mcjulie

The short of it: I didn’t write any blog posts because I was too busy actually writing. So, in the interest of remaining entertaining, I am posting an essay that I started long, long ago, and somehow lost the first half of. This essay is about the relationship between writing-writing, Goth House, and my submitaphobia.

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But I was waiting for something, and in my head I told myself I was waiting for me to write something that didn’t suck, but that’s probably a lie.

When I graduated from college, my thinking was, hey, I’m finally out of school, I don’t have homework, I can just go home from my stupid job that I hate and write fiction and stuff and then I’ll start submitting. Finally. But I wasn’t writing much. I didn’t seem to have a lot of ideas. And I was still at the phase where I thought, you get an idea, then you write it down. So I thought I had writer’s block. Maybe I even did. I do know that I was deeply unhappy for a lot of reasons.

That’s when I started cartooning. I was drawing the genesis of what became Goth House. Cartooning seemed to bypass whatever it was that felt like writer’s block, maybe because I could doodle if I didn’t have any real ideas? I still don’t know.

Over the next bunch of years, I drew Goth House and I wrote fiction, neither one in a particularly disciplined fashion. Goth House appeared in Throwrug and in self-published collections. The fiction — I don’t know, every once in a while I would write a short story that I didn’t hate, send it out a couple of places, fail to get it published, get discouraged, and give up.

Yeah, I gave up really easily. I think it’s that after a couple of rejections (or, let’s be honest, even one rejection) I would stop believing in the story. I would decide that it was an inherently bad story and probably didn’t deserve to be published.

I actually finished a novel. It took about three years. Several people read it and didn’t hate it. So I figured, I’m on the road now, baby! I’m making it happen!

You can probably guess the rest. A couple of rejections and…

Moving right along to 2001 and the Philadelphia Worldcon — during it, somehow I had this magic lightbulb go on in my head that told me I needed to go to Clarion West. I got laid off in late 2001, so applying for the 2002 workshop seemed like perfect timing, like the universe was just falling into place.

But in 2002 I didn’t get in. The universe clearly had it in for me.

For the first half of 2002 I was unemployed, and started doing a lot more work on Goth House. That was when I started the website. I was using gothhouse.org to work on web design and programming techniques, as well as computer art techniques. That was also when I wrote my first story that GOT PUBLISHED SOMEWHERE YAY, largely because Paul, as he puts it, stole it from me and sent it off to Talebones.

I’m on the road now, baby! I’m making it happen!

I was writing more short stories I didn’t hate. (And failing to send most of them anywhere.) But I wasn’t getting anywhere with a follow-up novel. It seemed like I could advance any idea to about 40,000 words and then hit a brick wall. I was starting to feel like the first novel was a trick that I didn’t understand and couldn’t repeat, like hitting a bullseye the first time you throw a dart, then all your other throws go into the ceiling or land in the beer.

I applied for Clarion West again a couple of times. In 2006, I wrote and drew what was, in my opinion, the best combination of Goth House story and artwork to date: Percival and the Brain. Then I got to attend Clarion West (at the last possible minute, which is an interesting story in its own right, to be told here eventually). While I was there, I discovered a curious thing. I had all this unstructured time, and anticipated spending at least some of it cartooning. Drawing about my experiences and so on. But I didn’t.

I discovered that the part of my brain that invents cartoons is mostly the same part of my brain that invents stories.

I guess it shouldn’t have been shocking — cartoons are a narrative visual art, after all. And didn’t I originally start cartooning in order to cope with writer’s block? But I was still surprised by it. It wasn’t a time issue, it was a brainspace issue. In the years since, that has remained true. The more time I spend writing fiction — the more dedicated work I put into it — the less cartooning I get done.

I tried to keep up with the general plan I had for where the Goth House story was going, but I didn’t like any of my artwork and couldn’t seem to get the story to flow visually. My cartooning muse seemed to have deserted me. When I got a new day job, the website really went into a decline.

It would be nice to report that I swapped one muse for another, and maybe I did in a way — I was writing more stories I didn’t hate, and managed to complete a second novel. But I still wasn’t sending out my stuff. I used to think the problem was that I didn’t like my stories, but as I liked my stories more and still wasn’t submitting, I knew that wasn’t the problem. I thought the problem was that I didn’t quite know what to do — where to send it, how that whole publishing thing worked. But as I knew more writers and editors, and had a better grasp of the process, and still wasn’t submitting, I knew that wasn’t the problem.

At some point, I realized the problem was me — my own whacked-out emotional state. I have submitaphobia. I mean, an actual phobia, where I get all heart-racing and sweaty-palm stressed out about the very thought of sending something out. I’m trying to get over it, but it’s hard. Most advice to writers about overcoming submitaphobia boils down to “don’t have it, because it’s stupid.”

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Thus ends the original essay. Anyway, on the good news front, I have some insight into the fear, which will be dissected in a future post. I have been considering how to revive the Goth House series, if only to finish out the story already planned. So far, I’m working with the idea of doing a much higher text-to-picture ratio, like The Christmas Truce or Alex in Punditland. Anyway, we’ll see what happens.

Originally published at Goth House. You can comment here or there.

mcjulie

These two pages are unusually autobiographical -- they are based on my own experiences and don't differ from them too much, except that I don't believe I ever had a fruity 70s unicorn on a birthday cake. But I might have, if it had occurred to me. Or I might have had a cheesy, vaguely Gandalf-esque wizard.

Because I am a big nerd.

The "another reason you should obey your parents" line, and the "great place to meet ministers" line are both direct quotes from Sunday School classes I remember from the Church of the Poison Mind. They came along well after I had disconnected from the proceedings and was just amusing myself by taking mental notes for future satire -- otherwise, that's the point where I would have disconnected.

