Assumptions

Assumptions are the bane of the human race.

Case in point:

The other night I was sitting in my cab when the phone rang.

"Night and Day Taxi."

"Hi, I'm in Hendersonville, and I need a cab at Dos Margaritas."

"You say Los Margaritas?  What is that, a bar?"

"Dos Margaritas."

"Oh, okay. You got a street address for me?"

There followed an extended exchange of mumbled words between my customer and someone else on the other end of the line.

"Uh, it's near Industrial Park Blvd."

I inputted this into my GPS and got a hit. "Okay, I'll be right there."

I hustled out to Fletcher, pedal to the metal.  But when I got there I found myself out in the middle of freakin nowhere.

The phone rang again.  "How close are you?  Will you be here soon?"

"Okay, where are you again?"

"Where are you? I can probably just direct you,"

"Well, the reference point you gave me was Industrial Park Blvd, but there's nothing remotely resembling a restaurant up here.  I'm in Fletcher, right on the edge."

"What?" He sounded peeved. "Fletcher? Where's that?"

I couldn't keep the exasperation out of my voice. "It's the town just north of  Hendersonville.  Surely you've heard of it?"

There followed a very long pause. "Never mind, sir.  I'll just call somebody who knows what he's doing."

That suited me just fine.

Later on, when I had some time to kill, I did a search for Dos Margaritas.

And found it. In Hendersonville, Tennessee.

Night and Day Taxi, the company I drive for, is based out of Hendersonville, North Carolina.

So Mister I'll Just Direct You, his voice oozing self confidence, had called for a cab in a city more than an hour away from him.  And then had the gall to suggest that I didn't know what I was doing.

And I'd assumed, at first, that he was right and I was wrong.

Assumptions...

SF writers and fans are so cool...

Excuse my for being a grumpy old bastard, but I absolutely refuse to spell that word as 'kewel'. I mean, come on, kids, what's up with that? And while I'm ranting here, why do you young doofuses all wear your baseball caps backwards? To show what nonconformists you are? (That's called 'irony'. Look it up..)

Anyway, today I had an actual hugo-nominated SF writer in my cab, one Cathrynne M. Valente. I've fallen out of touch with much of modern SF, and I'm sad to say I hadn't heard of her before, but after talking to her (briefly), I googled her, and I'll probably wind up being a fan. Her novella sounds very intriguing, and she was a very nice person.

And she mentioned my name in her Twitter feed. How ccol is that?

(I must confess--I don't really "get" Twitter... But I digress...)

Anyway, how could I not be  a fan?

And speaking of fans, just last Sunday (Father's Day), I picked up a woman in Flat Rock going into Hendersonville to visit her dad at a rest home. I happened to mention that I was thinking of getting my brother a copy of the John Carter DVD for Father's Day, and we wound up having a pretty far-reaching conversation that touched on E. E. Smith as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, and Andre Norton.

I don't usually get to have too many literary conversations in the cab, but that's two in less than a week...

Pretty damn cool...

An Interesting Encounter

You do tend to meet some interesting people when you drive a cab--people you'd never encounter otherwise.

I work the Asheville Airport on weekdays, but on Saturdays and Sundays, during the day I am Night and Day Taxi in Hendersonville. The company doesn't have a dispatcher; they just give you their company cell phone and turn you loose.

About Noon last Sunday I was half asleep, sitting in my cab downtown, when the phone jarred me awake.

I picked it up. "Night and Day Taxi."

"Hey, I'd like to request  a cab to come pick me up at one o'clock."

He went on to give his address, but he instructed me to meet him at the convenience store just down the block from him.

As it happens, it was a rainy day, so I assured him it would be no problem to come right to his doorstep. He said no, just meet him at the Marathon store.

I sort of hate time calls like that--they can seriously fuck up your flow. What happens if you get another call at 12:30, do you try to squeeze them in or do you have to turn them down? Time calls just stress me out.

Anyway, I figured I might as well get there early, so at 12:40 or so I was sitting in the parking lot of the convenience store.

He called me at about 12:45. "Hey, I'm the guy who ordered the cab for 1:00, I'd just like to confirm that you're coming?"

"As a matter of fact, man, I'm sitting in the parking lot of the Marathon station right now--I'm looking at your mailbox and your driveway as we speak. You sure you don't want me to come on up to your house? So you don't have to walk through the rain?"

"No, no, no, man, just sit tight. I'll be right there."

It hadn't quite dawned on me yet, but here was a customer who urgently wanted his cab.

I generally prefer for customers to sit in the back, but sometimes I'll clear off the front seat for them, which involves putting my laptop and whatever books I've brought with me to read in my rummage-sale briefcase and depositing it in the trunk. It's more trouble then I usually care to go to, but this guy was talking to me like I was already sort of his buddy, so I figured it might be worth my while to cater to him, tip-wise.

He fooled me, though. He got in the back. "I want to go to the the Octopus Garden at 2000 Spartanburg Highway; I'll only be in there a minute or two, so if you could just wait on me?"

This was turning out much better than I had expected. I was picking him up in Laurel Park and the place he wanted me to take him was down in East Flat Rock--and I assumed I'd be taking him right back to Laurel Park again. Awesome.

I generally try to make conversation with my fares. One good ploy is to ask them what's going on at their destination.

I had previously been told at some point that his destination was a "smoke shop", so I (naively) asked, "What's the attraction at  The Octopus Garden? I know they have the cheapest prices for cigarettes and all, but look at what you're spending on cab fare."

"Naw, man, I  ain't after cigarettes, I need to get some of that herbal smoke, you know?"

I did know, vaguely. "That's the stuff that's supposed to be just like marijuana?"

"You got it, man. They open at 1:00 on Sunday. I've been waiting all morninng."

Okay, so I needed to re-define "smoke shop". Well, that's part of being a cab driver. You live and learn.

