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dude.

I wrote 5,661 words today on the Silly Project.

If I kept that up for the rest of the month, I could finish NaNoWriMo in a third the time.

(This is not going to happen.)

unexpected

On the one hand, this is so not remotely any of the projects I intended to be working on right now.

On the other hand, it’s 3,854 words so far today, and I’m having fun; which is worth something all on its own.

since people appear to be confused . . .

Let’s take a quick moment to review the basic differences between trade publishing, self-publishing, and vanity publishing.

In trade publishing (which is what the majority of the books on your shelves probably went through), you write a book, and the publisher pays you money for it. You retain copyright, and license some number of sub-rights to the publisher. They then pay other people for printing, cover art, copy-editing, etc, and when it’s done they recoup those costs (hopefully) by selling the result to bookstores, who sell them to readers. You may be asked to contribute to marketing, or choose to do it on your own. The overall financial risk is shouldered by the publishing company, and they split the profits with you, the writer.

In self-publishing, you act as your own publisher. You contract with people for the above-mentioned services. You retain copyright and (aside from whatever is necessary to get the books printed) retain sub-rights. Once you have books, you a) give them to family and friends (if this was done as a purely personal venture — like, say, a genealogy) or b) start working your tail off to market the books to a larger readership. Bookstores will probably not buy them from you unless it’s local history or some other niche market they have a strong reason to believe will pick your work up, but if you’re really good at marketing you may still move enough copies to recoup your costs. The financial risk is shouldered by you, and you keep your profits.

In vanity publishing, you pay a company to act as your publisher. They provide variable services, depending on what you’ve paid for, usually at low quality and a fairly high markup (since they are now acting as a middle-man between you and the cover artist, etc). You have less control over the result than in self-publishing, and depending on the contract may have signed over a portion of your rights to the company. They may also require you, in that contract, to buy a certain minimum number of your own books. Bookstores will again probably not buy them from you. The company may sell you marketing assistance (again at a markup), or you can take on this burden yourself again. The financial risk is shouldered by you, and the company keeps some percentage of your profits. A vanity press makes its money off writers, not readers.

Harlequin Horizons is a vanity press, not a self-publishing company. It is the monetization of Harlequin’s slush pile. Removing the name “Harlequin” from the company is insufficient; they need to stop advertising their vanity press in rejection letters, and implying that paying them to publish your book may result in you being later picked up by a proper Harlequin editor. They are trying to take advantage of aspiring authors, and their spokespeople have consistently and disturbingly worked to blur the clear facts of this case with half-truths and statements that are either outright lies, or demonstrations of resounding ignorance as to how the industry works. RWA has rightly condemned this, and MWA and SFWA have their back. Trust the professional writers’ organizations on this. Harlequin has not launched some brave new venture in twenty-first century publishing; they have launched a scam, and it should be condemned as such.

If you want to see the story you wrote printed up as a book, and aren’t looking to make a career out of this, go to Lulu. They’re honest. Harlequin isn’t.

Nebula update

I didn’t realize the transition to the new Nebula rules means stuff published after July 1st of last year is still eligible, so my list also includes “Kingspeaker” and “A Heretic by Degrees.” (Possibly also “A Mask of Flesh,” but it’s right on the borderline, so I’m thinking no.) You can read or hear the first, and hear the second, in their entirety; details at those links.

on the topic of Nebulas

If you’re eligible to nominate for the Nebulas, you might be interested in an offer from Mike Allen, editor of Clockwork Phoenix 2: he’ll provide a PDF review copy to any SFWA member who wants to give the anthology a look. (Details about halfway through that entry.)

That antho, of course, has my story “Once a Goddess,” which has been getting some very pleasing attention in reviews. Other stories of mine out this year are:

Those first two and “Waking” are free to read in their entirety online; click through to find the links on their respective pages. Also, of course, I had a novel on the shelves this year.

Here endeth the obligatory Nebula-eligibility post.

it begins

Okay, so, researching the Victorian book. I’ve decided my first priority is to come up with something to call it other than “the Victorian book.”

The simultaneous convenience and inconvenience of the Onyx Court books is that I know where to go looking for a title (period literature), but I have to go look. I can’t just make one up. We therefore come to the first Request for Help of this round: what mid-Victorian literature should I read in search of a title?

