So it started at the Bellevue Writers Lunch (which is no longer held in Bellevue, but work with me here). There is a meme going around the interwebs that we can sum up in our verbal shorthand as “bi-sexual death commandos of the apocalypse.” (I’ll explain in a later post, or you can search social media for the term and giggle).

How this came about: We’re discussing oddball mashups of genre that go well beyond simple slipstream and wander down into really strange. There are already a bunch of them: Paranormal romance; Sci-fi/Westerns; “whatever the hell urban fantasy has turned into in the last 10-15 years”; etc.

What else can we come up with? (For example: I’m writing post-apocalyptic, dystopian, cowboy stories.)

One of the lunatics at the table, Sabrina Chase, threw out some very cool and utterly bizarre ideas, most of which probably won’t work.

And then, inspiration bit her.

Her suggestion was the “Post-apocalyptic cozy mystery.” For those of you not in the know, cozy mysteries are the ones with no violence, no sex, no adult language, etc. As G-rated as you can get, while solving a crime. Many crime-solving grandmothers fall into this category, and it is huge with readers. Light, airy, intellectual, and usually fun reads.

Pair that with post-apocalyptic, which USUALLY suggests very gritty, dark, frequently violent and messy. Think Road Warrior et al, for a good vision of the sorts of things the genre originally grew up out of.

There were other ideas. Many silly. Many strange. Possibly even a few that are doable. It was a fun lunch.

The next month, she announced that not only does it work, but that her sister Juliet is working on writing one, as we speak. Yes, post-apocalyptic cozy mystery.

Last night, we got the word. The book is live and ready for you to order. I haven’t read yet, because I barely have enough time as is, but at $0.99US, you should absolutely go buy a copy, just so you can say that you were there at the very beginning. I have.

“Toxic to Touch: A Post-Apocalyptic Cozy Mystery”

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you that you have entered the future.

There are no more rules. There is no publisher sitting in his corner office, dictating what your career is going to look like, or where to find your books.

Mental exercise, just to prove that you are on rails with books: Walk into your favorite bookstore, even just in your mind. What section do you walk to immediately? What (if any) other sections of the bookstore do you stop to look in? Ever?

What happens to you if some exotic new book gets filed on the “wrong” shelf because there is no shelf for it? Do you find paranormal romance in the Romance section or the fantasy? Do you miss the Sci-Fi/Western because they put it with the cowboy books?

Juliet could write something totally out of left field, because she can file it under both Amateur Sleuths/Cozy, AND Post-Apocalyptic. Any reader wandering along has the chance to see it from either direction they come, simply because they can look on both shelves, and not just one.

THAT is the promise of the modern revolution in publishing. You can find strange books, just by starting out in your normal places, and then letting your attention wander.

You might even find something cool you never imagined you would need to buy and read, ya know?

 

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

 

Stick Figures In White Rooms.

Such a charming image, no? I recently picked up a book that had been one of my favorites when I was a kid in the very long ago. Reread it for ideas, inspiration, and some general research, but one thing struck me as amazingly interesting.

At no point, could I tell you what any of the main characters look like. Height, weight, build, hair color, mannerisms. Nothing at all. The author had simply blasted past all that.

The scenery was the same way. Compelling dialogue, but at no point could I tell you what the walls were made of, or what color, or how the character felt, traversing them.

What we had were stick figures in white rooms, having conversations, fights, etc.

The thing this story lacked is called “Setting.” The seven point plot structure attributed to Dent is that you start with a character, in a setting, who has a problem.

Character is easy enough. So is problem.

What is setting?

It’s the descriptive part of your narrative. What do your characters look like? What does the room look like? What color are the walls?

But more importantly, it is how the character feels about what they see. One of my favorite exercises in setting goes like this: Describe the exact same room from three points of view. Someone who likes what they see; someone who hates what they see; and someone who doesn’t really care.

Done right, that evokes an emotional response. The child walking through the forest having a grand adventure by pretending to be in the Hundred-Acres-Wood is radically different from the teen fleeing a monster in a horror story, and yet they are the same trees. Walking into a magic store to buy new ribbons is going to feel different from buying materials to summon a demon, even if you are the same wizard and she is the same shopkeeper.