It developed that he was joining the marines soon, and that he'd been smoking pot since he was 13 (he was now 27) and that he didn't want to disgrace the marine corps by doing anything illegal. Fortunately, the herbal smoke was just as good as the illegal shit.

Like I say, you live and learn.

I had to wonder if this young man was really cut out to be a marine, but it would have been rude of me to say so.

"I've been staying with my aunt, that's why I didn't want you to come up to the house. As far as she knows, I just went out for a walk."

"In the rain?"

"Heh. Yeah."

We pulled up to the Octopus Garden. "Whenever I pass this place," I said, "I always think of the old song..."

"What old song?"

"The Beatles Song! Come on..."

"Oh, sorry."

I sang, "I'd like to be.... under the sea..."

"I never heard that one. But I bet they named their shop after that song."

Probably. But time flies, and fame is fleeting...

I found myself at a loss for words.

Anyway, I took him back to Laurel Park after he got what he'd been jonesing for, and he gave me a nice tip, and he left me feeling vaguely positive about the future of his generation.

I don't think he'll last too long in the marines, though...

Once A Cab Driver, Always a Cab Driver, Part 2

That last post was a little truncated. I actually had more to say, but it was late and I was tired. Sometimes you just hit that wall called fatigue and you're done for a while.

One thing that occurs to me is that I've been a writer longer than I've been a cabbie--I got my first typewriter when I was ten years old.

Be that as it may, I remember that getting my job as a cab driver for City Cab (now defunct) when I was 19 years old was a real break for me. Even now, looking back, it's hard to see it any other way.

I was fresh out of High School, and my first job as a pizza delivery driver had only lasted a couple of months. I think I lasted maybe a month as a construction laborer. I remember feeling a little desperate, hoping to find something that would last.

City Cab was a small company, with maybe a dozen cars. My first regular assigned cab was a 1968 Plymouth--cab #18. When I first started, the meter read 50 cents on the flag drop (meters actually had flags in those days), and the rate was 10 cents a mile.

I remember the company manager coming to get me on my first day, giving me a ride to work, telling me stories about the cab business. All I seem to remember at this late date was that he told me a high percentage of cab drivers were alcoholics.

City Cab was later bought out by Yellow Cabs of Tallahassee. And my income increased.

I'll probably post some more stories about those days, but it was really a long time ago; memories tend to fade...

Anyway, I just wanted to finish up the truncated post. My next blog entry will probably be about writing...

Once a cab driver, always a cab driver?

Short answer: No. Driving a cab is something you do, it's not something you are.

Long answer: I wouldn't mind if the answer was yes.

And that's enough with the philosophy for now.

In practical terms, I've been playing the role of an Asheville cabbie for about 5 or 6 weeks now.  It's been an ongoing adventure, and for the most part I've enjoyed it. I was able to pay my first month's rent at the RV Park where I reside just a couple of days ago, and today I bought an old Dell Windows XP laptop at a pawnshop for $155--and I still have enough money left in my wallet to make change for a twenty!  Life is good.

I wanted the laptop because I also write science fiction and suspense/thriller fiction (and I reserve the right to branch out into writing westerns or romances if the notion takes me), and I'm self-publishing on the internet--and I need to be able to upload my work in a timely manner.

You know what I mean... Smashwords...  Amazon... yada yada yada...

More about all of that later. This post is about cab driving!

I got my first cab driving job in 1972 when I was 18 years old, fresh out of high school, driving for City Cab in Tallahassee, Florida. Which company was shortly thereafter bought by Yellow Cabs of Tallahassee. Those were good years.

Ah, well, that's enough for now. Stay tuned for more.

This is now also a taxi driving blog

It will continue to be my writing blog, as well. And at some point it will be an RV blog, too--but I'm too tired to go into much detail about that tonight.

Suffice it to say there have been a lot of changes in my life lately. About a month ago, I got a job driving for Night and Day Taxi in Hendersonville, NC, and today, with the help of my family, I bought a little old Dodge RV to live in.

I drove a cab in Tallahassee, Florida for just about a decade, from 1972 to 1982, and after that I drove in Tampa for about a year. I always enjoyed being a cab driver, and I'm enjoying it once again. I'm actually assigned to work at Asheville Regional Airport; I don't get into Hendersonville much. Most folks who get into a cab at the Asheville Airport want to go into Asheville. Go figure.

As much as I love the business, it sucks when business is slow. Which it has been lately. But they say summer is the busy season around here, so I'm hopeful that things will pick up.

We'll see.

The Family that Writes Together, or My Nephew the writer (with a nod to my grandmother)

Recently I had the pleasure of working on a project that was a bit of a departure from the stuff I usually do.

My Nephew, Patrick Alexander Walston, had written a piece of what he calls "zombie fiction", so I took it upon myself to edit it and format it for Smashwords.

Never say never, but I don't think I'll be cranking out any zombie fiction myself anytime soon—yet I was fascinated to read Pat's story. It's a little rough around the edges, but despite some of its gruesome aspects I found Twelve Days in Hell to be charming.

Apparently zombie fiction is a recognized sub-genre with a loyal cadre of fans, so I'm glad I was able to help him put his stuff out there. If he keeps it up, I may very well be known someday as that old geezer who's related to the famous young writer, Patrick Walston.

Writing does tend to run in families, I'm convinced of that.

My maternal Grandmother, Blanche Reinick, wrote a novel many years before I was born. I gather that it was set during the American Civil War and that it was partially inspired by Gone With the Wind.

I believe she wrote at least one other piece of fiction, too—based on a half-remembered conversation with my Aunt Marti—but as far as I know there are no surviving manuscripts of hers in existence today.

I inherited her portable typing table, though.

It's a sturdy old thing, built of heavy-gauge metal and originally spray-painted a dark green, with little caster wheels, and with two surface extensions that fold out like wings to give you some extra working space.

