Tuesday, November 28
elmeraldus-neo asks:
If you see this, please help her out with the study by posting this on your blog. The full directions are here.
(Ganked from mizkit).
What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?
Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are—to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium—"skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.
For my talk at the MLA, I'd prefer being able to quantify this triumphalism with hard numbers....
If you see this, please help her out with the study by posting this on your blog. The full directions are here.
(Ganked from mizkit).
Saturday, November 25
I had a thoughtful, insightful post all mapped out in my head. Then we went car shopping. Intellectually I understand we must do the car shopping; carless is not an option in an area this rural, and the van we drive currently, while I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth, is a cow to steer, a bitch to park, and an insult to my environmentalist sentiments every time we pull up to the pump. Therefore, we shop.
Emotionally? There's only one thing more likely to send me into introvert-shock than shopping, and that's shopping with used car salesmen getting in my face.
Add to that a long drive, traffic, directions that weren't, lack of food, massive sun-in-my-eyes headache from the long drive, and general exposure to cities... well... about a quarter of the way home I pulled over and made Dan drive, because my particular form of introvert-shock involves an increasing sense of disconnection to the world around me (difficulty hearing or coherently replying to people, difficulty focusing, nagging conviction that I am actually asleep and dreaming, etc), and I felt that someone increasingly inclined to believe that the "real world" was some bizarre and irritating hallucination should probably not be behind the wheel of a vehicle. Then I lay in the passenger's seat sort of fading in and out of consciousness for a while. I think I scared Dan, but that whole being a real person thing had just gotten to be too much trouble.
On the bright side, we had dinner at a very nice place, and in the twenty minutes it took to get seated I went outside and communed with their fishpond until I was human again.
But my insightful post is off playing with the fishies somewhere still. Better luck tomorrow.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 515, plus about 150 revising chapter 3 until it was workshop-worthy.
Comments: Twenty thousand words! Woo! Now I just have to figure out how somebody broke William's ankle while Elliot wasn't looking and tie the friggin' valet subplot back in here somehow, and I'm golden.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Why can't the words come out pretty the first time? Or at least the third or sixth or tenth time?
Snips: Poor Kotchi. No one trusts him. I wonder why?
To his utter surprise, Kotchi was still there, sitting in the corner with his forehands dangling between his knees. "Wasn't me," he said sulkily, meeting Elliot's accusing glare with a glare of his own. "Didn't do it. Stayed in boring room all day, like I was told."
Emotionally? There's only one thing more likely to send me into introvert-shock than shopping, and that's shopping with used car salesmen getting in my face.
Add to that a long drive, traffic, directions that weren't, lack of food, massive sun-in-my-eyes headache from the long drive, and general exposure to cities... well... about a quarter of the way home I pulled over and made Dan drive, because my particular form of introvert-shock involves an increasing sense of disconnection to the world around me (difficulty hearing or coherently replying to people, difficulty focusing, nagging conviction that I am actually asleep and dreaming, etc), and I felt that someone increasingly inclined to believe that the "real world" was some bizarre and irritating hallucination should probably not be behind the wheel of a vehicle. Then I lay in the passenger's seat sort of fading in and out of consciousness for a while. I think I scared Dan, but that whole being a real person thing had just gotten to be too much trouble.
On the bright side, we had dinner at a very nice place, and in the twenty minutes it took to get seated I went outside and communed with their fishpond until I was human again.
But my insightful post is off playing with the fishies somewhere still. Better luck tomorrow.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 515, plus about 150 revising chapter 3 until it was workshop-worthy.
Comments: Twenty thousand words! Woo! Now I just have to figure out how somebody broke William's ankle while Elliot wasn't looking and tie the friggin' valet subplot back in here somehow, and I'm golden.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Why can't the words come out pretty the first time? Or at least the third or sixth or tenth time?
Snips: Poor Kotchi. No one trusts him. I wonder why?
To his utter surprise, Kotchi was still there, sitting in the corner with his forehands dangling between his knees. "Wasn't me," he said sulkily, meeting Elliot's accusing glare with a glare of his own. "Didn't do it. Stayed in boring room all day, like I was told."
Tuesday, November 21
"This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished, and put an asterisk* beside the ones you loved."
Now with commentary!
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien* Read it when I was seven. It rocked my world then. It rocks my world now. And I still have hippie-environmentalist-gasms over the Retaking of the Shire.
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov I'm pretty sure there were more than three of these. Either that, or those three were even longer and duller than I remember. I mean, I like Asimov in a way, but even as a kid I used to visualise poking the characters so's to watch them fall over with a cardboard clatter.
3. Dune, Frank Herbert Read when I was eleven. There were cool wormies and the sequels sucked. Hmm. That I can't remember more probably means it's due a reread.
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein *sigh* Sex, cannibalism, bouncy interchangeable women. Fine, Bob. You're cutting edge. Now go away.
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin* Actually this book freaked me out as a child, in that "freaked so I read it a dozen times" kind of way. That shadow-thing was creepy. Tombs was probably my favorite of the trilogy, though.
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson Pretty shiny things. Shame the main character is a waste of good oxygen.
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick Look, man, it's Dick. It's like scoring acid for the price of a paperback. I swear I walk funny after he's done with my brain....
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley This book was responsible for my mother's frequent announcements of, "We need rain, kids, so your father and I will be upstairs performing a fertility ritual. Bye!" Do you think it's too late to sue for emotional scarring?
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury Mmm. Scary post-apocolyptic Bradbury. Not my favorite of his stuff, but I don't think it's possible for the man to write bad.
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe -- I never got the hang of Wolfe. I can see the good there, but it's like reading a dream, and I like my waking hours with causality and basic logic, thanks.
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. It's on the pile! Honest!
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish I really liked bits of these, didn't like other bits, found other bits quaint and dated. The first of the cycle is probably my favorite.
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett Read it at twelve and became a Pratchett fan for life, though in retrospect twelve was probably the best age to read it.
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester I can count the number of antihero stories I like on the fingers of one hand. This is the pinkie.
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey Dammit, I won't diss McCaffery; she was one of the major delights of my childhood, even if now I read her prose and flinch a bit. It may be fluff, but it's fluff with power.
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card This one, on the other hand, I think i was a bit old for when I read it. It reads like overly pretentious martyrdom to me. Well-written, but subtextually suspect.
23. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson Ick, ick, ick. What a pointlessly depressing series that was. Of course, I was ten when I read it, which probably didn't help.
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman Another mixed experience: really liked bits, but there were a lot of other bits that were uncomfortably dated.
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling It's bubble gum, but hey, sometimes you need a little bubble gum. And anything that makes more kids read is good in my book.
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams Hee! Like Pratchett, I read it young, though these days I like Pratchett a lot more -- less bitter. Still. Adams is da man.
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin* Very. Good. Book. But LeGuin is an idol of mine; I can't be objective about her.
31. Little, Big, John Crowley I know I read this, and as an adult, but my only memory of it is a vague sensation of dreamlike things happening in a very big house. This often happens to me with Crowley, sadly.
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny I read it. It was okay, but I never got what all the fuss was about.
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick I had to look this up on Wikipedia to make sure I'd read it; all of Dick tends to blur into one massive paranoid drug-trip after a while. I have, though, and liked it.
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement Not on my list. I have read Hal Clement. It's hard to think of a more boring way to spend an afternoon short of reading an actual physics paper.
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith* Man. This was... some seriously beautiful stuff. Hard to say much about it more than that. Simply beautiful.
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute Uh, I listened to "Walk Me Out In the Morning Dew". Does that count?
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien Well, I fell asleep over it, anyways. Do yourself a favor and stick with the stuff Tolkien considered publishable.
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson* Hee. Far more my style than Gibson. Though Stephenson doesn't seem to know how to deal with endings, and hadn't yet hit on the ultimate solution as seen in his most recent series, eg, "just keep going, they'll buy it!"
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner Sheep Look Up was enough terrifying goodness for me.
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester That antiheroes-on-one-hand thing? Yup. This is the thumb. Or maybe the index finger, who cares?
