And it’s already happened!!!
The blue sapphire dog has already come to Earth! To the U.S.A.! It has taken control of this company and is spreading its influence to the rest of the population! We can’t deny the evidence of our own eyes!
Run for your lives!!!
I have set up temporary standing work stations in my home, but I’m going to see about creating a permanent one, with one or two easily put-together stations if I have to work in the bedroom.
But I wonder about my big old desktop. That’s not going to be easy to raise up above my desk.
My son just sent me an email (meaning he wrote the message in my msn account and sent it to the msn account, which I picked up in webmail at the Starbucks) letting me know a fat package from Random House just arrived.
Hello, copy edit for Circle of Enemies. I will be home shortly to scribble on you.
Progress in all things, right? I’ll finish the first draft of the short story I’m struggling with first, then it’s time for home-made meatballs delivered in yummy sandwich form and every grammar insecurity I’ve ever had laid bare on the page by the copy editor’s sharpened pencil.
In unrelated news, the guy sitting across from me keeps picking his nose, scraping at gaps in his teeth and digging his ear. Blech.
1) Woman laughing alone with salad.
2) “How’s Your Poor Feet!” Manly slang of the 19th century.
3) The year according to Tom Toles. Excellent.
4) Amazon.com pulls ebook that explains how to game its sales rankings. What? You mean Amazon’s sales rankings aren’t worth anything? Who could have known?
5) Are you a Comic Sans Criminal?
6) Countries winning the fight against poverty, in a way that’s so simple no one in the U.S. will believe it.
Don’t mind me. I’m just hanging up this dirty laundry. It needs airing.
You know how I discover that the Hugo and Nebula nomination season has opened? Dozens of writers start listing their yearly sales to say “Here’s my eligible stuff!”
Which is fine. It’s important to them and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And really, Pikachu forbid that I or anyone else tell people what they write on their own blogs, which I choose to read without paying a penny.
But I’m not going to do that, not this year or any, because the sort of books I write don’t win those awards. And that’s cool. I think of Hugo and Nebula awards as things of importance within the science fiction community and I’ve never really been part of that. [1] It’s like seeing the BAFTA winners, I guess; I’m happy for those people in that foreign country.
It does prompt me to look back over the year, though. Game of Cages came out at the end of August, of course, and it’s been doing pretty well. I also took part in A Glimpse of Darkness. But that’s it.
Many of the other writers I see out there had a couple of novels come out in 2010 along with a string of short stories. I envy them their productivity. Me, I had a tab open on this computer for three days which held an article about being productive and getting things done, but I couldn’t find time to read it, so I just closed it. (Not kidding).
So, my 2010? It’s been a frustrating year for me, writing-wise. The publishing end of things has been great–Del Rey has been doing a terrific job with my books, and I was glad that Child of Fire got a second printing.
But the first third of the year was spent finishing up Circle of Enemies, seven months past deadline. Yikes. I did not want to be that writer, and yet, there I was. I think it’s a solid book, maybe the best thing I’ve ever written, but it took so much time…
After that I spent months working on a proposal for The Buried King, a Harry-Bosch-in-fantasyland rhino killer, done my way. But there was something wrong with it–I’m not even sure what. I knew it would be difficult to translate a procedural to a second-world setting (a major part of the appeal of a police procedural is iron clad research and a glimpse into a privileged world, but how does that work when the author is making it all up?) but I guess I didn’t the the solutions in place. It didn’t get very far.
Then I went to work on A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark and… Jesus, what am I thinking here? Do people really want an urban fantasy with a 65-ish year old heroine? Who’s a committed pacifist?
I took a whack at the story once already, but none of it held together. right now I have, here beside me at the coffee shop, nearly 200 pages of manuscript for The Auntie Mame Files, about 30K words. I’m about to drop it into the mail for my agent.
If she can’t sell it, 2010 will have been a total wash, writing wise, except for the short chapter I wrote for A Glimpse of Darkness.
What the hell, right? It’s what I did. Hopefully, when the end of 2011 rolls around, I’ll be able to look back on a more productive year.
[1] That’s not meant as a condemnation. I’m just not much of a socializer
I don’t know why the header has disappeared, but the header has disappeared.
I’m starting to hate you, WordPress.
Following the LiveJournal poll I posted, I brought a handful of books on my train trip east. Here’s a quick write up of them:
Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers I’m going to be reading more of these, but I wish I’d saved this one for later. It’s the book where the two leads finally marry, and while reading the beginning I was very aware that it was paying off a long setup that I had barely touched. Still, it was a terrific book, surprisingly layered, with an interesting portrayal of the British class system of the time.
It was also the strangest cozy ever. Where most mysteries end with the killer discovered and everything set right, this one took a close look at the cost of setting things right. Terrific book.
