I answered a ton of questions, some about Ansel Zahn, some about ebooks, some about my upcoming project, and some just about writing books and telling stories. It was fun! It was also a lot of typing.
Anyway, head over there if you think someone might have asked a question that you would also be curious about.
Just click this link:
http://www.reddit.com/r/urbanfantasy/comments/1mfgaw/harry_connolly_ama/
and ask me anything you want.
And it’s going to be tomorrow, the 15th.
For those who don’t know, AMA stands for Ask Me Anything. Basically, people will post questions in a dedicated thread, and I’ll answer them.
That’s it. Not complicated, but very cool. I’ll post a link tomorrow to the actual post where you can do the actual asking.
1) Myths over Miami: Homeless children create an elaborate mythology of the city all on their own. I swear, this is the most amazing thing.
2) Amazon collects the funniest reviews on its site.
3) A convention attendance discussion for authors on reddit.
4) What every New Yorker should know, in .gif form.
5) Gifs of gelatin cubes dropped onto solid surfaces. There’s something strangely healing about this.
6) Take a virtual tour of the world’s largest cave, discovered recently in Vietnam. Video.
7) “Attacks of Opportunity” helpfully explained and demonstrated. Video. This is funny enough that I’m looking up other videos on this channel. h/t Tracy Hurley
Popehat has a great post about a subject that comes up all the time now: freedom of speech and the so-called censorship of public condemnation. Here’s a quote:
Speech has consequences. It ought to.
In America, we have an elaborate set of laws strictly limiting the government’s ability to inflict those consequences. That is right and fit; the First Amendment prevents the government from punishing us for most speech.
Private consequences are something else. Speech is designed to invoke private and social consequences, whether the speech is “venti mocha no whip, please,” or “I love you,” or “fuck off.”1 The private and social consequences of your speech — whether they come from a barista, or your spouse, or people online, or people at whom you shout on the street — represent the free speech and freedom of association of others.
Yes, this, very much. Everyone is fine when speech has consequences that they approve of. Tell a nasty joke that makes your friends laugh, hey, that’s a nice consequence. Tell one that pisses a bunch of people off, to the point that they call you an asshole?
Well, there are certain people who think that’s completely out of bounds.
There’s a culture tug of war going on, in which one side wants to call out racist and sexist statements, and the other wants to call out all criticism of racist and sexist statements. I happen to be on the side of the former but people need to work this out and it’s going to take time.
Still, trying to frame criticism as censorship is ludicrous. Keep the link handy for the next time your Facebook comments turn toward the ridiculous.
(Trigger warning: the blog post at the other end of that link has examples of criticized speech–specifically the Pax Dickinson dudebro bullshit that created a stir recently, so people who can’t handle racist rape jokes or other asshole behavior shouldn’t click.)
Ann Crispin recently passed away.
Here’s an obit for her in the Washington Post. Here’s one in Publishers Weekly.
I didn’t read her novels, but I still owe her a great debt. Before I was published, the work that she and Victoria Strauss (and others) have done on Writer Beware helped me separate the genuine/useful business opportunities from the scammers and the clueless wannabes. She helped explain how the business worked.
The Writer Beware site is hosted at SFWA but the information in it is for writers of every type, not just sf/f people.
She never received a red cent from me for the work she did, but it was invaluable. That she volunteered so much of her time, even during the time she was ill, is a testament to the power good people have to make the world a better place.
Rest in peace, and thank you.
I’ve long enjoyed James Nicoll’s Wednesday Night Gaming posts, so I thought I’d rip off pay homage to the idea by writing up our semi-weekly FATE game, which we’ve just started.
The setting: In the very near future, Earth is invaded by an alien race, called the Xenari, bent on genocide. We would never have driven them away without the help of a friendly alien race called the Shai’lun, who lent us advanced weapons, ships, and apostrophes.
It’s been a few years since the Xenari have been driven away, but a great deal of infrastructure is still unfinished. Also, local political figures are now beholden to corporate interests–corporations are pretty much in control now. The United States exists mostly as an idea of something people used to have; as a nation, it’s all but over. The Xenari are mostly gone, but the Shai’lun have stayed, mostly in orbit, as friendly but standoffish assistants.
The characters: Continue reading
Let’s see if I can briefly cover everything that’s been going on.
