Café Wednesday: M.C.A. Hogarth
It is sometimes said that every person has a novel in them, but how many can claim to be alien historians?
Croup Watch
I chatted to her about killing aliens, fencing, and crowdfunding as a business model.
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AMH: Poetry, novels, webfiction, art: you have your fingers in many pies. Which came first?
MCAH: I think we’re all born with the art impulse. We mess with crayons and paints, we tell stories as soon as we figure out language. I’ve watched my 2-year-old daughter do it, even with her limited vocabulary, manual dexterity and life experience. For me, art and writing have always traveled together, starting from the crayon-and-paper age. Poetry came later, and remains a personal effort most of the time. I know many talented poets who consistently write for an audience, but I don’t seem to be one of them.
The marketing distinctions of novel, webfiction, etc… those I didn’t concern myself with until I decided to “go professional” around 1999/2000. My professional stage lasted about seven or eight years, and now I am (again) not so much concerned with marketing distinctions, except to be fascinated by how arbitrary they are, and how dependent on culture and technology.
AMH: Aliens seem to play a big role in much of your writing. When did your fascination with off-world cultures begin?
MCAH: I was born into my interest in other cultures, literally: my parents immigrated to America, and I was always aware of a slight (or not so slight, in some cases) shear between home and the world outside it. The friction generated by uneven edges–belief systems, assumptions, social expectations–was familiar, and I wanted solutions to bridging the gaps, or mending them just so I could figure out how to get along. From that desire came the fascination with how other people have dealt, or failed to deal, with cross-cultural problems.
Alien cultures, human cultures. Gender–male and female are alien to one another just as much as any made-up alien–time, class… anything that creates divides across which experience, assumptions and identity differ… all those things interest me. Much of my favorite fiction deals with cultural divides. One of my all-time favorite books is James Clavell’s Shogun, and if I write something even approaching the nuance and power of that book I’ll be thrilled.
AMH: Let’s move to your art. There are thousands of pieces available on your website. Are there any common themes you continuously explore?
MCAH: Relationships. Faces. Eyes. Aliens! Elves! The tension between beauty, mystery and story!
Mother's Guardian
More seriously, my current goals with art are to reward careful viewing by enriching my finished work with interesting details; and to give viewers enough context into a picture that it seems to tell a story without being literal about it. I like my art to be internally consistent: it should have a world within its borders that feels complete in itself, even if you can’t see it all. I’ve been drawing all my life and I attended art school, but I feel as if I’ve only started making progress in the last five years or so.
I’m pretty happy with where I’m going now. I also love how crowdfunding works with art as well as writing, and have had successes both small and spectacular with online marketing/feedback/funding of art projects.
AMH: On to your writing. Give us your elevator spiel for your novel The Worth of a Shell.
MCAH: I like to build aliens to explore questions. Shell–all the Jokka stories–are about how biological imperatives shape society and relationships. How do you find your place when the needs of your culture and your species conflict with yours? How do you find, or even recognize, love? The Jokka go through two puberties during which they can switch sexes between neuter, male and female. Those changes, and their difficulties surviving, define them; at the time, they were perfectly posed to work through the questions I was most interested in.
Several of the short stories about the Jokka were bought by online magazines. Strange Horizons still has theirs archived. If you’re curious about the Jokka you can read those stories for free; they’re linked here.
AMH: Your “Pollyanna meets Starship Troopers” webfiction Spots the Space Marine features a strong female protagonist. Do you have much in common with this ass-kicking mother?
MCAH: Not long after I quit fencing I started going to the gym, which had its pros (lots of time to think) and its cons (lots of time to think). I wasn’t used to having so many spare cycles–fencing is rigorous cerebral exercise as well as physical–so an inducement to stay on the elliptical, I started counting off the minutes as “aliens killed” and keeping an alien kill count on my livejournal. Then I’d go home and reward myself for the hour by writing about an out-of-shape mom hunting crabs on an alien planet.
It only took about a month for this thought exercise to evolve into a real story… that was probably inevitable, if you give a storyteller too much free time and free rein with an idea. I asked my readers if they were interested in me running with it and the answer was an enthusiastic ‘yes!’
