words

The Kickstarter Humble Bundle is live

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[Update: links removed because the Humble Bundle is over.]

Hey, you guys, did you know that my Great Way trilogy is part of a Humble Bundle devoted to Kickstarter projects?

Also included:

    That Julie Dillon fantasy art book.
    The Choose-Your-Own Adventure Hamlet
    Issue #33 of John Joseph Adams’ Nightmare Magazine
    A new Michael J. Sullivan novel
    A Steampunk anthology that focused on protagonists from outside the US and Great Britain
    A humorous Greg Pak comics anthology
    A superhero comics parody
    A zombie apocalypse comic set in 1943 Soviet Union

And more. I mean, obviously, there’s much more there.

Several of these were projects I wanted to back but couldn’t, for a variety of reasons. Now is my chance to grab a copy, and help charity, too.

If you’ve been meaning to try my work, or if you just like really sweet deals, check it out.

Randomness for 7/13

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1) Why do people go bald? Video

2) A conversation between graffiti artists and removers.

3) Fearless girl rips out own tooth with a slingbow. ::faints::

4) The names of ten fireworks effects.

5) Assigned to write an essay about a “leader” a group of teens decide to stand out from the pack and contact gangster Whitey Bulger in prison. He wrote back.

6) Ten Paintings of Guy Fieri as a Renaissance Baby.

7) The Detective As Speech. “An early letter I received after publishing my first book, Indemnity Only, came from a woman who wanted to know why V. I. Warshawski was allowed to “talk back” to men without being punished. The writer wasn’t seeking help in learning to talk back herself; she was criticizing V. I. for behaving in a way that was neither right nor natural.” h/t James Nicoll

Linda Nagata says it’s okay to quit writing

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And I agree. A quote from her post[1] about it:

Quit if you need to. That’s my advice. And I can say that without hypocrisy, because I did it. I quit. Not utterly, and certainly not irrevocably, but I basically walked away from the game for ten years.

The reasons were the usual: money, time, and family. I had never made any reasonable amount of money from writing, so I was working full time, my kids were teens (not an easy time of life), my parents were elderly with issues of their own, my husband was working more than full time, and all those long years spent trying to create some sort of a writing career had begun to seem like a joke. Writing was making me miserable. So I quit. Given that I had only a few spare hours in any day, it was more important to me to spend those hours on my family than on writing. It was as simple as that. We all make choices. That was mine and I don’t regret it.

I walked away, too. I’d been struggling and failing for many years, and I had promised my wife I would go back to school and get an MA in something so I could get a real job when my agent offered to take me on. I returned my GRE study guide to the library and started revising Child of Fire.

There are sacrifices that have to be made, and sometimes the rewards are just not worth it.

Occasionally I’ll see someone online say “I’d KILL to write like you!” to an author, and that always seems weird. You’d kill someone? Steal years from someone else’s life? Because that seems like the easy way out.

Writing takes dedication. It takes hours from your week and years from your life. I’ve sacrifices all sorts of things for writing, from sleep to exercise to a high-paying career, and you know what I have to show for it? Books about a nearsighted faux hoplite who sings like Tom Waits, an ex-con armed with a magic piece of paper, and a genius gorilla in a fucking zoot suit.

Is that worth it? If I had skipped all that and gone to law school, could I have spent my years helping people who need it or earning enough to take my wife on trips? Should I have? Well, I haven’t stopped writing, that’s for sure. I’m still trying to get this right.

Is that the right choice for everyone? Of course not. There may come a time when I quit writing all together, if circumstances warrant it.

So don’t sweat it if you’re a writer who decides to stop writing, and don’t pressure people to keep going when they feel they need to stop.

[1] Like political Military SF? She has a new book out today.

Guest post by Steven Harper Piziks: Sometimes the writing gods laugh at you, and sometimes they laugh =with= you.

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Today’s post is by author Steven Harper Piziks. Check it out:

Several years ago, I decided I wanted to write about Ganymede, the teenager who was kidnapped by Zeus to serve as his cupbearer on Olympus. Zeus sees Ganymede on the earth below, decides he’s the coolest kid ever, changes into an eagle, and snatches Ganymede up to Olympus. Zeus then persuades Hebe to make Ganymede immortal, then dumps Hebe as his cupbearer and gives that exhalted position to Ganymede.

When I got older and read the actual material instead of the summaries and children’s versions, I learned that Ganymede was more than Zeus’s cupbearer. Zeus also took Ganymede to his bed. This was part of Greek culture–a powerful man would often serve as a mentor/teacher/second father/love interest to a teenaged male. Usually the parents went along with this: “Good news, son! Your uncle has offered to be your mentor!” So Ganymede was a mythological parallel to this mortal custom.

The stories, however, never went into what it was like. What was it LIKE for Ganymede to be snatched away from his family and friends and suddenly made into the cupbearer and lover of the king of gods? You have the ultimate mentor, but it wasn’t anything you’d asked for. Your culture teaches you that being taken to this guy’s bed is a good thing, or at least something you can put up with because all of us men went through it, but how do you =really= handle it?

The only way to find out what it was like was to write it myself. The trouble was the setting. Did I want to write ancient Greece and writing a straightforward fantasy novel, or could I get away with this in a modern setting and using characters who were parallels to the myth?

Ultimately, I settled on using both, and DANNY was born.