With a Single Spell by Lawrence Watt-Evans This one got the most votes in the poll and it was great fun (and a bit of a pick-me-up after the end of Busman’s Honeymoon. An elderly wizard dies after having only taught his apprentice to cast one spell: how to start a fire. Too old to be taken on by another wizard, and with no local ties, he sets off into the wider world.
Which sorta sounds like the plot to a whole bunch of other fantasies, but this is an lwe book: misunderstandings between characters build until they have a sensible conversation to clear the air, high adventure is something to be avoided if at all possible, crimes are something that make you look out a window wondering what all the ruckus is about, and people generally act like the regular folk you encounter in real life. Oh, and there’s no secret “Chosen One” powers to solve the plot at the end. It was a fun book and a nice antidote to a few overblown fantasy novels I can think of.
The Outfit by Richard Stark Zoom, this book races right by. Parker is an armed robber who has been targeted by the mob. This ticks him off, and he gets himself a little revenge with a gun and… a letter-writing campaign.
Which sounds nuts, but the independent criminals he’s been partnered with have always left mob-owned businesses alone. They have a truce of sorts. Parker lets word get out that the Outfit is leaning on him, so if any of his old partners see a mob joint ripe for robbing, now is the time to hit it.
Which means this is a Parker book without a lot of Parker in it. That turns out to be fine by me, since Parker is a bit of a pill on the best of days, and I sometimes have a problem with the way he kills a whole bunch of people for the sort of payday that would cover Joe the Plumber’s bills for a few months.
A good book, solid and exciting.
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris At first I found the voice of Sookie Stackhouse difficult to believe in, and the generic nature of Sam and Bill’s names confused me sometimes, but before I knew it I was sucked in by the story and racing along with the plot. Yeah I guessed the killer early, and I had a hard time believing that anyone would believe a “vampire virus” would let sufferers levitate, but Sookie’s relationship with her brother was wonderfully complicated, and she’s an engaging character.
I hated the TV show, but I enjoyed this.
Halting State by Charles Stross I’m only half-way through this sf high thriller, but it’s pretty damn good so far.
According to PW, Borders has suspended payments to some publishers.
At this point it looks as though Borders has no way to avoid bankruptcy, and the big question is whether they will take a bunch of publishers down with them. Small presses are especially vulnerable here, and Borders has been very hard on the whole small press scene for years, using credit from returns to order books on a much faster schedule than they actually paid for books sold.
As for Borders itself, it was once a great place to buy books–the staff were knowledgeable and the selection excellent, and while Joshua Bilmes offers a clear narrative of Borders’s descent into crappiness (quick warning about that link: very interesting), he doesn’t mention that the stores tried to control sky-rocketing rents by locking in long-term leases… right before the economy collapsed. Now their expenses are high and the revenues are low, and who’s going to suffer?
Well, authors for one. And publishers for another. Readers, too, because if we have one major chain store, as Joshua Bilmes points out, there will be certain books that readers won’t even get to see. Months and months ago, James Nicoll asked who was the most powerful but unrecognized person in sf/f, and the answer was the sf/f buyer at B&N. Without Borders, his decisions will sustain or destroy even more writers’ careers.
Hey, I know people like to see this stuff as the “Death of Traditional Publishing.” Isn’t B&N also closing stores (in high-rent areas, during a strained economic recovery)? But that’s just not the case here. Borders has been struggling for years, mainly because their upper echelons have no idea that selling books isn’t like selling other products. The economic crash simply exposed these long-term problems.
What does that mean for you? Well, if Borders isn’t paying publishers for the books they sell, you might want to stop shopping there. I know I will.
I had to install a security update to WordPress, which meant I needed to upgrade my theme. Of course that reset everything to the default, and now, after fussing with it for way too long, I have the links back to the color I want, and I fixed the tables, and I put my picture back in place instead of theirs, etc.
But the font is different. I swear, it’s different. It looks awful and is annoying the hell out of me.
Personally, I’m not one of those people who want to change their websites every few months. I like it to be simple and legible, with a little green thrown in. But it’s always an assload of work to update the stupid software.
Stupid WordPress.
1) Five skiffy death sports you can host in your own home. Reader, I lol-ed.
2) “America sends its best hunks to save the Earth.”
3) Dwayne’s Photo, a little family-owned shop in Parsons, Kansas, is closing down. They were the last processor in the world who could handle Kodachrome film, which Kodak stopped manufacturing in 2009, and now their equipment is going to be sold for scrap.
4) When are we happy? When are we not happy? Video. This one is long, but very, very interesting.
5) How It’s Made: PASS-ta. Video.
6) Robots Speak Out Against Asimov’s First Law Of Robotics.
7) The Most Epic Use of Google Docs Ever (aka Google-doc-based animation). Video.