1) Grippy not Sticky: Stanford engineers develop a material that sticks without getting stuck.
2) Modern superhero comics done in a Golden Age style.
3) KITE FIGHT, a five minute documentary about the sport of soltar pipas, popular in the favelas in Rio. Video.
4) Segmented Glass Sculptures, via Marc Laidlaw
5) Boy Wonders. ::sniffle::
6) A plea for culinary modernism. Being honest about the way people *used* to eat.
7) Taylor Swifties.
As I’ve mentioned before, there are three main ways that readers can keep up with an author’s new releases.
1. Follow them on social media, which many readers don’t want to do. Often they don’t have the time, or they aren’t interested, or they like the books but don’t care about the person.
2. Sign up for the author’s newsletter. If you’re looking at my website right now, the form is in the sidebar. The downside of that is that some authors send too many newsletters, and spam traps sometimes catch them, and readers might miss them.
3. Click that “Follow” button on Amazon. That’s a link to my page, but every author should have one. Downside, you’re only notified when the author puts something new *on Amazon*. Upside, that little thrill you get when the big river tells you about a book and you go to buy it at your local shop.
And finally, there’s a new option:
4. SFWA has created a newsletter to announce new books by its members. It will go out six times a year, announcing books released in the month and the month following of release. Sign up to get it here. SFWA authors, if you have new books to announce, you can do that here. Note that it’s only for upcoming releases, so it’s of no use to me at the moment.
This is such a good idea that it’s a wonder it didn’t happen five years ago. Or ten. And if you’re a reader on the lookout for something to help you break out of the same old same old, here’s your chance to check out authors and genres you might have missed.
#sfwapro
1) I just dropped the fully signed contracts for a German edition of The Great Way (read the first few chapters starting here). The money won’t be coming to me for a while, but it’s much, much better than what I was paid for the German rights to Child of Fire, and CoF was published by the largest English language publisher in the world. Epic fantasy seems to do much better than urban fantasy.
2) Monday was my wife’s birthday. She got a Pencil by Fifty-Three, along with their art program, so she can try yet again to make art on her iPad. After so many years, I’m doubtful this will work, but we never stop trying.
3) Those of you who’ve known me for a long time will know that, while we celebrate my wife’s birthday on June 1, it’s also my birthday. However, we don’t do presents and stuff for me until July 1. (Sharing your birthday with your spouse sort of sucks.) I just turned 50.
4) You can tell that I put a lot of importance on that number by the way I’m burying it in this post. It’s a perfectly arbitrary number, but it does help me realize that I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be at this point in my life.
5) If you’ve been following my #15in2015 posts, you’ll see that I’m almost certainly going to make it. That’s partly because I’ve chosen a bunch of shorter books, have mostly stopped reading graphic novels (and mostly don’t miss them), and I’m reading bestsellers in the hopes of understanding them better. My current novel is also on the short end, but I think the next one should be meatier, just for variety’s sake.
6) Have I mentioned that the Fate Core game supplements I’ve been working on are in revisions? Well, they are. Someday soon I hope to return to novels. SOON.
7) Finally, my to-do list has grown so large that I’m tempted to just chuck huge portions of it just to clear my schedule. I’m supposed to organize a Goodreads giveaway for The Way Into Chaos, which means research into best practices. I’m supposed to work out a Bookbub promotion, but the promotional price can be a pain in the ass to arrange. The Great Way has been offered a slot in a Kickstarter Humble Bundle, which is no small thing and not to be ditched. Plus there are tax headaches around foreign sales, and I don’t have an accountant. Also, Goodreads supposedly allows discussion threads on author home pages (rather than the pages for books) but I’ll be damned if I can see the link I’m supposed to click. At least I’ve found someone willing to help with the creative commons licensing issues with the game supplements.
You know how John Scalzi talks about working with a publisher because he doesn’t want to be bothered with doing all this extraneous crap? Well, I’m living the life he doesn’t want. I’m his cautionary tale. All I want to do is write and watch dvds of mopey British detectives. Instead, I deal with all this stuff. Ugh.
The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Book 10 in #15in2015
I didn’t believe a word of it.
1) Immortan Joe’s War Boys leave product reviews on Amazon. Shiny!
4) Showing what’s real and what’s cgi in Mad Max: Fury Road. People have been praising the practical effects in this movie, which some internet bozos thought was a claim that there was no cgi at all. Which is ridiculous. Check out the before and after shots. Pretty interesting.
5) How Hollywood keeps women out.
6) Joint pain, from the gut. Dealing with auto-immune issues through the microbiome. It’s more complex than taking a probiotic.
Ugh.
So, the Fate Core game supplement I promised to create for my Kickstarter is finished in the first draft.
Originally, I’d intended to write about six thousand words to cover the whole of The Great Way. I added a supplement for Key/Egg as a stretch goal, and figured that would be another 2K words, tops.
Just a few notes. Nothing fancy.
In truth, the first draft is over 45,000 words long. It’s half a novel.
Worse, the sort of writing that games require is very dense; finishing a thousand words in a day was the best I could hope for, and many days I couldn’t manage even that.
Fuck, man. Writing for games is hard.
Now I have to go through again. Not only will I need to revise the text, I’ll have to make sure I’ve got the rules basically correct. After that, I pass it to my GM for his notes.
In the end, it will all be fine, I hope. Fate Core operates on an open license, so I should be able to sell them for a nominal fee. Even better, I hope they’ll be effective promo for the books.
But Kee-rist, this has taken a sizable chunk of my lifetime productivity. I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.
Wow.
And I thought Fury Road was going to be the best action movie of the year.
1) Darpa successfully tests the first bullet that can be steered after it was fired.
2) Geologists grill up stakes with lava… and ruin them.
3) Richard Prince Selling Other People’s Instagram Shots Without Permission for $100K Whenever I feel cynical about publishing, I think about fine arts and give my oil-painter wife a hug. (Of course, if he was skimming other people’s work from reddit, I wouldn’t be surprised…)
4) Feces rained down on outdoor Sweet 16 party. Dumped from a plane, obviously. Stranger than fiction
5) Nothing about this toy makes sense. Video. Don’t watch that without the sound.
6) Law & Order: Daredevil. Video. Also requires sound.
7) A Kickstarter for a horror video game about a blind woman. Cool.
Today I share wisdom:
1. When a book that breaks new genre ground becomes wildly successful, publishers start looking for other books like it.
— Asperatus Undulatus (@TheBarbarienne) May 26, 2015
2. If this goes on long enough and with enough success, it becomes a new subgenre.
— Asperatus Undulatus (@TheBarbarienne) May 26, 2015
3. And at some point, a subgenre might become big enough that publishers are trying to always have a book of that sort on their list.
— Asperatus Undulatus (@TheBarbarienne) May 26, 2015
4. At this point, the subgenre crosses what I call "the midlist divide." When a subgenre is large enough to have a midlist.
— Asperatus Undulatus (@TheBarbarienne) May 26, 2015
5. This is when that subgenre will continue to sell well enough to support a few writers modestly, but is no longer "hot."
— Asperatus Undulatus (@TheBarbarienne) May 26, 2015
6. Publishers are no longer looking for a Big Book in that genre from a new writer. They will continue boosting their established writers.
— Asperatus Undulatus (@TheBarbarienne) May 26, 2015
7. But this is not when I would want to debut into a particular subgenre.
This is why you shouldn't chase the market.
— Asperatus Undulatus (@TheBarbarienne) May 26, 2015
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
Shows, man. Shows! This is a little late, but what the hell. I’m going to organize this by the order I would watch them every week, and this is going to be a little fast and loose.
Spoilers, obviously. Continue reading