Tor’s Dumb Letter

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Out here everything hurts, from Mad Max: Fury Road

A brief history: For years, Tor editor Jim Frenkel was widely known as a serial sexual harasser at conventions. What was done about it? Not much, for a very long time. Eventually, he was encouraged to resign after the public outcry became too much, which was announced with typical corporate blandness.

Last year, Tor contracts manager Sean Fodera publicly attacked one of Tor’s authors, Mary Robinette Kowal, in a typically gross and sexist way. He later apologized, in a half-assed way, and she graciously accepted.

In May of this year, on her personal Facebook page, Irene Gallo (Creative Director at Tor Books) described a group of extreme right wings fans who call themselves “Sad Puppies” as extreme right wing fans. She also described a group of fan who follow a neo-Nazi (he denies the label even though he fits it) who call themselves “Rabid Puppies” as neo-Nazis. That neo-Nazi screencapped her remark and filed it away so he could release it as the Nebula Awards were given out, to distract people from the award winning books.

Did Tor CEO Tom Doherty release a letter apologizing publicly for Frenkel’s or Fodera’s behavior, while insisting that they should have been smarter about separating the personal from the professional? Of course not. For one thing, Frenkel’s shitty behavior happened while he was representing Tor Books at public events. For another, they were dudes and their victims were women. Continue reading

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Book 11 in #15in2015

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Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Book 11 of #15in2015

It’s not often I set aside genre works to read something regarded as a literary classic, but I’ve wanted to read this since the author died a few years ago.

The main character, Okonkwo, is a tragic figure determined to make a prominent place for himself within his (fictional, but based on the Igbo of southern Nigeria) people. His father was a lazy, good-for-nothing layabout, who played music and drank other people’s palm wine, and borrowed sums he never intended to pay back. In a culture that valued community he was a likable taker.

Deeply ashamed of his father, Okonkwo was determined to be everything he was not. He worked hard, fought fiercely in war, and won renown as a great wrestler. But while he could fight and work and create wealth, he couldn’t manage the things his father was good at: he couldn’t create strong social bonds within the community. He was prone to rages, and did terrible things because he was afraid to seem weak/feminine.

Naturally, he ends up dying an outcast’s death, just like his father, because he was ready to go to war with the British colonials but no one was willing to follow him.

Okonkwo is one of those literary protagonists that literary readers lose so much: he’s an asshole you wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with in real life, but as a reader you go deep into his history and his tragic flaws, watching from a superior position as his misguided instincts push him closer and closer to tragedy. The text portrays his errors but doesn’t allow much commentary on them, except in the context of the way he clashes with cultural traditions.

However, those cultural traditions are not spared overt criticism in the text at all. For a people who explicitly value community and the bonds of tribal identity, they have terrible blind spots. The vicious misogyny, the cruelty toward babies born twins, and more, create weak points in their society that the English missionaries, who show up late in the book, exploits. Okonkwo’s own son, whom he has treated with nothing but anger and criticism (in the hope that he would grow up hard and strong) is one of the first to flee his traditional tribal community for the Christian church. And just as with the man, so it is with the community as a whole: the lowest and most despised break away first, and once on the outside, attack the culture they were once a part of.

Not that the British are made into good guys, with their sham talk about justice while they destroy the Ibo traditions and kill their people.

It’s a sad book. I like sad. It’s also complex–much more so than this review makes it seem. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be seeking out the subsequent books.

Buy this book

Author attracts a dozen one-star reviews by blowing his stack over one

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No author likes to see a one-star review, but the truth is that they’re a good sign for some books.

However, as mentioned previously, some authors really don’t deal well with rejection.

I’m an indie author. I work over 100 hours a week to get my books to succeed so that I don’t have to be a slave anymore. This review is not good for my business, so unless your desire is to ruin my dreams, it would mean a great deal if you could remove this review from my work and forget about it. But if it’s your desire to hurt me financially and ruin my business, then it’s understandable why you would post such a harmful review.

and

For someone to leave such a toxic review on a book that contains so much gnosis, that people had to die in order to learn in the past, is an utter disgrace to the human condition.

and

Someone that leaves 1 star reviews on someone’s work who didn’t wrong them, who they’ve never met, that’s IS THE MEASURE OF A BAD PERSON.

and one more

NONE of you have any more or less rights than anyone at the NYT. To me, you’re more important than the people that are bought off at the NYT. Or did you think Hilary Clinton could just write a bestseller on her own? Nevertheless, wait till the NYT tries me. I’ll start NAMING NAMES. See what you don’t understand is my experience with the dark occultists of this world that are destroying you from within. You think ToO is some pathetic little fantasy from an author with a God complex. It’s not. It’s an allegorical metaphor for what’s going on because I can’t come out and speak without being in serious danger…

And on and on. It’s quite the train wreck, and he does it in response to other comments as well.

But what he doesn’t understand is that a few one-star reviews mixed in with a bunch of five-stars (and I don’t even want to think about how he got those) legitimizes those positive reviews. Without a few slams, the praise seems like it came from friends, family, and co-workers (or worse, was bought and paid for). He should WANT some dings.

Instead, he’s going on about “dark occultists” and being attacked, which says everything that needs saying about him, I guess.

18 minute video about the staggering number of deaths in WW2

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Truly astonishing video. You won’t regret watching it.

Randomness for 6/5

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1) Grippy not Sticky: Stanford engineers develop a material that sticks without getting stuck.

2) Modern superhero comics done in a Golden Age style.

3) KITE FIGHT, a five minute documentary about the sport of soltar pipas, popular in the favelas in Rio. Video.