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein Nice read, but I fail to see anything more striking than that in it.
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks What? They were fun books. Not very original, but if stealing plot was the way for Brooks to escape the mind-numbing dullness of some of his later works, then so be it.
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
----
Twenty-nine out of fifty's not too bad. But man. So many books. So little time.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 434
Comments: Woke up cranky and still made myself write. Mind over matter! Virtue over sloth! I don't have to like it, though.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Must stop dogpiling gestures. The reader will get the idea even if I don't include the faint sideways tilt of her head as she twitched her fingers and raised an eyebrow while... BAD KAT!
Snips: Nothing good today.
Now with commentary!
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien* Read it when I was seven. It rocked my world then. It rocks my world now. And I still have hippie-environmentalist-gasms over the Retaking of the Shire.
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov I'm pretty sure there were more than three of these. Either that, or those three were even longer and duller than I remember. I mean, I like Asimov in a way, but even as a kid I used to visualise poking the characters so's to watch them fall over with a cardboard clatter.
3. Dune, Frank Herbert Read when I was eleven. There were cool wormies and the sequels sucked. Hmm. That I can't remember more probably means it's due a reread.
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein *sigh* Sex, cannibalism, bouncy interchangeable women. Fine, Bob. You're cutting edge. Now go away.
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin* Actually this book freaked me out as a child, in that "freaked so I read it a dozen times" kind of way. That shadow-thing was creepy. Tombs was probably my favorite of the trilogy, though.
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson Pretty shiny things. Shame the main character is a waste of good oxygen.
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick Look, man, it's Dick. It's like scoring acid for the price of a paperback. I swear I walk funny after he's done with my brain....
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley This book was responsible for my mother's frequent announcements of, "We need rain, kids, so your father and I will be upstairs performing a fertility ritual. Bye!" Do you think it's too late to sue for emotional scarring?
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury Mmm. Scary post-apocolyptic Bradbury. Not my favorite of his stuff, but I don't think it's possible for the man to write bad.
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe -- I never got the hang of Wolfe. I can see the good there, but it's like reading a dream, and I like my waking hours with causality and basic logic, thanks.
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. It's on the pile! Honest!
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish I really liked bits of these, didn't like other bits, found other bits quaint and dated. The first of the cycle is probably my favorite.
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett Read it at twelve and became a Pratchett fan for life, though in retrospect twelve was probably the best age to read it.
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester I can count the number of antihero stories I like on the fingers of one hand. This is the pinkie.
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey Dammit, I won't diss McCaffery; she was one of the major delights of my childhood, even if now I read her prose and flinch a bit. It may be fluff, but it's fluff with power.
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card This one, on the other hand, I think i was a bit old for when I read it. It reads like overly pretentious martyrdom to me. Well-written, but subtextually suspect.
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman Another mixed experience: really liked bits, but there were a lot of other bits that were uncomfortably dated.
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling It's bubble gum, but hey, sometimes you need a little bubble gum. And anything that makes more kids read is good in my book.
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams Hee! Like Pratchett, I read it young, though these days I like Pratchett a lot more -- less bitter. Still. Adams is da man.
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin* Very. Good. Book. But LeGuin is an idol of mine; I can't be objective about her.
31. Little, Big, John Crowley I know I read this, and as an adult, but my only memory of it is a vague sensation of dreamlike things happening in a very big house. This often happens to me with Crowley, sadly.
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny I read it. It was okay, but I never got what all the fuss was about.
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick I had to look this up on Wikipedia to make sure I'd read it; all of Dick tends to blur into one massive paranoid drug-trip after a while. I have, though, and liked it.
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement Not on my list. I have read Hal Clement. It's hard to think of a more boring way to spend an afternoon short of reading an actual physics paper.
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith* Man. This was... some seriously beautiful stuff. Hard to say much about it more than that. Simply beautiful.
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute Uh, I listened to "Walk Me Out In the Morning Dew". Does that count?
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien Well, I fell asleep over it, anyways. Do yourself a favor and stick with the stuff Tolkien considered publishable.
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson* Hee. Far more my style than Gibson. Though Stephenson doesn't seem to know how to deal with endings, and hadn't yet hit on the ultimate solution as seen in his most recent series, eg, "just keep going, they'll buy it!"
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner Sheep Look Up was enough terrifying goodness for me.
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester That antiheroes-on-one-hand thing? Yup. This is the thumb. Or maybe the index finger, who cares?
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein Nice read, but I fail to see anything more striking than that in it.
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks What? They were fun books. Not very original, but if stealing plot was the way for Brooks to escape the mind-numbing dullness of some of his later works, then so be it.
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
----
Twenty-nine out of fifty's not too bad. But man. So many books. So little time.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 434
Comments: Woke up cranky and still made myself write. Mind over matter! Virtue over sloth! I don't have to like it, though.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Must stop dogpiling gestures. The reader will get the idea even if I don't include the faint sideways tilt of her head as she twitched her fingers and raised an eyebrow while... BAD KAT!
Snips: Nothing good today.
Monday, November 20
The beginning of the World Fantasy Swag reviews:
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
As a child, Locke Lamora stole from policemen, started a riot, and finally committed a crime so dire that it forced his master the Thiefmaker to sell him in the dead of night to the Eyeless Priest. Now, as an adult, Locke and his fellow Gentleman Bastards are in the middle of carrying out the greatest sting of his lifetime: robbing a nobleman... a nobleman who knows he's a thief. Now if only Locke can keep the city's crimelord from finding out he's violating the Secret Peace by robbing the aristocracy -- or getting married off to said crimelord's beautiful daughter. If only he can keep one step ahead of the Duke's dreaded Midnighters. If only he can keep clear of the Grey King who seems determined to wipe out the city's greatest criminals....
But this is Locke Lamora. And while the Eyeless Priest may have succeeded in teaching him how to lie his way out of trouble, he never managed to show him how to stay out of it.
Scott Lynch's first novel is an addictive mix of richly imagined fantasy book, swashbuckling adventure, and caper story. It's Robin Hood for the world-weary. It's an Errol Flynn movie for grownups. Locke and his fellow Gentleman Bastards are an endearing mixture of the cynical and the touchingly naive: a group of hardheaded scoundrels and liars who are also orphans, survivors, and brothers; a batch of shameless thieves who laugh at their victims but are endearingly confused about what to do with their ill-gotten gains. The other characters, the city, and for that matter the entire story exist in the same precarious balance. It's not that the book eschews questions of good and evil -- quite the contrary -- but it achieves a sense of gritty realism without succumbing to the pseudo-literary air of gloom, bitterness, and depression that so often goes along with it. It's real, but it's also fun.
It's rare for me to give a genuinely glowing review, but this book deserves it. Go. Read. Join me in hoping the sequel will be out soon. You won't regret it.
(In the interests of full disclosure: I met Scott Lynch at World Fantasy and liked him, and I've been reading his blog since the Writerbo post, which had a lot to do with our buying the book. It had nothing to do with me writing a good review of the book, or for that matter for Dan and I (after a shared reading of the prologue) nearly coming to blows over who got to read it first. And frankly we only settled the thing peaceably because it would have been such a shame to get blood on the book.)
----
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 524 words.
Comments: At this point in my writing career I've learned to seriously worldbuild ahead of time (that I not commit cardboard-cutout setting) and to outline (that I not forget to include important things -- like, say, a plot). And generally my world and my outline look all pretty and reasonable and realistic on paper. But it isn't until I start writing that I learn whether they'll work. Writing isn't science. It doesn't matter how well I put the body together. If the lightning don't strike, the bitch don't breathe.
Today... well, some of the subplots are definitely not breathing, and some others may require CPR, and there's still quite a few bits that I'm not sure whether I'm laying groundwork or merely spewing blather that I will have to cut on the rewrite. But a huge chunk of the main plot just sat up, took a look around, and started making snide commentary on the furniture. Today is the first concrete sign I've had that the book works.