Setting, I am reliably informed, is one of those things that separates the new writer (or the not-that-good-writer) from the competent writer, which is what I aspire to be every time I put words on paper. (There are also those people like Stephen King who mind control you with their words, which is why they are so successful. I’m not that good, but I’m working on it.)

For me, one of the ways I convey setting is with fashion. I tend to write a lot of military science fiction. One of the keys to that genre is that everyone is wearing uniforms. Those uniforms will vary, and in the variance you have value: rank, assignment, MOS, etc. And the other side will also be uniformed.

Additionally, I have been teaching myself to sew (middle-aged, middle-class, white male, dork, never learned to operate sewing machines when I was a kid, just how to fix buttons and such with needle and thread) so I have an appreciation for fabric: how it flows, how it shimmers, how it feels on your skin, what message you are trying to convey to the people around you.

Clothing is all about attitude. What a goth girl wears her first day of high school is going to send a very different message than the band geek.

Mental game: What are you wearing, right this second? And why did you choose that particular outfit when you got dresses? And, most importantly, what does THAT say about you as a person?

Me: old tan shorts, basic purple t-shirt. It is not a day I have to face anyone, and am not really planning to leave the house except for the occasional walk around the block.

For work: Nice jeans and a golf shirt. Black tennis shoes. Cleaned up around the beard. That’s me going into an office with a bunch of other nerds to commit software, but not to have to deal with customers or clients.

I’m conveying quiet competence without committing to stupidly-uncomfortable fashion shows for nobody but me. That includes days I wear a kilt (summer and warm, for the most part).

I always chuckle at the assumptions that people bring to my books. Readers will rave about the the action sequences, but bitch about “pages and pages of clothing. Where is the action?” because they read science fiction for explosions.

Based on my sales, those few dozen people represent a significant minority, if however vocal, of my overall readership. They don’t mind stick figures in white rooms, because that’s all they ever read, until they run into Jessica and Moirrey. And boy, does that get sideways in a hurry.

I work really hard not to write women as bimbos, unlike some of the old guard, sexist, dinosaur writers  in the process of finally dying off. Where I work, three of the four immediate bosses in the section are female, and we are a software development organization in Seattle. (We might be the only one so female-heavy in the city, but that’s one of the reasons I like working there. I get to see strong-willed, competent women on a daily basis. I haven’t used any of them as characters yet, but that’s because this generation is barely a year with the company at most, and they are just getting settled. Three years ago, four of the top eight execs with the company were female.)

The purpose of that aside is to remind you that there are a LOT of female fans of science fiction these days. They run down a whole different path than many of the male readers. They won’t settle for just getting straight to the explosions and space battles. They actually might want to know who the characters are, what motivates them, where do they want to go?

Shocking, I know. Girls reading science fiction? Yesterday, at the month writers lunch, towards the end, we got onto the topic of how girls can’t write science fiction. Mind you, this was according to the distilled wisdom of a bunch of jackknob assholes, that same generation of writers and publishers who are also happily dying off as we speak.

I was the only male at the table at that point, the other one having departed for the long drive home. So me, Fabulous Publisher Babe (TM), and four other women, three of whom write science fiction. I’m pretty sure Judith Tarr sat bolt upright, down on her ranch in the Southwest, and said “Hey, fuck you,” to the air in her barn, possibly frightening a horse, for no apparent reason she could name. (There have been a lot of people who told her that she WASN’T ALLOWED to write SF over the decades. Happily, she stopped listening.)

So there is an element of rampant sexism in Science Fiction. I won’t overcome it by myself, but I also won’t stand for it. You can ask my friends about getting thumped for saying something out of line.

Modern readers, including a large contingent of females who have graduated from just reading fantasy (because that tends to have way more setting built in, when done right), they demand better writing.

Setting. Opinion. Texture. Color. Place. Hair color. Eye color. Build. Stance. Sneer.

You who are readers are nodding your heads right now, perhaps suddenly realizing why some book you read left you so cold, when it was supposed to be the greatest thing, including sliced bread.

Can any of you tell me how tall that main character was?

So if I hammer on those things repeatedly, there is a reason. Jessica is 5’3. Javier is 5’10. Vo is 6’5. Two of them are confronting hair going gray as they settle into their forties and become middle-aged adults.

