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Randomness for 2/12

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1) The Galactic Empire responds to the White House refusal to build a Death Star.

2) Goodreads review in 2250 of a historical novel set in the present time: “Most of the details were correct, but the author forgot that, in the early 21st century, people had to wear special clothes in the rain because their clothes were not yet water- mud- and oil-proof.” Video.

3) An index to fantasy maps. Would it be ungrateful of me to suggest that this seems thin?

4) Walter Cronkite describes the space age kitchen of the far-distant future of 2001. Video included but no auto-play.

5) A chart to demonstrate that fantasy series get longer with each book.

6) “Game of Thrones” Valentines

7) OH MY DAYUM. Video. Normally I’m not big on autotuning normal dialog but this is brilliant.

Marie Brennan’s reading for A Natural History of Dragons

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Just came back (actually, I’m writing this at night and it’ll post in the morning) from the reading described above (author Marie Brennan can be found on LJ and Twitter as swan_lake) and you know what I came away with?

Voice. Voice, people. That was the big lesson I learned from reading all debut novels for a year. The one thing they all had in common was a strong voice.

Brennan is not a debut author by any means, of course, and the voice in A Natural History of Dragons is distinct and assured (also funny). Check out the excerpt.

The reading itself was fun. I actually talked to people. My wife was so happy when I told her about it later that she cheered and clapped me on the shoulder.

In which I have opinions on recent publishing news

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First, as per James Nicoll and Making Light, Games Workshop, the game company that makes Warhammer 40K, is asserting a trademark claim to the term “Space Marines.” They have the trademark on the term in the gaming world, supposedly, but now that they’ve started publishing ebook tie-ins they’re claiming a common law trademark over the term and filing DMCA notices to make Amazon pull books from the shelves.

Of course, the writer they’re doing this to doesn’t have the money to fight back because deep pockets uber alles. If you’re a fan and customer of the company’s games, maybe you should stop buying from them until they clean up their act, and let them know about it.

Second, yet another article about the slow-motion collapse of Barnes & Noble written for The Atlantic this time. Is there any surprise, really, that our slow-motion recovery from a nasty economic collapse is still taking a toll on out-sized companies? Or that the agency-price collusion lawsuit filed in Amazon’s favor would be another cinderblock in B&N’s rowboat?

I’m not what you’d call a fan of B&N, although I will say that I’m less-likely to be given the side-eye when I shop for SF/F in a big chain than in an indie store. Also, I love seeing huge sections of a store devoted to genres, something you rarely see in indie corner shops.

What would be lost if the last of the big chains go under? We would lose a physical space designed to sell according to readers’ tastes rather than the tastes of the bookstore owner.

Third, Chuck Wendig wants to make today International Don’t Pirate My Book Day. His thoughts about treating art as a thing of value are worthwhile, but here’s where he and I differ: when you read my work without paying for it, it doesn’t hurt my feelings.

It’s pernicious, yes. It’s harmful in the long term. If I am giving something away for free, read for free. Enjoy. If not, I would prefer you pay. However, it doesn’t hurt my feelings because my feelings don’t enter into it.

I’ve talked about this before: In the digital world, price is not constrained by supply and demand. Supply is/can be effectively infinite, so there’s no reason for people to pay extra to procure scarce goods. However, the constraint on price is actually “theft;” the balancing act has to be “How much will users pay for this?” vs “At what price point will people just steal it instead?”

Really this is an inevitable consequence of our advertising/consumer culture, in which you the consumer deserve whatever you want when you want and it ought to be cheap as possible. That’s the culture that vendors of every size, from mom and pop stores to massive corporations, have been pushing for generations. It’s thoroughly internalized in our outlook on the world, and now that machines in our homes allow us to cut the actual producers out of the equation, people do so with gusto.

It’s pernicious, yes. Also, I know people will respond with “Customers are willing to pay if you make it easy for them to do so and keep the price low enough.” Yes, that’s true. It’s also a calculation that occurs solely within the head of the consumer. What’s a fair price? How long should I have to wait for it?

There will always be people who think the smart thing to do is to take what they want and give nothing back, if you get my reference. The real issue becomes the size of that group of consumers and how the culture at large talks about them. In my opinion, the battle against book piracy will not be won in courts or legislative chambers, but in the culture at large; what behavior is normalized? That’s the question.

