the story.

Then again, few are the furry webcomics with good writing, period. :P

Kristy

Re: Tipjars and Micropayments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I've thought about the idea of paid archives, or the reverse (i.e., older stuff is free, but it's the new stuff you gotta pay for). I'm not sure whether either would work, but as haikujaguar noted, it's difficult to get people to pay for something you're giving away for free. If you're an author, conventional magazines or webzines following a conventional model--that is, you send the story in and if they like it they send you back money--are, well, much less scary. As much as internet nerds may argue that your audience on the net is every internet user, selling something to Asimov's for $200 means you get that $200, whereas shoving it out on the net and saying "if you like this, click here to send me $1" likely means... well, a lot less than $200.

Of course, the conventional model works for authors by pushing the risk up to the publisher, which carries its own obvious problems. :) It's not lost on me that the state of pro/semi-pro fiction publishing on the web is dismal. Omni and TomorrowSF flamed out years ago. SciFiction shut down at the end of 2005, the Infinite Matrix has just produced its last issue, and as far as I can determine both of them existed as long as they did because of generous backers who didn't expect to see a profit (and didn't). Strange Horizons persists on what might be dubbed the "public radio" model of sponsors, grants and donations, and I'd best substantially more from the first two than the last.

As for writing versus pictures, I think my original observation still holds true--that's not a furry thing, it's an across-the-board truism. Comics are a different case than fiction in that--exceptions like Dilbert notwithstanding--both the art and the writing have to hit and maintain a certain quality level. For fiction, you don't need art at all, but in practice having an illustration may get someone reading the story who wouldn't have otherwise. (It's possibly worth noting that one of Claw & Quill's Ursa Major nominations was for an illustration.) This is, of course, another thing that's traditionally pushed off on the editor/publisher: I wanted to get illustrations for stories, but I didn't expect the author to go out and track down an artist.