Yay!

After so long with no news, I have more now.

White Crane is available for pre-order in all the usual places. Comes out June 28.  Superheroic Contemporary Fantasy and the beginning of a trilogy, and a whole new world in which to play.

The Blurb:

Kai Di laments the death of her best friend, who, it turns out, lived a double life as a super villain. A secret life she hid from everyone, including Kai Di.

Kai Di’s anger at the world smolders, unquenched by family and the rituals of death.

How can Kai Di properly mourn her closest friend, the one person who understood her, while the rest of the world celebrates her demise? How can Kai Di get vengeance on the “hero” who killed her?

White Crane—the first novel in the fantasy trilogy “Modern Gods”—puts a new spin on the superhero genre in this enchanting, engrossing tale. This story explores coming of age while dealing with great power, the true meaning of good and evil, as well as what sort of payroll options you should give henchmen.

I had fun with it. The genesis of the whole thing was a short story I wanted to tell. In the process of plotting that out, I needed to add back-story. Which turned into more back-story. Eventually, I realized that what I originally had was a couple of chapters in the middle of book three. Which was a pain in the ass.

But in the end, I think it worked out. I really enjoy it. I sent a friend a copy for some favors he has done, and because he really doesn’t like superhero stories to begin with. Didn’t figure I should make him buy a copy, just because he likes my writing.

Couple hours later, I get this email back from him: “God Blaze,this is really good stuff-more later…”

And mind you, he hates superhero fantasy enough to bark at me for wasting my time writing it, when I could be doing for epic SF for him. (One of his favorite categories.)

So hopefully, I done good. It’s hard to categorize this novel, but here goes: YA/New Adult, Coming of Age, Literary (cringe), Superheroic Contemporary Fantasy.

Seriously.

And the cover looks amazing, as well as the interior.

For me, the best part was exploring the seedy underbelly of putting on a cape and cowl. Building a “secret” base. Hiring henchmen. Fighting other costumes. Handling payroll.

And doing it all in a way that “explains” where superpowers come from and why we went from almost none to lots of these people, what Burnham calls Modern Gods.

I already know what book two is about. And most of book three was fully plotted in the course of figuring out how much story I had to tell, so I’ll probably write them over the next two years, assuming I sell more than three copies of book one before Xmas.

I have really enjoyed setting up these characters for a long run, and a lot of depth. It also lets me tell other tales like it, by creating a larger sandbox into which they can play.

It’ll be awesome.

Also, I just got back from CampCon in Oregon this last weekend. Got a good start on the next novel, while camping in the middle of nowhere with friends from all over the northwest. The group is almost all writers (a few artists and spouses), getting together for a solid weekend in the woods with no internet to distract you. I have gone three years now. If you are a writer, and enjoy car-camping with showers and flames hot enough to melt cast aluminium, you should go. We do nothing for four days but write, eat, and sleep. Send me a note and I’ll connect you with all the information.

And more interesting, I’m going to edit the CampCon Anthology that will come out in March. The title will be “Steam. And Dragons.” (Note the period in the middle.) Already have my story done. At least four of the people there have good ideas coming as well.

Watch this space for more news.

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Hiya,

I would have given you more warning, but it came up at the last minute.  My SF thriller novel Imposters is part of a bundle on the Rabbit.

https://bundlerabbit.com/not-only-humans

Very short term bundle (as in, maybe a week, I think), and you’ll get awesome writers like Mindy Klasky, Leah Cutter, Douglas Smith, and  Kim Antieau at the base level. At higher levels, you get my favoritest person (after Fabulous Publisher Babe): Anthea Sharp. There’s also Eric Edstrom, Carl Plumer, Marcelle Dube, J. Daniel Sawyer and, for the really big guns: Dean Wesley Smith, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Sales Copy:

12 Thrilling Summer Reads

From galaxy-spanning alien cultures to the discovery of Bigfoot, these page-turning novels feature gripping stories where humans and non-humans work together, fight each other, and even fall in love.

Pounce now.  These deals will go fast, and this is a great way to explore strange new worlds.  🙂

The seven point plot structure definition of fiction writing starts out with a character, in a setting, with a problem. And you can have different points of view as you go. How does the reader get to see the scene? First Person is inside the character’s head, listening to “I.” Third Person Distant lets you watch the scene as if from the audience of a play, or on television. You can see everything that happens, but are never privy to what the character is thinking.