It was built to hold some weight—typewriters in the 1940s must have been heavy damn things.

My clunky old CRT monitor and Compaq Windows XP Computer are both easily as bulky as antique typewriters, so the typing table is serving me well. I don't  need a fancy desk—Grandmom's table suits me just fine.

I just wish she could have lived to see the e-book era.

There's probably still a market for Civil War fiction...

Welcome, Readers!

Hello. Thanks for dropping by!

Up until now, this blog hasn't been overburdened with visitors.

But I've provided some links to it in the two free e-books I just released, so I expect that maybe there will be some occasional traffic now.

If that's indeed how you found this place, you're most welcome here.

If you're curious as to what I'm putting out next, lately I've been working on a novelette called The Dreaming Game, which I expect will weigh in at about 15,000 words or so. I'll release it as a 99 cent e-book just as soon as I finish it.

I'm not sure when that will be. I should have the first draft completed in a couple of weeks, but I may want to put it away for a bit before I do the final revision. I was hoping to have it ready for the Christmas Season, what with its explosion of new e-reader owners and all—but hopefully a few of them will still be downloading books in January or February.

After that, I have some other story ideas that are bubbling inside me—but if I get any positive feedback on Saviors of the Galaxy, maybe I'll buckle down and finish that novel first, before I do anything else.

Unfortunately, I'm prone to procrastination. But if there was ever a time for me to put my nose to the grindstone, I believe this has got to be it

I've already basically done the cover for Dreaming Game, though, so at least that won't hold things up. I may change the color of the graphics. Or perhaps not.

Here, take a gander:

Like several other of the covers I've done, it was made with the Windows 98 Paint program and an old version of MS Power Point (or Powerpoint, or however you're supposed to write it).

For the most recent cover (the one I did for Incident on Sugar Sand Road, a short story), I upgraded to the Windows XP Paint program, but as far as I can tell it's identical to the earlier version—I had to switch computers a couple of months ago, otherwise I'd have stayed with Windows 98.

I'm on one hell of a shoestring budget, if you should happen to wonder why I've chosen this whole route.

I was a lot happier with the Saviors cover before I released it, to tell you the truth. If you've read the book you probably figured out by now that the green fuzz on the buildings is vegetation, but I do have to wonder—what do people who haven't downloaded the book make of it? And the colors, which looked all right as a bitmap file, seem to look a little yucky as a PNG file.

Whatever. Anyway, right now I'm happy with the Dreaming Game cover. As soon as I release it I may decide it's too weirdly abstract or something, but I was trying to create an image that would look interesting as a thumbnail—which is how most people will first see it—and I wasn't worried about making it look realistic.

Overall, I'm having a lot of fun with my foray into electronic publishing.

That's not really reflected in some of this blog's posts, I'm afraid. I've been guilty of pontificating about e-publishing vs. traditional publishing when the fact of the matter is that I'm just another opinionated writer jumping on that viral bandwagon because Indie publishing feels so very right for me.

I've already detailed the reasons why—but there was no need to keep making an issue of it, was there? I'm just one among many aspiring writers who got trampled in the rush over the years, and I've blogged about that too. I live out in the middle of freaking nowhere, and I've never even set foot in New York (unless JFK airport counts), and it was just plain silly of me to imply that I had intimate acquaintance with the ins and outs of the publishing world.

Anyway, I'm happy with the way things are going right now. There's room for all of us, after all. Isn't there?

Happy Holidays, everybody.

The Gradient between Science Fiction and Fantasy

What is Science Fiction? What is Fantasy? What do they have in common? How are they different?

You might as well try to write a grammar book. What is a verb?  Define it, please!

Okay, whatever.

Back when people were living in caves, if Ugh the storyteller came up with a neat little tale about how those fluffy white things in the sky were sentient beings of some sort, and how when they darkened and poured down torrents of water it meant this thing or that thing, the tribe gave him a chunk of meat to eat even though he hadn’t been involved in the hunt.

That was a pretty good deal for Ugh. If he was a thoughtful person maybe he really believed his story was possible. Perhaps he was actually engaged in honest speculation. So let’s call him the prototypical science-fiction author.

On the other hand, maybe Ugh was a mystic who truly believed the clouds were departed spirits or whatever. So was he a fantasist, then? Well, if you allow the concept of "spirits" into your worldview in the first place, is it really mysticism at all? I would answer no. So Ugh should be considered a mainstream author in that case.

And in fact, since the estates of ancient cave dwelling authors aren't protected by current copyright law, you could legitimately riff on one of his old stories without fear of consequence: Cloud People—Today's Generation. 

Ah, but you know that clouds aren't sentient beings, don't you? Then I'm sorry to tell you this, bub, but you've just moved into the fantasy authors' ghetto. The welcome wagon will be along to visit you shortly.  

Now, at some point, some bright soul in Ugh's tribe probably noticed that water evaporates in the sun. And sooner or later people will generally notice that fog and mist feel wet, and that they both resemble clouds. So eventually the tribal consensus would have been that clouds are a form of water.

But as long as nobody could prove it, well, we'd still have some wiggle room.

Nevertheless, if Ugh's grandson had continued the "sentient cloud" series a generation later, when everybody finally "knew" that clouds were made of water, he'd probably also have been labeled a fantasy author.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

I recently saw a great article by Lois McMaster Bujold on this subject (it was on the CD-ROM that was included with Cryoburn). She opined that science fiction aficionados were seeking a "sense of wonder", whereas fantasy buffs were looking for a "sense of the numinous".

She's written some great stuff in both genres, so I'm inclined to listen to her.

Now, she didn't say this, but it seems to me that the "sense of wonder" people are basically in awe of the natural universe but don't care to have dogmatic explanations shoved down their throats. Which means their ranks will include atheists (who are quite the dogmatists themselves, ironically enough), agnostics (some of whom could go either way), and a large group of quite sensible people who intuitively have faith and are open to amazing possibilities.

