Man With High-Paying, Prestigious Job Expresses Interest In Extending Current Employment

Standard

This is the sort of story that annoys me, I have to admit. For those who don’t want to click, it basically says that Taylor Lautner would be interested in continuing his role in the TWILIGHT movies, if the author decided to write a spin off series.

And how is this news? The guy’s an actor. Actors want jobs. I imagine Lautner has a whole SHARKMAN AND LAVAWOMAN pitch carefully folded in his pocket, just in case he runs into Robert Rodriquez at a party or something.

You know what would be news? An actor who said they hated a role and never wanted to do it again. Even better: An actor that loved a role so much that they were raising funding to pay the novelist to write a sequel. Wake me up when that happens.

In more personal news, over on my LiveJournal account, user Ms_King asked me about outlining, and I answered, describing my odd way of pseudo-planning the books I write. So naturally, what should happen? Later that morning I realized I had rushed into the draft of A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark, before I was ready because I had some half-baked character interactions and not nearly as much of the book worked out as I needed. In fact, I was almost at the end of my synopsis at only 34K workds.

No worries, though. I have plot elements and under-utilized characters, so I’ll just have to work out how they all come together, and I’ll be ready to draft again. Today is a long(ish) writing morning, so I’ll be on that for the next few hours.

Also, Twitter, where I’m @byharryconnolly.

Quick followup post

Standard

As a quick follow up to yesterday’s post about print costs, here’s a comment from someone who actually does small print runs.

Spent the morning writing

Standard

And you know what? It feels great.

I sorta expected my wife to push me to return to the convention today and make another go of it–socialize! network!–but no. Today has been work day, and I’m happy about it.

Anyway, regarding something said during a panel at Norwescon yesterday: Lou Anders was talking about ebooks, paper books, and pricing, and he said that one of the things keeping prices of paper books low was large print runs. If ebooks drive down sales of paper books, he’ll have to choose between a) smaller, more expensive print runs, which means higher prices, or b) the same old large runs of books, but with most of them stored in a warehouse and earning him a tax hit at the end of the year.

But I thought there was a c) that he was missing. If printers want to keep their businesses alive, they’re going to need to adapt to smaller print runs and downward price pressures. It seems like new technology would be the ticket here. (note: I know next to nothing about the current technology used by book printers, so clearly I’m typing this with my ass.)

I don’t mean printers in stores (although that would be tempting) because that takes forever. We’re a long way from having one or more of those in a store, handling large numbers of books at once.

But I suspect the price pressure from ebooks is going to hit printing presses especially hard. Is anyone familiar with the current state of their technology? So much has changed with printing at home in the last ten years (although obviously that’s very different) has book printing tech been changing too?

Norwescon Con Report

Standard

Short version: No.

Long version: I’ll be spending tomorrow at the library, writing my new book.

Probably.

I will say that I saw more ass crack than I’m personally comfortable with, and while people were perfectly nice, the folks I did manage to chat with did not share any of my interests. No, I’ve never seen the Matt Smith “Doctor” (and I’m not all that fond of Tennant, either). No, I don’t know what “GNOME” is, let alone what it’s doing on my MacBook (“running” apparently).

Actually, it was pretty much what I expected: a place for folks to connect with their friends and blather about things genre.

It does require me to ask myself: What the hell are my interests? What could I talk about at a con? The nuances of the ACA? What the hell do I know about now that I’m a stay-at-home dad who spends most of his time working on books and trying to get his son to flush the damn toilet?

At least I know what programming is like.

Bedbugs in NYC

Standard

How bad is the bedbug infestation in New York City at the moment? We’re trying to plan a 4-day trip to Manhattan for the summer (after watching the Ric Burns documentary, my son is anxious for the trip) but only for a few days. We’re looking at the Cosmopolitan Hotel for our stay, but I need to be able to tell the fam something reassuring about being bitten in our sleep.

Also, other hotel options would be welcome.

N Things Make a Post

Standard

n-6 ) I want to say thanks to everyone who answers my hypothetical posts. I don’t always respond to every comment mainly because I don’t want to do a bunch of “Cool!” or “That’s a great idea!” replies, but that’s pretty much what I’m thinking. However, my filmmaker friend Steve Barr left this comment, which probably deserves its own story seed spot.

n-5 ) “Then you are prejudiced, Timmy, because Steve is your filmmaker friend, and not your friend.” (I suspect that the only people who’ll get that reference are readers Of A Certain Age.

n-4) According to Twitter, ARCs of Circle of Enemies have been spotted in the wild. Yay! (gulp!)

n-3 ) Norwescon starts today but I’m not going. I have some stuff to do, and I have other plans for tonight. Here’s my schedule for the rest of the day: 1. Finish this post. 2. Email agent to let her know Twenty Palaces is on the way. 3. Walk to the post office on this chilly, sunny day to mail said book. 4. Go to library to drop off books and write a few pages of A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark. 5. Return home to have dinner (burger salad tonight!) 6. Kick back with a book and read for most of the evening. God, I’m so looking forward to reading again.

n-2 ) This deserves its own post, but R.I.P. Elisabeth Sladen. She was the costar of the first Dr. Who I ever saw, and every costar since has had to measure themselves against her. She was wonderful in the role, and I hope that she had good, happy, satisfying life. Too soon.

n-1 ) I’ve talked before about the Bookscan numbers Amazon.com shares with authors, and the fact that the numbers for my books were improving after I guest-posted at Charles Stross’s blog. Well, last week the numbers had nearly returned to the levels they were during my stint at antipope.org, and I wondered over it. This week, the numbers have jumped even higher. Like, much higher, about triple what they were before my guest blog. At this point, I don’t much care why. I just want it to keep going on.

n) I haven’t seen GAME OF THRONES and I’m not planning to. The problem with having a kid who’s a night owl is that I can’t spend late evenings watching grownup shows with the volume down while he sleeps. Instead, I spend them sitting beside him, gently suggesting he shut his damn eyes and lie back down. I’m seriously excited for the next book, though.