I generally prefer to write in what is called Third Person Close. You, the reader, are outside watching, but also occasionally get to dip into the head of one character enough that you can listen to their thoughts. In a complicated piece, you might have different points of view, and be able to listen to all of them. (Only one per scene, please, unless you are REALLY freaking good at your craft.)

This is on my mind today because this week I re-read Dash Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. It is a really good book, but I can make easy comparisons to the movie because it is always in Third Person Distant. You can see Spade working, but you never know what he is thinking, only what he says. For the reader, you are absolutely watching the action on a screen, and never get any closer than arm’s length. Think movie, in book form.

I found it somewhere disappointing. This was the first time I have re-read that book since I got serious about my own writing and began to study my craft. I would have made different choices, were I writing that story. But I have the advantage of hindsight, and nearly a century of other people building up the craft of fiction to something far greater than it was then.

Hammett wrote this like a screenplay. I have written those, so I notice and appreciate the difference. Screenplays are almost always Third Person Distant. You must show action and speak words for the audience to “know” something. (There are very few places where a narration effect works. Use them amazingly sparingly, and to set up some complicated money shot.)

In The Maltese Falcon, the story works because nobody knows what is going on behind the facades. You see the faces and hear the words, but all of the characters are duplicitous, and so everything constantly spins and twists until the ending comes upon you as a shock and a surprise.

And it works. I think the movie with Bogart is better, but that was because they took the novel and chopped out the soft spots, and left off the last chapter entirely for one of the best closing lines in the history of cinema.

“The stuff dreams are made of…”

But I found the novel to be a little too much cotton candy. Pretty and tasty, but not the least bit filling.

What is lacked, for me, was Voice.

You have the character, in the setting, with the problem. Spade, in dreary Thirty’s San Francisco, trying to figure out why his partner was killed, what’s the girl’s game, and who can be trusted.

But Spade himself is a cypher.

Hammett pretty much invented the genre of modern, hard-boiled detective. Certainly everyone else is competing with him (and Chandler). Some succeed. Some fail.

Setting is place. Where are you? What does the room look like? What did you have for breakfast?

What I was missing was Voice.

Voice is how the character feels about the setting. “The just-past-over-medium eggs reminded him of Sunday mornings at the old kitchen table back home, in a simpler time. Dad rounding up kids and getting them dressed with Mother running a perfect, little assembly line of food as he and his siblings cycled through, got fed, and waited patiently to go to Church and have their souled saved.”

Not just eggs. Eggs that remind the character of something, whether a good association or a bad one. That take him back to being a child, fussing with siblings, and then getting fed and heading off to Church. Voice.

There is an exercise writers go through occasionally, to practice Voice. Describe the exact same room from the point of view of three characters: One who is happy and excited to be there, one who has been dragged along kicking and screaming, and one who is neutral on everything they see.

You will get three radically different scenes. And this is a good thing. It draws the reader into the world more fully and colors their impressions. The Maltese Falcon kind of fades from my memory after a little bit, because while the characters are all classical archetypes, I’m kept at arm’s length from all of them.

I’m never emotionally invested in any of them.

For that novel, it is necessary. And one of the reasons why I find Chandler more fulfilling. For example, Marlow ending one story putting together a model of a P-38 for the kid. I know how he reacts to all the bad things that have happened up to that point. And that he is trying to do some little thing for a kid he might not otherwise ever see again, just to make the world a better place. Not on a grand scale, but that little corner he can control.

He had Voice.

That is why I like Third Person Close. As a writer, I can show the reader how the character feels about what they see, without long soliloquies. [Seriously, next time you are having a serious conversation on a topic with people you know, pay attention to how many words any one of you says in one stretch, before someone else speaks. Not monologue, but dialogue. (Not counting, of course, That Guy.)]

In a screenplay, we call that effect conversational exposition, where one character needs to spell out a great deal of information. You can always do the info-dump, but that’s clumsy. You have to talk.

In a novel, I do not have that limitation. I can let the reader see what Moirrey thinks about what’s happening around her. And Moirrey has a LOT of Voice, as many of you can attest to. (She has a sizeable role in book four, Goddess of War, which I just completed the first draft. Lots of Voice.) I can show you how someone acts, and then let you see some layer of why.

That’s something I enjoy in what I read, so I try to make it something I practice when I write. I think it makes me a better writer. Hopefully, it give you a better reading experience.