It's a good feeling.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: I wrote a chunk of action, and then a chunk of conversation, and then another chunk of action, and then sat there for five minutes scratching my head over why they were all boring and the pacing felt wrong before I realized that, y'know, perhaps it would be better if I interspaced conversation with action. Because things do not have to happen in a linear manner. Slow on the uptake, me.
Snips: "Dammit, Gwen, run! I'll stay here and try to distract her."
Now she did look down, her expression amused. "Did you get hit on the head, or are you always afflicted with situational stupidity?"
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
As a child, Locke Lamora stole from policemen, started a riot, and finally committed a crime so dire that it forced his master the Thiefmaker to sell him in the dead of night to the Eyeless Priest. Now, as an adult, Locke and his fellow Gentleman Bastards are in the middle of carrying out the greatest sting of his lifetime: robbing a nobleman... a nobleman who knows he's a thief. Now if only Locke can keep the city's crimelord from finding out he's violating the Secret Peace by robbing the aristocracy -- or getting married off to said crimelord's beautiful daughter. If only he can keep one step ahead of the Duke's dreaded Midnighters. If only he can keep clear of the Grey King who seems determined to wipe out the city's greatest criminals....
But this is Locke Lamora. And while the Eyeless Priest may have succeeded in teaching him how to lie his way out of trouble, he never managed to show him how to stay out of it.
Scott Lynch's first novel is an addictive mix of richly imagined fantasy book, swashbuckling adventure, and caper story. It's Robin Hood for the world-weary. It's an Errol Flynn movie for grownups. Locke and his fellow Gentleman Bastards are an endearing mixture of the cynical and the touchingly naive: a group of hardheaded scoundrels and liars who are also orphans, survivors, and brothers; a batch of shameless thieves who laugh at their victims but are endearingly confused about what to do with their ill-gotten gains. The other characters, the city, and for that matter the entire story exist in the same precarious balance. It's not that the book eschews questions of good and evil -- quite the contrary -- but it achieves a sense of gritty realism without succumbing to the pseudo-literary air of gloom, bitterness, and depression that so often goes along with it. It's real, but it's also fun.
It's rare for me to give a genuinely glowing review, but this book deserves it. Go. Read. Join me in hoping the sequel will be out soon. You won't regret it.
(In the interests of full disclosure: I met Scott Lynch at World Fantasy and liked him, and I've been reading his blog since the Writerbo post, which had a lot to do with our buying the book. It had nothing to do with me writing a good review of the book, or for that matter for Dan and I (after a shared reading of the prologue) nearly coming to blows over who got to read it first. And frankly we only settled the thing peaceably because it would have been such a shame to get blood on the book.)
----
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 524 words.
Comments: At this point in my writing career I've learned to seriously worldbuild ahead of time (that I not commit cardboard-cutout setting) and to outline (that I not forget to include important things -- like, say, a plot). And generally my world and my outline look all pretty and reasonable and realistic on paper. But it isn't until I start writing that I learn whether they'll work. Writing isn't science. It doesn't matter how well I put the body together. If the lightning don't strike, the bitch don't breathe.
Today... well, some of the subplots are definitely not breathing, and some others may require CPR, and there's still quite a few bits that I'm not sure whether I'm laying groundwork or merely spewing blather that I will have to cut on the rewrite. But a huge chunk of the main plot just sat up, took a look around, and started making snide commentary on the furniture. Today is the first concrete sign I've had that the book works.
It's a good feeling.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: I wrote a chunk of action, and then a chunk of conversation, and then another chunk of action, and then sat there for five minutes scratching my head over why they were all boring and the pacing felt wrong before I realized that, y'know, perhaps it would be better if I interspaced conversation with action. Because things do not have to happen in a linear manner. Slow on the uptake, me.
Snips: "Dammit, Gwen, run! I'll stay here and try to distract her."
Now she did look down, her expression amused. "Did you get hit on the head, or are you always afflicted with situational stupidity?"
Wednesday, November 15
For various reasons, inspired by various posts: a roundup of my views on self-publishing. Non-writer people may quietly sneak out the back door now.
Point the first: writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Writers -- traditionally published or otherwise -- take a while before they start making a living wage off their work, if they ever do. How long a while depends on how good they are, how lucky they are, what their definition of "living wage" is, and, what kind of support they get from their publisher. Since the answer to the fourth question will always be "zero" for self-published writers, "a while" will most likely be longer for them than for others.
If you think writing is a good way to get rich and quit your day job, here's a dollar. Go buy a lottery ticket. The odds are better, and it will spare us all so much time and suffering.
Point the second: self-publishing is not a moral stance.
You are not a bad person if you self-publish. (You are a bad person if you're one of the innumerable scammers who tend to run self-publishing companies, but I digress). You are not necessarily a good person if you traditionally publish. There are some well published, well-documented assholes out there. You are not necessarily stupid, clueless, talentless, and doomed if you self-publish; you may be the first two and end up the fourth if you fail to do thorough research, but then, you won't be spared that seeking publication through traditional means either. Those who don't believe me need to check out Writer Beware.
Those who automatically apply the "bad, stupid, clueless, etc" label to the self-published, or those seeking self-publication, are generally aspiring writers desperate to sound like they know what they're talking about. More rarely, a professional writer will put her foot in her mouth. Industry professionals are a lot more cautious about the whole thing.
Point the third: "self-published" is not a statement of quality.
A self-published book is not automatically a bad book. as arcaedia points out in the post I link above, there are a lot of reasons a good book could not get published: because the subject matter wasn't "timely", because all the slots for the year were already filled, because while the book was good the audience was just too darn small to waste precious slots on it, because the marketing department, in its infinite wisdom, misread the market. These aren't the sob stories I hear from authors: these are the sob stories I hear from agents and editors about the "one that got away", the good, good book that they just couldn't beg, borrow or steal a contract for. It happens, and we all know it. And some of these bad-luck books will end up self-published.
On the flip side of the table, "self-published" is not a statement of quality. It makes no statement about the quality of the book at all.
A book published by a traditional publisher has, by necessity, gained the enthusiastic support of numerous people. The author obviously thinks it's publishable, or he wouldn't have submitted it; the editor thinks it's publishable; the agent thinks it's publishable. Depending on the size of the company, there will be a variable number of other people that the editor has had to convince that the book is publishable. Now, these people are human, and sometimes they make mistakes, but the crux of the matter is: at least one person besides the author, who had no personal connection to the author, looked at the book and went, "yup, this is good. This could sell."
When a book is self-published, the only person who has to think it's publishable is the author.
As jaylake has recently pointed out, the writer is the worst judge of their own work. All the people who submit to the slushpile at a major editor clearly consider themselves publishable too, and yet Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Tor says she rejects 6o to 75 percent of the stuff in her slushpile for reasons like "author is functionally illiterate" or "author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs." That's not even a quality issue; it's a readability issue.
But all of those authors think their work is good enough to publish.
All of those authors are self-publishing.
Readers are not interested in becoming slushpile readers. They do not read for charity. They read to be entertained, and they expect what they read to conform to certain basic standards. When 6 out of 10 books they pick up from a specific source are unreadable -- not mediocre, not bad, not even craptastically bad, but unreadable -- they will start to avoid that source.
(Don't believe my stats? Look at POD-dy Mouth's. Ten percent of the books she read were so bad, she couldn't get past the first page. The only traditionally published book that struck me as being that unreadable from page one was Joyce's Ulysses.)
Self-publishing has a major filtering issue. Until it's dealt with, self-pub will be barely a footnote in the marketing world, and it will carry a stigma of the second-rate. It's unfair, but then life is also unfair.
Point the fourth: a publisher does a great deal more than print the book.
An off-the-cuff list of things that, say, Bantam-Spectra will do for books it publishes:
- Edit it.
- Copyedit it. (Yes, there's a difference.)
- Provide it with cover art.
- Send preview copies (ARCs) to reviewers, booksellers, and others in hopes of getting their attention.
- Send ARCs to other authors on its list in hopes of getting a cover blurb.
- Write ad copy -- back cover, inside flap, teaser page, and what have you.