The writing sometimes turned out to be torturous. DANNY stalled out, went down dead ends, or just died on me. DANNY also rushed along at breakneck speed, hurtled around bends, and leaped to life under my fingers. I never knew what it was going to do.

During this book, I suffered from terrible insomnia. I was turning into a zombie from sleep loss. I finally went to the doctor, and she gave me a scrip for Ambien. Some of you may have heard of an Ambien side-effect, that some people take it, fall asleep, and sleepwalk or do other things in their sleep, with no recollection of it afterward. The writing gods were ready to laugh here.

I was working on a chapter of DANNY one evening. This was a torturous night, and I swear I was sweating at each word. At last I noticed it was getting close to bed time. Since Ambien takes a while to kick in, I took my dose and went back work, intending to continue working until the medicine made me sleepy.

Naturally, that was when everything started to work really well. Words flowed wonderfully. But the Ambien would start working any moment now. I worked as fast as I could, even after I felt the medication pulling at me. At last, in a fog, I saved my work and stumbled off to bed.

The next day, I called up my file tree. There was a new chapter I didn’t remember seeing before. What the heck? I opened the file and found most of a chapter. It was definitely my writing, and it was in the voice and style I had chosen for the book. It continued the story in the proper direction. It was even good writing. But I didn’t remember writing a word of it. Ambien and the writing gods at work.

It was both fascinating and chilling. For the first time in my life, I had the experience of reading my own writing as a reader, something every writer dreams of. But I also felt like a ghost has possessed me and written all this. I didn’t dare delete it–the writing gods were laughing too hard.

The chapter appears in DANNY, which is available at Book View Cafe http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/danny/ and at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Danny-Steven-Harper-ebook/dp/B00ZYTNYUK/

Steven’s Blog: http://spiziks.livejournal.com
Steven’s web page: http://www.stevenpiziks.com

Randomness for 6/23

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1) Peanuts comics with Game of Thrones quotes.

2) The Tumblr I Work At A Public Library.

3) One of GRRM’s fans made a (spoiler-free) series of maps showing the history of Westeros before the events of the books.

4) Energy harnessed from humidity can power small devices. Cool.

5) If JK Rowling had written the Harry Potter books from Voldemort’s point of view.

6) Remove cat before takeoff. Video.

7) Six SF/F authors who hated their legacy. Quick note to the universe: I don’t know if I would grow to hate a book of mine that became wildly successful, but I’m willing to risk it.

Kindle Unlimited Switches to Pay Per Page

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Cue surprised reaction.

I’ve been arguing for a while that Kindle Unlimited is a bad idea for writers. Instead of taking a commission on book sales (don’t bother calling it a “royalty”, because it isn’t), they set up a fund and divvy it up among the authors.

That fund has been getting smaller. And that makes sense, since Amazon has long been in the business of squeezing other people’s margins. For authors who have been paying 30% or 65% commissions, it’s difficult to work out why they would agree to bigger cuts. Amazon’s idea of creating a subscription library that paid a share only if the reader read 10% of the book.

Naturally, authors began to game that system right away. Why dump a 400-page novel into the KU marketplace when you could drop in, say, 50 eight-page novels? If a reader merely opened to page one, that was enough to reach the 10% threshold and trigger payment.

That was clearly not a situation that was going to last (although it lasted much longer than I expected). Now Amazon has switched to a “pay per page” system. Instead of dividing their (arbitrarily-designed) kitty among partially-read books, they’re going to distribute it according to the number of pages people have read.

That improves a terrible program somewhat, but I still wouldn’t put my work in it.

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

Chasing the market into the midlist

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Today I share wisdom:

When I started the Twenty Palaces books, I wanted to change a bunch of things that were standard in urban fantasy: the protagonist who’s an expert in the setting, the supernatural elements that had been ported over from horror and folklore, the stories that focused on the concerns of supernatural figures rather than actual human beings.

When I started Key/Egg, I wanted to challenge myself to write an urban fantasy that was not just a string of violent clashes. I also wanted to move the elderly woman out of the traditional expository role and into the limelight.

When I started The Great Way, I wanted to move away from the lackadaisical travelogue pacing of epic fantasy and write it like a thriller. I also wanted to have a little fun with the idea of the Hero Prince.

I wouldn’t say these were attempts at creating a new subgenre. Continue reading

Dudes Writing Rape Scenes

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I’ve been reading the Game of Thrones novels ever since I picked up the first one from a remainders table at the Jersey shore, and liking them pretty well. There are too many characters and the glossary doesn’t do a very good job helping me remember who’s who from one book to another (especially with years between the end of one book and the start of another) but I’m invested.

I don’t watch the show. Continue reading

Why is Frodo so mopey all the time? Paying attention and critical response

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It’s pretty common for readers to write reviews that get basic facts wrong.

It’s not surprising. If the reader doesn’t like the book, isn’t engaged with the characters or the plot, they start to skim. Skimming means they miss character motivations or plot details. Missing those details means the reader thinks the story is full of flaws, and lowers their interest further.

As an example, I read a review of Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man that one of the main characters inexplicably became a great fighter even though he spent all his time studying in a library. The only problem with that assessment? The text explicitly states that he spent hours every day learning to fight. It’s right there in the book, but a skimming reader missed it, so it might as well not be.

Anyway, this is why I stop reading books when I find myself skimming. Continue reading