My preference is for poetry over prose, because it’s more likely to have a short, evocative phrase that I can spin out; fiction (especially in the Victorian era) is rather too fond of going on at length. The book will probably start circa 1870, so I’d like material no later than that. No specific limit on how early it could be, but I’m trying to avoid going as early as the Romantics. So who was writing good (and preferably non-pastoral) poetry around 1840-1870?

apropos of absolutely nothing

I would pay money to see somebody choreograph a contemporary ballet pas de deux to the song “Gaeta’s Lament” from Battlestar Galactica. It would be a beautiful adagio, morphing into something huge and powerful when the drums kick in. Alternatively, do it on ice, with some really athletic side-by-side and throw jumps at the end.

I never had it in me to be a professional dancer, but there is and always will be a choreographer living in a back corner of my head, drafting movement to the music I’m hearing.

Metallica covers

I’ll use my French horn icon because, well, it’s what I use for music. But given that I’m talking about Metallica, it might not be the most appropriate choice.

Or is it? You see, this post is about one of my odd collections: Weird Metallica Covers. I’m not just talking about S&M, though since we’ve brought that up let me take a moment to drool over what happens when you pair a metal band with an orchestra. (The band acquires body and the orchestra acquires teeth. Oh yeah.) No, I’m talking about piano solo, grand harp duet, cello quartet, plus Rodrigo y Gabriela tackling the odd song here and there.

(For the curious: the most frequently-covered song I’ve got is “One,” which clocks in at four and a half renditions, not counting the original. [“Half” because the Rodrigo y Gabriela version segues into “Take 5” partway through.] It’s narrowly trailed by “Enter Sandman” and “Master of Puppets,” with four apiece.)

Can anybody recommend more of this to me? Or, y’know, odd covers of things other than Metallica. I have a string quartet doing Evanescence, Richard Cheese doing lounge-singer covers of all kinds of random crap (including “Down with the Sickness,” which is freaking hilarious in lounge style), Rondellus doing early medieval covers of Black Sabbath in Latin. Techno remixes of opera, shamisen duet of Radiohead — if it’s a weird mashup of instruments or styles, I’m there*. What should I look for?

*(I haven’t actually soundtracked any of my Driftwood stories, but in the back of my head, this is what it calls for.)

another one-book question

Similar to my Gunpowder Plot query — if I were to read only one history of the Napoleonic Wars, which one should it be? I’m specifically looking for a history of Britain’s naval campaign. The kind of thing that would be useful background for reading O’Brian, Forester, et al.

Awesomeness in the Old West

If nineteenth-century America is something you know something about, this post is aimed at you.

For the second time in my life, I’m gearing up to run a game. The first one was Changeling (and resulted in the Onyx Court series); this one is Scion (and god help me if it tries to turn into a novel). For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Scion is a role-playing game where the characters are the half-mortal children of gods. Think Hercules, or Cú Chulainn, or the Pandavas, running around in the modern world. Except that my game will be set, not in the modern world, but in the nineteenth-century American frontier.

Larger-than-life personalities doing over-the-top deeds? Nah, there was nobody like that in the Old West. 🙂

I’ve already got a nascent list of people I can reinterpret as half-divine, but I’d like more. This is where you, O internets, come in: who really seems like they might have been the child of a god? Who excelled in their chosen field? Whose deeds acquired legendary status?

The game will likely take place in the mid-1870s, so while people who predate that point are okay (they might fit into the backstory — or not be so dead after all), anybody born later is out. Mostly I’m looking at the frontier, but will also entertain suggestions from back east; the game may wander there at some point. I am especially interested in people from the groups more often overlooked by history: blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, etc. One of the things I want to look at in this game is the way in which a wide variety of cultures collided in the space of the frontier. (Adding a mythological layer should make that extra interesting.)

Bonus points if you can suggest a possible divine parent along with the Scion. Whose kid is Doc Holliday? How about Marie Laveau? Pretty much any god is up for grabs; the books provide rules for handling nine different pantheons, and I’ve found decent-looking player-created material for three more, so I can field most things.

Suggest away. The more names, the merrier.

Took the damn thing long enough.

I spent a stupidly long time wrestling with the last paragraphs of this bloody thing — write two grafs, delete one, write another, delete both, write one, delete it, replace it with the two previously deleted, wipe the first one out but leave the second, etc — before I finally hit something I was willing to hit “save” on.

But “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” is finally complete, at 3100 excessively difficult words. I suspect there’s some interesting theme buried in there, that I can try to unearth when I go back to revise, but for now, we’ll call that a draft.

Look! It’s, like, actual short story production!

1663 / 4000

I miss the Zokutou meter. <sniff>

If I weren’t getting sleepy, I might try to finish “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” (the story I blame mrissa for) tonight. But I’ve done more than 1300 already, and I suppose it’s just as well to spend a little extra time pondering just what Hel might say to Loki, especially while there’s a snake dripping venom on his face.