4) Segmented Glass Sculptures, via Marc Laidlaw

5) Boy Wonders. ::sniffle::

6) A plea for culinary modernism. Being honest about the way people *used* to eat.

7) Taylor Swifties.

SFWA creates new book release newsletter (#SFWApro)

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As I’ve mentioned before, there are three main ways that readers can keep up with an author’s new releases.

1. Follow them on social media, which many readers don’t want to do. Often they don’t have the time, or they aren’t interested, or they like the books but don’t care about the person.

2. Sign up for the author’s newsletter. If you’re looking at my website right now, the form is in the sidebar. The downside of that is that some authors send too many newsletters, and spam traps sometimes catch them, and readers might miss them.

3. Click that “Follow” button on Amazon. That’s a link to my page, but every author should have one. Downside, you’re only notified when the author puts something new *on Amazon*. Upside, that little thrill you get when the big river tells you about a book and you go to buy it at your local shop.

And finally, there’s a new option:

4. SFWA has created a newsletter to announce new books by its members. It will go out six times a year, announcing books released in the month and the month following of release. Sign up to get it here. SFWA authors, if you have new books to announce, you can do that here. Note that it’s only for upcoming releases, so it’s of no use to me at the moment.

This is such a good idea that it’s a wonder it didn’t happen five years ago. Or ten. And if you’re a reader on the lookout for something to help you break out of the same old same old, here’s your chance to check out authors and genres you might have missed.
#sfwapro

N Things Make a Post

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1) I just dropped the fully signed contracts for a German edition of The Great Way (read the first few chapters starting here). The money won’t be coming to me for a while, but it’s much, much better than what I was paid for the German rights to Child of Fire, and CoF was published by the largest English language publisher in the world. Epic fantasy seems to do much better than urban fantasy.

2) Monday was my wife’s birthday. She got a Pencil by Fifty-Three, along with their art program, so she can try yet again to make art on her iPad. After so many years, I’m doubtful this will work, but we never stop trying.

3) Those of you who’ve known me for a long time will know that, while we celebrate my wife’s birthday on June 1, it’s also my birthday. However, we don’t do presents and stuff for me until July 1. (Sharing your birthday with your spouse sort of sucks.) I just turned 50.

4) You can tell that I put a lot of importance on that number by the way I’m burying it in this post. It’s a perfectly arbitrary number, but it does help me realize that I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be at this point in my life.

5) If you’ve been following my #15in2015 posts, you’ll see that I’m almost certainly going to make it. That’s partly because I’ve chosen a bunch of shorter books, have mostly stopped reading graphic novels (and mostly don’t miss them), and I’m reading bestsellers in the hopes of understanding them better. My current novel is also on the short end, but I think the next one should be meatier, just for variety’s sake.

6) Have I mentioned that the Fate Core game supplements I’ve been working on are in revisions? Well, they are. Someday soon I hope to return to novels. SOON.

7) Finally, my to-do list has grown so large that I’m tempted to just chuck huge portions of it just to clear my schedule. I’m supposed to organize a Goodreads giveaway for The Way Into Chaos, which means research into best practices. I’m supposed to work out a Bookbub promotion, but the promotional price can be a pain in the ass to arrange. The Great Way has been offered a slot in a Kickstarter Humble Bundle, which is no small thing and not to be ditched. Plus there are tax headaches around foreign sales, and I don’t have an accountant. Also, Goodreads supposedly allows discussion threads on author home pages (rather than the pages for books) but I’ll be damned if I can see the link I’m supposed to click. At least I’ve found someone willing to help with the creative commons licensing issues with the game supplements.

You know how John Scalzi talks about working with a publisher because he doesn’t want to be bothered with doing all this extraneous crap? Well, I’m living the life he doesn’t want. I’m his cautionary tale. All I want to do is write and watch dvds of mopey British detectives. Instead, I deal with all this stuff. Ugh.

The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin, book 10 in #15in2015

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The Naming of the Dead (Inspector Rebus, #16)The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Book 10 in #15in2015

I didn’t believe a word of it.

Buy a copy.

Randomness for 6/1

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1) Immortan Joe’s War Boys leave product reviews on Amazon. Shiny!

2) “Though she was a little-known B-movie actress in the 1950s, Allison Hayes also had a legacy with the Food and Drug Administration.

3) My Mad Max: Fury Ponies

4) Showing what’s real and what’s cgi in Mad Max: Fury Road. People have been praising the practical effects in this movie, which some internet bozos thought was a claim that there was no cgi at all. Which is ridiculous. Check out the before and after shots. Pretty interesting.

5) How Hollywood keeps women out.

6) Joint pain, from the gut. Dealing with auto-immune issues through the microbiome. It’s more complex than taking a probiotic.

7) How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body.

Progress, I has it

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Ugh.

So, the Fate Core game supplement I promised to create for my Kickstarter is finished in the first draft.

Originally, I’d intended to write about six thousand words to cover the whole of The Great Way. I added a supplement for Key/Egg as a stretch goal, and figured that would be another 2K words, tops.

Just a few notes. Nothing fancy.

In truth, the first draft is over 45,000 words long. It’s half a novel.

Worse, the sort of writing that games require is very dense; finishing a thousand words in a day was the best I could hope for, and many days I couldn’t manage even that.

Fuck, man. Writing for games is hard.

Now I have to go through again. Not only will I need to revise the text, I’ll have to make sure I’ve got the rules basically correct. After that, I pass it to my GM for his notes.

In the end, it will all be fine, I hope. Fate Core operates on an open license, so I should be able to sell them for a nominal fee. Even better, I hope they’ll be effective promo for the books.

But Kee-rist, this has taken a sizable chunk of my lifetime productivity. I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.