Conversely, I think the "sense of the numinous" folks are more in awe of the very fact of existence itself, and are a little less blown away by its outward manifestations.. They wish to find something they're longing for rather than to discover something new.

What something? Again, their ranks will include many sorts of folks, and their answers to that question will vary all over the map.

There, is that all vague enough for you?

Obviously, the two fandoms aren't mutually exclusive. There are people who like both genres.

As far as that goes, lots of scientifically-minded people have a mystical/religious streak. I fall into that category myself. And I definitely like both genres.

How about you?

Predictions

In this brave new world of indie publishing, obviously there will be many more stories published then there were under the old system. They will be written by writers in various stages of development and with wildly varying degrees of flair. We all know it's inevitable.

Readers and critics may be more understanding then we think. We've at least got enthusiasm and passion going for us, and people may pick up on that. Hey, slush could become fashionable. It might even become an area of study.

Stranger things have happened. If things do turn out that way, remember—you learned about it here first.

I can think of at least one precedent for my prediction—The Eye of Argon

But I digress.

In my home genre of science fiction, there have been many tides of fashion over the years. I'm betting we'll soon be revisiting a lot of them.

For example, once there was something called New Wave. In its heyday (the mid-to-late-1960s and the early 1970s) it indeed seemed novel and exciting. I won't attempt to define it, exactly, but there was a certain psychedelic stream-of consciousness aesthetic to a lot of it, and literary pretensions absolutely abounded—but they were good-hearted pretensions, all in all, and a lot of good stuff got published. Some writers were pigeonholed as New Wave whether they embraced the movement or not (which was probably good for them commercially), but others felt left out who needn't have doubted their own coolness. It was a heady time.

There are probably at least a few writers who still wish to mine that particular vein of ore. And now they can all be published.

Then there was that whole "Del Rey Books fantasy gravy train" back in the 1980s. That was when Tolkien-style fantasy became viable as a separate genre in its own right (to the point where the Science Fiction Writers of America changed their name to the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, thus cleverly keeping their acronym), due mainly to the vision of one Judy-Lynn Del Rey, who was surely as influential an editor in her own time as John W. Campbell was in his.

Even now a boatload of fantasy writers are doubtless waiting in the wings—including some younger ones inspired by Tolkien's timeless tale who missed that early-80s tsunami of stuff the first time around—and they're all hoping we'll love them. Some of them could even attain their desire.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cyberpunk at this point, but I'm durned if I have a lot to say about it. On the whole, I think it took itself too seriously, but I have to acknowledge the sheer brilliance of William Gibson, and the Cyberpunk aesthetic has certainly been an influential one, even on me—George's databand in Saviors of the Galaxy owes something to Cyberpunk, I think (although I first encountered the concept of 'jacking in' in Samuel R, Delany's Nova, way back in the New Wave era). But I have to admit I resisted reading Cyberpunk solely for the sake of its supposed importance. Which probably means that I missed out on some good stuff.

Might there yet be a few Cyberpunk authors out there hoping to wow us all with their visions?  What do you think?

I'll give one final example of an SF trend (though I could probably think of others): Starting in the early 1960s there was a vogue for something you might call Science Fantasy. Examples would include Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight series, Ursula K. LeGuin's first novel Rocannon's World, many of Andre Norton's novels including the Witch World series, Leigh Brackett's Ginger Star trilogy, and Frank Herbert's Dune series.

There. I've finally gotten around to what I actually wanted to talk about. I don't know how fashionable Science Fantasy might be at the moment, but it's the sort of thing I want to write. And I'll have more to say on the topic in my next installment.

Thanks for dropping by.

Writing as a career

Fred Pohl once remarked; "The good news about writing as a career is that the income curve is asymptotic. The bad news is that it starts at zero." It wasn't till the early '90s that I started making enough money to actually live on and support my family—Lois McMaster Bujold, in an interview that appeared on Baen.com

I'm sharing this quote because it touches on the careers of two people in the topmost rank of my pantheon of admirable writers.

Frederik Pohl, in his memoir The Way the Future Was, recounted that he felt like a failure during the first year of his first marriage, but that certain things he wrote that year continued to earn money over the course of his lifetime, and that in retrospect he realized he'd spent his time more wisely then he knew.

Ms. Bujold informs us it was almost a decade before she could earn a comfortable living as a writer. Yet I can't think of another SF author in the last thirty years who has had a more enviable career than she has.

One thing they have in common is that neither of them gave up.

Food for thought, that.

Look to the Future, part 3

Okay, so I'm a published writer now, in the sense that my first book is available to the public.

So far, it has sold just one copy on Smashwords (so you could also say I've already made my first buck in this business). And as of midnight tonight [this particular paragraph was written on Tuesday, August 30], it will have been out for two whole weeks, officially.

But I didn't choose Smashwords because I expected a lot of sales there. I chose it because I was broke, and they're a free service.

And because of all the places they'll eventually distribute my book to. It's actually a pretty amazing deal they're offering.

They're very up front about your financial prospects with them, including the fact that their own retail operation is very small potatoes. 80% of your sales, they hasten to assure you right at the beginning, will come from retailers other than Smashwords itself. Keep your expectations low, they caution you, Many authors never even sell a single book, they point out.

Fair enough. But still--I'm human enough to have entertained fantasies of being an immediate breakout phenomenon with unprecedented sales right off the bat.

Sigh. Okay. So that didn't happen.

But my book has now qualified for the Smashwords Premium Catalogue, which means it will soon be distributed to Barnes and Noble, the Apple iBookstore, Sony, Kobo, and--by the end of the year--Amazon. And then there's Stanza, which seems to be a way for people to read books on their cell phones--not that I can see why anybody would want to do that, but if Stanza can earn me a few extra bucks I will gladly go along with the gag.