For me, Third Person Close is the most emotionally fulfilling way to craft or consume a story. I will occasionally drop into First Person (Kaleph, for example.)

I don’t generally like Third Distant, because I find it too off-putting. If I have to do something like that, I’m more likely to stay in Third Close, but use a different character as the Point of View, so that you see what they think, rather than the main actor. (In the big scene of The Librarian, I specifically did everything from Suvi’s point of view, while Doyle was trying to decide who to kill. You know her emotional response, and not his, but what you can see of it.)

What is your favorite way to enjoy a story?

My apologies for a wee bit of radio silence recently.  Managed to throw my back out a couple of weeks ago, and then caught a touch of norovirus or something this week as I was close to recovering.  Last night was the first I had slept through this week.  Kinda nice, but still on the mend.

News: Siren is available for pre-order on all the usual platforms, and will drop on May 31 (a little over a week from now).  Thanks to those of you who took advantage of the BundleRabbit Middlings bundle to catch the original release.

Siren takes place after Last of the Immortals (Jessica Keller Book 3) and fills in some of the gap. I needed to work on Vo Arlo and some things that I knew needed to happen in the fourth Jessica novel, so this gave me a chance to focus on him.

It also sets up Book Four, Goddess of War, which I have just about completed (almost done with the complicated last battle and then wrap up). Writer brain is helpfully filling in details and plot threads for Books Five and Six for me this week as I have been flat on my back on pain meds, not moving much. Looking forward to working on those, but in between now and then I have several projects to work on that, while not secret, are not ready to be shared with the whole world.

What I do know for sure is that I’ll be at CampCon in mid-June in Central Oregon. This year, I might be editing the anthology we do each year, so I have some ideas.  It will come out next winter, right before Norwescon.

Next novel comes out in late June. The White Crane, first book in the Modern Gods trilogy.

Kai Di’s best friend was killed and she swears revenge. The problem? The man who did it is a costumed superhero. So she decides to become a supervillain.

Superheroes, coming of age, alternate present world.  Planning other stories in the same universe, just because I spent a lot of time and effort working out the physics and history of superpowers and the world, and because I can. Already have the rest of the trilogy plotted out, but other projects take precedence right now (unless this one simply explodes in popularity and I find that I need to pivot).

After that, the novella Demigod comes out in late July. [REMINDER: Some of you will be getting copies ahead of time as a thank you for participating in the Bundle.] This is a follow-up to The Librarian, seeing the return of Doyle Iwakuma and his crew in their adventures exploring the fallen galaxy. Piper stars in this one, and has a great deal of fun. I had fun with it as well, taking one of my favorite characters and getting to explore some of what turned her into who she will eventually become. (One of these days, there is a Last Waltz novel out there, I just don’t have enough hours in the day right now. And nobody clamoring for more Doyle books. You could fix that, you know.)

Based on current schedules, Goddess of War will come out this fall, a bit before OryCon down in Portland, OR. Planning on being there again this year. Probably will volunteer for panels, but nobody down there knows who I am, so I doubt I’ll be on any. Next year, will probably not even volunteer if they don’t need me.

I’m also editing a couple of anthology collections later this year, as well as contributing, so this will not be a year I publish four novels. Two and some novellas should be enough for everyone, I hope. Depending, I have both the second Henri Baudin novella and the fourth Javier Aritza novella plotted out, and might be able to slot those into whatever free time I eke out. (Vote now!)

That’s about it. Just sent Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) off on her trip and I’m about to log off the interwebs and head off to the farm, where there be dragons. Hoping to grind out more words today and get deeper into that grand finale.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

So every day or so I log in and check my website.  It is probably not obvious, but I have the system padlocked.  If you make a comment on something (and I encourage the humans in my audience to do so), it goes into a queue until it gets approved by an Admin (me, or Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm), generally).

Threw my back out, middle of last week.  Its an old football injury, dating to when I was holding a tackling dummy during practice and a defensive lineman who was mad at my sister blindsided me at full speed, folding me in half sideways. (As an aside, 5’4″ coach grabbed 6’3″ lineman by the facemask after they got me vertical again (no concussion, but serious hurt). Pulled him all the way down to face level. Rattled his skull with an open palm (and class ring) to the side of the football helmet, loud enough the entire practice field turned around to look.)

So thirty years later, I get flare ups every year or two. Bent down, and something tore in the muscles in my back. When that happens, one of the vertebrae moves left and twists. And then everything swells up and holds. And I’m horizontal for a week, in a mind-boggling amount of pain.