As much as I had been a Christian since I could remember, I had also been a feminist since I could remember. Until this point in my life (early adolescence) I had never thought for even a moment that there might be a conflict between those two ideologies, that is, the teachings of Jesus and sexual equality. So now, suddenly, I had these people telling me that there was a conflict. You had to pick one. Jesus or feminism. Jesus or science. Jesus or rock music. Jesus or rational thought.

mcjulie

At the churches I attended growing up, very young children don't typically go to the regular sermon -- they go to Sunday school, and then to either daycare, or some kind of children's church. So, most of our earliest Bible lessons come from a Sunday school teacher, rather than from the minister. Ministers usually have gone to some kind of divinity school -- they are trained professionals. Sunday school teachers are usually volunteers, which means they are very often daft old ladies who fail utterly to make any kind of distinction between their own quirks, actual doctrine, and weird jokes you are too young to get.

(Paul tells a story about -- maybe a nun -- who insisted that angels shot from the tips of your fingers when you prayed, so that you should make sure to have your hands pressed together with fingers pointing up when you prayed, so that the angels would fly up to heaven. If you clasped your hands together, you were shooting those fingertip angels straight to hell.)

So, the youngest and most impressionable members of the congregation are the ones being schooled by daft old ladies. Which explains a lot.

As a child, I was confused by most of the things that confuse Terra here, except for the fig tree withering. I didn't discover this particular "miracle" of Jesus until much later -- it's right there in Matthew 21, right after he drives the moneychangers out of the temple, but somehow I missed it. And, oddly enough, nobody ever preached a sermon on it. It doesn't show up in dramatizations of the story. Nobody ever talks about it, except Lore Sjöberg, who rates it along with other Miracles of Christ. It goes like this:

And he left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where he spent the night. Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, "May you never bear fruit again!" Immediately the tree withered.

So, you know, I figure Jesus must have been hypoglycemic or something.

Anyway, when you teach stories to children, consider: you might think that the story of Adam and Eve conveys the message "do what adults tell you" when actually, what they are getting out of it is "don't eat apples."

And, Jesus was not a zombie.

Probably.

Link: Terra Goes to Hell

mcjulie

So, this is it -- the end of "Percival and the Brain." The next series is "Terra Goes to Hell," followed by "Pages Torn Out of Alexandra's Notebook." All three cover the title character's life from early childhood until the summer of 1983 -- right before their senior year in high school.

Because, by the last couple of drawings of Percival and the Brain, it was already 1983, I checked out my senior year high school yearbook to see what their hair should look like.

All I can say is.... ew.

I knew that 80s had some very unfortunate hair trends, you know, the kind of thing that makes a mohawk look like a reasonable alternative, but I think my memory of the actual time period was influenced too much by pop culture -- that is, I knew what actors and musicians and counterculture types looked like in 1983, and forgot how irredeemably dorky actual middle America teenagers looked. Helmet hair. It's amazing. I had forgotten all about helmet hair.

Also, something extraordinary has happened. I knew it would, based on having laughed my way through my mother's 1964 yearbook, but I wasn't paying attention and so it still came as a surprise: enough time has passed that I can no longer tell, just by looking, who was cool and who wasn't.

You can tell who was a cheerleader, and who was dating a cheerleader, on account of homecoming photos and things like that. And you can guess who was popular based on how frequently they turn up in the incidental shots. And there are a few people who are obviously studs, because they have that look in their eyes, and a few who are obviously nerds, because they have that look in their eyes too. And of course, I remember -- but imperfectly. There are seniors in those pages whose names don't ring even a small, tinkly little bell.

And even the "cute" boys have ridiculous hair.

mcjulie

Okay, so, this installment of "Percival and The Brain" was supposed to go up on Friday, but we had to leave for a wedding and I hadn't finished it yet. And we were out of town all weekend. So, here it is. Just one panel. I know.

Sometimes it just works out like that.

mcjulie

Percival and the Brain continues, as our best friends navigate the murky, tumultuous waters of puberty.

Will their friendship survive? Tune in next fortnight and see!

There are some things about being a teenager -- well, a lot of things, actually -- and all of them are strange, and I think, as I have mentioned before, that most adults must sort of block those years out of their memory, or perhaps cover them over with a peach-colored haze of nostalgia. Were you ever, as a 15- or 16-year-old, told "these are the best years of your life"? Did you think, "thanks, Grandma, but that's one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me, and if I actually believed you, which I don't, I would have no choice but to kill myself right now."

mcjulie

This is the first installment of the first real "High School of the Damned" storyline: "Percival and the Brain." Which actually takes place almost entirely before the characters even get to high school, but that's kind of how this works -- if you want to understand an adult, go back to high school, to understand a high school student, junior high, and so on. You want to understand an infant, go back to the dawn of time.

Shelley and Byron had interesting, scandal-filled lives and died young after creating enduring art, which was very rock star of them. Byron was a classic cad -- he would seduce absolutely anybody, and abandon them completely when they started to bore him. Even if they were pregnant. (Although he did have one legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine)

This sort of thing led to him being described as "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know" by Caroline Lamb.

Shelley wasn't quite as infamous, though he did get kicked out of Oxford for being an atheist. He merely practiced free love, whether or not his wife agreed. So, during the summer of 1816 (when Mary famously got the idea for Frankenstein and John Polidori -- one of Byron's many romantic castoffs -- got the idea for The Vampyre) Mary and Percy were not actually married. They wouldn't get married until after they returned to England and his first wife killed herself.

Any time somebody tries to tell you that people conducted themselves better in the old days? Don't believe it for a second.