Little things. Details. Color.

We call it setting.

Are your favorite authors giving you enough of it?

We’ll get you through the summer with this one. Yes, even you.

Most times, a bundle represents about a dozen books. Maybe novels. Maybe shorter stuff. But you get stuff to read at a really good price.

They went a little crazy with this one: https://storybundle.com/bundle

If my math is correct (I was told there would be no maths), you are looking at ten titles rather than books, representing something like 19 novels and over 100 short stories, once you open them all up.

Let’s round that up to an imperial shit-ton of stuff. Enough to keep you happy, lounging by the pool (or, better yet, inside where the air conditioning is on, while the other silly folks are out sweating).

And we’re talking serious writers here: Kristine Katheryn Rusch, Mindy Klasky, Thomas K. Carpenter, Anthea Sharp, and Dean Wesley Smith. Plus other nifty things like the Uncollected Anthology and Fiction River has one in there as well.

Why are you still here? Get our your credit card and go nuts. I’ll wait.

Back? Good.

A note on my contribution. I’ve only mentioned it briefly up until now, but not splashed it everywhere yet, because I knew that this project was coming.

I love Javier Aritza and all his crazy friends: Suvi, Djamila Sykora, Zakhar Sokolov, Afia Burakgazi, Del Smith, etc. As we approach the second half of 2017, I am going to publish four more Science Officer volumes (5-8, with The Doomsday Vault already available for pre-order). Coming soon are The Last Flagship, The Hammerfield Gambit, and The Hammerfield Payoff.

To celebrate, and make it easier for some folks to get sucked into the excitement, you can now get the first four Science Officer books (The Science Officer, The Mind Field, The Gilded Cage, and The Pleasure Dome) as a single title: The Science Officer Omnibus One. (There will be a #2 eventually, but don’t wait.)

For not much more than the price of the single Omnibus, you can add enough reading material to the TBR to get even you to Labor Day. And some of you to Christmas. Maybe.

This won’t be the last time you hear me mention this bundle, but you only have a limited time to strike, because these things only last a very short time and then they are gone forever.

BONUS:

The charity that you will be benefiting with your purchase of the mega-bundle is AbleGamers.

Description: AbleGamers is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that enables people with disabilities to enjoy the amazing world of video games. In America alone, over 33 million gamers with disabilities need specialized, custom controllers and assistive technology in order to enter the same virtual worlds as everyone else. Since 2006 AbleGamers has enabled thousands of individuals with disabilities to have a greater quality of life by providing these expensive pieces of assistive technology to children, adults and veterans with disabilities who need help overcoming the social isolation being disabled can bring. AbleGamers has helped tens of thousands of people with disabilities through one-on-one consultation and building a customized solution for each individual, tailored to their specific needs.

So you know what? You’re also making the world a better place for a lot of people.

Get yours today.

The last three weeks are a vague blur, mostly because I caught that damned zombie cold that was making its rounds in Seattle, with a tremendously bad batch of allergies on top. Blogging has fallen by the wayside, which is bad, because I try to put something up three weeks in four, mostly to give myself somebody to talk to.

Plus, I lose track of time, when we talk publishing.

From the point when I finish writing something, time passes. It goes to one or more first readers for review, usually at least Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and stays there a while. Then I fix all the mistakes she caught. After that, the big pieces go on to a proper copyedit by a fantastic expert.

Couple months have passed by the time I get it back from her, and then incorporate all the things she caught. From there, we produce a final edition that goes into the publishing schedule.

Those of you who have been paying attention at home should have added a reminder on your calendar that I will have something come out on the 10^th of every month (not counting me screwing up her schedule). You can also go to my Amazon author page, sign in as you, and CLICK ON THE “follow me” button, middle left side, under my picture. When you do that, Amazon will send you helpful reminder emails when I put something up for pre-order, as well as when things go live. Usually on Saturdays.

You’ll get one shortly. Hint hint.

So it is the beginning of July.

I wrote the fourth Science Officer, The Pleasure Dome, in January, and she published it in May. The fifth Jessica Keller novel, Flight of the Blackbird, I actually wrote last fall, but the novels have a LOT of lead time built in. Fabulous Publisher Babe just put the fifth Science Officer book, The Doomsday Vault, up for preorder in all the usual places. It comes out in August.