Fourth and last, I’m going to a reading tonight and my body is in full allergic freak-out mode. I don’t have anything life-threatening going on, but the patchy red marks on my face and (fading now, thankfully) hives on my arms turn me from ugly guy to full AVERT! AVERT! status. Oh well.

Randomness for 2/6

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1) The Periodic Table of Super Powers.

2) It’s Downton Abbey for Super Nintendo!

3) Leeroy Jenkins: the short film. Video.

4) The best way to eat from a Chinese takeout box. Video.

5) Dorothy Parker’s telegram to her editor.

6) Make your own pulp cover.

7) Yes, of course you’re sick of Gangam Style. But have you seen it done as flip-book animation? Video.

Bonus! Chicago comedian Joe Kwaczala got himself banned from OKCupid with this profile. This is funny as hell. Seriously.

See me see Marie Brennan

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If you’re in the Seattle area, I thought I’d let you know that tomorrow, Wed. the sixth, I’ll be going to the UW Bookstore to hear Marie Brennan (@swan_tower) read from A Natural History of Dragons.

Todd Lockwood, who illustrated the book, will also be there. If you follow science fiction and fantasy art, you’ve almost certainly seen his work, and if you bought the Tales of the Emerald Serpent anthology, which contained my story “The One Think You Can Never Trust,” then you definitely have, along with one of his short stories.

Anyway, I’m not exactly a raconteur, but if anyone wants to come out and say hello I’d be happy to shake your hand.

Follow up to my new cover art post

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Over the weekend I posted the cover art to my next novel. Here you can see it without the text, here you can see the preliminary pencil sketch.

Hey you guys, it’s the artist’s web site. Check out the other work he’s done. Every link in the page opens in a new tab, which is a little bit something but check it out.

On my Facebook page, there are currently 140 people who “like” me. Basically, they’re there to keep up with what I’m doing.

Unfortunately, the link to the post about that cover art was only seen by 62 of those people. Less than half. If these folks who are interested in hearing about my books want to actually hear about them, I’m gonna have to pay.

I’m not the first to say this, but this is stupid. If you want to put in a “promote” button, promote beyond the people who are already on my “like” list. Not to the people who have already signed up.

More and more I’m thinking that I should disconnect from FB (as a writer, at least) so that people won’t think they’re getting the latest news when they’re not. I’m becoming increasing convinced that it’s better to have nothing to do with a social media company than to make do with defective service.

I mentioned in the blog post that KING KHAN will be “upbeat and family-friendly,” and right away someone asked me if that meant they could hand it to their seven-year-old.

That was a bit of a stumper. There’s nothing in the book I wouldn’t show to my 11yo, but seven? There are hopping vampires, dirty cops, and period-appropriate (I hope) racism. At one point the action goes to a Sunset Strip nightclub taking part in the Pansy Craze. There are a handful of lechers, an island populated with beautiful women where men are kept in cages, and one mostly-elided sex scene. There is punching. There is shooting. There is stabbing.

I don’t think there’s anything in the book a kid can’t read, but a seven-year-old kid? The only way to know would be for a parent or guardian to read the book first to judge for themselves. Maybe I’ll do what my friends at Jet City Improv do, and change “family-friendly” to “TV-clean.”

A Piece of Writing Advice That Always Seems To Surprise People

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I didn’t watch PROJECT GREENLIGHT when it was on, but I heard a story about it that I really, really like. For those who don’t remember or care, it was a reality TV show in which a complete newbie was given the chance to make a million dollar movie in Hollywood, complete with name stars you’d recognize, the whole bit.

The story: After a difficult day of shooting in which they fell behind schedule, the producer came to see the crew–director, cinematographer, key grip, the whole bunch–and he was pissed. It was way too early for them to fall behind and they needed to get their shit together.

And who was he yelling at? The cinematographer, not the director. In response, the cinematographer smiled.

Why was he smiling when he was being yelled at? Because the guy who takes the blame is the guy who has the power. In this case, it wasn’t noob in the director’s chair. It was the man running the camera. When the producer yelled at him, the cinematographer knew he was the one who was really in charge.

