La Vie Boheme

This is why I avoid the magazine rack at Borders...

Right now I'm dealing with a profound sense of dissatisfaction that just hit me from out of nowhere.

We were talking tonight at Write Club about some of the drawbacks of being a genre writer as opposed to a mainstream writer--a popular topic of conversation. It was spurred this time by a selection of genre-fic magazines that I'd picked up to flip through since my laptop battery was dead. Just checking out possible markets and such. I rediscovered why I very often don't bother to read magazines before submitting to them.

Most short genre-fic is crap.

(Note, if you are an aspiring genre fic writer who writes short stories, rest assured, I don't mean you. I mean everybody else. You're probably marvelous. This is not entirely facetious. Most of the writers I actually know are quite good.)

I sat there and read a few stories and cringed, CRINGED at the writing, at the plots, at the characterizations... and these weren't minor markets. These were some of the biggies. Then, for shits and giggles, I flipped through a non-genre market that I'd also picked up. The difference in the quality of the writing nearly knocked me out of my seat. The non-genre stuff was good. Well-written, thought-provoking, funny.

It depressed the hell out of me. At the risk of sounding egotistical, I read those stories in the genre magazines and thought, "I am a much better writer than that." Then I read the stories in the non-genre magazine and thought, "I'll never be that good." Maybe I'm not better. Or maybe I am. Maybe I am as good as the non-genre stuff. Or maybe I'm not. Maybe it's not writing ability that I'm missing. Maybe it's just luck. Maybe, an insidiously arrogant part of my mind insists, I'm just casting pearls before swine.

I'm the first one to yell about how spec fic gets a bad rap as a "lesser" genre than literary fic (which IS a genre, damn it). I've defended sci fi and fantasy in my literature classes many times. But Jesus Christ, reading some of the bad prose I've seen published under the heading "speculative fiction" I sometimes have to wonder if the lit snobs have it right.

I don't know. But I'm frustrated as hell. It's not even that I've been at this for that long. I think part of my frustration stems from the fact that at least two of the magazines that had the crap have turned me down on multiple occasions. I kept thinking, "You turned me down for THIS?!" Moral outrage is bad for the complexion.

On the one hand, I'm proud of the stuff I write. I'm proud of my faeries and myths and fantastic worlds. But on the other hand, part of me doesn't want to be associated with the crap just because we use similar (only remotely similar, in some cases) tropes. I don't know. I guess right now I'm just experiencing a weird sense of dissonance, wanting to be published but having very little respect for a lot of the publications I want to be published IN.

This isn't to say there aren't some quality spec fic publications out there. There are. Black Gate comes to mind. Strange Horizons. There are others as well. But there aren't enough. Eventually you run out of the 'good' ones to submit to.

Grar. It's late, and I'm rambling now. Maybe it's all sour grapes. I don't know. But I'll tell you, I'm starting to get whiplash vacillating back and forth between arrogance and insecurity about my own abilities.