- Possibly include ads or samples of the book in the backs of other books it publishes.
- Possibly provide promotional materials, like bookmarks, for the book.
- Possibly fund other marketing campaigns -- posters, special bookstore placements, giveaways, contests -- for the book.
- Distribute the book: it will be at least potentially available in major and independent bookstores across the country(s) and on Amazon.com.
- Do a big enough print run of the book that it will be affordable by market standards, and warehouse the extra copies.
Again, there will be mistakes. Budget will be lavished on a real loser of a book, while the year's real find starves to death in a corner. The cover art will suck. The ad copy will suck. The print run will be too small and they'll refuse to do another. The print run will be too big, and there will be too many returns, and the author will quite unfairly see it reflected in her royalty statements. But they will do it all.
Whatever company an author chooses to self-publish with will do none of this. He will have to do it all.
A great many people do not realize this when they choose to self-publish. Of those that do realize it, not all realize just how ineffective their attempts at marketing will be when compared to what the big boys do, or how expensive it will be when they're footing the bill up front. Amazon.com listings are easy enough to come by, but shelf space in major bookstores? Forget it. Most of the chains won't even special order self-pubbed books anymore, having been burned by the "promotional techniques" of certain scam publishers one too many times, and they certainly won't allot precious shelf space to them. The rest -- well, the rest simply costs money and time.
It's not easy being a published author either, and any published author who thinks she can sit back and rake in the cash is in for a nasty surprise. But she will at least have some support. The self-published author is doing it alone.
Point the fifth: writers really don't like hearing this.
Writers are as a collective neurotic, egotistical, insecure, poorly socialized, and insanely desirous of attention. I speak from experience here. They also have serious reality issues. This is perhaps to be expected of people who spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, creating their own worlds, to the point that they, say, nearly walk out of Wal-Mart with a map they are convinced they want before they remember that, no, it was a character who wanted it. (Silly, silly character! There are no Wal-Marts in the desert! ... uh, not that this really happened to me, or anything. *ahem*)
Sit a group of writers down and try to explain the hard facts of publishing and marketing to them, and there will be a lot of out-of-tune humming and absent-minded staring-out-the-window. They can be trained out of this, but the basic desire to deny reality -- or at least warp it to their personal desires -- will remain.
And the thing that writers really, really don't like to hear, the thing that will bring out the humming and the staring and perhaps even the fluffy blanket, is that their book is not good enough.
Good writers learn to deal with this. They learn to take the slam critique, or the rejection letter, or the bad review, and learn what they can from it, and toss the rest over their shoulders. Good writers become better writers.
Bad writers do not learn this. Now, bad writers with enough talent may become successful writers -- yet another sign that I do not run the universe -- but they don't tend to become better writers. And rather than face up to the grain of truth in that critique, rejection, or review, they start doing what they do best: inventing. Inventing reasons for the badness that don't involve their book being bad. My critique group is full of losers! Those critics are just jealous -- someone must be paying them to say bad things about me! Publishing discriminates against men!
The problem with this -- aside from the basic, you know, inability to learn -- is that such people are ripe for a con. There is nothing that draws the sharks like the scent of self-illusions.
Anyone who looks to submit their work to any publisher will have to pick their way through this sea. Scam agents. Scam small presses. Scam editing services. All kinds of people willing to tell you just what you want to hear while they take you for all you've got.
But self-publishing has its own friggin' ocean. The people who turn to self-pub are often those who've been turned down, repeatedly, by larger, more reputable presses. They're rejected. They're humiliated. They're secretly afraid that all those faceless people who told them their book was not good enough may be right. They can feel a dream slipping through their fingers, and they're desperate to keep it.
They are fucking ripe to be plucked. And plucked they are, by the thousands, many paying as much as $5000 to get their books published or signing truly terrifying contracts with their "publisher". And the victims now don't just have pride and their writing on the line any more -- there's all that cash they paid out, too, and the humiliating possibility they've been not just rejected but subsequently hookwinked. Their book-peddling takes on an edge of desperation that not only drives away potential readers but gives more savvy self-pubs yet another stereotype to fight.
Conclusion.
Is self-publishing "wrong"? Of course not. It can be the wrong choice, and people have made and will continue to make terrifying messes out of their lives via self-publishing. A far larger number will coast along happily, make the occasional buck, and continue to write bad books secure in the knowledge that they're "good enough" and don't have to learn anything new. And a smaller number than either will make genuinely good writers out of themselves and possibly even achieve financial success. The odds are abysmal, but then, if any of us were good with numbers we wouldn't be chasing wordcount.
Is self-publishing the same as traditional publishing? No. What many self-published writers fail to realize is that the simple act of publishing a book does not get them any respect. It does not make them significantly different than the aspiring writer next door. Self-publishing is hard work, but to the general reading public it says nothing more than I thought my book was good enough to publish!
The general reading public wants a second opinion. In fact, the general reading public wants a third, fourth, fifth, and tenth opinion, which is why big publishers spend all that money putting ARCs out to reviewers. But as a self-pubbed, you're going to have to provide them those extra nine opinions before you get so much as a second glance, and you're going to have to do it by yourself. You're on your own out there.
Traditional publishing is not perfect, but it does have filters built in. What self-published writers have done is essentially move themselves from slushpile to slushpile, in hopes that readers will be less unkind than editors. On the downside, it's a pretty slim hope. On the upside, you only have to feed yourself from the proceeds, so you can be content with a much smaller profit margin than the houses would be.
-----
Hello, you've reached the bottom of Kat's long and involved ranting. If your final conclusion is that Kat is pretty sick of both the whining of the self-published and the unthinking knee-jerk EBIL declarations of the determinedly aspiring... have a cookie. After reading that whole damned thing, you deserve it.
Point the first: writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Writers -- traditionally published or otherwise -- take a while before they start making a living wage off their work, if they ever do. How long a while depends on how good they are, how lucky they are, what their definition of "living wage" is, and, what kind of support they get from their publisher. Since the answer to the fourth question will always be "zero" for self-published writers, "a while" will most likely be longer for them than for others.
If you think writing is a good way to get rich and quit your day job, here's a dollar. Go buy a lottery ticket. The odds are better, and it will spare us all so much time and suffering.
Point the second: self-publishing is not a moral stance.
You are not a bad person if you self-publish. (You are a bad person if you're one of the innumerable scammers who tend to run self-publishing companies, but I digress). You are not necessarily a good person if you traditionally publish. There are some well published, well-documented assholes out there. You are not necessarily stupid, clueless, talentless, and doomed if you self-publish; you may be the first two and end up the fourth if you fail to do thorough research, but then, you won't be spared that seeking publication through traditional means either. Those who don't believe me need to check out Writer Beware.
Those who automatically apply the "bad, stupid, clueless, etc" label to the self-published, or those seeking self-publication, are generally aspiring writers desperate to sound like they know what they're talking about. More rarely, a professional writer will put her foot in her mouth. Industry professionals are a lot more cautious about the whole thing.
Point the third: "self-published" is not a statement of quality.
A self-published book is not automatically a bad book. as arcaedia points out in the post I link above, there are a lot of reasons a good book could not get published: because the subject matter wasn't "timely", because all the slots for the year were already filled, because while the book was good the audience was just too darn small to waste precious slots on it, because the marketing department, in its infinite wisdom, misread the market. These aren't the sob stories I hear from authors: these are the sob stories I hear from agents and editors about the "one that got away", the good, good book that they just couldn't beg, borrow or steal a contract for. It happens, and we all know it. And some of these bad-luck books will end up self-published.
On the flip side of the table, "self-published" is not a statement of quality. It makes no statement about the quality of the book at all.
A book published by a traditional publisher has, by necessity, gained the enthusiastic support of numerous people. The author obviously thinks it's publishable, or he wouldn't have submitted it; the editor thinks it's publishable; the agent thinks it's publishable. Depending on the size of the company, there will be a variable number of other people that the editor has had to convince that the book is publishable. Now, these people are human, and sometimes they make mistakes, but the crux of the matter is: at least one person besides the author, who had no personal connection to the author, looked at the book and went, "yup, this is good. This could sell."
