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Ruminating on romance novelist Vicki Hinze’s advice (If you can quit writing and be content, then do it) and an unrelated discussion in a closed forum led me to set up this thought experiment for myself:

Think about your current inventory of completed but unsold fiction. Novels to flashfic.

What if you never sold a word of it? Not. Ever.

(In my case, I’ve written about 382,000 words of fiction since 2003, and sold about 100,000 of them. So about 282K of work that–for the sake of this thought experiment–I never, ever sell.)

Do you feel like you will have wasted your time on those unsold stories?  That none of them deserved to have ever been written?  Where is your urge to write any particular story coming from: the love of creating stories and exercising your craft-muscles, or on the external validation of publication and readership?  Some other locus I’ve not thought of?

Are some stories coming from one place, and other stories from the other?  Has that changed for you as you progressed on your walk with The Muse?

Boosting a few signals from the Writerverse.

+ On the DEATH! OF! PUBLISHING! “As has been pointed out many times by people better with numbers than I am, the costs of publishing an ebook are not zero. That is, if you have any interest at all in a quality product. No one goes around suggesting that everyone should become their own autonomous cheesemakers and cheering the death of the cheese industry. Why? Because that would result in a lot of shitty cheese.”  From The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by Cat Valente.

+ Think you’ve heard enough about the Amzilla vs. Mothra-millan throwdown?  Not yet.  Go read this analysis at Making Light, if you haven’t already. And everything they link to.  You’ll be smarter for it.

+ On Publish America: “Niche publisher? That’s one way to put it. Sort of like saying Al Capone was a niche businessman.”  More at Today’s Publishing Industry Embarrassment by Nick Kaufmann.

+Oh, and one last link for the grammar geeks:  While conscientious writers have been worried sick about anachronisms like using the word “moron” before it was coined in 1910–not to mention howlers of Hollywood proportion–Now we have a new one to obsess over.  Turns out the “apostrophe-s” wasn’t usually used to indicate possessives till at least the 1800’s.  Good thing I’ve kept my artistic license up to date!  For extra fun, check out the list of antiquated contractions on page 8.

Unless, that is, you han’t the time to click oth‘ link….





The part of the whole Amazon-Macmillan thing that surprises me most, at least with its irony, is the number of people out there saying Amazon’s got the right idea–books have no purpose other than being a loss-leader for the Kindle, and not only that, but Amazon should be able to force publishers to sell at a loss EVERYWHERE, just so Amazon’s price point stays lowest. This kind of dollar-sign-driven, selfishly short-sighted, bottom-line-only thinking is almost too weird for me to even get my brain around. 

(Yes, despite numerous failed attempts to shepherd me into “Lean 6 Sigma Solves Everything” fold, I still think it’s just one tool in the toolbox and even though you can use a hammer to sink a Phillip’s head screw, is that really the best approach?  But I digress.)

I strongly suspect that the very same people–you know, the ones who are so up in arms about Macmillan wanting to protect the value of books as products in and of themselves–would be ABSOLUTELY FOAMY AND RAILING if their company decided to outsource their jobs in the name of saving a few dollars and reducing prices for its customers. 

Hey, it’s just about the bottom line, right?

+Ever wonder just how much unique identifying information your browser is betraying to the sites you visit?  EFF wonders the same thing.  So they set up Panopticlick.  Dumb name, potentially scary results.  Give it a click and help them compile crunchy data in the name of protecting your online privacy.

+We Amurricans like to think we aren’t as dumb about the rest of the world and what they think about us as we think they think we are.  (Parse THAT one, Furriners!)  Find out just how much you know about the rest of the world’s attitudes at the Pew Global Attitudes Project.  The results, at least in my case, were rather humbling.

+A rare, rare interview with the Salinger of my generation:  Reclusive Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes. The man who quit at the top of his game–and stayed quit.  If only that trait was more common, and creators were able to resist the siren call of keeping their creations on life support for a few dollars more.  One of my most treasured books is the leatherbound Complete Calvin & Hobbes.  I hope it stays complete–though I sure would have liked it if he’d allowed a darn C&H calendar!   [via Erica Hildebrand]

Too bad you can’t be here to taste it.  This soup is crazy good, and the way she makes it is pretty easy on the waistline, too.

Wanna make some yourself? Here’s her recipe.