Fabulous Publisher Babe has been working on a fixit regime.  Heat. Massager. The right meds. Was actually able to walk by Saturday, and am at work on Monday (sweating because I have a heat wrap around my middle cooking me). Going to try a new accupuncturist this week, now that everything’s largely aligned again.

Because we were at the farm, I had not internet access. I kinda like that concept. Got to Starbuckistan on Sunday and looked up bw.com.  I had 28 possible spams in my queue. (Thank God for Wordfence. If you have a wordpress site, install Wordfence right now and set it to shoot-on-sight.)

The crap fell into two categories. SEO was the smaller group. Lovely emails explaining how I can pay someone a small fee and they will optimize me for search engines. I might even believe them, if they ever had “real” email addresses, instead of randomly-generated hash.  That’s the mark of a script kiddie somewhere firing off fifty thousand emails and hoping for a sucker.

(Personally, I think we should be charged a penny each for the emails we send, by our ISP. Partly for infrastructure, partly so that fools will stop sending ten million spams. If Coca-cola wants to have that as a marketing budget, more power to them. But otherwise, piss off.)

The other group were more interesting. The same basic email, within small limits, explaining that the Orange candidate for USPresident was functionally identical to a former Chancellor of Germany in the thirties. Did I really need eighteen of those emails? I presume the included links were either crude youtube videos or drive-by download sites waiting to infect my computer with Russian Chat Relays. Or both.

Why am I thinking these mean thoughts?

A friends of mine took me aside at a con, a while back, to thank me. “What for?” I said.

“As long as I’ve known you, both online and in person, I still have no idea what your politics are.”

That still makes me smile. And she still doesn’t know.

Don’t get me wrong. I”m a political junkie of the first order. But I also believe that good fiction does not require a political axe being ground. (I have other axes, if you pay attention.) I don’t want to alienate at least a third of my fans by being “one of them.” (And that really happens. I will not read certain authors, just because I choose not to support them and their political views with my money. If I do it, you probably would, too.)

So I hope, with this little note, you might pay attention a bit more to things you read on the interwebs. Look at the actual sender address (and not just the display name) and see if it passes a sniff test. Get involved with politics, by reading things you don’t agree with, and deciding if your views need to evolve enough to accept that things might have changed and you need to change with them.

Vote.

That’s all. I don’t care who you support. Here in Washington, I will have probably 10 different candidates for USPresident this year, including both a Stalinist and a Trotskyite. (I love America. Where else do you get that kind of option?)

Make your voice heard, but not by walking in, picking a letter, and going down the line. Again, in Washington, I HAVE to vote my mail-in ballot. That means I open a beer, spread out the voter’s guide on the kitchen table, and spend an hour, reading what the candidate thinks is important. Not what the ads say (I gave my last television to Goodwill years ago, and don’t miss it. Spend too much time on a screen at work, thank you very much.) but what the candidate themselves wanted me, the voter, to know. Are they visionary? Completely insane? Hopelessly partisan? Bitter kitten?

“Will my vote make this a better world for my five daughters and my grandkids?”

Your vote will.

If you don’t vote, as important as it is, you are telling those lazy shits that send us spam that they don’t have to worry about things. This is good enough. The world could go to hell in a handbasket, to quote my father, and you would still be glued to your weekly shows and gossip sites.

Passive.

That level of spam only works if everybody accepts it. I don’t. That’s why I have to spend the time deleting it and blocking those senders. I shouldn’t. You shouldn’t.

But you have to care. I can’t want your world to be a better place than you do. Or, to quote Fabulous Publisher Babe: “You made those choices.”

Make better choices. You’ll be amazed what you can accomplish.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

okay, so I don’t always blog on a believable schedule.  But I wanted to put this out there. I got invited to a new bundle, focused entirely on science fiction this time. Auberon is in there, for those of you who have not gotten around to reading it. There are also a bunch of other people with various book ones to read

Plus, it’s Mother’s Day this weekend. Have you gotten her a present to read?  Why not?

🙂

https://bundlerabbit.com/scifi-may-day

I did warn y’all this was coming, didn’t I?

The deal is this:

Buy the full bundle. $12 for 12 books. SUCH A DEAL.

Email me (Blaze at BlazeWard dot com) the receipt from Bundle Rabbit, showing that you’ve bought all the books.

