frustrated1) If you are an acquiring editor, you can rule out categories of things you don't want to buy. But it really sucks when everyone gangs up on a topic and tries to choke it out of existence. That amounts to censorship. You hold great power, and an obligation to use it responsibly.
2) Everything is liked by somebody. Many fans do, in fact, adore portal stories. It's a top favorite for me, because it's a major subset of my all-time-favorite motif, Fish Out Of Water. I have done whole panels on this topic! My favorite thing is to take some hapless character out of their comfort zone and dump them somewhere utterly unfamiliar. A portal works great for that, whether it transports Terrans to another world or vice versa. It is aggravating to imply that "nobody likes" something, especially when their are great examples of it in literary canon already. You just make yourself look stupid.
3) In good hands, a portal makes an awesome plot device. Something like the Teflon Tesseract in my Schrodinger's Heroes series is a never-ending source of challenges. Sunnydale's Hellmouth is another good example, and Narnia remains a splendid classic. I would, you know, like to see the next one without some editor smothering it in the cradle.
4) Any motif in entertainment can be done well or poorly, and they all have been up one side and down the other of Quality Street. So quit trying to steal things out of the writers' toolbox. *smack* *SMACK*
5) Are you actively trying to murder traditional publishing with knives and poison? Because hey, crowdfunding is over yonder yelling "Come here! Bring your spending money and your unmet desires. Bring your awesome ideas and your unpublished entertainment. Let's have a party!" Because if you don't meet the needs of a whole swath of customers, somebody else will.
The stupid, it burns like hydrogen.
October 20 2012, 15:03:52 UTC 8 years ago
I do something a little different with my portal stories. I have some people who have to build new lives because they've been dragged away from their old life and others who are given a chance to live a safe life, because they've never had that before. If someone looked at that and said it was just like any other portal story I would walk away, because no two portal stories are the same. It's just not possible. All writers are different, all characters are different, and a plot doesn't make the story the same as one they've read before. (Someone rewriting Narnia, for example, would probably come at it from a very different viewpoint to C. S. Lewis.)
That's why I love crowdfunding, from both sides. As a reader I get beautiful stories I probably never would have seen because some gatekeeper would have stopped it and as a writer I can write stories people want. There's no one to tell me that what I'm doing is too like someone else's, or it won't sell, or I can't have gay characters.
October 20 2012, 15:15:27 UTC 8 years ago
Yes...
October 20 2012, 19:55:18 UTC 8 years ago
October 20 2012, 16:53:44 UTC 8 years ago
Thoughts
October 20 2012, 19:52:10 UTC 8 years ago
You and I think SO much alike.
>> because stories are firstly (to me) about characters. The plot is simply what life events, whether they be real or fantasy, the characters have to deal with, and shoving someone through a portal is a great way to see how they react. <<
I tend to lean that way myself. I often think of story seeds in terms of plot, but it's the characters that hook me. Most of my stories are character-driven, some are event-driven, a handful are milieu, and a very few are stories of idea.
>> I do something a little different with my portal stories. I have some people who have to build new lives because they've been dragged away from their old life and others who are given a chance to live a safe life, because they've never had that before. If someone looked at that and said it was just like any other portal story I would walk away, because no two portal stories are the same. <<
Yes, and that's crucial. Narnia is great because C.S. Lewis was both a Christian scholar and a mythic scholar, and he put all of that into his stories. Christ-figure Aslan and Bacchus running in the woods -- that is awesome. Stargate is another good example; the nature of the device required them (in the original movie, which remains my headcanon) to find not just a linguist, but the best linguist. ("Why do they even keep reprinting his books?") Your portal stories rely mainly on the intricate, thoughtful, meticulously justified world-web created to bail out the fae from the magical drain that ruined their homeworld. It's a unique configuration, and that influences the kind of stories it generates. My Teflon Teferact is another example of how a device influences storyline and attracts characters: it's based on quantum mechanics, so it requires the team to have a physicist, and the other members have to be science-fluent or science-tolerant, and everyone needs a flexible grasp of the ever-changing reality.
What makes a portal story tend to suck is if the author uses it as a cheap substitution for real conflict. By all means, rule that out. But if you're not checking for quality, then as an editor, you're not doing your job. Sheesh, we had guys submitting stuff all the time to SageWoman; if it looked competently written, I encouraged them to send it to one of the other Pagan magazines instead.
>>That's why I love crowdfunding, from both sides. As a reader I get beautiful stories I probably never would have seen because some gatekeeper would have stopped it and as a writer I can write stories people want. There's no one to tell me that what I'm doing is too like someone else's, or it won't sell, or I can't have gay characters.<<
*CHEER* That's my deepest love for alternative publishing too: it removes the bottleneck, so more stuff gets released into the wild. I love it because I don't have to put up with the mainstream's narrowminded view of entertainment anymore. I can write and read with ALL the tools in the box.