Shelley’s Curried Carrot Soup

1 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 tbsp butter (I used Fat Free I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter)
1 medium onion, chopped
1.5 lbs packaged baby carrots
6 cups chicken stock (organic with ultra-low sodium is best)
1.5 tbsp curry powder
1/4 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp coarse salt
1 cup sour cream (I used Fat Free)
6 blades fresh chives

Preheat medium pot over medium high heat.

Add olive oil, butter, onions and carrots and saute for five minutes (if
you use the fake butter make sure you keep stirring because it acts
funny at high heat).

Add 4 cups chicken stock, curry, cayenne and salt.

Bring to a boil, cover and cook until carrots are very tender (about
15 minutes).

Process soup in processor in 2 or 3 small batches until soup is smooth.

Return soup to pot over low heat.

If soup is too thick add more chicken stock (up to two cups) to
achieve desired consistency.

If soup is too thin add a paste of corn starch mixed with cold water
(1 to 2 ratio).

Adjust seasonings if necessary.

Place sour cream in small sandwich bag.  Cut small hole in corner.
Ladle soup into bowls and squirt a swirl of sour cream around the bowl
from center to rim.

Drag a toothpick or knife from the center of bowls out to the edges to
make spider web effect.

Garnish with chives.

Apart from a disappointingly pat ending, this review of THE UNNAMED by Joshua Ferris does a decent job laying out the playing field–without making the mistake of turning it into a battlefield.

[Or even the cliche of invoking Joyce!]

When we talk about the difference between “high” and “pop” culture, we often mean that one requires the work of interpretation, while the other is a ready source of easy pleasure. Certain writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers are assumed to have intentions beyond simple entertainment: The Metamorphosis can’t really just be about a guy who wakes up one morning transformed into a beetle. It has to be a metaphor for self-alienation. (Unless it’s about the Holocaust. Or capitalism.) Anyone who has taken an introductory course in literary theory can play this game, and feel all the smarter for it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it deepens our appreciation of the work.

When we evaluate a work first and foremost for its subtext, we can overlook the power of the text itself. “To interpret is to impoverish,” Susan Sontag wrote 50 years ago, arguing that the best way to engage with a work of art is not to analyze or unpack it, but to take it at face value. Sontag believed cinema, with its capacity for total sensory immersion and its designation as mass, instead of high, culture, was the art form most likely to resist the deadening effects of interpretation. But today even the most mainstream movie is ripe for pseudo-serious analysis: consider the recent essay collection The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, a compilation of academic papers about the cult favorite The Big Lebowski. Rather than film, the most interpretation-proof form of art is nonfiction: memoir, documentary, and, at its most mass level, reality TV. It is possible that the current popularity of nonfiction art is due to just this freedom to consume it whole, without first having to figure out what it “means.”

A bit more behind the link at the full article.  (However long it lasts for free anyway.)

Major Davis followed Sam to the ticket window and attempted to purchase a return ticket on Sam’s behalf for the following morning.  Sam, assessing the major’s air of duty and frank disappointment, nearly went against his first impulse and allowed the man to buy the ticket.  His temper rarely cooled as quickly as it flared, however.  In a huff, he declared, “I’m returning home tonight, by carriage, since there are no more trains.”

The major nodded grudgingly and made the arrangements with the driver of a horse and buggy.  “Mr. Twain, it’s been an honor meeting you, despite whatever went on between you and the President.”

Sam considered asking the major whether he had seen any action in the Philippines, or if he’d partaken in any good Indian massacres lately, but something stayed his tongue.  Instead, he quirked one fuzzy white eyebrow and quipped, “Best you found some honor here in America, Major.  It’s in damned short supply overseas.”  With that, he signaled the driver to start for Wave Hill.

* Someone (an actual person, not that laggardly Google Alert service!) sent me a link to fantasy author Joshua Palmatier’s very kind review of Triangulation: Dark Glass, with extra special love for my story “Deadglass” which was reprinted within.

* It’s the 75th anniversary of beer coming in cans.  A hearty “D’oh!” to the geniuses who made the first ::mumble,mumble:: years of my Navy career very hard to remember.  I know some of you are out there a little confused…. “You mean it comes in servings smaller than tankard?!”  :)

* And of course since I’m talking about beer and the way the Navy used to be back when it was fun, why not make it a hat trick and bring up tattoos?  Somehow I never got one, but according to this article, it’s not the first, or even the second tattoo that makes you a “deviant”, it’s the fourth.  Is a stated policy of tattoo profiling next?  Take it with a grain of salt, people.  Remember–strictly speaking, people who stay married to the same person for longer than 20 years are also “deviants” to a sociologist….