First, I’m revamping the Kickstarter page pretty thoroughly. As I mentioned before, I asked some folks with KS experience to check it over and I made a bunch of changes. Then my agent had a look and she told me that I was underselling everything. Like a lot of writers, I’m not the best advocate for my own work. She encouraged me to explain why the books are actually fun instead of, you know, doing the whole “Here’s a thing I wrote you might like it maybe” bit that writers do.
So, revisions. I have new text for the main page ready to go and I’ll be shooting a new video this week. As some of you folks know, I get ugly red blotches on my face when I eat certain foods, so I’m trying to be super careful about every meal until then. I don’t think it would help me make my goal to have leprosy face.
By the way, if you want to know when the Kickstarter launches before anyone else, you should sign up for my newsletter in the form on this page.
The print edition of TWENTY PALACES is still a few weeks off. Everything takes longer than you think it should. That’s the law.
Finally, while the Kindle version of TWENTY PALACES is still only $2.99, there’s a sale price of $5.99 for CHILD OF FIRE, GAME OF CAGES, and CIRCLE OF ENEMIES. If you read from the Kindle and have been meaning to pick up some or all of my books, you’re not going to get a better price.
I recommend starting with the prequel, although I wrote each book to stand alone.
There are shiny new ideas for me to work on, but I have so much revision and other work ahead of me that I don’t expect to get to any of it before the end of the year. Yeah, that sucks; we only get so many productive years in this life, but it needs doing.
More later.
(Announcement buried below)
If someone from Del Rey/Random House is reading this, please feel free to put my books into Amazon’s MatchBook program.
If you haven’t heard of this new program, it works like this: For publishers who sign on to the program, readers who buy (or have bought) a physical book from Amazon.com will have the opportunity to also buy the ebook edition at a discounted price. Some books will be as low as $2.99, some will be free.
So, if you bought CHILD OF FIRE when it came out in 2009, you could (if Del Rey signs the contract) pick up an ebook copy for cheap.
I’ve already seen some authors speaking against this deal. They don’t like the bundling and they earn part of their living from people who buy replacement copies for books that wear out.
Another strike against is the fact that I could buy a copy of a book, give it to my buddy Jim as a gift, then pick up a cheap/free version for myself.
Yeah, what Amazon is doing is selling the content, but what the have the right to sell is the copy. The whole point of copyright is that I make copies of my IP and sell them to people who want to buy them; if I’m selling the right for another person to make more copies, that person is a publisher and we need to have a publishing deal.
Except that model has been under serious strain for a long time. It’s now trivially easy to make copies of other people’s work, and some people can be amazingly clueless about it:
Email of the day: "Hey, my wife downloaded your book from [piracy site] and the file was p%rn instead! Can you fix that?"
— Brent Weeks (@brentweeks) September 2, 2013
“Help me download a copy of your book without paying you!” I mean, Jesus.
But these are just bumps in the road. I think that selling the content over the copy is the way of the future and I’m surprised it took so long for a program like MatchBook to get started. Yes, the readers who want an author to fix their torrents are annoying. Yeah, getting a free copy of a book you intend to give away is a pretty nice deal.
It’s good promotion, though. There are a handful of books out there that won’t need it, but most do. I don’t blame any author for shying away from this deal, but I think that, overall, it will be a good thing for those who sign up.
I also strongly suspect that this is part of a plan to drive self-publishers to CreateSpace, which they should have been doing anyway.
What’s that? you say. How can you talk about using CreateSpace when TWENTY PALACES is still ebook only?
Well, here’s the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: Lately, with the help of a saint of a human being, I’ve been working on creating a paper edition of TWENTY PALACES. If you’ve never read it because (like me) you don’t read ebooks, you will soon get a chance. Also: to buy a copy for your friends. Also: to buy a copy for your friends and get a discounted ebook for yourself.
The book won’t be available for some weeks yet; there’s still a lot to do. Frankly, one of the reasons I’m prepping this is to buffer the budget for my upcoming Kickstarter on The Great Way (I wrote a status post about that over the weekend). The other is so we’ll get to have Christmas this year. Yeah, it’s getting to be like that.
But… MatchBook: I’m surprised it took this long and while I expect there to be bumps, this should be a great thing.
1) Darkseid is impressed by Thanos’s coffee.
2) 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense Of The World. James Nicoll, some of these are relevant to your interests.
4) How to build a cat fountain in Minecraft. Video. Note: that’s not a fountain for cats to drink from. No, it is not.
5) The Most Important Book on Color Theory Is Now an iPad App.
7) A printer with no paper tray. You just set it on top of a stack of paper and let it go. h/t @KeithCalder