I will email you a zip file containing the epub and mobi of The Science Officer.

This deal only lasts for the next 24 hours, so until April 21st, 10 AM.

Here’s the blurb of the novella:

When pirates commandeer Javier’s starship, they give him a choice: corpse, slave, or volunteer.

Javier chooses to survive, as well as keep his honor and his sanity intact.

However, when things get rough, will he save the pirates from someone even worse?

This novella is Volume 1 of The Science Officer. Find the continuing stories of Javier Aritza in The Mind Field and The Gilded Cage.

Sooooo…for a short time only. Twenty four hours. You’ll actually get THIRTEEN books for just $12.

Hurry and get yours!

First nice weekend of the season. That means a garden and an orchard that needs weeding. It includes slightly overgrown game trails that need work with the machete. It involves frightening the deer.
(Seriously, I went out to throw some stuff in the composter this morning. It’s across the open backyard, close to an ancient two-horse barn in an advanced state of falling down. I’m about ten feet away from the composter, minding my own business, when a little black-tail deer pops up from where she had bedded down, and scampers back to the far corner of the space, where she can flee down the side of the hill to safety.)
I’ve got a pair of horse troughs out for her and her kids. One is in the upper meadow, over by the pumphouse. The other is across the driveway from the orchard, close to the septic drain field. And I frequently put out deer licks for her to get all the trace minerals she needs.
They’re almost pets, in case you couldn’t guess.
One of my neighbors, years ago, said she sat for thirty minutes one day and watched momma give birth to twins at the bottom of my long driveway. I have no idea if the one I saw today was momma or one of her daughters. I never bothered to figure out how long black-tail live in the semi-wild exurbs of the Central Cascades. (If any of you know, an email would be nice.)
And, it’s spring. That means Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I get up kinda early on a Sunday to go into town for breakfast. I had a serious hankering for chicken-fried steak for breakfast, but there ain’t nothing approximating it at the grocery. (And I asked around.) And I did not have the mood to make it for myself from scratch today.
So back still early from breakfast, and walking around, getting in my steps.(The fitbit is a terrible taskmaster.) I have a long driveway, and I can cross over to a neighbor’s driveway easily, so it makes a nice loop for about a thousand steps.
Fabulous Publisher Babe™ looks at me like I’m nuts when I grab my work gloves out of the back of the pickup. “It’s a farm. There’s always something needs doing.” I was afraid she was going to hurt herself rolling her eyes at me, but she grabbed her gloves as well and we went to walking.
Yesterday, I had been pulling up vine maple and some similar scrub weed trees by the roots to clear things. They grow shallow and the dirt is soft. Today, it was scotchbroom everywhere that needed to be pulled up.
Have I mentioned that I have brambles of blackberry and salmonberry everywhere? Unless I wear long sleeves, I get ripped, cut, spiked, etc. (Hence, the spring and bleeding.)
And I got critters around here. They kind of mat down the weeds and salal bushes on the hillside. Mostly several deer and at least one small herd of elk. (Came around the corner getting home early from work one day over the winter and stumbled into a bull, eight cows, and two babies that had been hanging out in the septic field. Most of them bounced up the side hill and hid, but the matriarch gave me the stink eye as I parked, smiled at her, and walked in the front door, from maybe fifty feet away. Watched them from the living room window for the next twenty minutes before they ambled off.)
For today’s afternoon walk, after some time working on the latest Jessica Keller novel, instead of walking the driveways, I grabbed the machete and we went overland over the top of the hill and down the back. There’s a trail, mostly. It involves winding around a little, following old paths a little grown over. And a machete. And blackberry and groundberry vines every-bloody-where.
I cut, I pull, I toss. Fabulous Publisher Babe follows, also pulling and tossing. There are deadfalls that need to be moved to one side so I can get in there with a saw later in the spring and chop them up for a burn. They always have hidden nubs and branches that catch me blindside. There are ferns everywhere that need to be stomped down and eventually moved out of existence. Down to the bottom of the hill we go, re-hacking a trail I put down two or three years ago.
Then down and up the side-hill. I have a pond at the bottom of the hill that never gets more than about a meter deep in summer. And maybe another thirty cm deeper in the winter.
There’s a trail that runs alongside it, but it’s a swamp right now, until the water recedes and the ground dries out. So we go up the side of the hill. This is an old game trail the deer have put down, filled with all sorts of places that they bed down. And a lot of deadfalls. And it is spring.
