Because I didn’t have free fiction set to give away. What can I say? My son’s “novel” isn’t finished yet and most of my short fiction is already for sale as ebooks, either on my online store (which is still not working ten days after I asked for help from Shopp tech support) or B&N/Amazon.
Then I realized I’m still giving away free chapter of my novels. Chapter one of Child of Fire is here.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t really count. Go easy on me here, I’m behind on my current book.
Yesterday on Twitter I was talking about the importance of taking the blame for every failure and rejection. Today I feel like talking about the shame of revisiting work.
There’s not a lot to say, though. After I send something off, I hate to revisit it because I know I’ll see things I want to change. Not little tweaks, either, but places where I use a pronoun with an unclear (to me) antecedent, or text that seems too rushed, or a scene without enough description of the setting.
I just did it last night. Nothing big, you understand. Just a quick little nothing. But looking at it now just makes me feel sad and useless[1]. (Not that I have time to redo it.)
Which is the perfect way to start a writing day! Actually, yesterday was pretty good if a bit tough. Today will be even harder, but I’m hoping to surpass myself. I really really need to finish this book.
[1] Usually when I post something like this, I get people dropping me notes of encouragement or whatever. Thanks, but it’s not necessary.
The Tales of the Emerald Serpent anthology is over and it’s fully funded:
(Let’s see if iframe will work in WordPress.)
Thanks to everyone who pledged. I know a lot of readers were unhappy that the benefit level for a physical book was so spendy, but when the book itself comes out I’m sure you can pick up a copy at regular book price.
The Dinopacalypse Kickstarter is nearly over…
and is running out of stretch goals. The benefit levels are pretty reasonable, too. At this point you can get ebooks of several of those novels for a paltry pledge. Take a look.
Finally, here’s a project I’m not involved in at all, except as a backer:
Sentinels of the Multiverse is my new favorite game to play with my son, and they made their goal for the new expansion set AND the second edition of the basic game in one day. That’s how popular this game is becoming. Personally, I’m hoping that they make their stretch goals so we can get the “promo cards” that let us change the way games are played.
Anyway, I’ve been recommending this game (as often as I do such things) but at this point I think it would be best to pick up the second edition. It will have better game balance for the villains and will make record-keeping less of a chore. And the Rook City expansion means tougher fights.
Added later: iframe doesn’t work in the cross-poster, so I’ve added links in the text.
You are in the kitchen cutting some lunch meat for a sandwich[1] and you give yourself a serious cut on your thumb. You get blood on the cold cuts and on the bread, too. After cleaning and bandaging your injury, you return to the kitchen. There are blood spots on the meat and your bread is red and wet in one corner. Worse, you have no more fixings in the house to make another sandwich.
Do you throw it all out and make something else, or eat it anyway? Heck, you put your thumb into your mouth after you cut it just out of habit, but that bread looks like something from WARHOL’S DRACULA. Would you try to trim it somehow?
Eat the sandwich or not?
[1] If you don’t eat meat, pretend it’s some other ingredient. If you can’t eat gluten, pretend it’s GF bread. If you never eat sandwiches or cut your food or whatever, please don’t jump in to say why the hypothetical simply can’t apply to you, because that’s tedious.
NPR does a story about the “formula” for bestsellers (pfft! Don’t even), and the comment section turns out the wackiness.
I’m writing an international suspense novel about a vampire wizard from India who is a descendant of both Jesus and Mohammed, and who leads a secret elite team of spies fighting the worldwide crime syndicate. This individual can have out-of-body experiences, visit heaven, or change sexes at will, has a cool costume, and can fly.
I asked him to read this blog post by Mur Lafferty, then I pointed out the quote at the top, which comes from the opening to every episode of BURN NOTICE. We’ve been watching season one of BN, and that quote had gotten by me without notice every time. It was an opportunity to talk to my son about something I try to point out often–the way women and girls are treated in this society.
But there it had been on my TV set and I hadn’t even noticed. I hate that.