Randomness for 4/21

Standard

1) “Speed-climbing” the Eiger. This dude is nuts but the footage is gorgeous. Video.

2) “You will ripen with my child, faerie girl.” I don’t like to take digs at romance novels because so many people do it out of ignorance and misogyny, and I think the genre is unfairly maligned. Still, these excerpts from bad romance novels are pretty damn funny.

3) Curious to see what a professional comic book script looks like? Greg Rucka helps you out.

4) DIY Bacon Roses. via Jay Lake.

5) Ten Important Tax Charts.

6) Ten Deadly DIY Gadgets. The “flame gloves” pretty much qualify you as a Batman villain, and the crossbow that shoots machetes would be perfect for a zombie apocalypse, but it’s the car you can drive with an iPhone that really scares the hell out of me. via Jay Lake

7) An interactive map showing how much oil each country produced over the last fifty years. Just click “play.”

5 Things Make a Post

Standard

1) I have three things left to do before I send Twenty Palaces to my agent: clean up some formatting issues like chapter headings, spellcheck, and check every instance of “him” in the script to see if I should have changed it to “me” when I went changed the book from a third person pov to a first person pov. So incredibly dull but I’m really catching some embarrassing errors, like “I jumped to his feet.” Oh well.

2) Here’s my Norwescon schedule:

Friday: Whatever I want.
Saturday: Whatever I want.
Sunday: Stay home and hang out with my son.

Hah! I’ll be there as a regular attendee, mainly to look around and see whatever this is to be seen. It’ll be my first convention, so I don’t expect to know anyone. If you’re going to be there and you see me, please feel free to say hello. I look like this. Also, I have a terrible memory for faces and names, so don’t be offended if it takes me a couple of seconds to “place” you.

3) Seattle is enduring the coldest April on record. I’m sorta sick of it.

4) Revisions on Twenty Palaces have taken control of my life. I can’t wait to send them off, if only so I can go back to responding to comments promptly (as opposed to passive-aggressively complaining on my blog, like this post) and reading books. Honestly, I can’t wait to spend some hours every day reading.

5) This NY Times article (only available if you haven’t used up your 20 articles/month) isn’t the first time I’ve heard that fidgeting has a powerful effect on weight gain and loss. I’ve been using my standing desk more often (thanks to the Topricin my wife just bought me) but I attribute most of the weight I’ve lost recently to the fact that I’m getting the sleep I need. I still have a long way to go, of course.

Even more hypothetical

Standard

You are contacted by an old friend who invites you to a gettogether. After hanging for a while, the friend wants to show you something really cool. He leads you to the secret lab where he works and uses his security pass to get you in after hours.

There he shows you a special device. It can send a message back in time to one of four days, New Years Day in 1950, 1960, 1970 or 1980. The message will be received by a machine which will print it out on a postcard, stamp it, and then drop it into a chute to an outgoing mailbox.

Your friend offers you the chance to send a message, but it can’t be longer than a tweet: 140 characters. You can send it to any of those dates and it will be mailed to the person of your choosing (the address is handled separately from the tweet and will not affect the length of the msg you can send, but it also can not contain non-address information or the postcard will not be stamped and mailed, just discarded. Also, you can only do one for technical reasons he can’t explain. Your friend also tells you to keep in mind that most of the messages sent so far have been discarded by the recipients for various reasons.

Do you send a tweet? Who do you send it to, and when? What steps do you take to ensure it won’t be laughed off or ignored?

The Undiversified Writer

Standard

Several full-time writers have been talking on their blogs about how they make a living. John Scalzi for one, Tobias Buckell for another, and Chuck Wendig for a third[1] have mentioned that they make sure they have several pots on the boil at once.

I don’t have that. It turns out that I’m much too slow a writer[2] for that. I turned in Circle of Enemies to Del Rey seven months late. That’s shameful, but luckily they were careful to set my real deadline quite a bit farther out, so I didn’t suffer the career disaster that, arguably, I should have.

And the truth is, CoE was a really difficult book to write. I don’t know if I’ve blogged about the book in this way, but it’s better than anything I’ve ever written. Briefly: Ray’s successes draw attention to him and someone strikes at him through the people he knew; he discovers that his old car-stealing crew has acquired magic–magic that may be killing them–and he has to return to L.A. to find out what’s going on. It gets deeper into the nature of magic, it reveals a bit more of the society, but most of the book is about his complicated relationship with these people who used to be his whole life. (Plus face-punching, as always).

And now I’m revising Twenty Palaces and let me tell you, revision is the sort of thing that expands to fill all the available time I have. I can write 500, 1K, 1.5K words[3] of first draft and spend the rest of my day reading or being a human being, but when I have a revision in front of me it’s all I want to work on until I’m done. How the hell would I have a second income stream (assuming I could even think of what I could be writing besides fantasy fiction) when I’m so damn slow?

[1] Three dudes. Hm. I have quite a few female authors on my LJ friends list, but I can’t recall a woman talking about this subject. Have I missed something in my little window on the internet or is this a guy thing?

[2] There’s a powerful tension between “This is how I am” and “Argue for your limitations and they’re yours” that I have to continually adjust. I’m trying to increase my productivity (and I know it can increase, because it’s better now than it used to be) while keeping my expectations realistic.

[3] Never more than that. Not unless I want to ruin the next day’s work.