Machete work. In the middle of stinging nettles and thorn bushes.
Just now, counting my forearms, I have blood in eight places. And that’s after I took a shower because I had grown a little funky.
But it is a gorgeous day. Just looked at the thermometer in the orchard box and it is sunny and right at 80F. Kitty is stretched out on her palace, or her windowsill, or in the sun in the middle of the kitchen, thinking important kitty thoughts.
There is a sirloin roast in the oven turning to heaven right now. Went down to Cash and Carry in the middle of winter and paid $30 for a 15 lb hunk of sirloin the size of a small dog. Hacked off a couple of roasts and a number of steaks. Been munching on that all winter. This is about the last piece left to kill.
Tenderize it with a fillet knife. Rub with cayenne, garlic, dill, salt, pepper. Rub the triangle with melted butter. Slice up a sweet pepper, a pair of tomatoes, a parsnip, and a sweet potato. Cover with a sauce made from more spices and chopped garlic and Damiana liquour. Put it all in a dutch oven on 200F for four hours.
Why?
That’s my idea of paradise on a Sunday afternoon. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I were wondering what other people were up to. My suggestion was sports bars and the playoffs.
Noise. People. Yuck.
I bought this piece of land when I did because I don’t really like people. I mean, y’all are nice in controlled increments, and I’m nowhere near as twitchy as she can be, or my buddy C. But today, the only person I talked to that I wasn’t married to was the waitress. (Kitty doesn’t count because everything is interpretive dance with her.)
My dream is to be selling enough books on a weekly basis that I can walk away from the day job and spend half my life out here on the farm, doing farm stuff. Growing fruits and making booze from them. Planting a vegetable garden. Writing. Psychologically abusing medium to large ungulates. You know, fun.
(The other half would be in town, at her house, but she’s got a lovely backyard where the hedges are twenty feet tall and mostly solid. I can hear you, but can’t see. And then I’m annoying Northern Flickers and getting attitude from hummingbirds. And everything we want to do is in walking distance, so I don’t have to drive with people that should never have been allowed to own cars in the first place.)
Yes, I know I’m rambling. I will have a purpose, eventually.
She and I took a very good out-of-town friend to dinner the other night, just before we put him on the plane to fly back to the East Coast.
He’s always a little astounded at us, and not just the still-honeymooning part. She and I take a radically different approach to life than just about anybody else we know.
It comes down to “being all in.”
If is worth doing, do it right. Do it all. Do it now.
For example, she’s a coffee nut (y’all knew that, right?). And I do mean nerd. She bought her own counter-top roaster and I take her down to my favorite brewing supply place in Tukwila, WA (Larry’s Brewing Supply moved from Kent over the winter, now they’re in the Southcenter area), and she buys green coffee beans. At home, she roasts them herself.
She’s even got a grimoire where she tracks the kind of bean, the ambient temperature and humidity, the timing, the results, and the taste.
Our friend isn’t like that. He didn’t get it. (And I don’t just mean home-roasted coffee.) So she sat him down, walked him through the entire process, and sent him home with enough custom-roasted beans to either get him through a couple of days, or get him hooked. (I hope the latter, but I can’t want more out of life than you do.)
What do you want out of life? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? If you suddenly had enough money to walk away from the day job tomorrow, what would you do?
I’m getting to the point where I’m no longer really amazed that most people can’t answer that question.
They don’t dream. And if they do, they don’t figure out where they want to be, and the day that they want to be there, and then make it happen.
They don’t plan.
I know.
I spent my 40th birthday on Trafalgar Square in London thinking about that. This farm is the result.
When I met her, she opened up the possibility that I could transform from being merely a storyteller into a writer, and make money at it. Not much, yet. But enough that I know it can be done. That I can meet people who have done it, are doing it, have become it.
I can live on the farm. I can live (part-time) in the city. I can write. I can be successful.
But more importantly, I can be happy, because I took the time to identify what it was that would make me happy.
Have you done the same, yet?

p.s. the parsnip and sweet potato could have roasted a little longer (or had some more juice to stew in), but OMG that sirloin was perfect. Just the right amount of medium rare to be heaven. Yum.

So last week, we talked about the onrushing death of Traditional Publishing. That generated some interesting responses, both on and off line. Mushroom cloud peeking over the horizon.