Maybe that’s not a true story. Maybe it never happened. I keep telling it, though, because I like it.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, over the weekend I posted a long piece about the Twenty Palaces series, and why I wasn’t going to be Kickstarting the next one. If you’re the sort of person who wisely spends their weekends away from the web but who has been hoping for book number next for Ray Lilly, give it a read. It’ll disappoint you.

The response to it has been great; thanks very much for all the kind words I’ve received. However, a number of people have suggested that the books should have been a success but for bad marketing or clueless readers or whatever.

I don’t buy that. There’s only one cause of the failure of this series, and that’s me. I’m the one who wrote them. I’m the one who decided to leave the background mysterious rather than explained. I left out a romantic subplot. I did that, and a lot more. If they had been a success, you can believe I would be taking the credit. When they failed, I pushed the blame on no one but me.

Yes, there was bad luck. The economy crashed between the time I made the deal with Del Rey and the time the books came out. Circle of Enemies wasn’t on the shelves of B&N until two weeks after publication because a palette of books was damaged by Hurricane Irene. And of course Borders had just collapsed two months before.

None of that matters. Bad luck hits people all the time and they still manage to succeed. It was my job to write books that a lot of people wanted to read, no matter what obstacles got in the way, and I didn’t do it.

Plus, the fault wasn’t in the obstacles. Other writers have released books around the same time as I did, and they were entirely successful. What they could do, I could have done as well.

Anyway, this is a rule with me. No matter what happens, failure is always my fault. Every one-star review comes from my choices. Every lost sale is the same. If I write a book that editors don’t want to purchase, it’s on me for writing that book. Never mind that their line is full for the year, or that they hate books with cannibalism, or they just picked up a UF with an ex-con protagonist and mine is too similar. Never mind that they were hung over because their cat had just died, and they rejected everything that had come in that week.

It’s my job to break through all that. It’s my job to be so compelling they can’t turn away.

If you’re frustrated with rejection (and I know how hard it can be, I’m still living it) the answer isn’t to blame others: not publishing professionals who don’t understand your work/don’t know how to market a book/don’t support new writers the way they used to, not readers, not booksellers. The answer is to look at the book you just wrote and ask yourself “What should I do differently next time?”

Sometimes the answer is “Nothing.” Sometimes you’re proud of your work no matter how many rejections it got. There’s precious little I would change in the Twenty Palaces book.

But by taking the blame for failure, you keep hold of the power to succeed in the future. Better that than giving it away to a complete stranger with a hangover.

Take the blame. Keep control over your career.

Let me tell you about my ambitions, and why they don’t include Kickstarter (right now)

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Along with the release of the sales numbers of my self-published novel has come a flood of requests that I turn to Kickstarter to fund The Twisted Path (that’s the working title of the next Twenty Palaces book). Currently, I have no plans to do that, and I’m writing this post because I want to explain my reasoning to you guys and I want to have a post I can link to when people broach the subject. Because they do broach the subject. A lot.

I want to be a best-selling author.

What’s more, I want to do it on my own terms; I want to write the books I think are cool, and I want a hundred thousand readers to snap them off the shelves the first week they come out. I want to write thrillers with good characters and magic, along with A Few Things I Want To Say. I mean, not to jump up and proclaim that I want to be Stephen King, but I want to be Stephen King. It’s not about making a whole bunch of money, it’s about having my books in the hands of lots of readers from all over the world.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to copy Stephen King, or Nora Roberts or George R.R. Martin or Gillian Flynn. I wouldn’t even try. I intend to write books my own way because honestly believe the things I think are cool will be cool to bunches and bunches of readers.

Or maybe not. We’ll see. That’s what I’m shooting for, anyway.

How does this tie in to Twenty Palaces, a series that you, the person reading this post, quite possibly read and enjoyed? Well, 20P has dedicated fans, but not very many. As mentioned in the Twenty Palaces sales post, I sold over 3700 copies of my book, self-published. Couldn’t I sell at least that many if I self-published The Twisted Path? Or maybe even more if I turned to…

(dramatic pause)

Kickstarter?

Well, sure. Maybe. Maybe I could write two 20P books a year (or three in two years), and quite possibly the readers I have right now would be willing to pony up the cash I’d need for an editor, cover artist, copy editor, and the disreputable author himself (not to mention covering Uncle Sam’s and Kickstarter’s cuts). A Thousand True Fans, right?