The sixth Science Officer, The Last Flagship, is due back from the copy editor shortly, and is scheduled to come out in October. The seventh Science Officer, The Hammerfield Gamble, is in the can right now. I’m very close to finishing the eighth Science Officer, The Hammerfield Payoff, as we speak.

Those last two will most likely come out together, probably in the December timeslot. I write these things like television episodes, and that one is the cliff-hanging, season-ending, double-header. 5-8 are also a mini-series called The War of the Pirate Clans.

Meanwhile, the first four (The Science Officer, The Mind Field, The Gilded Cage, and The Pleasure Dome) are set to come out together as an omnibus edition soonish.  Available in both print and ebook. That will be a good thing for you to buy for those friends you want to hook on the stuff. The next four will be Omnibus 2: War of the Pirate Clans.

And I haven’t even talked about audio books, yet. Matt Weight just finished the audio for The Pleasure Dome and it should be going up soon. And I think he just started on The Doomsday Vault this week. I’m hoping there exists some extra neat way we can take his first four audio books and also to do an omnibus audible edition. The Science Officer audio books don’t sell that well, but that’s due to length. People don’t want to burn free credits they get for signing up for Audible, on something short.  If there is a novel-length omnibus, they might bite, and the first four combined come in at around 110,000 words.

You can see why I need a score card.

Do you want a scorecard?  I could put together a page on my website that is configured to print easily, with titles, series, pub dates, and a check box for you to mark what you haven’t read yet.

Someone remind me to do that.

So then, Jessica.

I have a tremendous amount of notes about the sixth Jessica Keller novel, The Red Admiral. That’s the next major project, minor ones tucked in along the way. I won’t spoil Flight of the Blackbird by giving anything away, but The Red Admiral will be the first book of an interior trilogy (six, seven, eight) that picks up right at the end of Blackbird, and will set the stage for the ninth and last book.

I love Jessica, but I want to finish her story so I can go on and do other things. Some of them will occur in the Alexandria Station universe, but I also have some wonderfully fun other things I want to write. There is an epic space opera series I plan to go after next, on a scale that makes Alexandria Station look tiny and provincial by comparison.

I might have to write the first three novels back to back to back so I can drop them all at once. People tell me that some readers won’t touch a series until it is done. You can thank GRR Martin and a few others for that.

Moving on.

The first two short stories in Agent Kiesler’s Secret War (The Rescue and The Machine) are coming in July. Number three is just back from first reader and I need to fix it.

There will also be The Rangers: Tales From A Post-Apocalyptic America. It will come out in the fall and have the first five Dale Embry short stories (#1 being The Last Ranger in Alternative Truths Vol 1). I have already planned the next cowboy novel that comes after that in that world.

(If you people make me rich and famous writing cowboy stories, I might never forgive you. Just want you to know that’s on your conscience. Not saying I wouldn’t do it. Got a page of story ideas and themes to hit one of these day. But still.)

I’m also publishing a number of superhero pieces this year to go with White Crane. The Breakfast Dragon came out in “Steam. And Dragons.” Kid Lexington came out in Hiding Behind The Cowl. Have several others written and being edited. A sequel of sorts to Kid Lexington (set twenty years later) will be coming out in November as part of a bundlerabbit bundle comprised (I think) of around a dozen, all-new pieces, purpose-written for the bundle.

Busy, busy, busy.

And I’m finally mostly over that damned cold, even if I’ve been popping mentholated cough drops like candy to break up all the crap in my lungs.

So stay tuned. There will be more updates coming, once I dig out from under the mess. And you’ll have lots more things to read.

 

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Yay!

Flight of the Blackbird is now available everywhere. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the fifth novel in the series (currently planned to be nine when she’s done with me.)

For the next week or so, this is also an opportunity to get your friends hooked on the whole series. Over at Storybundle, Auberon (book one) is part of the Moonscapes bundle.  It’s a good way to share the joy, so tell all your friends for me (I’m tired of the day job and want to just write full time, ya know…)

So, here’s where we’re at:

Jessica Keller (to date)

• Auberon
• Queen of the Pirates
• Last of the Immortals
  • Siren (Vo Arlo independent novella)
• Goddess of War
• Flight of the Blackbird

Sometime later this year, I will start writing book 6 (The Red Admiral), once I  get done with all the Science Officer books (#4: The Pleasure Dome just came out, #5 The Doomsday Vault is coming in July, followed by #6 The Last Flagship in the fall and I’m working on #7 as we speak).