Went to Emerald City ComicCon yesterday/Saturday (it’s nice to be able to walk to something like that and then home, even if I ended up doing 22k steps yesterday).

Last summer, I was at WorldCon in Spokane, WA. The thing that struck me there was the age of the attendees. Me, the dorky, forty-something white guy was in the lower half of the general age group, from what I could see. There were a tremendous amount of folks in their fifties and up, but a much smaller contingent in their teens and twenties. Some, but not enough.

We talked about how that old thing called “Fandom” was “aging out” as people got older and younger people were not drawn in to replace them. My theory was that literary Science Fiction and Fantasy, which is what WorldCon thinks of itself as, is giving way. Yesterday, I had the proof.

All those kids who were not doing WorldCon were at ECCC. All of them. And better (SJW-warning), it was not limited to old white guys. I saw just about every ethnic variety I could think of. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I disagree, but I think (at least Saturday) that female attendees outnumbered male. (Would be interesting to see if they publish that stat, but I’m too lazy to look it up to be sure.)

The best part, at least for me, were all the young’uns. I saw a Mom and Dad with kids in tow. One boy, maybe eight, dressed as Old Jedi Luke from SW7. And his two little sisters (maybe six and five) were both done up as Rey. Absolutely freaking awesome.

I don’t know how many little Wonder Women I saw, but the four-year-old blond girl Wonder Woman riding on Daddy’s shoulders and telling him which tables to stop at so she look was priceless.

That is fandom, today.

Those are the kids that will support me in my old age, assuming I can produce stories they want to buy. Sure, right now they are elbows deep in comic books and Extended Universe tie-ins from Marvel/DC and Star Wars stuff, but one of these days they will want more. And they’ll grow up into feisty little Social Justice Warriors of their own, demanding stories where the hero isn’t a lantern-jawed, heterosexually-rigid white guy.

Warms my heart.

Last year, at WorldCon, the tiff in the sandbox was the Sad Puppies. I don’t frequently do politics on my blog or my social networking, so look away now if you are of the faint of heart.

No, really. Look away now.

Okay, I warned you…

IMHO: The whole reason behind the Sad and Rabid Puppies was the firmly-held belief in some (small) minds that women and minorities do not belong in Science Fiction. (They can have Fantasy, as the story goes, but hard SF is a man’s field. A white man’s field.)

Fuck you.

Let me repeat that: FUCK YOU.

(Emerald City) ComicCon embraces minorities of all flavors. They want more women. There are entire tracks and events dedicated to LGTBBQ in all it’s glory. The place had easily five times as many people moving around as Spokane Worldcon did. Part of that is Urban Seattle vs. small-town Spokane. Part of that is the fact that much of Washington State was on fire and the air was unhealthy in Spokane last summer (chewy, in all the bad ways, downwind of massive wildfires. Blood red full moon was kinda cool, though.)

But all those people the Puppies don’t want in “literary SF” were here at ECCC. And having a ball. I bought a bumper sticker from a lovely, incredibly-gay man, boogieing to the disco music in his stall. He was having fun, and making money because he is the future of fandom. (By the way, his website is www.northwestpress.com, if you want to buy some books from him and support a worthy cause. It might not be to your tastes, but I want to support them, so I have a book with an ETD of this Friday. They are doing good things by pushing all the walls back.)

And all those little girls dressed up as Rey and Wonder Woman? They are going to grow up to be badass readers with money in ten or twenty or thirty years. They will want to read about people who look like them, sound like them, act like them.

The age of the helpless little Princess in SF/Fantasy literature will be over soon. The Sad/Rabid Puppies may not have realized it, cocooned in their little he-man, girl-hating clubs, but they have ALREADY lost. And lost big.

They have lost the hearts and minds of an entire generation who will happily snap their fingers at the crazy old white men turning into that racist uncle at Thanksgiving.

Good riddance to rubbish.

Now, I just gotta get a really big bakery of stuff written so that when those kids start demanding books over graphic novels and videos, I will have something they will enjoy. I always try to write that way. Not because I’m SJW. I’m not even entirely sure what SJW means, but I am old hippie and I ain’t got time for that stupid shit. I want to sell books and entertain people. And make enough money so I can quit the day job and write more stories that entertain more people.

So, all in all, a totally awesome kind of weekend. I highly recommend you make it to a ComicCon, if you want to see what you should be planning for over the next thirty years.

That little girl dressed up as Rey is your future.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA.