I’m having a quiet day at home, just like yesterday, hanging with family. We were planning to camp out on the side of a hill somewhere to watch the fireworks tonight, but we’ve been invited to a party. I have no idea what we’ll end up doing. All I know is that I plan to bore my son with an explanation of what we’re celebrating and why.
Happy Birthday, America.
I knew touring comedian Gallagher had did conservative schtick, but I never realized he’d become such a pathetic asshole. Sample quote: “If Obama was really black, he’d act like a black guy and get a white wife.” Jesus. James Nicoll would mark this with the “memetic prophylactic recommended” tag.
1) Wonder Woman trades in her star-spangled panties for actual pants (and a very ’90’s jacket).
2) “Officer, I recognize that woman! Her name is Selena Kyle!”
3) OMG. Promoted from a comment Rose Fox made: The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu. I love it!
4) Et Cetera and Otherwise: A Violent Book Trailer. That won a Moby Award for Best Foreign Book Trailer and I laughed my ass off.
5) The other Moby Award winning trailers are compiled here… except for the one named “Least Likely to Sell the Book”–aka: the worst book trailer of the year. The author pulled that one off of YouTube, and produced this new, “improved” version of the trailer. And I swear, if this is the good version, I can’t even imagine that bad one.
6) Batman’s Greatest Tweets. Sample: “We’ll miss you, Jack Bauer. If you ever come out of exile, I’ve got a pair of green ankle shoes and a yellow cape waiting.”
7) What sf ideas does Rudy Rucker wish you were writing about?
1) Time for a yay! I’ll be doing another Big Idea essay at the end of August, this time for GAME OF CAGES. Yay! This time I’m going to write a little bit about pets and pet-owners. You guys know how I feel about pets, right? I’m sure many of the people who read it are going to suspect I’m an alien infiltrator, but I swear it ain’t true.
2) I have a huge disorganized jumble of odd books at home. Why, you ask? Because I’m going to be giving them away. They’re all out of my father-in-law’s collection (with his blessing), and they range from ethnic joke books with blank spaces where the ethnicity would go (“You supply the ethnic!”), to stacks of old Archie comics, to old-time erotic photography (now with more bodystockings!), to other, odder books. As the big event, I’ll be giving away this puppy. That’s right, folks. Watch this space.
One question: should I bother with contests? Or just pretend to choose people at random?
Anyway, those books shouldn’t be in a jumble, but they are, because…
3) I spent a good portion of last night tidying my desk so the new printer will fit. My laser printer has stopped working since my Qwest troubles caused me to reinstall my operating system. The Australian print drivers I’d installed seem to have been wiped, and I wasted a bunch of time looking for working replacements. Grr. Way to not support Mac OS, Samsung! I hate you now. Add to that a phone conference about the book trailer for Man Bites World, and I find that…
4) I have a lot of housework to do tonight. Vacuuming, dishes, tidying, recycling, not to mention a quick shopping run for my wife and son’s comfort foods because…
5) Tonight my wife and son come home. They will both need a lot of attention, and I have to say I’m excited to see them. I don’t do very well when my family isn’t around.
Links to the reviews are behind the cut: Continue reading
Found another review of Child of Fire today that used the “L” word. “Lovecraft.” It’s one I think about often. I stuck werewolves into my first novel because they’re scary (to me, anyway–I have had many nightmares about dog attacks) but the books are meant to feature supernatural creatures you don’t normally find in folklore. No pixies, no rakshasa, no ghosts, no ifrits, none of that. I wanted to make my own.
Which would be one thing if I was writing a second-world fantasy, but the setting for the Twenty Palaces books are contemporary Earth. And if you write contemporary fantasy but do not use the traditional horror/folkloric supernaturals, how are people going to describe those creatures?
With the “L” word.
Me, I enjoy most Lovecraft–especially the monsters–but I have always hated the names. Cthulhu. Nyarlathotep. Yog-Sothoth.[1] They always rubbed me the wrong way. I can’t believe people would be willing to stick with those unpronounceable names, except under very special circumstances (as in “Nyarlathotep, have I got a deal for you!”). I mean, how long did it take for the U.S. to stop using the name “Peking.” People change things for their convenience.
But the real question is, how do you write a fantasy creature that does not draw on a religious or folkloric tradition that does not prompt comparisons to H.P. Lovecraft?
edited to add: finally reached 100 reviews on Amazon.com yesterday, which I think is pretty cool.
[1]All spelled by memory. Because.
People, when you call a company, sometimes the person who can help you is the first person who answers the phone. Don’t be rude to them and don’t try to blow by them to the person you think can help.
Anyway.
As much as I try (try!) to make this blog a not-specifically-about-writing blog, here’s two writing-related things:
First is Rob Sawyer’s post about the end of the full-time SF novelist, and John Scalzi’s reaction.