Hope the summer is treating you all well.

Remember to mark your calendars: I plan to put out something new on the 10th of every month going forward and running for several years after I’m dead. (Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is required to outlive me, and I don’t plan to make that easy, by the way.)

In July (next!!!) are the first two short stories in “Agent Kiesler’s Secret War” and I’ll provide more detail in a little bit.

Not much more to say, other than make sure you are up to date on my books and that you go browbeat all your friends into buying them as well. (And for Amazon readers, there are Special Editions available in print for $9.99, if you needed to buy presents for people. And bring them to Orycon this fall and I’ll sign and personalize them for you.)

much mushiness

blaze

Hey, gang.

I’m in a Storybundle that started late last night (had to keep it a secret up until now for all the obvious reasons).

From Dean: “The Moonscapes Bundle, curated by Dean Wesley Smith, was born out of Fiction River: Moonscapes, a volume of his bi-monthly anthology series. He says: “When editing the volume, I got lucky to find eleven great hard-sf stories from eleven top science fiction writers. Over seventy thousand words of fiction. I was and still am very proud of the volume.

“But as the years went on, I wanted to keep the idea of Moonscapes going. Then the chance to do this science fiction bundle came up and working it around Fiction River: Moonscapes just seemed to be a logical idea. Six of the authors in Fiction River: Moonscapes had hard science fiction novels that would fit in this bundle. And three other great sf writers, including Kevin J. Anderson, joined the fun. So nine hard science fiction novels plus the volume of Fiction River: Moonscapes.”

What is a Storybundle?

Ten (10!) sci-fi novels (well 9 and an anthology, but you get the picture) for a single, low price, running for the next three weeks. And then gone forever. Pay what you think is correct ($20 is suggested). and if you pay more than $15, you get all ten. You also get the option to donate a portion of the total price to a charity group Dean picked out, in this case http://www.ablegamers.org/

From their website: We give people with disabilities custom gaming setups including modified controllers and special assistive technology, like devices that let you play with your eyes, so they can have fun with their friends and family. We’re using the power of video games to bring people together, improving quality of life with recreation and rehabilitation.

This is a really special charity, and we get to help them. And I get to be part of a bundle with some amazingly good writers (Dean, Kris, Matt, Kevin J, Ron, Annie, Maggie, and Lisa) and your very own copy of Fiction River: Moonscapes with a bunch more great folks.

My novel is Auberon, book one of the Jessica Keller Chronicles. Originally, we discussed putting in Queen of the Pirates, since so much of the action there takes place on a moon, but wanted to get new folks the opportunity to start fresh, since Jessica is one of my favorite characters.

And here’s the great news: we are less than two weeks from the fifth Jessica book going live.

Flight of the Blackbird drops on June 10th.

What does all this mean?

Memorial Day just passed here in the United States. Traditionally, that is the beginning of summer. Vacation. School break. Camping. Whatever. For one low price you can get a whole bunch of reading material to take with you on your next trip, for those long drives or flights, or for quiet time camped along the side of the river with no internet access for miles.

Wouldn’t some SF be better?

And because this is Storybundle, you can also buy the bundle as a gift for someone as well (Or buy twice and keep one for yourself). Get them hooked on Jessica and the rest of the novels and series available here.

And help a good cause, too.

Thanks for your support and your help. We’re making the world a better place.

That’s what I call it, anyway.

We started out there a couple years ago, meeting at a place on the east side of Lake Washington for a Saturday afternoon to talk business with some other writers we knew. It’s not a reader/critique group, because those have a tendency to devolve into mendacity and outright hostility, more often than not.

No, this is us getting together to talk about the business of being an indie writer. (TradPubs are also welcome, and many of the group have been NY published at some point in their career, but this is about the future.) Many of the group (myself included now, but not until recently) are OWN/Coast writers (people who have taken workshops down in Lincoln City, Oregon from Kris and Dean) and we share what we’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working, etc.