When a book is self-published, the only person who has to think it's publishable is the author.
As jaylake has recently pointed out, the writer is the worst judge of their own work. All the people who submit to the slushpile at a major editor clearly consider themselves publishable too, and yet Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Tor says she rejects 6o to 75 percent of the stuff in her slushpile for reasons like "author is functionally illiterate" or "author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs." That's not even a quality issue; it's a readability issue.
But all of those authors think their work is good enough to publish.
All of those authors are self-publishing.
Readers are not interested in becoming slushpile readers. They do not read for charity. They read to be entertained, and they expect what they read to conform to certain basic standards. When 6 out of 10 books they pick up from a specific source are unreadable -- not mediocre, not bad, not even craptastically bad, but unreadable -- they will start to avoid that source.
(Don't believe my stats? Look at POD-dy Mouth's. Ten percent of the books she read were so bad, she couldn't get past the first page. The only traditionally published book that struck me as being that unreadable from page one was Joyce's Ulysses.)
Self-publishing has a major filtering issue. Until it's dealt with, self-pub will be barely a footnote in the marketing world, and it will carry a stigma of the second-rate. It's unfair, but then life is also unfair.
Point the fourth: a publisher does a great deal more than print the book.
An off-the-cuff list of things that, say, Bantam-Spectra will do for books it publishes:
- Edit it.
- Copyedit it. (Yes, there's a difference.)
- Provide it with cover art.
- Send preview copies (ARCs) to reviewers, booksellers, and others in hopes of getting their attention.
- Send ARCs to other authors on its list in hopes of getting a cover blurb.
- Write ad copy -- back cover, inside flap, teaser page, and what have you.
- Possibly include ads or samples of the book in the backs of other books it publishes.
- Possibly provide promotional materials, like bookmarks, for the book.
- Possibly fund other marketing campaigns -- posters, special bookstore placements, giveaways, contests -- for the book.
- Distribute the book: it will be at least potentially available in major and independent bookstores across the country(s) and on Amazon.com.
- Do a big enough print run of the book that it will be affordable by market standards, and warehouse the extra copies.
Again, there will be mistakes. Budget will be lavished on a real loser of a book, while the year's real find starves to death in a corner. The cover art will suck. The ad copy will suck. The print run will be too small and they'll refuse to do another. The print run will be too big, and there will be too many returns, and the author will quite unfairly see it reflected in her royalty statements. But they will do it all.
Whatever company an author chooses to self-publish with will do none of this. He will have to do it all.
A great many people do not realize this when they choose to self-publish. Of those that do realize it, not all realize just how ineffective their attempts at marketing will be when compared to what the big boys do, or how expensive it will be when they're footing the bill up front. Amazon.com listings are easy enough to come by, but shelf space in major bookstores? Forget it. Most of the chains won't even special order self-pubbed books anymore, having been burned by the "promotional techniques" of certain scam publishers one too many times, and they certainly won't allot precious shelf space to them. The rest -- well, the rest simply costs money and time.
It's not easy being a published author either, and any published author who thinks she can sit back and rake in the cash is in for a nasty surprise. But she will at least have some support. The self-published author is doing it alone.
Point the fifth: writers really don't like hearing this.
Writers are as a collective neurotic, egotistical, insecure, poorly socialized, and insanely desirous of attention. I speak from experience here. They also have serious reality issues. This is perhaps to be expected of people who spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, creating their own worlds, to the point that they, say, nearly walk out of Wal-Mart with a map they are convinced they want before they remember that, no, it was a character who wanted it. (Silly, silly character! There are no Wal-Marts in the desert! ... uh, not that this really happened to me, or anything. *ahem*)
Sit a group of writers down and try to explain the hard facts of publishing and marketing to them, and there will be a lot of out-of-tune humming and absent-minded staring-out-the-window. They can be trained out of this, but the basic desire to deny reality -- or at least warp it to their personal desires -- will remain.
And the thing that writers really, really don't like to hear, the thing that will bring out the humming and the staring and perhaps even the fluffy blanket, is that their book is not good enough.
Good writers learn to deal with this. They learn to take the slam critique, or the rejection letter, or the bad review, and learn what they can from it, and toss the rest over their shoulders. Good writers become better writers.
Bad writers do not learn this. Now, bad writers with enough talent may become successful writers -- yet another sign that I do not run the universe -- but they don't tend to become better writers. And rather than face up to the grain of truth in that critique, rejection, or review, they start doing what they do best: inventing. Inventing reasons for the badness that don't involve their book being bad. My critique group is full of losers! Those critics are just jealous -- someone must be paying them to say bad things about me! Publishing discriminates against men!
The problem with this -- aside from the basic, you know, inability to learn -- is that such people are ripe for a con. There is nothing that draws the sharks like the scent of self-illusions.
Anyone who looks to submit their work to any publisher will have to pick their way through this sea. Scam agents. Scam small presses. Scam editing services. All kinds of people willing to tell you just what you want to hear while they take you for all you've got.
But self-publishing has its own friggin' ocean. The people who turn to self-pub are often those who've been turned down, repeatedly, by larger, more reputable presses. They're rejected. They're humiliated. They're secretly afraid that all those faceless people who told them their book was not good enough may be right. They can feel a dream slipping through their fingers, and they're desperate to keep it.
They are fucking ripe to be plucked. And plucked they are, by the thousands, many paying as much as $5000 to get their books published or signing truly terrifying contracts with their "publisher". And the victims now don't just have pride and their writing on the line any more -- there's all that cash they paid out, too, and the humiliating possibility they've been not just rejected but subsequently hookwinked. Their book-peddling takes on an edge of desperation that not only drives away potential readers but gives more savvy self-pubs yet another stereotype to fight.
Conclusion.
Is self-publishing "wrong"? Of course not. It can be the wrong choice, and people have made and will continue to make terrifying messes out of their lives via self-publishing. A far larger number will coast along happily, make the occasional buck, and continue to write bad books secure in the knowledge that they're "good enough" and don't have to learn anything new. And a smaller number than either will make genuinely good writers out of themselves and possibly even achieve financial success. The odds are abysmal, but then, if any of us were good with numbers we wouldn't be chasing wordcount.
Is self-publishing the same as traditional publishing? No. What many self-published writers fail to realize is that the simple act of publishing a book does not get them any respect. It does not make them significantly different than the aspiring writer next door. Self-publishing is hard work, but to the general reading public it says nothing more than I thought my book was good enough to publish!
The general reading public wants a second opinion. In fact, the general reading public wants a third, fourth, fifth, and tenth opinion, which is why big publishers spend all that money putting ARCs out to reviewers. But as a self-pubbed, you're going to have to provide them those extra nine opinions before you get so much as a second glance, and you're going to have to do it by yourself. You're on your own out there.
Traditional publishing is not perfect, but it does have filters built in. What self-published writers have done is essentially move themselves from slushpile to slushpile, in hopes that readers will be less unkind than editors. On the downside, it's a pretty slim hope. On the upside, you only have to feed yourself from the proceeds, so you can be content with a much smaller profit margin than the houses would be.
-----
Hello, you've reached the bottom of Kat's long and involved ranting. If your final conclusion is that Kat is pretty sick of both the whining of the self-published and the unthinking knee-jerk EBIL declarations of the determinedly aspiring... have a cookie. After reading that whole damned thing, you deserve it.
Sunday, November 12
The good news: the shipping dorks actually managed to pick up our pallets of cheese -- not on Friday, as they'd said, but early Saturday morning. Dan and I didn't end up having to help make up the actual pallets, as my parents decided that getting us on site and capable of work at 6 am was more trouble than it was worth. I am wounded. Not a walking zombie as I would have been at 6 am, of course, but nonetheless wounded.
The weird news: the truck driver for this shipment, while a nice man, somehow managed to get my cellphone number instead of my father's (they're only one digit apart) and despite repeated attempts to convince him that he needed to call ***8 instead of ***9, it was me that he called at 8:30 in the morning for directions. The poor sod's lucky he even ended up in the right town.