So the short answer: we’re as much alike as any author and her characters, in the sense that it’s hard to escape your own themes. We’re both mothers, we’re both of some kind of Spanish descent and we’re both in our thirties. But by now that’s all that Magda’s taken away from her start point as my self-insertion into an alien video game to keep myself entertained while doing weights.
I blame Claws. When he showed up I knew I was doomed.
AMH: Why did you decide to publish online, and in a crowdfunded format?
MCAH: I crowdfund because it works for me. I’ve been experimenting with online funding of stories since 2004, when I started writing my audience-influenced novel Flight of the Godkin Griffin: everyone could read the story, but people who paid could participate in polls to shape the story. That was an interesting experiment, a little like GMing a roleplaying game and a little like traditional writing. I made about $700 off my posting of Flight.
Shame's Altar
After that, I crowdfunded my short story collections The Aphorisms of Kherishdar and its companion volume The Admonishments of Kherishdar. I posted a single 2-page story every time I hit my donation cap. The Aphorisms paid me 3-5 cents a word and The Admonishments 5-7, rates that would have qualified me for SFWA had they been paid by an acceptable market. I call that an appreciable success. The hard copies are still earning me money, though I consider that incidental to the crowdfunding approach.
I’ve sold some work to paying markets, enough to have been in and out of SFWA. I had an agent for a while and several near-misses with novel sales (in both cases, the buying editors moved on before we signed the contract and their replacements weren’t interested). Traditional publishing has many advantages, but I’m not particularly unhappy that I missed that boat when I did: the marketplace is in flux and I think I would have been extremely stressed had I been invested in traditional publishing, trying to weather the changes.
My current plan is to debut a hybrid crowdfunding/subscription model in the next year or so, by which people who pay me can read my fiction on my website, and when enough people have donated to the coffers I start posting the stories publicly. Patrons who helped finance the free version will get their names listed with thanks in the same way I did with the Kherishdar collections and Spots. And I plan to continue experimenting with crowdfunding models. There’s a lot of research to be done on how to make them work, particularly given the additional overhead do-it-yourselfers have over traditionally-published authors.
AMH: You’re actually one of the admins of the LJ Crowdfunded community. Who is this community for, and how does it work?
MCAH: The crowdfunding community is open to anyone interested in alternate payment methods for artists of any kind. We have members doing everything from crowdfunding movies to living off tips for their posted artwork; we get together to discuss how different payment models have worked for us, our experiments with new publishing or patronage models, how to develop fanbases and do outreach… anything of interest to people wanting to exploit the internet’s ability to connect people of similar interests with artists who want to make a living. We welcome new blood!
AMH: Crowdfunding depends entirely on fan support. What’s the nicest thing a fan has ever done for you?
MCAH: Oh goodness, I’ve been so blessed in this regard. I am humbled by my audience. But in particular, I remember the one Christmas I posted my address online for someone who asked, thinking I’d get a card. When I arrived at the mailbox center, the man behind the counter brought out a stack of cards. And then a stack of boxes. And another stack of boxes. I was just… overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who’d decided to mail me something for the holidays. I think I went home and cried. And then I drew a picture for thanks which I think is still on my archive… yes, here.
AMH: Let’s finish off with what you’re a fan of: any webfiction recommendations to share?
MCAH: I’m really enjoying The Personal Logs of Minor Sutherland, which would be hard to find if you didn’t know about it… it’s Search & Rescue science fiction with a great assortment of characters (and aliens!) and a stubborn, prickly main character who nevertheless doesn’t give you the annoying urban-fantasy snark-narrator vibe. You can pick that up here.
I’m also reading Daron’s Guitar (which won the Rose & Bay last year, deservedly in my opinion).
AMH: That’s everything from me. Any last words for our readers?
MCAH: Just a reminder: in the internet marketplace of art and ideas, your support counts. Art is a conversation between creator and viewer; you can participate silently, but acting or speaking up closes the circuit and greatly enriches both parties. If you’re debating whether your one-dollar tip is “enough” or your “I really liked this” comment is too bland, stop second-guessing yourself! A dollar buys enough gas to get to the grocery. Your comment might be the one that convinces an artist to keep going that week. With payment and patronage models evolving right in front of us, your actions and opinions may help decide how artists are compensated in the future. This is an exciting time for art-lovers everywhere. Get involved! :)
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To learn more about any of the projects mentioned above, check out Stardancer.org, and don’t forget to follow Maggie on Twitter!