None of this stuff is totally instantaneous. My book has already appeared at Diesel ebooks, but so far it isn't available anywhere else (besides Smashwords), although it's been distributed to Kobo and should show up there any minute now.

I looked at my Smashwords account page earlier this evening, and my book won't be distributed to anybody else, though, until the end of this week.

So. Not instantaneous, but not unreasonably delayed, either. In my opinion.

Reports of sales won't be instantaneous either, and neither will royalty statements. But Smashwords does pay out royalties four times a year, which is much better than traditional NYC-based print publishing ever managed. And likewise, data about sales seems to be on a much faster track than it generally was with traditional publishing.

As fascinated as I am by all this stuff, none of it is really under my direct control. So what am I doing to secure my future?

Writing like mad, that's what.

Anyway, I'm planning to write like mad. Just as soon as I give my trailer a good cleaning. And wash my truck.

Oh, and I mustn't neglect maintaining my presence in the blogoshpere. Gotta keep my name out there, and all that. And there sure are a lot of interesting blog convos going on right now.

Maybe too many.

Still. The best way for me to move forward is to write, publish, and repeat--a formula I first encountered on Kris Rusch's website. So that's what I'm going to be doing.

Soon. Any day now.

At some point I'll also take the opportunity to learn more about computer art and graphics, because I do feel compelled to keep on creating my own covers.

Likewise, there will come a time when I'll need to embrace learning what it really means to be publisher as well as writer. Smashwords is certainly my home base for now, but somewhere down the line it might be advantageous for me to deal with all the various sales outlets directly.

And then there's the POD option. CreateSpace or Lightning Source? I'll need to check that out, because eventually I also want to offer a hardcover print version of my book, on Amazon, at least, since POD makes it so very possible for indie writers like me to do so.

And one of my own personal priorities will be marketing to libraries. How to do that? I'm confident that the quality of a POD book these days will be more than acceptable to potential buyers. But how exactly does one go about cracking the library market?

Wow, I've still got a lot to learn.

But I won't really need to know how to create a spiffy cover, or to make my hardcover edition attractive to librarians, until I have written--at the least--two more actual additional books.

So. Write, publish, and repeat. Let the buyers and readers find you in their own good time. And let the chips fall where they may.

That's the strategy I'll be embracing.

For now.

Just as soon as I can finish cleaning out my truck.

Look to the Future, Part 2

There was a very interesting post on Joe Konrath's blog yesterday. I'm still in the process of absorbing all the implications it raised.

In a nutshell, the only constants in this publishing dance we're all engaged in are writers and readers. Everything else is variable.

That had already occurred to me, actually.

It's perfectly true that things are always changing. Two months ago I had only the very faint hope that I might someday sell something to Tor or Baen. Today I already have my first e-book out, and it's just been approved for the Smashwords Premium Catalogue. Which means it'll be available on quite a few websites other than Smashwords soon, including Apple, Sony, Barnes and Noble, and a number of others. If Borders was still in business it would be available there, too, and by the end of the year it will also be available on Amazon. I don't have to do anything further to facilitate any of this. It's already a done deal.

Now, some writers are apparently afraid that all this great new stuff will change suddenly or go away entirely.

Well, yeah, things always go away. We don't have any control over that. Smashwords could go bust tomorrow. Amazon could drop their royalty rate from 70% to, let us say, 10%. There aren't any guarantees. Like I said, that had already occurred to me.

I don't think any of that is very likely right now. But what do I know? Let's just say nothing would surprise me.

I do think it's silly for writers to wring their hands and worry themselves over stuff they can't change. I think they're fixating on the wrong thing. They're focusing on how they get published, when they should actually be focusing on how they find, build, and continue to reach their potential readership.

It's not too soon to prepare for change, of course. That's why I'll be going back to Joe Konrath's blog today and trying to fully absorb all that was said there yesterday.

I'm a huge beneficiary of the largesse of strangers right now. Smashwords has let me put out my e-book, my way (that's their slogan, in fact) to occupy virtual shelf-space alongside everybody from Stephen King and John Grisham to Mary Shelley and Katherine Stockett. For free. Blogspot has given me this very website, also for free, where I could even sell things if I wanted (like e-books—mine, and maybe yours; someday we might not even need Smashwords or Amazon).

These things are assets. I'm grateful for them. And as long as I've got them, I intend to take advantage of them.

That's all for now. Thanks for dropping by.

Look to the Future

Let me repeat something that's already been said elsewhere: publishing is moving into the future at lightspeed velocity.

Writing and storytelling? Not so much. These ancient and honorable arts remain durable, though they may soon take radical new forms—but if you're a practiced practitioner thereof, trust me, you're still gonna be in demand—even if you ain't that all that radical.

But on the business side, wow, I feel like a spectator at an insanely rapid sporting match where the rules keep changing daily and new players can join the game at any moment. You may not even notice them until you collide with them unexpectedly.

A heck of a lot of stuff has happened this week.

John Locke, of whom I'd never heard before a month ago, and whose work I have not yet had a chance to read, just got an Indie writer's dream deal. He keeps all of his e-rights, and all of his more traditional other rights, and Simon and Schuster will print, distribute, and promote his books in paper form. I don't actually know if he got an advance (probably), or has to submit to editing (that's optional, I'm guessing, but he might want to take advantage of that), or if they'll supply the cover art (almost certainly, but he probably retains the final say-so), but any way you slice it, that seems like a really good deal to me.

It's just that I really didn't think such a thing was possible. I thought we were all lined up over here, and they were all dug in over there.

Just shows what I know.

But I'll damn sure be keeping it in mind. I'd like to have a print publisher someday, but I don't want to give up my e-rights. And I'll bet I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I'm reminded of an interview with musician Steve Miller that I saw in Guitar Player magazine back in the 1970s:

"--but what we did was we really revolutionized the contract. Everybody wanted us; we had we had three major companies really bidding for us. They could see that we were better than most of the bands that were around at that time. So we negotiated for about ten months, and we got all of our studio costs, half the advance, a five album contract; we were given complete control over pictures, advertising, anything they did on us. It had to be approved by us, which was unheard of then. Plus, we got a really hot royalty. We were making twice what the Beatles or the [Jefferson] Airplane were making on royalties. Then we turned around and just gave it away to Quicksilver [Messenger Service] and everybody else--[we] said, "Hey, this is what a contract is." Because it was my attitude that record companies had always historically cheated musicians."

In other news, Smashwords has finally announced that they'll be distributing to Amazon by the end of this year.

For me, these are welcome tidings. The next item on my agenda was going to be investigating what it would take to publish on Amazon—I'm aware of their "Amazon Direct" option, but I don't yet know the specifics (though I'll certainly investigate the matter when I can find the time)—but my gut tells me I'm better off just focusing on my writing now, because there's no way I can have my next book ready for publication any sooner than late November anyway, and if Smashwords is at last ready to put my books on Amazon, I'm just as happy to let them.

So for now, I'm thinking, the future looks bright.

Left Brain, Right Brain

I'm adopting a several new approaches to my writing—or at least I'm thinking about doing so.

In the past, I've always just jumped right in and started writing. This is the approach Stephen King recommends in his book, On Writing, and it seems to be the way Robert A. Heinlein worked, as well, as documented in Grumbles from the Grave—but it's certainly not the way every writer works, and it may not even be the way most writers work. I wonder if anyone's ever taken a survey?

Sometimes, in my case, there has been a kind of pre-planning document that came first, where I sort of told myself a bit about the story in order to get it clear in my mind (or at least enough about it to get started), and sometimes, later on, when I've gotten stuck I've had to do a similar bit of writing about the next part— the part I was having trouble focusing on—in order to continue.

More often, though, I've actually started with worldbuilding and exposition and so forth before I even had much of a story.

Saviors of the Galaxy is a case in point. In the first draft, the conversation between the human and the alien he meets in a bar was considerably longer then what it wound up being because the human was explaining what the hell he was doing way out in that part of the galaxy to me, as well as to the alien. Once I had it all straight, I was able to cut that scene considerably.

And it may still be too long—it just might be a little too much infodumping to lay on a reader all at once. In the end, I decided to keep it because I felt it was interesting infodumping, and because I felt I had whittled it down to a bare minimum, but I don't think I'll be doing much of that sort of thing in the future.

If you want to see what I'm talking about first-hand, the first 35% of my book Incident on Sugar Sand Roand and other stories is free for anyone to sample, and it includes the scene I'm talking about. If you care to take the time, I'd love to hear what you think.

Anyway, what I think I'll be doing from now on is making the pre-planning document (a sort of mutant hybrid between a synopsis and an outline, with lots of cryptic notes to myself) a definite first stage of any serious project, and putting a little more work into it.

I did just exactly this recently, during the week I was without a computer. First I wrote (on paper, with a pen) quite a bit about the universe the story was going to be set in. This was satisfying to the creative side of my brain, and I generally did this at night.

The next morning I would look at what I had come up with, and if I felt that warm creative glow I would continue—but if I didn't, I would look at what I had with a more critical eye, checking for lapses in logic or continuity or whatever. This was satisfying to the analytical side of my brain, and it's something you have to do at some point anyway. Better to do it before you've gone too far down a wrong turn, I've come to think.

Next I wrote a bit about my characters. I had hazy, vague notions about them, but they came into sharp focus once I'd written a little bit about them—a cave girl and a barbarian swordsman, from two different cultures—and three or four paragraphs apiece was all I needed to write.

Then came the story itself, and this is really the first time I've tried to think one through in advance. I'm not talking about plotting, a story, or structuring it so much as discovering it for myself for the first time—in essence, it's a really abbreviated, condensed first draft that I'm talking about here. Writing is creative, in my way of looking at things, and plotting is more analytical—and I agree with Stephen King that it's not exactly trustworthy.

Thinking about it all and setting it down, though—telling myself the story, in other words—was again satisfying to my creative half.

But toward the end I got a little stuck for a bit. The girl, Teshua, and the barbarian, Denegor, had reached Denegor's home city, and Teshua was out of the predicament that had driven the tale up until then.

At this point I started to flounder a bit. What came next?

I flirted with the idea of having Denegor sell Teshua to a brothel—but really, I wondered, what was the point? He's a barbarian, to be sure, but he's not really such a bad guy...

That was when I found myself involuntarily switching gears again from creative to analytical. It's not something you want to do in the same writing session, usually, or at least that's how I feel about it, but this time it was helpful; I was able to clear the blockage that was stopping me. The theme of the story, I realized, was hope. Poor Teshua has been driven from her home into a big wide scary universe she has some mistaken notions about, but she never gives in to despair. Why not?

Because she has hope. It's internal, and the loss of everything else in her life doesn't take it away. Of course she can never rely on anything outside herself again, and that does include Denegor—but it's also true for him; and Teshua realizes this whether he does or not.

At that point I was able to come up with a much more satisfying conclusion to the whole segment.

What I'm going to do next is transcribe the story in detail from the notes I've written so far. There will be enough new things to discover, I believe, that it will be fun. I think it will go fast and that I'll probably be able to do it in a warmly creative sort of mood.

And then I'll just leave it alone for a bit.

See, that's another thing I'm changing about the way I work. No more endless tinkering. I still have some early drafts of Saviors of the Galaxy and they're not really that much tighter or better than the finished product, in spite of the fact that I've been fiddling with that story for years. This is in itself a sort of revelation. There are passages I altered a dozen times, to the point where I probably wound up changing it back to what I had in the first place. That's just silly.

