words

Dammit.

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Everything takes too long, including revisions.

Amazon.com reviews

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No, not the reviews I’ve been getting; I mean the ones I write. Twice now I’ve written a view on Amazon.com for a book I bought from them, and twice it has not posted after a 48-hour delay. I swear I’m filling the form out correctly.

What could be causing this? The reviews are pretty short–probably around ten words. Could that be it?

Randomness for 12/7

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1) “What do you mean kids’ books? It says right here, they were made in 1956. How could they be kids’ books?”

2) The eleven topics all crime fiction blogs post about.

3) Ten things crime fiction writers can learn from Paris Hilton

4) Michael Shanks as Hawkman? No. Just… no. Isn’t there a superhero who plays tennis and does hot yoga he can play? Because that seems more his speed.

5) Your book isn’t self-published, but do readers know that?

6) Mark Henry has an offer for readers who want to try his funny, sexy books, and who would like an ARC of the new one.

This again

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Why Science Fiction Is Dying & Fantasy Fiction Is The Future.

Fantasy author Mark Charan Newton has some ideas about why sales for sf is flagging while fantasy is still going strong. He comes across as the extra who had to nod and duck out of frame when Claude Rains said “Round up the usual suspects.” We have literary types and Hollywood and “We’re living in the future!” and, er, women. (Because “Women matter” which I guess is supposed to suggest that women as a group read very little science fiction, or that sf doesn’t appeal to women. Or something. The author doesn’t make it entirely clear, stating that sf readership is falling and citing “More women than men read books” as a reason, leaving the reader to draw the conclusion. I know there are many, many women who read sf, but I wonder whether the percentages match the percentage of the reading public as a whole.)

There are a couple of interesting comments and assumptions in the post. One is the comment about women I mentioned already. Another is that the LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER movies have driven people to read fantasy as a genre. While I’m sure that’s happened, I’m not all that convinced it’s happened at a significant scale. Harry Potter was bringing people into the genre well before the movies; that’s why they made the movies, actually.

An interesting question raised but not addressed in the post is that there are lots of science fiction movies out there (TV shows, too) but they don’t seem to be driving people to pick up sf novels. (In comments, “Niall” states that DOCTOR WHO is the exception, and if that’s true it would be interesting to figure out why.) Didn’t sf have a huge spike in popularity after STAR WARS?

He also states that he’s “talking about Space Opera, Hard-SF etc – the core genre.” I can’t help but wonder what parts of science fiction don’t make it into the core.

I guess my final point would be that I don’t expect science fiction will ever die. Not really. It might become the sort of thing that only a specialty press would want to publish for a core audience, but I seriously doubt it would ever fall to that level. Seriously doubt, in part because the poster notes that when talking about the survival of the genre, literary sf doesn’t count. I can’t quite figure out why.

I should mention that the last science fiction hard science fiction[1] novel I read was probably Picoverse, which was great fun until I realized the characters weren’t. My interest flagged quickly, and it occurred to me that several of the sf books I’d read recently had incredibly uninteresting or unbelievable characters. I’d been reading them out of a sense of duty–science fiction is supposed to be good for me, isn’t it? And the culture, too?–but not enjoying them. So I stopped. At this point I read mostly fantasy and mystery, and I’m happier for it.

[1] Discussion in comments has made me realize that I have read sf since then, but I wasn’t thinking of them as sf because I’d enjoyed them.

Randomness for 12/3

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1) “Climategate:” Not as damning as certain people would like.

2) My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement Former front man for the band Too Much Joy jousts with a major label over royalty statements. Much more interesting than it sounds.

3) NFL creates more stringent rules to prevent players from going back into games with concussions. Which is great and all, but it doesn’t tempt me to watch again.

4) I wish I understood why the NY Times included this as the second sentence in this article: “She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.” Maybe it’s a valuable piece of information in an article about a new bill in the French parliament that would require all retouched photo to be labeled as such. Maybe they wanted to deflect accusations that the politician was just a jealous fatso who should get to the gym. Maybe the writer couldn’t write a story about fashion and women’s bodies without taking careful note of who has an approved body type and who doesn’t. It just seems unprofessional to me.

5) I do not want to know.

6) Patrick Nielsen Hayden on HP Lovecraft, the founding of SF fandom, and friendships with people you’ve never met in person.

Randomness for 12/2

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1) Perils of translation: Emailed out-of-office autoreply text from translator used on road sign.

2) Seductive monsters, Batman-style. Has to be seen to be believed. The “best” part is that this is part of a villain’s origin story.