* The big honkin’ 29th edition of the textbook I edited for work survived the first class of the year with no hair-on-fire catastrophes in the final printed version.  Wanna find out all there is to know about U.S. arms sales and giveaways to other countries, as they are practiced today? Email me and I’ll point you to the free 24 Meg PDF.  (Hey, it’s cheaper than Ambien!)

770 pages and no plot. Sort of like the Necronomicon that way.

*Oh, and there’s also this–a cool pre-order offer for Dark Faith (which will include a new poem of mine when it debuts in May 2010.)   If you pre-order through this link, I’ll even get a little bit of extra payola!

Advice on handling medical issues in fiction, in all its bloggerific goodness.

How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends is a new blog by a multiclassed doctor/writer friend. It’s off to a promising start!

…enjoying the parts of the apple that *aren’t* bruised.

PRODUCTION

Total new fiction written in 2009: At least 323 pages, or about 81,000 words.

Days actually writing new fiction: 30.

Average fiction-production day: Almost 11 pages, or about 2,750 words.

Best single day production: 31 pages, or about 7,750 words (Two middle chapters of The Whisperer in the Willows)

Here’s the breakdown–

• Added to novella-in-progress The Light That Will Not Fail
• Finished short story “Farrah’s Heart Was Not Hard Enough”
• Started and finished new short story “Like Baby Elephants”
• Started, finished, and revised short novel The Whisperer in the Willows
• Wrote only 1 new poem this year, Desperata (Or, The Desiderata of H.P. Lovecraft)
• Started and finished new short story “Subclinical”
• Started and finished new short story “Never the Twain”
• Started alternate history novel The American in His Season
• There was also miscellaneous editing on some older short stories mixed in throughout the year (apparently to no avail, heh)

SALES & PUBLICATIONS

• Short story “Head Music” was reprinted in Apex Magazine
• Poem Banshee sold and was published in ChiZine
• Short story “Deadglass” sold and was reprinted in Triangulation: Dark Glass
• Short story “Prelude to a Theme by Dougie Franz” became my first podcast, kicking off the Theme and Variations podcast anthology
• Poem Desperata (Or, The Desiderata of H.P. Lovecraft) sold to Dark Faith anthology, forthcoming in 2010
• Short story “All That Remains is the Middle” sold and will be reprinted in Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy & Nostalgia, forthcoming in 2010.

EDITING & NONFICTION

• Worked all year as editor of 29th edition of The Management of Security Assistance, the Defense Department’s 700+ page textbook of arms dealing.  The first few thousand copies should already be delivered and in storage at work when I return.

RECOGNITION

• 2008’s Talebones story “A Road Like This, At Night” made the long list of Honorable Mentions for Year’s Best Horror
• And so did my 2008 ChiZine poem Sugar and Old Spice

Folks seem to be liking PARSEC’s  Triangulation: Dark Glass.  Check out what readers at Sci-Fi Online and Small Press Reviews had to say.  (PS They are spot on about Rachel Swirsky and D.K. Thompson’s stories–my favorites of the book.)

And there are a few nice comments here and there on the various podcasting sites Theme and Variations has been made available on.  It’s a wonderful arrangement (see what I did there?) of music-themed stories.  If you like audio fiction, this one is a “don’t miss.”

None of these reviews single my stories out in any particular degree, but it’s nice to be part of a winning team!  :)

The decision by the journal’s owner, the Nielsen Company, to close Kirkus stunned the industry, with a reaction that was a mix of “Oh no!” “Good riddance” and “Ho hum.”

I guess I’m of the Ho-hum school on this one.  I’ve never been a bookseller trying to sell books, but it seems like if that was the market they primarily served, they had to know their niche was going to be gradually eaten away by the internet’s democritizing influence.  In broad general terms, the throughline of the past twenty years is of proscriptive “we know what’s best for you” avatars of just about anything–taste, culture, government, ideology–being toppled or at least threatened by the cacaphony of free information and expression that the internet provides.  Isn’t that why China and Saudi Arabia and many other countries work so hard to limit their citizens’ access to it?  And why some have banded together to protect our liberties online?