(Or more to the point, while there’s a snake dripping venom into the bowl above his face. Because Sigyn’s going to be sitting there during this whole conversation. And won’t that be interesting.)

But hey. It’s like I’m actually writing a short story or something. I’d forgotten what that feels like . . . .

Sirens site now up

As I mentioned before, I will be one of three Guests of Honor at next year’s Sirens Conference, along with Holly Black and Terri Windling. They’ve launched their new site, so go take a look; you can register, submit a proposal for programming (academic or otherwise), or just browse what’s already there. Everything I’ve heard about the conference has sounded utterly fabulous, so I hope to see some of you there.

State of the Swan

I don’t have to report for jury duty today — yay! So here’s an update on where I stand work-wise, in the wake of the India trip and A Star Shall Fall.

1) I do, of course, have to deal with copy-edits and page proofs for Star. Not sure yet when those will show up, though, so for the time being that work is in limbo.

2) Next after that one is the Victorian book. Due to the vagaries of my last few years, this, the fourth Onyx Court novel, will be the first one where I’ve had more than a month or two of lead time in which to do my research before I put words on the page. You have no idea how wonderful that feels. In order to give myself more time for the actual drafting, I plan to start that at the beginning of April, but that still leaves me five months for a leisurely, low-pressure campaign of prep reading. Look for various “help me o internets” posts as I figure out what I want to pick up first.

3) Writing full-time means I need to hold myself to a higher standard of productivity than I did while teaching or taking classes. Ergo, I’m also starting work on a pure spec project. For those not familiar with the term, writing “on spec,” i.e. “on speculation,” means you’re doing it on your own time, without a contract promising money when you’re done. This project, code-named TLT, is a just-for-me novel; if I don’t finish it, or if I do finish it and then decide it isn’t really for publication, then that’s okay. I’m doing it because I want to, because I think it’ll be fun. And “having fun” is an important part of this job, for the preservation of sanity. Anyway, the plan for this is to aim for 5K a week, with weekends off, and if I don’t make my goal then I won’t beat myself up over it.

4) I also have another sekrit projekt on the back burner, code-named FY. No wordcount goals for this one; I just want to play around with it and see what happens.

5) Short stories. I’m beginning to accept that short stories aren’t likely to happen while I’m drafting Onyx Court books, but the result is that my pipeline of stories has gotten fairly empty at every stage — very few upcoming publications, because very few sales, because very few submissions, because very few stories prepared, because very few stories awaiting revision. Between now and April, I’d like to make some progress in fixing that. The tentative goal is to finish both Edward’s untitled story and “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” before the end of the month; we’ll see if I can manage it or not.

Now I head up to the city for errands and the Borderlands signing tonight. India pictures later — hopefully tonight or tomorrow.

aaaaaaand we’re done.

A Star Shall Fall has been revised and sent to my editor. Now I wait for the CEM to show up. (Anybody want to start a betting pool as to whether I’ll be working on it over Christmas?)

Time to go eat the candy bar I’ve been saving as my reward.

WANT.

If you are a language geek . . . .

Go drool.

What I really want is, as the poster suggests, an online version integrated with the OED proper. The 4000-page doorstop sounds less user-friendly. But OMG do I want access to this book (and oh god, the things I could have done with it for Midnight, Ashes, and Star . . .).

an everything update

Back from India. I definitely need to post pictures and thoughts eventually, but I’m not sure when I’m going to do it, because of the rest of this post . . . .

World Fantasy is this weekend. If you’re going to be there, you can find me at the big autograph session, or at the “Bad Food, Bad Clothes, and Bad Breath” panel on Sunday at 11 (the topic being the grittier and less-pleasant side of premodern life).

I will also be at the second group signing at Borderlands Books on Monday night. Assuming, of course, that I don’t end up eaten alive by my Very First Jury Duty that day.

Aaaaaaalmost done with book revisions. I pretty much finished before I left for India, so I could let the book sit and then tweak anything else needing tweaking. Well, kittens, it’s time for some tweaking. But that needs to get done before World Fantasy, so I can send the book off to my editor.

And then there are some projects I intend to dive into as soon as that’s done with. More on those later.

In other news, a new interview with me has gone live at I Am Write, where (among other things) I talk about how the Onyx Court books were almost an all-folklore extravaganza instead of focusing on faeries.

Now I need to convince myself not to crawl back into bed (curse you, jet lag!), but rather to knock some of these things off my to-do list. I haven’t been reading LJ at all in my absence, so if you or anyone else posted anything I should see, let me know . . . .