Anyway, he read the letter above, and I told him his homework for this week would be to look around him for more examples of this sort of thing: bad-mouthing the female, using women or girls as an example of something shameful.
We’ll see how long it takes him to find them.
1) Notch, creator of Minecraft, is planning a new “hard science fiction” space exploration game. Sadly for James Nicoll, the early promotional materials mention a cloaking device.
4) Top 10 Dying Industries in the United States.
5) If Darth Vader had been a good father.
6) Nazis hire official lobbyist to lobby Congress.
7) Murals in Minneapolis that will soon face the wrecking ball.
Have been in Surrey, B.C. for 97 minutes. Still have not tasted poutine. Am too self-conscious to ask the front desk staff about it. Drove to mall where Pokemon tournament will take place tomorrow to make sure we could find it. Discovered they have enough seating for a Neil Gaiman reading, which should be more than enough. Have already scouted outlets for tomorrow’s long event.
Realized I packed my laptop but not my powercord, leaving me with nothing but the charge on a four and a half year old laptop battery. Bought replacement powercord at Mall. Wept tears of blood over price tag. Consoled myself that I completely funded an injured child’s MRI, probably.
Ate at food court at insistence of boy. Not only was food terrible, there wasn’t enough of it. Returned to hotel room to discover this is the only Best Western on the continent to not have a list of local pizza places that deliver in the room.
Boy has declared Surrey much more “futuristic” than Seattle based on an elevated train and hi-rise apartment buildings. How did a kid born in 2001 come to embrace the futurism of the 1930’s? Have tried to convince him that a “mooney” is a coin worth a million dollars, but he is not convinced.
Now he wants to see the hotel pool. May be getting wet soon, but in metric units of water.
In a few hours my son and I will be taking off for Surrey and the Pokemon Regionals there. I won’t be dropping by bookstores or meeting folks: this trip is about my son and his fun. I do plan to work on my book while my son plays.
Anyway, progress on A BLESSING OF MONSTERS has been tough lately… right up until yesterday, when I had a great day. Protip: It’s hard to be motivated to write when you know every word is just going to be cut in the second draft. Yesterday I reached a part I knew I would keep, and things magically became easier.
With luck I’ll have time to write a bit later so I won’t lose the whole day. But tomorrow should be better.
First the store: It’s not working and I don’t know why it’s not working. Shopp’s help system isn’t very helpful but I plan to create a help ticket (or whatever they call it) sometime tomorrow morning.
Until this gets fixed, everyone who buys a story directly from me will have to wait for me to email the file to them. I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t see another way to handle this for right now. To complicate things, I’m going away this weekend and don’t know how much internet access I’ll have. No matter what, I hope to get some Starbucks time to check emails and so forth.
Anyway, yeah I suck. No big.
About the agency pricing thing: John Scalzi already wrote some sensible advice for people who root for one side or the other in the ebook price battles. But one thing I want to point out (and I’ve talked about this before, bear with me) is that these changes are not the result of some inexorable process.
For too many people, the changes we see around us are treated as though they’re the result of “natural” progressions. They think that New York City has a bunch of highways cutting through it because people like cars, and that’s also Los Angeles dumped the trolley system in favor of all those freeways. But that’s bullshit; people made those decisions, and they didn’t make them because Americans were clamoring for it. They had the power to do what they thought was best and highways were it.
You can argue whether it was a good choice or not (I think not) but despite the fact that people love cars and were buying cars as fast as we could make them, other choices could have been made, other directions taken.
The same is true for ebooks. E-readers and ebooks are beloved by some people, and they want more and more of them. I don’t find ebooks very convenient but I’m not against them–the first half of this post was all about the difficulties I’ve had selling them.
Still talking about “publishers fighting to protect their old business model” or “Time to get ready for this new economy” is childish crap. It’s Naivete dressed up in Cynicism’s old clothes. There is no unavoidable future here, there are only choices. Either we make the choices, or people with money and power will make them for us.
Personally, I’d like to see us work on a system that fosters competitiveness and openness, and you don’t get that with either collusion or monopolies.