One year anniversary of the end of 20 Palaces

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I’m writing this ahead of time because I expect to be hanging with my son at the tournament when this posts, but today is exactly one year since I announced that Del Rey would not be picking up any new Twenty Palaces novels and that I was putting the series on hiatus, with all the ominous implications of the word.

And that fucking post is still the most popular thing on my blog. More people have read about my failure than ever read my books.

What has changed since then? Well, A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark is on indefinite hold. The book itself is a major misfire–not in concept but in execution. It needs a massive rewrite before it’s ready to be shown anywhere and that’s not a very high priority for me right now.

What about Epic Fantasy With No Dull Parts? aka A Blessing of Monsters? Well, shit. We’ll see, won’t we? One big change is that I seriously underestimated the amount of story there; what I’d planned to complete in one volume is not, in fact, complete after 140K words. So it will become two books. Possibly three. We’ll see what my publisher says, assuming I find one for it.

As for me, I’m working on a Twenty Palaces short story, which won’t be told from Ray’s POV. I’m hoping to have it finished soonest so I can get to work on Epic Sequel With No Dull Parts. I’m still waiting on editorial notes for King Khan, the game tie-in book I wrote for Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century role-playing game, and that will likely be the only book release for me in 2013.

I know. 2012 saw only two anthologies: Don’t Read This Book and Tales of the Emerald Serpent, and next year will almost certainly be a single game tie-in novel. I like all of that work and I’m proud of it, but I need to put out original novel-length fiction if I want to keep my career going.

In which I try to be as cool as John Scalzi

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The view from my hotel room:

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Hmm. I don’t quite think I’ve managed it here.

Anyway, have arrived in San Jose for child’s event. My trip will be all kid all the time, with no other socializing planned.

Pray for me.

Amazon Author Rank: Utterly irrelevant to me (plus free fiction)

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It’s pretty clear what the new Amazon Author Rank system is supposed to do. (For those who haven’t heard of it: they now show sales rank numbers for authors as well as their books.) It’s supposed to be a way for authors to promote themselves.

The author becomes a “top ten” author on Amazon (for an hour) and starts using that in their publicity, as though it’s some sort of bestseller list. Not only does this get Amazon’s name out in front of people but it will inevitably push some authors to work like crazy to bump their sales. Writers, while pursuing that supposedly-valuable label, put money in Amazon’s bank accounts.

Me, I don’t much care. I stopped following Amazon’s sales rankings for my books right around the time Random House started giving me accurate sales figures, updated weekly. Do I want to look at “rankings” which only compare me to other authors without giving me actual sales data, and which are calculated in secret, or do I want to look at the number of books sold? No contest for me at all.

In other news, tomorrow I take a long, long weekend away from home. My son and I are catching a train for northern California so he can compete in the Pokemon regionals. I have no idea what sort of internet connectivity I’ll have (certainly none on the train) so don’t expect to see me around much. I’ll do my best to visit at least one Starbucks a day to check email, but I’m not sure I can promise even that much.

Finally, Black Gate has begun to feature fiction on their website, and their latest offering in the first short story I ever sold. To be honest, it’s been available for free since it was published, but they’re featuring it again. Check it out. Special thanks to author Martha Wells for pointing it out. Good thing I read her LiveJournal, eh?

All right. There are errands and packing to do. Signing off for a while.

Brickcon was last weekend and here are the pics

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Brickcon, for those who don’t know, is a “con” that allows adult Lego enthusiasts to show off their ultra cool builds. This year I dragged my son, his buddy, and my camera off to the show.

Unfortunately, this year’s pictures aren’t what you call fabulous. For one thing, the camera wasn’t the best. Depth of field was needed for quite a few of these dioramas, but you don’t get depth of field from a point-n-click.

For another, I had a terrible time checking the screen to see if they were really in focus. My vision is getting pretty bad in these old, old prescriptions, and it was only that night that I could see just how off some of them were. So, quite a few didn’t come out at all, and several are not as crisp as I would like.

Before I go on: Here are the posts for Brickcon 2010 and 2009 (we skipped last year).

Now the pictures: As in previous years, the fantasy builds were arranged in massive contiguous dioramas, while the science fiction was mostly isolated ships and gadgets… except for this: Continue reading

Brickcon pics to come, but first…

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Something happened over the weekend that I found a little unnerving. As I mentioned on Twitter, I took my son and his buddy to Brickcon last Sunday and it was cool and all (until my camera battery died) but afterwards we stopped for a couple of slices.

On the way to the pizza place, we passed a used book store. “Ooo, books,” buddy said, and I suggested we stop off there after lunch.

We did, and my son was a complete pain about it.

The first thing I did, as always was look for a copy of my own book. Once I found it, I checked the title page; it had been inscribed to “Patty” and overall looked very lightly handled. We joked about apologizing to her and then my son was ready to go.

His buddy and I were interested in browsing the shelves, snapping up stuff by authors we had heard about, looking for books in series we hadn’t finished, all the usual stuff. But my son just wanted to joke about making messes in the valuable book section and complain about going home to play Minecraft.

It was a little disheartening.

My kid does read. Currently he’s on a tear through YA post-apocalyptic thrillers and obviously he reads for school. But his mom and I delight in books, while he doesn’t seem to care at all.

Maybe it’s a phase. Maybe he’s the cobbler’s barefoot son. Maybe it’s that I’ve been bringing him new library books every Saturday for years and he’s become blase.

But it’s pretty annoying.

To hell with it.

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I’m just going to straight up embed this comic. Source!


Read more like it!

Hiding from your troubles (publishing post)

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I’m sure you all know people who hide from their problems. Maybe you’re one of those people yourself–I’ve certainly been there and understand the urge. The short-term pain of telling someone something they don’t want to hear–along with the chance that they will truly freak out and lose their cool–can be so upsetting that people put it off as long as they can. Yeah, it will all be worse someday, but at least they’re avoiding the pain of right now.

It’s always better to be as up front as possible: This book will be late, there’s a problem with these checks, chain store X won’t be carrying your books. Present the problem as soon as you know for sure you can’t avoid it. Present a plan to fix it. Apologize for the difficulties it will cause. Yeah, there may still be anger and embarrassment, but it will be less.

Now, I don’t *know* this was the problem with Ridan Publishing (Context), but the particular author mentioned in that post did a good bit of research into them before she signed with them to make sure they were legit, and still things turned weird. No payments. No communication. No acknowledgements that contracts have been terminated.

But that’s what it sounds like.

The good news is that the publisher has contacted the unpaid author in question with the promise that communication will resume and issues will be addressed. It’s a good first step, but I’d like to hear that all royalties have been paid.

Whatever the cause, I realize it’s not as simple as saying “Always be upfront about problems.” Of course that’s easy to say, right? I know that it life can sometimes seem overwhelming and stress can make us do the wrong thing even when we know it’s wrong. Still, however hard, doing the right thing is usually less painful than doing the wrong one.

In other news, I completely forgot that Brickcon is this weekend. Maybe my son will want to go tomorrow, since today is already dedicated to errang running.

See, yesterday afternoon my internet suddenly shut off. I tried all the usual tricks but couldn’t reconnect, and my son hovering at my shoulder (he had a multi-player Minecraft session planned) didn’t help. Eventually, the help tech at my ISP declared that my problem was my modem and, although it bounced back for a while last night, I have to spend most of this afternoon on a three-bus trip to buy a replacement.

I hate going to Best Buy.

Anyway, it’s another writing day shot all to hell. Ah well. At least I’m not pretending the modem is just fine and I don’t have to do anything about it.

ATTACK THE BLOCK

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Last summer, I walked into the theater intending to watch the new CONAN movie. I expected it to be bad but I felt I ought to watch it any way.

Then I saw a poster for ATTACK THE BLOCK hanging on the wall and was seriously tempted to switch tickets at the last minute. I didn’t. Because I’m an idiot.

CONAN failed to meet even my low expectations, but ATTACK THE BLOCK, which I finally saw this morning, is fantastic. You guys, you should absolutely go see it.

Look at this piece of art

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I ended up doing a fair bit of blogging over the weekend. Most of it was jokey, silly stuff, but not all. There’s at least one post about failing at writing.

I mention it because I know people like to read about my shame.

What I didn’t mention was that I turned in KING KHAN to Evil Hat. The first round of (minor) revisions have already come back and I’m working on those today.

In the meantime, I have something nice for you guys: My in-laws are artists, in case you didn’t know, and my sister-in-law has just started a tumblr for her work. Check out the first painting she’s showing there.

Things I would buy myself if I were an idiot

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The website This Is Why I’m Broke is nothing more than a collection of unusual products you might want to buy. Far too many of them relate to a certain space ship from a certain movie from the seventies, but there is definitely some cool stuff on display there.

Not that I’ll ever buy any of it. Not that I could even use it if I’d bought it. Not that I have space in my home for new things.

Still, it’s fun to think about, so here’s the list of seven things I would buy if I were a complete idiot.

I don’t even have a car but it would be funny as hell to drive around with

Batman Brake Covers.

Batman Brake Covers.

Yeah, that shit is almost certainly illegal, but it would definitely be funny even to a casual Batman fan like me.

I have zero interest in Mortal Combat, but I had no idea there were so many variations on this:

MacBook Stickers

Snow White holding the bitten apple seems to be the most popular, but Iron Man’s glowing repulsor is also popular. Personally, I sorta like the Banksy molotov cocktail thrower, but even I would find that too ridiculous.

Then there’s this:

Dolphin power boat

Yes, the dolphin power boat submerges and leaps out of the water. I get whiplash just thinking about it.

You know what this liquid is, don’t you?

toilet coffee

It’s coffee. That’s a coffee mug.

In case you have 55 grand burning a hole in your pocket, you can hit the road in this, Tron-style:

tron cycle

It’s supposed to be 100% street legal.

More affordable is this:

Pizza cones

Pizza.

Cones.

If I were trying to put on weight instead of lose it, I’d be all over this like ugly on an ape.

Finally, there’s this:

superhero

That’s right. It’s a radio-controlled flying superhero, perfect for tricking people into believing there’s a real flying person overhead (depending on how loud the environment is). I laughed like a loon at the video.

But wait! Surely there are some really, really bad ideas on that page, too!

Boy, are there.

No, you may not mash the buttons.

mechwarrior

Yes, it’s 13 feet tall, weighs over 4 tons and there’s a cockpit for the pilot to ride in. It also costs over a million bucks and I would not want to run out of gas with the cockpit hatch jammed.

gun lamp

Because you really want to be in the habit of pointing guns and squeezing triggers to change the brightness of your lamps.

Fuck you, man. Seriously. Fuck you.

wallpaper

If you want to freak out the cops or a nervous in-law, be sure to put up this wallpaper done up in a “bloodbath” design.

Assasin's creed

Yes, those are the retractable blades from Assasin’s Creed. From the description: “Perfect for cosplay, these hidden blades are actually made from real steel.”

Oh, perfect!

There’s an awful lot more at the site–literally hundreds of products–and it’s damn fun to look at, despite the zombie lawn gnomes. The OCD cutting board looks like a great idea, but it’s so cheap I suspect it’s not very good. As for the dog umbrella, the life-sized dragon and T-Rex statues, the Boba Fett hoodie, the gangsta-rap coloring book, the poolside climbing gym… well, it’s fun to look at.