also on the short story front

I mentioned before that Mike Allen bought “The Gospel of Nachash;” well, now you can see the rest of the table of contents.

And that is, in fact, the TOC — that’s the order the stories will be in. Yeah, I’m at the front. No, I don’t know what Mike has been smoking. One member of my crit group could barely get through the story because of the KJV style; I’m already anticipating that at least one review will hate it on the same grounds. And yet Mike wants to start off with me. I guess he’s done well with this editing thing so far, so I’ll trust him, but yeesh . . . talk about pressure!

Also at that link, you’ll find him talking about Norilana Books, the publishers of the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies. He says some important things about them, better than I can, but for my part I’ll just encourage you all to go look through their inventory and see if there’s anything up your alley. If not one of the CP volumes, how about another anthology? They’ve revived the Sword and Sorceress series, and started one called Lace and Blade that’s full of romantic highwayman-style goodness. Or there are novels, both originals and reprints of classics. They’ve got quite a list, so check them out, and maybe pick up a book or two.

One down, one to go.

No progress on “And Blow Them at the Moon,” but I’ve finished off “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes,” which is competing with “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” for the achievement of being my most ridiculous title yet.

Yeah, I just wrote a fake academic paper. As a short story.

I blame Patricia Briggs’ husband.

the impossible favor

Back when I decided to spend 2008 writing In Ashes Lie rather than the Victorian Onyx Court book, the rightness of that decision was encapsulated by two things: I had both a title and an LJ icon for Ashes, and I had neither for the Victorian book.

Now it’s almost 2010, and I realio trulio am writing the Victorian book, and I still need those two things. I’m working on the title issue at the moment; I have possibilities, though all of the ones assembled so far have flaws.

But I don’t have an icon. And the problem there is, I’m not sure what I want for an icon. Midnight had Elizabeth, Ashes had the Fire, Star had the comet, but I don’t quite feel like there’s the same kind of central object in this book — except London itself, really, and it’s hard to pack the “monster city” with all its smog and townhouses and gentlemen and beggars into 100×100 pixels. The best I can think of is some pic of a Victorian-era train, especially an Underground train, but my attempts to find such on the Internet have not turned up anything that leaps out at me. This is the closest I’ve come, but it doesn’t crop to icon size very well.

So here’s the favor I’m asking. Make me some icons — no text needed, just an image that evokes gritty nineteenth-century industrial London. If I use your icon, you’ll get a prize. Most likely prospect for said prize, if you’re willing to wait, is an advance copy of A Star Shall Fall; if you’re more impatient, I’ll come up with something else. A magazine with a story of mine in, maybe. But some kind of prize for saving me from having no icon with which to post about this book.

It’s hard to ask for something like that when I’m not even sure what I want. But I figured I’d toss the net out there, and see what it pulls in.

signals that deserve boosting

Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.

Watts’ own account of the incident.

Here’s the thing. In the various comment threads on the many posts advertising this incident, you will find people popping up to make the inevitable argument that Watts probably brought this on himself, not by actually assaulting anyone (the charge), but by not being sufficiently respectful to the border guards.

And that attitude is, quite simply, part of the problem. Because it says we have to knuckle under, not ask why we’re being detained, not question authority, not demand the basic right of knowing what’s happening to us. Last time I checked, though, that is not actually how our laws work. Even if Watts was disrespectful, that isn’t a crime. Cops even get training in how to cope with people getting up in their faces, without resorting to violence, because punching and kicking and pepper-spraying someone is not an acceptable response to being shouted at, or called an asshole. But rent-a-cops don’t always, and given the growing tendency to outsource these jobs in America, I won’t be surprised at all if these guards turn out to be contractors — who seem to be statistically more likely to get drunk on their own authority.

Authority which goes only a certain distance, and no further. So telling us we should bow down when it pushes pasts its bounds, and it’s our own fault if we get punished for being mouthy, only reinforces their bad behavior.

Even if you can’t agree with that, then agree with this: that turning a guy out, at night, into a winter storm, without even his coat, isn’t an acceptable response to anything.