Here’s the truth: I could do that. I could live on that money. I’d probably have to depend on 2.5K mostly-true-occasionally-false fans, but I’m still living on the advance money Random House started paying me in 2008, okay? I live cheap. I have no car, no cell phone, no new clothes, no new glasses…

Oh, wait, that part sucks. Anyway, I’m cheap as hell, I don’t need much money, and I could make that work, right?

Yes. Yes, I could. But you know what? That would be another year of not making my goal. That would be another year of working on a series that didn’t get me where I want to be. Every Twenty Palaces book I’ve written has sold fewer than the one before; do I want to keep going after fewer and fewer readers every year?

Several people have suggested that I could get new readers with a Kickstarter campaign, but I don’t consider that realistic. Take a look at these guys: their campaign has been fantastically successful. At the time I write this, they’re over 11,000% of their goal. However, they have fewer than 8,500 backers.

That’s huge for a Kickstarter but Circle of Enemies sold more copies than that and it’s considered a failure. When I look at fiction projects run by novelists, especially ones who are more successful than I am, the number of backers is usually in the low-three figures.

So no, a Kickstarter campaign won’t bring in new readers. It would sure please the readers I already have, though, and you know what? I want that. Wanting to be read by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world includes the people who already know and like my work. I’m grateful for everyone willing to buy a copy of my books or to recommend Ray Lilly to their friends.

But to stay with Twenty Palaces when I know the reading public at large–not just the ones who enjoy my work, but the wide audience–has rejected it would be to never move beyond my starting point. It would mean standing in this small safe place. I would be giving up the chance to grow and try something new.

If I were a different writer–someone who could put out 20,000 finished words a week–I’d write Ray Lilly books alongside whatever new things I came up with. I can’t do that. I’m not prolific. It has to be one thing at a time with me.

I just can’t get past the opportunity cost. Twenty Palaces novels are challenging: each one took me a year or more to write, and you know what? I’m not young. Look up at that third paragraph; did I say I wanted to be the next EL James or JK Rowling? Nope, it was “Stephen King.”

Because I’m old. Life is short, and I need to spend my years wisely.

So here’s my plan: I have already written a book in The Auntie Mame Files which needs to be revised. I’ve also written about 200K of The Great Way, which is the series name for my epic fantasy. Everything I’ve written so far has been aimed at publication through New York. Yeah, I know it’s possible (maybe not likely, but possible) to make more money by publishing books myself, but more money isn’t enough. I want more readers, too.

If I Kickstart or self-publish a new novel, it will be one of those books.

I won’t be returning to the Twenty Palaces setting until I’m honest-to-god successful. It’s only when I have, say, 100,000 eager readers buying my books that I’ll reintroduce 20P to see if the series can find new life.

So that’s it: the final word. I could self-publish or Kickstart The Twisted Path, but it’s not going to happen until after I succeed with something else. If you liked the Twenty Palaces books, I hope you’ll like the next thing I write. If not, that’s cool, too.

But please don’t argue with me about continuing the series, or try to explain to me what Kickstarter is, or insist that yes, in fact, truly, it would be the right move for me to write The Twisted Path next. The series is dead. It was starved of sales and died. I won’t be trying to revive it anytime soon.

Sorry if you’re disappointed by that–believe me when I say it hurts me even more–but that’s how it’s gotta be.

Added: As if he used his powers as SFWA president to read this unfinished blog post, John Scalzi put up a terrific post about writing for a living. It’s not just an art, it’s a job, too, and we all have to make realistic choices.

Plus, I’m convinced the dude has installed spyware on my computer or used a time machine to read this post in the future and then come back and pre-empt it. Hmf.

I recommend reading his thoughts on the matter, plus the comments from other pros in the comments. As an addendum: keep in mind that, looking at the numbers in this post, where he’s talking about the sales figures of Redshirts, John Scalzi, as successful as he is, has not yet reached the threshold I set myself for returning to 20P. Just sayin’

Randomness for 1/24

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1) Dr. Seuss books retitled according to their subtexts.

2) A Minecraft wedding.

3) 25 words that don’t exist in English.

4) Most popular dog names in New York, by neighborhood.