3) “The slush pile seems, in some sense, to serve as a sort of representative sampling of the collective unconscious of the American public—a surreal landscape of vengeance, conspiracy, otherworldly beings, and really big guns. Sexual relations between ladies and gentlemen are fraught with peril (especially given that one or more participants in any romantic endeavor may very likely be aliens, demons, were-vampires, undead, or in a coma); queerness is almost nonexistent, as is any sort of radical politics (unless by “radical” one means “hoping to overthrow the government and install in its place a parliament selected by extraterrestrials from a more spiritually advanced dimension”); and people of color exist only as grotesque caricatures.”

4) The NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. No, I’m not going to read it, either. I loaded the page, “control f” searched for my name, and of course found nothing. Now I’m done with the list.

5) Cormac McCarthy donates his typewriter to charitable auction. The most amusing part is that the dealer handling the auction thinks it’s astonishing that McCarthy wrote all that fiction on such a primitive machine. Someone should explain to him that it’s the machine in McCarthy’s head that did the real work.

6) Celestial Soul Portraits. The perfect gift for your most hated enemy. via tnh’s Particles.

7) Maureen Dowd in a telling misstatement: “Barack Obama is the ultimate party crasher. He crashed Hillary’s high-hat party in 2008 and he crashed the snooty age-old Washington party of privileged white guys with a monopoly on power.” A quick note for Ms. Dowd: Barack Obama didn’t crash a thing. He was invited by the only people empowered to give out invitations.

Book too short?

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I don’t often give out writing advice here on my blog (seems pretty presumptuous at this point in my career[1]) but on message boards you can’t shut me up. So instead of writing something original this morning, I’m going to link to a post I made for people who find they need to add plot to a novel that came out too short in the first draft.

Feel free to tell me I’m wrong, there or here, or offer additional ideas.

[1] Holy crap I just called it a career.

According to Google

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According to Google, the search term:

“Nick Biter” vampire

gets no hits. Yes! If the Twenty Palaces books don’t take off, I know what I’m writing next!

(Yes, work is dead slow today and I’m getting antsy.)

Probably a good thing

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It’s probably a good thing that The Straight Dope broke down the “J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser” story. I don’t really have time to write a “Hoover as Asia the Invincible” story.

You may find this post annoying

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I realize this is a touchy subject, but this is my blog and sometimes I’m an annoying person.

Occasionally, I’m embarrassed by my genre.

It came up at Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker party[1] while I was talking with Mark Henry. I told him that I didn’t have a good elevator pitch for Child of Fire in part because I’m a little embarrassed to describe it.

He turned his face away from me as though he didn’t want to look at me right then, and I didn’t blame him. I understand people have strong feelings about this and the urge to do a little armchair psychoanalysis can be strong. But I’ll tell you: Writing fantasy is my life’s work and I work really fucking hard. I aspire to create art and entertainment both. In no way would I accept the idea that my love of the genre and my dedication to it is less than serious.

But at the same time I recognize that the genre is pretty damn frivolous. Vampire romances. Supernatural compulsions. Little gremlins with littler swords. Suburban werewolves. Superhero-like wizards. Hell: Superheroes.

I like to describe my work by the tone and the genre (“noirish contemporary fantasy”) not by the character or plot elements. Do I want to explain to my non-genre co-worker that my book is about an ex-car thief turned sorcerer’s helper who has an enchanted sheet of paper in his pocket? Or that they’re supernatural vigilantes?

Hell no. Stripped of the context of the actual story, that sounds deeply dorky. However, I’m more than happy to have them read the book. If I could get people to read the book–or even try the sample chapter–without any further description, I’d be damn happy. Because within the context of the story, those supernatural elements carry weight. They matter, in a way they will never matter during an elevator pitch.

I realize there is a long history of genre writers using pen names because they didn’t want their writing associated with their real lives. I remember well that Marion Zimmer Bradley hated pen names because she thought it evidence that writers were ashamed of their work.

Well I say Carpe humiliatum[2]. Seize the shame. Magic amulets are deeply dorky and utterly non-serious in the real world. Personally, I think recognizing–and addressing–this tension between real-life frivolity and in-story seriousness is a strength of mine.

Okay. I have to go to the dentist now. I’m hoping to have happy foreign rights news for CoF soon. Cross your fingers for me.

[1] Something else from the party that surprised me: Cherie mentioned that the book was printed in brown ink, and I thought: “What? Really?” Sure enough, I’d read nearly 200 pages of squinty text without even noticing they were in color. Would I need someone to tell me the seat of my pants was on fire, too?

[2] You know I’m serious when I break out the pretend Latin. Besides, it’s been 30 years since I took a Latin class; I couldn’t work out the correct form of verecundia for cash money.