Cover theory gets discussed (they evolve slowly but continuously, so you have to refresh your covers every 3-6 years, depending on your genre) on occasion. What we’ve learned about writing copy. What books we’re planning or working on and how to genre them (you’d be amazed how hard it is for some writers to categorize themselves.)

Business.

Originally, just genre fiction writers, because that’s what we are, most of us, but I know people. And come across people. Through one of my step-daughters, I also know lots of musicians. And through one of them, I met a neat photographer-lady  and managed to convince her to join us last month, and then again yesterday (without running screaming from the restaurant either time, even).

What I have realized is that we are all artists. Writers tend to be more introverted than musicians, but for them, that’s mostly the act of having to always be ON if you want to be a rock star. Or whatever. Writers are more like mushrooms.

But she came, and was telling us some of her stories from the early 90’s, when she was deeply involved in the Seattle music scene (as in, she might have known Chris personally in passing, like so many of them did). His death hit her hard, but she also realized that she has this tremendously interesting insight into the history of the early Grunge Years, because she actually worked at Sub-pop records during some of it.

And she has amazing voice to her storytelling.

Let me put it to you this way, she had a spellbinding, utterly mesmerizing story about filing. As in putting crap into files from the piles of junk everywhere. And had us on the edge of our seats.

And she has gotten the itch to tell some of these stories. (We’ll edit out all the names later, but I’m hoping she does a full-on historical version first, and then we’ll file off the serial numbers for folks wanting to be just entertained by someone who was there.)

So, yay, awesome sauce.

On top of that, I was talking to one of the lawyers at work (I work in a law firm-ish) about hobbies, and she said she wanted to create cookbooks. Not write them, but actually make them in the formatting sense. So I hooked her up with Fabulous Publisher Babe’s(tm) book on publishing and she read it over the weekend. Loved it, apparently. I’m sure I’ll hear more details tomorrow at work, but I invited her to join us at the next Writers Lunch. I’m pretty sure she’ll try to make it, because it apparently opened up a new work of ideas for her, and my sweetie might be able to help her realize them.

And that was pretty much the whole reason we do these lunches. To work with other artists, other creatives, to help them find an outlet, and to make money from it. To learn from them what tricks work to make money. Each little thing might only be worth nickels, but them nickels add up, and them nickels spend. If you have enough of them coming in (little trickles turn into streams of revenue if you work it) then you don’t have to have the ugly day job. Or perhaps any day job at all.

And I got to thinking about it today and realized that, while we average about six people at the average lunch, last month we had thirteen. And probably about twenty on the general invite list but that’s only because some folks we’ve talked to aren’t that into it, or don’t see the benefit, or whatever.

But I wanted to put this word out. Folks in the sound of my voice, or close enough. We do this one Saturday each month. 1pm-3pm. Food. Chat. Business. Contact. Ideas.

If you are in the Seattle-ish area, we meet right now up in Lynnwood (north end, not far from Alderwood Mall). If you are interested in joining us, ping me or Fabulous Publisher Babe for details. Next one is June 17. The weekend after CampCon.

We’d love to see you. And see how we can help you achieve your dreams.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

 

so on top of all the other craziness going on in my life, I have a new superhero anthology that came out today. (Can you tell my precognition skills are kinda lacking here?)

Hiding Behind The Cowl was born out of several desires. One was to delve into superheroic fantasy as a serious medium for storytelling, when some folks can’t get their heads past the comic book aspect of it. Their loss.

Another was to reach out to several authors I know and work with them as an editor. In the end four took me up on the offer and we had a ball.

I learned a lot about the craft of editing, which was the entire goal for me.  They got to go someplace outside their normal comfort zone and play in a brand new sandbox.

The final product contains stories by (in order): Annie Reed, Leah Cutter, Blaze Ward, JD Brink, and Michael Kingswood. We have teenage coming of age, manga as genre fiction, and an origin story, plus two others:

Kingswood’s story was what happens when an author looks at me and says “you would never publish a story about a racist superhero who was basically Klanman.”

Oh, really? Why not?

Try me…

Is it a well-crafted story? Is it well told? Do the characters have arcs of development? Do they learn from their mistakes? Are there heroes and villains? Is it entertaining?