If you’d like to donate to his legal defense, details are at the first link. Either way, the more noise gets made about this, the more likely it will be picked up by news outlets, which means we’re more likely to get proper investigation into the matter and maybe steps taken to make things right. We can hope, anyway.

hee

Every so often a meme comes along that just amuses the hell out of you. So:

If I came with a warning label, what would it say?

Me or my writing, I suppose — whichever springs to mind first.

crawling out of the sickbed

I came down with a cold right after Thanksgiving that seems to have segued with hardly a pause into a second cold, which means I’ve been sick for all of December so far. Bear with me as I try to get some actual business done here.

First of all, and I should have posted this sooner: Epic fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss is putting his fame to good use by raising money for Heifer International. More details at that link, and all of the related posts can be found under this tag, but the short form is that he’s selling off lottery tickets for a giant mountain of prizes, including signed books from many fabulous authors (and also me). Go forth and win swag in the name of a good cause.

Second: this seems an ideal time to remind people of the existence of Anthology Builder, a service that lets you buy short stories and have them bound into a print-on-demand anthology of your own design. My own stories are here, and there’s enough of them now to make a decent-sized antho (especially since you can print Deeds of Men); or you can mix and match with other authors. AB has built up quite a nice selection now, and this is a great way to try out the short fiction of various writers you’ve heard good things about.

Third: I am 599 words into “And Blow Them at the Moon,” aka the Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story. I’m still not sure how exactly this thing is going to end, but it’s begun with Cornwall’s two most incompetent knockers trying to dig a hole for their own faerie palace in Westminster, which is amusing me. And being amused seems like a good way to start.

The goal is to finish that story and another one that needs a proper title before the end of the month. Whether or not I will manage both depends in large part on whether I can manage to find my way out of these stupid colds.

I am now free to say . . .

. . . that Mike Allen has picked up “The Gospel of Nachash” for Clockwork Phoenix 3.

In the beginning God made the world, and on the sixth day he made creatures in his image. Male and female he created them, and they were the bekhorim, to whom God gave dominion over every herb bearing seed, and every tree bearing fruit, to be in their care. Mankind he formed from dust, but the bekhorim were made from air, and their spirits were more subtle than that of man.

Old Testament + New Testament + Jewish midrashim + Secret Ingredient = this story. All done in the style of the King James Bible, no less. I don’t know if it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s up there, and I’m very glad Mike bought it; the minute I finished the draft, the Clockwork Phoenix series was the home I envisioned for it.

By the way, all the CP2 stories are available now in the SFWA forum; if you’re a member, you can read them there for Nebula consideration.

The Literary Line

A discussion over on Catherynne Valente’s livejournal has me thinking about what distinguishes literary fiction with genre (i.e. speculative) elements from genre fiction as such.

People approach this in a lot of different ways, of course. There’s value in saying, if it has a genre element — ghosts, vampires, time-travel — then it’s genre, and enough with all this waffling. (Margaret Atwood, I’m looking at you.) Otherwise this notion of “speculation” loses all real meaning. There’s also value in saying the real line lies in shelving: it’s all about what publisher will pick you up, what audience they think they can market you to. That, more than the actual content of your book, determines which camp you belong in. This ends up being a fairly accurate descriptor of how society creates the divide, after all.

But I do think there is something within the stories that separates Is Genre from Contains Genre. Some people say it has to do with the centrality of the genre conceit: if you could pull out that thread and still have a coherent story fabric, what you have isn’t really science fiction or fantasy. This almost but not quite hits the mark I’m looking at, and I can give a good example of how.

I mostly enjoyed the movie Stranger Than Fiction. If you haven’t seen it, this is a story about a man who suddenly starts hearing a woman’s voice narrating everything he’s doing in his life. He comes to discover that the woman in question is a writer, and what she’s writing is a novel about his life — a novel in which he’s going to die.

This is not just genre but as central as you get. Pull out that thread, and you have no story left at all. But in the end, I felt dissatisfied with the film, and my dissatisfaction grew directly out of the fact that I wanted it to be a genre story, and I don’t think it was.