The bad news: we bought three itty baby pigs on Friday for eventual sausage dinners. And now we have two itty baby pigs. Apparently while my mother and the NYC intern (who is a real sport) were transferring them from the truck to their new piggy home they made the mistake of leaving one piggy in the truck while they carried two to the pen. My mother did put the camper's lid down but the piggy, having watched his brethren being carted off and apparently having watched more horror movies than were good for him, made a desperate leap into the unknown. After getting chased over half the farm by two women and a very excited dog he finally escaped, last seen heading off into the woods as fast as his little piggy legs could carry him.
So somewhere on our 175 acres is a very lost, damp, and lonely pig. Hopefully we will find him before the coyotes do.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 304 words. I suck.
Comments: In my defense, that measly 300 words did get me to the end of the chapter. And I did spend the rest of the day whipping up my flagging enthusiasm for querying Harmony. I sent off four e-queries (one a re-query to an agent who hasn't responded) and have five further queries waiting to go out in tomorrow's mail (one of those also a re-query). So not unbearably lazy -- just lazy.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Does a butterfly attention span count as a crappy writing skill?
Snips: Rare poetic moment: Behind Elliot, the unborn kin twitched, giant hooves fighting to churn at the nonexistant earth.
The weird news: the truck driver for this shipment, while a nice man, somehow managed to get my cellphone number instead of my father's (they're only one digit apart) and despite repeated attempts to convince him that he needed to call ***8 instead of ***9, it was me that he called at 8:30 in the morning for directions. The poor sod's lucky he even ended up in the right town.
The bad news: we bought three itty baby pigs on Friday for eventual sausage dinners. And now we have two itty baby pigs. Apparently while my mother and the NYC intern (who is a real sport) were transferring them from the truck to their new piggy home they made the mistake of leaving one piggy in the truck while they carried two to the pen. My mother did put the camper's lid down but the piggy, having watched his brethren being carted off and apparently having watched more horror movies than were good for him, made a desperate leap into the unknown. After getting chased over half the farm by two women and a very excited dog he finally escaped, last seen heading off into the woods as fast as his little piggy legs could carry him.
So somewhere on our 175 acres is a very lost, damp, and lonely pig. Hopefully we will find him before the coyotes do.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 304 words. I suck.
Comments: In my defense, that measly 300 words did get me to the end of the chapter. And I did spend the rest of the day whipping up my flagging enthusiasm for querying Harmony. I sent off four e-queries (one a re-query to an agent who hasn't responded) and have five further queries waiting to go out in tomorrow's mail (one of those also a re-query). So not unbearably lazy -- just lazy.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Does a butterfly attention span count as a crappy writing skill?
Snips: Rare poetic moment: Behind Elliot, the unborn kin twitched, giant hooves fighting to churn at the nonexistant earth.
Thursday, November 09
Hello, and welcome to Kat's Obscenely Long Catch-Up Post.
For those of you with lives, I offer this cliffnotes version of the Catch-Up Post: WFC rocked my world. I voted. Work is kicking my ass. And I'm writing again.
Overall, I think that's a vote for the positive.
-----
So after much debate about cost Dan and I decided we'd go to World Fantasy in Austin this year. I don't think we'll bother with the debate next year. Unless I am broke enough to be living in a trash can, I will be going to this con.
Thanks to the remarkable kindness of juliarandolph we had both a ride to the con and a spot in the volunteer lineup, greatly helping with both the finances and the sanity, but also meaning that shortly after arriving at the con after a week's worth of hauling cheese to and from the basement, I was put to work hauling massive bags of books from the basement. My back did not appreciate the irony. It was probably a situation that would have been helped by packing at least one pair of sensible shoes, but dammit, I work on a farm. I spend nine-tenths of my life slopping around in men's jeans, sports bras, and ripped t-shirts. I wanted to dress like a girl for once, and to hell with the agonizing pains in my arches.
The majority of the con, however, was not spent hauling books: it was spent volunteering with cool people like KC and docdad2, then going to the bar and hanging out with cristalia, sosostris2012, stillnotbored, clarentine, and other willing or unwilling members of the Bar Amoeba, and listening to matociquala, jaylake, and scott-lynch try to one-up each other with stories (an experience well worth repeating, I might add, despite the rib pains from laughing that much.) I went to the ConSuite with everyonesakitty and jmeadows and learned that I am apparently an internet presence, or at least that my webpage's Google-Rankings-Fu is strong (don't people pay money for that?); I worked the autographs table and learned that, despite the autograph session starting at eight and officially ending at ten, people would come up to the table demanding to know -- with various levels of anger and despair -- when Michael Moorcock would be signing, until at least twenty to ten. (Though considering that Moorcock himself showed up at ten before the hour uttering the immortal words "I know I'm a bit late...", perhaps the moral of the story is that hope doesn't spring eternal enough.)
Does anyone spot a pattern here? Oh, yes. This was my socialization for the year. I'm pretty proud of myself for not collapsing into an introvert puddle midway through this one, though. For all of you who accidentally met my alter ego Badly Socialized Girl (she of the motor mouth and inability to pick up even blatant social cues) I apologize: I try to keep her in her cage, but occasionally a bit of the wild jungle nerd escapes.
In between my adventures with volunteering and the Bar Amoeba I did manage to attend a few panels. The first was called "Why Does Meritocracy Read Aristocracy?", a panel on why Americans in particular seem so addicted to monarchies in their fantasy. It was an interesting enough panel, if a bit disappointing. The three positions taken by both the panelists and the audience seemed to be a) because aristocrats and kings are the Natural State of humanity to which we will all return, b) because it's the accepted trappings of the genre from which we cannot escape, and c) because most writers are lazy buggers who don't want to think about politics. Position A was morally offensive to me, but position B I simply found inexplicable -- particularly since its main proponent was Michael Moorcock, who is from his comments on this panel a rabid anti-monarchist but nevertheless unquestioningly uses monarchies in his fantasy. I haven't really read much Moorcock, so perhaps this all makes sense in context, but it's the kind of disconnection between one's fiction and one's real-life views that I've never been able to achieve.
(I am, for the record, a proponent of Position D, which is really an extension of Position C which states that westerners in general have a fondness for pure hierarchical government, by which I mean "those kinds of government which only appear in books." In fantasy it's kings, in science fiction it's "democracies" in which the president has enough unchecked power to give Bush & Co. a year's worth of wet dreams, and in both cases everything is very neat and tidy and explicable. Real government is much more messy. And if you don't believe me, go read a history of the British monarchy.)
The second panel, "The Barbarian in Modern Fantasy", was also disappointing, though in hindsight I should have expected it given the theme of the con. There were a lot of interesting points made and some interesting observations shared, but the presence of the rather large (in both senses of the word) Robert E. Howard fanclub in the front row acting as Third Columnist panelists made sure that the focus remained claustrophobically Conan. I did find the concept of Howard and Tolkien as opposite ends of the spectrum interesting, since it coincides with my own ideas about those two.
The third and final panel I attended, "God or the Machine?", about uses of magic vs. uses of technology, was by far the most successful. Of course, it had Walter Jon Williams on it, and I've yet to attend a bad panel he's on, but there was a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion as well, including the statement (unattributed in my notes -- sorry, guys) that science is for discovering the laws of nature, whereas magic is for changing them. I was a bit sad that all of the panelists were proponents of the this-equals-that, rules-and-regulations style of magic in fantasy books, which is the style that least appeals to me. I enjoy magic systems where certain things are irreplicable, where one person can perform the same set of actions but -- because of personality, morality, or simple karma -- end up with an utterly different set of results. Of course, I've spent most of my life as a writer, a cheesemaker, or a farmer, where following a formula without adjusting for your circumstance frequently gets you a bad book, a sour vat of milk, or a very interesting set of bruises, respectively, so I may not be indicative of the general population.
One final point about WFC: dear God, what a con for books. Between the at-the-door handouts, the trading table, the special backroom stash for volunteers, the books Julia had been holding for me for six months, and our controlled (for us) foray into the dealer's room, we came home with twenty-seven books. I know the number because one of my first acts upon coming home was to unpack them and enter them into two seperate book databases on my computer. With the bar-code scanner I bought for that purpose.
Getting "GEEK" tattooed across my forehead is on next week's schedule.
-----
The first time I ever voted was in the 2000 elections. Yes, those elections, the ones that saddled us with the Dope Monkey and his war-mongering posse. I voted for Nader, which should tell you just how pissed off the results made me, and every succeeding election has only added insult to injury.
These are the first elections in which someone I actually voted for won. Not to mention the first evidence I've seen in a long time that my country is worth the time I've spent defending it to various incredulous outsiders.
It's not about the Democrats vs. Republicans. It's about sanity and being led by people who bear some resemblance to adults, rather than spoilt children.
You rock, guys.
-----
This was the week that we were supposed to have two pallets -- the first we'd ever tried to build -- picked up and shipped to two separate locations. This isn't a momentary burst of insanity on our part. No, this is a sustained burst of insanity, starting at roughly the beginning of August when we started making the extra cheese that would be needed to fill these orders and continuing through the next three months as we desperately juggled shelf space and fought with contractors trying to get our new cellar opened while our other two coolers bulged at the seams with twice the cheese we'd ever intended to store there, as we attempted to make sensible arrangements with various corporate entities for moving this cheese from us to them, as we ordered boxes and canceled because Corporate Entity One decided they'd rather have a different size of box and re-ordered boxes, as we called desperately up and down the East Coast looking for a shipping company that would admit to having refrigerated trucks on at least two subsequent phone calls....
... culminating in the insanity of this week. Which was not wrapping, weighing, labeling, boxing, and invoicing upwards of four hundred wheels of cheese; no, that was just hard work. The insanity has been in dealing with the shipping company, which has, on various occasions, forgotten which week they were supposed to pick us up on, forgotten they were supposed to pick us up at all, forgotten who we were and why we kept calling them talking about some "cheese" business, and forgotten that they were supposed to call us with (insert important bit of information here). The crowning glory was when they failed to call us by the promised date with our pickup time, leading my mother to call them this morning and have the dispatcher tell her they were going to be picking us up sometime between eight pm and midnight today.
"Today?" my mother said.
"Yes. Definitely today."
The dispatcher then tried to talk us out of having the cheese picked up by them (despite the fact they've already been paid for one of the pickups) and eventually, huffily, agreed to call my mother back before noon with the driver's phone number and a slightly narrower time frame. About one we started calling the dispatcher. There was no answer until four-thirty, when the phone was answered by some random truck driver who happened to be passing by -- the dispatcher having left for the day. He talked to someone with more knowledge than him and came back on the phone to assure us, with great confidence, that we would be picked up sometime late in the afternoon tomorrow.
My mother threw a snit, but he stood by his assertion. So we're now operating on the assumption that we'll be picked up sometime tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe a very annoyed truck driver will be showing up tonight. Since we can't assemble the pallet until a few hours before the truck comes, as it's too big when assembled for us to refrigerate, he's out of luck if he does show. My father's plan is to offer to pay for a hotel room and dinner in town. If he doesn't take the offer, we punch out his lights and steal his car keys.
I am somewhat dubious about this plan, but my father has worked with truck drivers far more often than any of the rest of us. We'll just have to assume he knows what he's doing.
-------
After a month-long dry spell, WFC has finally gotten me motivated to write again, which means y'all are once again subjected to the dreaded stats:
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 701 words.
Comments: After crawling on my belly through 300 and 400 word days, and then suddenly having a day where I had to force myself to stop writing, I've reached the inescapable conclusion: yup, still easier for me to write dialogue than it is for me to write description. But people whine if I leave all the stuff out. Curse you, foul description!
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: I am still in a somewhat uncertain state with my adverbial tags, wherein people are telling me I use them too much (despite all attempts at self-control) but my little words look all naked and cold without them. And a large chunk of my writer-brain is convinced that if I just ignore all those nasty people for long enough, they will go away. Or at least move on to complaining about POV shifts. Bad writer-brain, no cookie.
Snips: No good ones. But Trevor and Darien did have to explain culling to poor, innocent Elliot. I've had that conversation myself, and I sympathize with them.
For those of you with lives, I offer this cliffnotes version of the Catch-Up Post: WFC rocked my world. I voted. Work is kicking my ass. And I'm writing again.
Overall, I think that's a vote for the positive.
-----
So after much debate about cost Dan and I decided we'd go to World Fantasy in Austin this year. I don't think we'll bother with the debate next year. Unless I am broke enough to be living in a trash can, I will be going to this con.
Thanks to the remarkable kindness of juliarandolph we had both a ride to the con and a spot in the volunteer lineup, greatly helping with both the finances and the sanity, but also meaning that shortly after arriving at the con after a week's worth of hauling cheese to and from the basement, I was put to work hauling massive bags of books from the basement. My back did not appreciate the irony. It was probably a situation that would have been helped by packing at least one pair of sensible shoes, but dammit, I work on a farm. I spend nine-tenths of my life slopping around in men's jeans, sports bras, and ripped t-shirts. I wanted to dress like a girl for once, and to hell with the agonizing pains in my arches.
The majority of the con, however, was not spent hauling books: it was spent volunteering with cool people like KC and docdad2, then going to the bar and hanging out with cristalia, sosostris2012, stillnotbored, clarentine, and other willing or unwilling members of the Bar Amoeba, and listening to matociquala, jaylake, and scott-lynch try to one-up each other with stories (an experience well worth repeating, I might add, despite the rib pains from laughing that much.) I went to the ConSuite with everyonesakitty and jmeadows and learned that I am apparently an internet presence, or at least that my webpage's Google-Rankings-Fu is strong (don't people pay money for that?); I worked the autographs table and learned that, despite the autograph session starting at eight and officially ending at ten, people would come up to the table demanding to know -- with various levels of anger and despair -- when Michael Moorcock would be signing, until at least twenty to ten. (Though considering that Moorcock himself showed up at ten before the hour uttering the immortal words "I know I'm a bit late...", perhaps the moral of the story is that hope doesn't spring eternal enough.)
Does anyone spot a pattern here? Oh, yes. This was my socialization for the year. I'm pretty proud of myself for not collapsing into an introvert puddle midway through this one, though. For all of you who accidentally met my alter ego Badly Socialized Girl (she of the motor mouth and inability to pick up even blatant social cues) I apologize: I try to keep her in her cage, but occasionally a bit of the wild jungle nerd escapes.
In between my adventures with volunteering and the Bar Amoeba I did manage to attend a few panels. The first was called "Why Does Meritocracy Read Aristocracy?", a panel on why Americans in particular seem so addicted to monarchies in their fantasy. It was an interesting enough panel, if a bit disappointing. The three positions taken by both the panelists and the audience seemed to be a) because aristocrats and kings are the Natural State of humanity to which we will all return, b) because it's the accepted trappings of the genre from which we cannot escape, and c) because most writers are lazy buggers who don't want to think about politics. Position A was morally offensive to me, but position B I simply found inexplicable -- particularly since its main proponent was Michael Moorcock, who is from his comments on this panel a rabid anti-monarchist but nevertheless unquestioningly uses monarchies in his fantasy. I haven't really read much Moorcock, so perhaps this all makes sense in context, but it's the kind of disconnection between one's fiction and one's real-life views that I've never been able to achieve.
(I am, for the record, a proponent of Position D, which is really an extension of Position C which states that westerners in general have a fondness for pure hierarchical government, by which I mean "those kinds of government which only appear in books." In fantasy it's kings, in science fiction it's "democracies" in which the president has enough unchecked power to give Bush & Co. a year's worth of wet dreams, and in both cases everything is very neat and tidy and explicable. Real government is much more messy. And if you don't believe me, go read a history of the British monarchy.)
The second panel, "The Barbarian in Modern Fantasy", was also disappointing, though in hindsight I should have expected it given the theme of the con. There were a lot of interesting points made and some interesting observations shared, but the presence of the rather large (in both senses of the word) Robert E. Howard fanclub in the front row acting as Third Columnist panelists made sure that the focus remained claustrophobically Conan. I did find the concept of Howard and Tolkien as opposite ends of the spectrum interesting, since it coincides with my own ideas about those two.
The third and final panel I attended, "God or the Machine?", about uses of magic vs. uses of technology, was by far the most successful. Of course, it had Walter Jon Williams on it, and I've yet to attend a bad panel he's on, but there was a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion as well, including the statement (unattributed in my notes -- sorry, guys) that science is for discovering the laws of nature, whereas magic is for changing them. I was a bit sad that all of the panelists were proponents of the this-equals-that, rules-and-regulations style of magic in fantasy books, which is the style that least appeals to me. I enjoy magic systems where certain things are irreplicable, where one person can perform the same set of actions but -- because of personality, morality, or simple karma -- end up with an utterly different set of results. Of course, I've spent most of my life as a writer, a cheesemaker, or a farmer, where following a formula without adjusting for your circumstance frequently gets you a bad book, a sour vat of milk, or a very interesting set of bruises, respectively, so I may not be indicative of the general population.
One final point about WFC: dear God, what a con for books. Between the at-the-door handouts, the trading table, the special backroom stash for volunteers, the books Julia had been holding for me for six months, and our controlled (for us) foray into the dealer's room, we came home with twenty-seven books. I know the number because one of my first acts upon coming home was to unpack them and enter them into two seperate book databases on my computer. With the bar-code scanner I bought for that purpose.
Getting "GEEK" tattooed across my forehead is on next week's schedule.
-----
The first time I ever voted was in the 2000 elections. Yes, those elections, the ones that saddled us with the Dope Monkey and his war-mongering posse. I voted for Nader, which should tell you just how pissed off the results made me, and every succeeding election has only added insult to injury.
These are the first elections in which someone I actually voted for won. Not to mention the first evidence I've seen in a long time that my country is worth the time I've spent defending it to various incredulous outsiders.
It's not about the Democrats vs. Republicans. It's about sanity and being led by people who bear some resemblance to adults, rather than spoilt children.
You rock, guys.
-----
This was the week that we were supposed to have two pallets -- the first we'd ever tried to build -- picked up and shipped to two separate locations. This isn't a momentary burst of insanity on our part. No, this is a sustained burst of insanity, starting at roughly the beginning of August when we started making the extra cheese that would be needed to fill these orders and continuing through the next three months as we desperately juggled shelf space and fought with contractors trying to get our new cellar opened while our other two coolers bulged at the seams with twice the cheese we'd ever intended to store there, as we attempted to make sensible arrangements with various corporate entities for moving this cheese from us to them, as we ordered boxes and canceled because Corporate Entity One decided they'd rather have a different size of box and re-ordered boxes, as we called desperately up and down the East Coast looking for a shipping company that would admit to having refrigerated trucks on at least two subsequent phone calls....
... culminating in the insanity of this week. Which was not wrapping, weighing, labeling, boxing, and invoicing upwards of four hundred wheels of cheese; no, that was just hard work. The insanity has been in dealing with the shipping company, which has, on various occasions, forgotten which week they were supposed to pick us up on, forgotten they were supposed to pick us up at all, forgotten who we were and why we kept calling them talking about some "cheese" business, and forgotten that they were supposed to call us with (insert important bit of information here). The crowning glory was when they failed to call us by the promised date with our pickup time, leading my mother to call them this morning and have the dispatcher tell her they were going to be picking us up sometime between eight pm and midnight today.
"Today?" my mother said.
"Yes. Definitely today."
The dispatcher then tried to talk us out of having the cheese picked up by them (despite the fact they've already been paid for one of the pickups) and eventually, huffily, agreed to call my mother back before noon with the driver's phone number and a slightly narrower time frame. About one we started calling the dispatcher. There was no answer until four-thirty, when the phone was answered by some random truck driver who happened to be passing by -- the dispatcher having left for the day. He talked to someone with more knowledge than him and came back on the phone to assure us, with great confidence, that we would be picked up sometime late in the afternoon tomorrow.
My mother threw a snit, but he stood by his assertion. So we're now operating on the assumption that we'll be picked up sometime tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe a very annoyed truck driver will be showing up tonight. Since we can't assemble the pallet until a few hours before the truck comes, as it's too big when assembled for us to refrigerate, he's out of luck if he does show. My father's plan is to offer to pay for a hotel room and dinner in town. If he doesn't take the offer, we punch out his lights and steal his car keys.
I am somewhat dubious about this plan, but my father has worked with truck drivers far more often than any of the rest of us. We'll just have to assume he knows what he's doing.
-------
After a month-long dry spell, WFC has finally gotten me motivated to write again, which means y'all are once again subjected to the dreaded stats:
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 701 words.
Comments: After crawling on my belly through 300 and 400 word days, and then suddenly having a day where I had to force myself to stop writing, I've reached the inescapable conclusion: yup, still easier for me to write dialogue than it is for me to write description. But people whine if I leave all the stuff out. Curse you, foul description!
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: I am still in a somewhat uncertain state with my adverbial tags, wherein people are telling me I use them too much (despite all attempts at self-control) but my little words look all naked and cold without them. And a large chunk of my writer-brain is convinced that if I just ignore all those nasty people for long enough, they will go away. Or at least move on to complaining about POV shifts. Bad writer-brain, no cookie.
Snips: No good ones. But Trevor and Darien did have to explain culling to poor, innocent Elliot. I've had that conversation myself, and I sympathize with them.
Wednesday, November 01
I'm twenty-six today. Um... woo? *half-heartedly blows a noisemaker*
Oh, wait, I get cake for that. Woo!
On to the main purpose of this post:
Tomorrow morning, at an insanely early hour, Dan and I will be getting on a plane to Austin, TX that we may attend World Fantasy. If you live in Austin and would like to meet me, or if you're going to World Fantasy and would like to meet me, please drop me a line or comment here. I seem to remember there was an unreasonable concentration of ex-Brin-L'ers in Austin (Marvin? Adam?) and it seems like we should at least do dinner er something, because God knows when I'll venture into the wilds of Texas again.
In the meantime, I need to move more cheese. We have finally completed the new cellar we've been working on for the last two years, which is good, and now we must carry much cheese into it, which is bad. I estimate that I hauled at least 500 pounds down the stairs yesterday. It is at times like these that you realize how much being an ectomorph sucks. My back hurts, my knees hurt, and I have a series of scrapes and lovely fresh bruises because any time I loose my balance and bump the wall, it's gonna bump a bone. I was so tired last night that I was literally falling asleep on my feet at points. And this morning I creak like an old woman. Bah. All this skinny-preying-mantis stuff is pretty enough, but when you've got a job that requires heavy lifting the problems rapidly start outweighing the benefits.
Oh, wait, I get cake for that. Woo!
On to the main purpose of this post:
Tomorrow morning, at an insanely early hour, Dan and I will be getting on a plane to Austin, TX that we may attend World Fantasy. If you live in Austin and would like to meet me, or if you're going to World Fantasy and would like to meet me, please drop me a line or comment here. I seem to remember there was an unreasonable concentration of ex-Brin-L'ers in Austin (Marvin? Adam?) and it seems like we should at least do dinner er something, because God knows when I'll venture into the wilds of Texas again.
In the meantime, I need to move more cheese. We have finally completed the new cellar we've been working on for the last two years, which is good, and now we must carry much cheese into it, which is bad. I estimate that I hauled at least 500 pounds down the stairs yesterday. It is at times like these that you realize how much being an ectomorph sucks. My back hurts, my knees hurt, and I have a series of scrapes and lovely fresh bruises because any time I loose my balance and bump the wall, it's gonna bump a bone. I was so tired last night that I was literally falling asleep on my feet at points. And this morning I creak like an old woman. Bah. All this skinny-preying-mantis stuff is pretty enough, but when you've got a job that requires heavy lifting the problems rapidly start outweighing the benefits.
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