As far as I'm able, I've come to think it will be a good idea to keep the two halves of my mind separate, and work on different stages of the work on different days.

So that's what I plan to do. Thanks for taking the time to read, and thanks for stopping by.

Having Passion for Something You Do

Way back in 1976, as I recall, I read an article in Guitar Player magazine about the founding of Alligator Records.

 It was a Blues label, and at that time Blues as a musical form was at its lowest ebb ever. African-American music was still alive and kicking, but it had grown slick and commercial. There weren’t that many black musicians back then who wanted to be involved even with 1960s-style R&B--much less the blues—because they mostly wanted to be part of that polished “Philadelphia Sound” (think of The Commodores, featuring Lionel Ritchie—or of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes). Or, failing that, they all wanted to jump on the Disco bandwagon, God help us.

Young white American musicians of the era weren’t too keen on the Blues, either. The Ramones from NYC were the prototype, but Punk Rock--imported from the UK—was all the rage, as I remember, and the blues-based psychedelic hippie jam bands of the 1960s were scorned and abandoned.

Alligator Records, based out of Chicago—for many years itself a bastion of the Blues—was formed when its founder, Bruce Iglauer,  noticed that there were still a lot of Blues cats practicing their craft at small clubs in the Windy City even though their music wasn’t “trendy” any more. They were playing out every night for small audiences because they loved it, and they didn’t care about “making it big”. They just wanted to play their music.

They had a passion for what they were doing.

Blues music is of course much healthier these days (as is the jam band scene, now that I think of it), and some of those musicians are still going strong. They’ve had respectable careers doing something they loved because they followed their hearts.

Fast-forward to the present.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the blogosphere of late, checking out the blogs of indie writers like myself. One refrain I’ve heard repeated over and over again is how excited so many of us are about the opportunities that now lie before us.

Some writers are overjoyed to release their work to the world for free. That’s a beautiful thing right there, and I’m glad for them.

Others of us are hoping to derive some income from our work somewhere down the line, but one thing we all share is a passion for what we’re doing.

But those are topics for another day. Because, right now, I’d like to introduce you to my favorite computer tech—the guy who just saved my ass--a young man named Jesse Warne.

Here’s somebody else who’s got a passion for what he does. When I asked him how he got started in computer repair, he told me he read a big thick book about A+ Computer certification when he was 14 years old.

And never looked back.

He installed the hard drive from my old computer into a slightly newer computer that was light-years ahead of what I’d had before. He offered me so many options that my head grew dizzy. Any glitch in the path was promptly countered by a wizardly click into an obscure corner and some well-placed lines of type. I was very impressed.

If you live in Western North Carolina, Jesse’s services are available for hire. Overnight service or in-home, virus removals, custom PCs, upgrades, networks, and consultation. This is a very articulate young man who really knows his stuff, and I highly recommend him.

His business slogan is Best Rates; Guaranteed Services; Fast. Marvelous, don’t you think?

A lot of computer repair people are just in the business because they completed a course, or it seemed like a good direction to follow, or they thought it might be a good career path.

Jesse’s a computer tech because it’s a calling of his heart. That’s the sort of person you want fixing your computer, because he knows way more solutions then somebody who’s just going through the motions. 

Visit his website at http://www.theexpertcomputerrepairs.com                     

And do tell him that I sent you.

My book is available at Smashwords!

Finally! Looks like my little roadside pop stand is open for business at last.

Take a peek at my book here.

Decisions, decisions

I've been making quite a few of them lately, most of them connected with my ongoing journey as a writer.

Earlier this year I was just a lifelong writer with a number of unfinished works-in-progress. There was one in particular I felt pretty good about, a novel called Saviors of the Galaxy that was about two-thirds of the way done.

I was in no particular hurry to finish it, although I'm sure I'd have gotten around to it eventually.

Because--according to the 2010 Writer’s Market--there were only 3 major SF publishers that would look at an unagented manuscript anyway.

I had tried to get a novel published once before, in the mid 90s (when there were many more places where you could submit your work) and I had found the process to be somewhat discouraging, even then.

You sent your novel off to the first publisher on your list. And then you waited.

(Actually, even then few of them would look at a complete manuscript--they wanted to see a "proposal": three chapters and a synopsis. Or, wait a minute, some of them wanted to see a query letter first.

All the writers whose work I admired had lived in a world where you could submit your stuff "over the transom" (so to speak) with some reasonable expectation that it would be given a cursory glance, at least, so the query letter thing and the synopsis thing didn't sit too well with me--but I figured, hey, that's what we're faced with these days, so I'll just have to deal with it.)

The waiting was something you simply had to accept. It would be "unprofessional", you were told, to call them up after six weeks had gone by and politely  ask them if they'd even gotten the thing.

And we all bought into that. We had no choice.

Publishers were "inundated", we were told. It was like we content providers were inflicting some sort of plague on them.

Only when you finally got your manuscript (or proposal) back were you free to then try the next publisher on your list. And start the whole dreary waiting process anew. Because you had to try them one at a time, you see. Simultaneous submissions were not only frowned on, they could get you blacklisted.

In his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card, bless him, tried to make a distinction between simultaneous submissions (not okay, as he admitted) and simultaneous proposals (perfectly all right, he opined), but I was told in no uncertain terms at an SF convention by an editor for Baen that the publishers didn't see it that way. And that you could get a bad name in what was really a pretty small community (New York SF publishing) if you took Card's advice.

When you exhausted all the possibilities on your list, you could start submitting to smaller publishing houses, or try to find an agent (but we were repeatedly told not to bother an agent unless you'd had something accepted somewhere).

I saw all of this as my only path to publication.

Now fast forward to June 17, 2011. That was the day I first learned about indie publishing, when I discovered a new indie publishing board on a writer's forum I frequently visit.