I’m still sifting through my thoughts on both men’s ideas. I’m a fantasy writer myself, which some people might consider a close, close cousin to “SF writer” but I doubt Mr. Sawyer would agree. So, my experience is not directly transferrable to his, since we write for different but somewhat-overlapping markets.
First of all, as I mentioned in the comments on Scalzi’s blog, health care is a huge issue. I would be a full-timer right now if I were a Canadian and had access to their Medicare system. I doubt I’ll even try to become a full-timer until the Affordable Care Act comes into play, and we all have a chance to see if it works.
Second, also mentioned in Scalzi’s blog, there are a lot of people who make their living off novels. The person who drives the truckload of books from the warehouse to the bookstore is one of them.
But for writers? There’s an awful lot of competition out there, and it’s getting more intense. Every time I see a 4 (out of 5) star review on Child of Fire, I feel like a minor leaguer. If I’m going to try for a career in writing, I need to max out the awesome scale as much as possible.[1] That’s the way to build readership, and that’s the way to maintain an active backlist.
Because it’s the backlist that does the heavy lifting. One of the lessons from Donald Maas’s free ebook on writing, The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success, was that the writers he represented who earned six-figure salaries didn’t do so with their advances, but with their backlists. That’s what I want, too.
But how much of Rob Sawyer’s concerns come from the recession rather than general publishing trends? Is the type of work he does going out of fashion? Should I dump a bucket of live bait over his head because he uses an offer of three grand for ten days of work as an example of why SF writers can’t write full time?
And for John Scalzi, he’s pretty clear that he’s coming onto the scene in a big way (he’ll become SFWA president tomorrow, among other things)–how will the market look for him in 15 years?
Great, I hope. And for Rob Sawyer, too. I hope the two of them become filthy millionaires, just like me. But Scalzi’s correct that few novelists ever get to quit their day jobs[2][3]; however, just pointing this out doesn’t speak to how many of them can do so in the future.
But this is a really bad time to be making predictions about the publishing industry. The recession is hurting a lot of folks right now, from readers to publishers to us writers, too. New delivery systems are gaining ground, and it’s still too early to judge how far they’ll penetrate the market, or how deeply. Urban fantasy is still doing well, but Christ, does that genre need to be shaken up and broken open.
On top of that, U.S. health care reform may make it possible for me to go full time with my writing. In fact, I’m hopeful that there will be a bunch of positive effects of the ACA, including a reduction in job lock, more new business startups, and more self-employed workers. How great would that be?
Which is just me saying that I want it and hope to get it. I suspect I’ll need to be way more prolific than I currently am, though.
Damn, wasn’t I supposed to talk about two writing-related things? This got a little long, so I’ll put that other topic off until the next post. Also: day job still crappy.
[1] Not that I need five stars from 100% of all readers who ever pick up my book; that would be crazy. I’ll settle for half.
[2] Why oh why didn’t I get a degree and a career back in college when I had the chance?
[3] Dean Wesley Smith talks about how many writers work full-time right now right here. Interesting stuff.
This story is audio only and is 16 minutes long. That’s a lot to listen to on the internet, but it’s pretty damn interesting. The speaker is author Andrew Solomon, who wrote The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. The story he tells describes a trip he made to study folk treatments for depression in Senegal and how he ended up being the recipient of that ritual. And how it affected him.
It’s a pretty amazing story. Highly recommended.
The Center for Economic and Policy research has a debt calculator that allows people to see the implications of various policies. I managed to drive the number down below the magic (according to some budget hawks) 60% line by pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reducing our nuclear stockpile, instituting a carbon tax to fight climate change, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, opening up a buy-in “public option,” increasing the social security tax cap, instituting a tiny financial speculation tax to slow speculative buying and selling, allowing the Bush estate and gift tax cuts to expire, and change the mortgage tax deduction (which only serves to inflate home prices anyway) to a 15% credit.
And all that policy allows me to increase investment in infrastructure, education and other government programs (aka stimulus spending), and increase social security benefits for low earners.
How much money can you save the government?
1) A half-hearted defense of the Star Wars prequels. I agree with his assessment of the attitudes of the Jedi in the prequels, but I’m not convinced that Lucas himself recognized that it was problematic.
2) British stores told they can no longer sell eggs by the dozen.
3) The NY Post reacts to U.S. World Cup elimination.
4) I’m not one to link to music videos, but here’s The Go-Go’s circa 1984 (love the lighting) cross-dressing onstage and looking good doing it. And Belinda Carlisle sings the hell out of this song.
5) AT-AT afternoon.
6) An American woman in a German supermarket discovers an American ethnic food section. What foods do you think they consider American?
7) More evidence on the brilliance of Facebook users. The fan page for this author’s book has 700,000 fans, and he is sure none of them care one bit about reading his book. But damn, if even three percent could be convinced to buy a copy…