So, yeah, you have a outright racist who was gifted with superpowers. And he’s using them to protect the white race from extinction.

A lot of editors would have bounced the story right there. Which is exactly wrong, but I  won’t fault them their choice. Not everyone would be comfortable with the heat that something like this might generate.

He’s not a scenery-chewing villain racist from the movies. He’s a man doing what he thinks is right, based on how he was raised. He hurts people he thinks deserve it, based on the pain he is going through in his own life.

And it can be a brutally hard read. I put it last in the anthology because some people will not ever be able to get past that story, and I didn’t want the authors behind him in the table of contents to be ignored and never encountered.

I also put it last because it is a powerful story, and putting it last gives Michael The Last Word. Literally. It will make readers uncomfortable, because it holds up a stark mirror for them to look at and wonder how close to those characters they are. How much of that darkness do they have underneath their cheerful facade?

Some of you will hate the story. That’s your choice as readers.

Some of you will hate me for publishing it. Fuck you. These stories need to be told, because we need to discuss the sorts of casual racism that is still out there. We need to confront the fact that we do not live in a utopian future.

And, more than a year after I started this project, we need to look at the people around us who do not believe the same ways we do. I have been accused of being SJW by someone who considered that an insult, rather than a badge of honor.

Social Justice means fighting for those without. Protecting the weak. Comforting the afflicted. Afflicting the comfortable.

Making the world a better place.

So you need to look at those places, and “those people” and see how to talk to them. Reach out to them. Many are lashing out in pain, not anger. It is a different kind of pain, but they hurt.

Our job is to help.

On the flip side, my story in the collection is about a 32-year-old US Army veteran in 1952. He fought in Europe. Silver Star. Purple Heart. Developed powers in 1947. Wanted to become a hero.

One catch. He’s 5’6 and weighs 130 pounds.

Working with a scientist hero who knows his secret, he became the “teenage sidekick” to another hero. Every major hero in those days had a teenage sidekick. Robin. Speedy. Bucky. You get the picture.

Oh, and this particular gentleman is Japanese-American.

Nisei.

442nd RCT. One-Puka-Puka. 34th Engineering Battalion. Varsity Victory Volunteers.

But he can’t even be a citizen of the country he was born in. There are places where he can’t own property, let alone vote.

People forget that the institutional racism that afflicts Blacks and Hispanics these days used to include Asians of all geographies (E, SE, S). For the Japanese-Americans, it eventually got better. But it took generations. Vietnamese refugees have been here for forty years now, and are beginning to be accepted as just another place that brought interesting cuisine to the party.

So in this anthology we get to explore more than just middle-class white American stories of becoming superheroes. We explore race, culture, and even sexuality to a certain degree. (Always PG-13, with shadows in the background, as it were.)

All things guaranteed to upset some delicate readers who don’t want to think. Just want to be entertained. More power to you.

The point of writing is to tell stories. The point of good writing is to tell stories that make people stop and reconsider their world.

I want you to think.

I want you to ask yourself what you would turn into if the genie offered you three wishes. I bet your place, your response, is far darker than mine is. Why is that?

Background: back in November, this country looked around and decided that a carnival barker with a penchant for nude teenage girls, sexual assault, corporate bankruptcy, and a distinct aversion to the truth, was just what this country needed. I held my nose to vote for the other option, having hated that woman for most of three decades (because I found her to be a power-hungry sociopath, and still better than the clueless narcissist.)

So then he took power, and actively began working to undo twenty decades of civilized behavior by emulating the most egregious aspects of such lovely places as the mid-twentieth century Juntas of Central and South America, or the Big Man politics of post-colonial Africa.

If he was more competent, it would be one thing. When he was elected, my fear was that we had empowered Sulla. Later, I revised that down to Caesar. Finally, it appears that the Mendoza Line for the orange shitgibbon will be Caligula.

I’m not sure he’ll stay above it.

(Sulla didn’t destroy the Roman Republic. It was already dying. Caesar just put it down for good. Caligula broke the Empire.)

But it also emboldened my friends Bob and Phyl. Bob’s even more of an old hippy than I am, and decided that joining the ACLU in that big spike wasn’t enough. (I’m now an evergreen member, because they NEVER waver, regardless of which jackass they are defending.)