The way to “not just survive, but prevail” in the kind of laissez-faire world the internet would have us live in is to develop the ability to think for ourselves.  After all, the only other options are to let some single individual think for us (i.e. pastor, pundit, politico) or to just follow whatever herd of sheeple best strokes your instinctual sense of “the way things oughta be”.   The internet lets everyone have a voice, and the only way to separate signal from noise is the old standby: independent, critical thought applied by an open mind.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I do feel bad for the people who are economically affected by this.  I wish them the best of luck in finding new, rewarding work.  Losing a job (or an entire industry) is always painful, and the never-ending parade of what-comes-next in a modern society can be a terrifying thing.   But  I suppose it is especially terrifying for the subset of the population who feel most comforted when parental figureheads shush them, pat their backs and murmur “there, there” from strategic positions within the bedrock of establishment.

Happy Hanukkah!

Just finished the hardback of 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill’s collection.  I picked it up for 6$ on the remainder table at Barnes & Noble.  The collection was so overwhelmingly solid and rich, like a good, dense hunk of Granny’s chocolate cake, that I feel ashamed for having paid so little for it. I suppose I’ll have to make up for it by getting HORNS in hardback when it comes out.  After HEART-SHAPED BOX, and now this one, I’d have to be a fool not to.

***

I’ve decided I’m probably not going to blog everything I read next year. I’ve been doing it for the past few years now.  Time to shake things up and see what happens.  It’s been fun to do, in its way.  Interesting to look back over what I’ve read in a year, and see if the stories that affected me strongly then still do.  Analyzing the trends of my own reading has been instructive as well.  But there comes with those benefits a kind of tension:  How much of what I end up reading, and in what order, is shaped by the knowledge that I’ll be blogging about it later?   How does the decision to make a public statement about something I’ve read impact what I have to say about it, what I think about it as I am reading it? The Observer effect is not limited to quantum physics, even though that field doesn’t deign to consider the internalities of the observed.

None of which is to say I won’t blog the occasional exceptional read–I doubt I could stop myself, honestly.  But I’m interested in seeing what happens to my reading and opinions when there aren’t any witnesses.  Maybe in 2011, I’ll start up again, maybe not.  So anyway, just a heads up, in case anyone out there gives a hoot.

For those folks checking out my blog who aren’t already plugged in to the writerverse–What are there now, like three of ya?–here’s a look at the striking new cover for Dark Faith, an anthology exploring the intersection of what we fear and what we believe.  My poem “Desperata” will be included and I’m pleased as punch about it!

Looking forward to the release date this coming May!

(Click on either of the title links to see the positively swoonworthy table of contents!)

Dark Faith cover

(An occasional reminder to myself of the things I think I’ve figured out about the craft, hobby, business, joy and dismay of writing, being a writer, and having a head full of strange. Feel free to come along for the ride.)

Haven’t done one of these posts in a while… Life’s been kind of hectic.  Plus, I haven’t had any grand mal epiphanies of late.  Then this one came along, so I knew it was time to share.  Thinking about characterization and what makes a good character, I realized that when I’ve written my favorite characters (or read them) I’ve always had in mind at least one central lie the character tells himself or herself, and understood why it was that character’s whole world depended on them believing it.

Is it the doting daughter who insists her aging father can’t get along without her help–when he really can?  The wiseass who needs to be at the center of the spotlight or his life is meaningless? The martyred mother who swears she’s nothing like her own? The scientist who’s willing to throw out evidence he doesn’t understand?  The frumpy former goth who never takes care of herself, because if she let herself be gorgeous it would mean she had given in and conformed?

When you know what the lie is, and why the character needs it to be true–believes their whole world might fall apart if it wasn’t true–then you have a real personality to write about.  Let it color the character’s outlook and behavior in a way that gives them a sense of internal consistency.

Of course, this revelation may lead you to immediately chart out a course of events designed to make the character eventually confront that lie.  Be careful, a little bit of that goes a long way in any given work.  Can’t have five characters uncovering their lies in one flash fiction, you know?

A character you are writing/reading right now has a lie they tell themselves, or maybe even one they hardly dare acknowledge; they’ll fight to the death to protect it. Do you know what it is?

Making Light has a good roundup of Wal-Mart Black Friday abuses, but why stop there?

Don’t forget the performance activist Reverend Billy’s question:  ”What Would Jesus Buy?”  (I have a story along these same lines that predates the Rev, but I’m not gonna hold it against him.)

Woke up this morning to news that my story “All That Remains is the Middle” will be reprinted in Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy and Nostalgia.  Some cool ToC-mates listed here.

I’m really happy this one will see more readers.