That was when I made my first decision, to forget about traditional publishing and go the indie route. As I said in my very first blog post here, that decision took all of five minutes to make.

My next decisions were to release my first e-book as soon as I humanly could, and to make it an anthology of short pieces I had written over the years.

I'm perfectly well aware that no traditional publisher will release a book of short stories by an unknown writer these days. But I decided to go with what I had on hand, and that decision felt right to me.

Next was my decision to do my own cover. That wasn't so much a decision as a forced necessity--I don't know any artists and I have very little money. But I do have a bit of artistic ability, I think, and I actually rather like what I finally came up with.

Some people may think it's laughable, or that it sucks, but them's the breaks. I'm satisfied with it for now, at least, and nobody has any veto power in the matter.

Then I had to make a decision about the price.

There's been a lot of discussion about price on various blogs, and I was mainly interested in it because it wasn't an abstract debate to me, it was a real actual decision I was going to have to make.

The topic has been more or less beaten to death at this point, so I'll spare you the details of my ruminations. I finally settled on $1.99  as an introductory price, but I'm keeping my options open.

It's been a great deal of fun, this whole journey. And I'll be releasing my first e-book very soon, just as soon as I can get certain computer issues ironed out.

Meantime, thanks for dropping by. 

      

Disaster Strikes!

I'll look back on it as a bump in the road, I'm sure, but my old computer crashed the other night, and apparently no other computer in existence can read the backup floppies I made on it periodically. Talk about your unpleasant surprises.

The Word file of my first book is on its hard drive, the anthology that I was going to submit to Smashwords, as are the 40,000 words or so of the novel I was going to resume working on, and the cover I had already created for it.

On reflection, those are the only things I truly need to retrieve, and my niece's boyfriend is a computer whiz who assures my sister-in-law it shouldn't be much trouble to sort things out.

In the meantime I'm taking the advice of the several indie publishing gurus I admire, and continuing to write. On paper. With a pen.

(I'm able to continue blogging using the computers at my local public library.)

 Oddly enough, I'm enjoying myself.

I went through something like this once before, actually. I used to write on a Brother WP3700 Word Processor with a monochrome monitor, and about a year and a half ago, the cable between the monitor and the main unit went flooey.

No question of replacing it. Have you tried to buy a monochrome monitor lately?

I lost a great deal of the work saved on floppies in its proprietary format that I had done over the years.

Now I'm recreating one of the projects I regretted losing the most. It's all coming back to me, and that's exciting.

It won't be the book it would have been then, I don't think. It will be a better one.

So, all things considered, I'm not unhappy with the situation.

On change in general and the closing of Borders in particular

I'm saddened by the closing of Borders. It seems to me they were a beautifully conceived operation. But unexpected changes took them unawares.

Tell me about it.

It's ironic, but speaking as an aspiring science-fiction writer, change has never been my friend. In the 1980s, when I began seriously contemplating writing as a profession, I used to purchase copies of Locus on a regular basis (if you're an SF writer and you're not familiar with it, you really should be).

In those bygone days of yore, I would often read about promising new writers getting advances in the low five figures.

(The lowest five-figure possibility is $10,000.00— nothing to sneeze at, even today!)

I was greatly heartened by this information. I assumed the situation would remain stable, awaiting the day I could get my act together.

Alas, it was not to be.

There's no need to rehash the whole sad story here. I don't even understand it how all happened. Suffice it to say that advances grew smaller and the number of places where you could submit unagented manuscripts shrank steadily.

You can still catch a break. J. K. Rowling did. But the chances are against it. You'd think nurturing new writers would be considered good business practice, but apparently it's not a priority these days. Everybody's got other things on their minds.

A lot of us have had blinders on, with no choice but to hope for the best. But it's hard to ignore the truth. A crap shoot when nobody's rooting for you is a fool's game.

I'm gonna miss Borders. The publishers will miss them too. Fewer places to buy books means fewer books will be sold. They've hardly started to feel the repercussions, I'm sure.

Another thing I did in the 1980s was purchase all of Robert A. Heinlein's YA novels, the ones I had loved in my youth, in paperback. I got 'em at a grocery store in south Tampa. They were there to buy, so I bought 'em.

You see, it used to be that you could find SF books anyplace they sold paperbacks and magazines. Then things changed, and there was a preponderance of Star Wars and Star Trek books. I don't know how those decisions happen, but that's the way it was.

That's not the way it is now. Now there's nothing. My local grocery store in Hendersonville, North Carolina has a little clone of a big box bookstore in it, half an aisle with books and magazines and chairs to sit on. Paperbacks and hardcovers and magazines, and a nice little wood parquet floor. Somebody spent some money on that setup.

But there aren't any SF books there. Or SF magazines, for that matter. Just top selling writers like Stephen King and Catherine Coulter. That's all you can find there.

No mysteries or westerns, either. You know, I kind of miss westerns.

(There's not even a section for westerns on smashwords. Oh, I know, there's a section for historical fiction. But still.)

I miss record stores, too. I miss browsing through racks of CDs. Fuck that, I miss browsing through racks of vinyl LPs.

　

Those days are long gone.

Borders had a respectable selection of CDs. That's another reason to miss them.

I'm not up on how music consumers get their fix these days. Digital downloads, I presume, but I've never learned how that works. I just know the world has moved on.

I remember being absolutely stunned when the big record store chains closed down. The closing of Borders is just a new version of that changeover. The world has moved on again.

But indie musicians and indie writers now have unprecedented access to their audiences. That's a good thing. I recognize that, even though I still feel like a stranger in a strange land.

It's called serendipity. Nobody planned it. Nobody said hey, let's give all those creative people a break.

But until they figure out a way to close the floodgates--and I'm sure they're busy thinking about it--we've got a window of opportunity.

Let's take advantage of that.

Even as we shed a tear for the way things used to be.