5) Ten of the most unusual houses in the world. These are absurd and/or gorgeous.

6) REM’s Losing My Religion digitally remastered to turn all the minor scales into major scales. Video. They’ve given the same treatment to “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors.

7) Finally, a runway model with good reason to look pissed.

Teaching Writers to be Talented

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As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I’m pretty iffy on the subject of “talent.” People say “That writer is SOOO TALENTED!” based on the work they produce, and there’s really no way to know where the work–not to mention the expertise that created it–came from. Multiple revisions? Strong editorial hand? A childhood spent ear-deep in books? Years of study?

This blog is mirrored on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, where people can leave comments. On DW, David Hines started a conversation about how we learned to recognize the things that need to be revised.

As I said before, if it feels wrong, I revise it[1]. The question is: how did I learn to recognize good from bad? I mean, it’s easy to talk about teaching the rules of grammar or plot cliches, but those are intellectual lessons. For me, I know it’s wrong before I really understand why. It’s the feeling that makes me give it a second look.

So how do we train writers to have this instinctive response to things that suck in their own work?

Here’s how I understand it works:

1. Make sure they’re exposed to good work.
1a. Make sure they understand what makes it good.
2. Make sure they’re exposed to terrible work.
2a. Make sure they understand what makes it terrible.
3. Tease out the good from the bad in problematic works.
(None of this is exactly revelatory, is it?)
4. Expect writers to explain for themselves why they respond the way they do.

It’s number 4 that matters most, I think. It’s important for mentors, peers, and teachers to point out not just good from bad but good from great, but it’s even more important for writers to acknowledge and analyze their own responses to work. What they feel, not what they ought to feel.

Eleven-plus years ago, when my wife and I were expecting, we did a lot of research on proper parenting techniques. Let me just say, there’s a lot of bullshit out in the world about raising your kids. Most of it is about discipline and far too much is faddish, but we were happy with John Gottman’s teaching. (Yes, this is a digression. I’ll bring it back to the topic at hand soon, I promise.) Actually, we borrowed a DVD from the library featuring a lecture he gave on “emotion coaching.”

Essentially what he explains is that it isn’t enough to love your kids or to be warm to them. It’s also important to teach them about their emotions. You set boundaries for proper behavior. You pay attention to those times your kids are feeling angry, frustrated, sad, etc. You don’t try to change their moods to something else with jokes or play or tickling. Instead, you teach the child an age-appropriate name for what they’re feeling and make sure they understand that it’s okay to be sad or angry or whatever.

And so on. The important thing is, when the child understands and trusts their own feelings, they get a host of benefits not the least of which is to trust the little feeling of alarm you get when you meet someone sketchy and manipulative.

To bring this back to writing, there are a lot of responses that people have to narrative and language that, left unexamined, lead them to make really shitty story choices. They may know what will evoke a particular response in a general sense, but can they predict the response accurately? Do they understand their own responses, and have they developed the empathy to incorporate the responses they’ve learned to expect from other people?

Because that sort of accuracy is what people call “talent.”

You can tell I think that previous sentence is important because it’s got its own paragraph. Here it is again in bold: Talent = Accuracy. If you can evoke a response from the reader[2] that you intended to get, that’s what people call talent. If you can do it while avoiding cliches like beautiful-but-klutzy-heroines or villains-shoot-the-hero’s-dog, people will think you’re even more talented. If you can make the reader feel something compelling but unusual, coming out of a narrative they can not find anywhere else, they’ll think you’re extraordinarily talented.

It doesn’t have to be something you’re born with. It doesn’t have to be something that makes itself known before you turn 18. It can come from hard work and close study and long sessions spent gabbing with other writers. No one can really tell, because the only thing they can see is the finished work.

That’s why I think that creating a talented writer is a pretty straightforward process, if the writer is willing to do the work: Examine their own responses. Understand how and why others respond as they do. Practice getting the responses you want. Become lauded as “a talented writer.”

The best(worst) thing about it is that people will see the end result of all that hard work and declare that it must have come from something innate within you, and they could never manage it themselves.

[1] Having already spent too much of my day on this post, I’m going to throw it onto the blog as a vomit draft. No revision! I fully expect to regret this at some later point.

[2] “The Reader” = Not every reader everywhere but a fair proportion of them.