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

[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.