What made it not genre, for me, was its utter lack of interest in the cause of its own conceit. Why had this strange connection happened? Did the writer’s imagination create that man, summon him into reality, or did she somehow tap into the life of a pre-existing individual? Did her work control or merely reflect him? Stranger Than Fiction doesn’t care. What it cares about is the moral question of that connection: once the writer discovers her character exists outside of her head, what will she choose to do with her story? She insists the death she has planned for him — a meaningless, random demise; I think he’s supposed to be knocked down by a bus — is a powerful ending, the one the story has to have. Which I found to be an interesting nod toward the conventions of literary fiction in general, the notion that an ending where somebody dies is somehow more meaningful than one where the person lives.

The moral question is an engaging one, certainly. But it wasn’t enough for me. I want not only to think about the ethical ramifications of our fascination with watching characters suffer and die, but also the metaphysics of how a writer might be confronted with her own protagonist. Otherwise — in strange contravention of mainstream opinion — the story feels shallow to me. Its own world feels like a painted backdrop, rather than a reality.

Which brings me around to the division I like best, where narrative content is concerned: genres as conversations. Stranger Than Fiction is talking to litfic, not specfic. It’s debating this whole notion that telling a story about some schlub who wanders through his life and then gets knocked over by a bus is inherently better than telling a story about that schlub living, which is very much a litfic kind of issue. If it were a genre story, the conversation would address the matter of causation. Is her typewriter magical? Is that man some kind of tulpa, called into existence by the power of her thought? Is this some intervention on God’s part, or a weird experiment conducted by aliens? The moral relationship between author and character could still figure into it, but the manner of that figuring would be shaped by the cause.

It isn’t that a genre story absolutely has to explore the causes of its own science fictional or fantastical elements. Not every narrative needs to be about its own foundations. But Stranger Than Fiction‘s complete disinterest in its own fantasy was a clear signal, at least to me, that its conversational partners are not mine. This is also what annoys sf/f readers when a litfic writer decides to write a book with (say) time travel in it: in most cases it’s painfully obvious that the writer is ignorant of the long-standing conversation on that subject. As a result, you get novels where the author seems to think they’re the first person to discover the grandfather paradox or branching realities or whatever, and their community celebrates it as this awesome new thing, while the specfic community yawns at the sight of Yet More Old Hat.

Who’s involved in the conversation? Which writers and works is a story responding to, agreeing with, counteracting, poking fun at? It isn’t just a litfic/specfic divide; I suspect, for example, that you can use the same principle to sort urban fantasy from paranormal romance. And it’s probably a rare story indeed that can talk with equal facility to more than one community at a time, however much the basic content of the narrative may look like a hybrid of two worlds.

For me, that’s where the line really lies. Sometimes it’s useful to say “if it contains genre, it is genre,” and sometimes it’s useful to look at where a work is shelved, but ultimately, it comes down to the conversation.

irony

And after that last post?

Two e-mails have shown up in my inbox, advertising Black Friday special offers. Granted, for online shopping rather than some doors-open-at-midnight riot, but still.

Reminds me, too — I need to get myself taken off those lists.

stomach-turning

It occurs to me that it’s more useful to post this today than two days from now.

I’ve condemned Black Friday before. This year, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden at Making Light does it way better than I can, focusing on Wal-Mart and the company’s persistent refusal to institute measures that would decrease the frenzy and protect both customers and employees.

It isn’t like this takes them by surprise, people. That post documents a four-year history of injuries and property damage, hospitalizations and crowd violence that takes police to shut them down. And there are well-defined methods of reducing that risk.

They do not include tossing laptops at the crowd like t-shirts during a rock concert.

When your employees are making statements like “They trampled each other for ’em, […] It was great,” then something has gone horrifically wrong. Wal-Mart’s corporate masters create and feed the mob mentality, because it benefits their bottom line. But the cost to the rest of us — including their employees — is sickening.

so much for my standard

It appears that some time between the last time I used Nero and now, it has turned into a bloated, computer-hijacking piece of crap. Ergo, I do not want to buy it.

I do, however, want a program with which I can design CD labels and case inserts. There are free ones out there, but all the ones I’ve seen are extremely limited. I need something that will allow me reasonably full functionality from a graphical and text standpoint — not full-scale image manipulation, since I can do that in other programs, but (at a minimum) the kind of control you’d get out of, say, MS Paint. I don’t mind paying for this; I just don’t want to pay for 270MB of crap I don’t want in order to get the 30MB I do want.

Any recommendations?

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.