People were inspired by the words of the President’s bottle-blond-spokes-bimbo who didn’t like to describe his words as flat-out lies, and instead described them as Alternative Truths.

And so Bob and Phyl decided to put together the Alternative Truths Anthology to celebrate the mendacious, lying weasels who are just out to loot the treasury and oppress anyone who isn’t a white, cis, loudly-Christian (anyone here ever read the Book of Matthew?), male, billionaire.

There appear to be a lot of very angry people out there, and not just me.

The deadline for stories was weeks, rather than the usual months.

And I get this email from Bob asking me where his story is.

Uhm, what?

Shit, did I owe Bob a story for something and I’ve totally forgotten?

Nope. Bob just wanted my take on things.

So I listened to writer-brain.

I was inspired by the Alt-National Park Service folks, who went quietly rogue, and imagined that dystopian world where the agencies dealing with the Interior and Science all decided to fight back. To lead a physical rebellion, and not just an emotional one.

I started writing a story about a pair of Park Service Rangers in the post-second-civil-war era, when the United States had fragmented into nations, rather than regions. To envision what civilized folk would have to do when facing a world where the right wing considered 1984 and the Handmaid’s Tale to be good starting points.

It was inspiring. It was liberating. It was really kinda fun.

Couldn’t stop at just that first story because so many ideas kept popping up and demanding that they go on the story-list. Story number 1 went into Alternative Truths. All of them will come out in November as a cowboy novel. In the old days, cowboy novels were 20,000-40,000 words, so about the same length as The Science Officer, for comparison, or what we would classify as a novella these days.

Here are the titles I have for book one:

• The Last Ranger
• The Maiden
• Forty-Niner
• Posse
• Refuge

But let’s talk about the Alternative Truths Anthology. It came out on Thursday, ahead of the original goal of Day 100 goal for publication. Bob and Phyl assembled a stellar cast of writers, some twenty-four in all, I think. And they accepted The Last Ranger to be among those.

I’m not sure if it qualifies as hopeless dystopian or hopeful, since it is about the side of civilization that is actively fighting the entropy embodied by a man who thinks sexually assaulting teenage girls is an exciting hobby. Or who never met a lie he wouldn’t tell. Or who thinks that welching out on contracts and settling later for pennies on the dollar is the best way to conduct business. Or actively recruiting racists who are planning the next Holocaust into his administration and putting them in charge of things.

He has permanently damaged this nation. Already.

Unless his kind are crushed like cockroaches, you will be able to tell your grandchildren you were there for the Fall of the American Republic, and its descent into madness, anarchy, and/or an aristocratic hellhole.

Think either Mad Max movie, without the sand.

Can you tell I’m still angry?

The group writers represented in the anthology are also angry. And we didn’t do it for the money, because Bob was never offering professional rates. Instead of six cents per word, it was two cents, plus a royalty share (which rarely make any money). And the royalty share was only ever going to last three years, after which whatever money came in was going directly to the ACLU in their eternal fight for manners against the denizens of the pit (who are today usually represented by the Republican Party, but that’s not eternal, and I expect the wyrm to turn one of these days).

But then something incredible happened.

The damned thing landed on Thursday, and promptly EXPLODED.

Thank you.

We spent a good chunk of time in the top 500 titles for sale on all of Amazon. That’s in the top 500 of something like five or eight million books people could spend their money on. I’m pretty sure Bob and Phyl earned out the advances they paid. And that was Day One. I’m not sure how long it will sustain, but we’ve made our point.

There are a lot of angry people out there.

But that’s the spike.

I need you to do two things now. Not just for me, but for everyone.

One: go get your own copy, or buy one for a friend who needs someplace to channel their discomfort or anger. Or both. The ACLU is getting a writer share from day one. And in three years, they will start getting it all.

Two: After you read it, write a review. What touched you? What sparked your imagination? Or your rage? Or your funny bone? Last I looked, we had already gotten over ten reviews, all amazingly good. Either 30 or 50 is the next threshold, and you can help get us there.

The more reviews we get, the wider the bots spread us out among the “you might also like this one…” for people. And the longer we sustain the Bestseller list, the more we will catch the eye of people who only read the charts for ideas, and the news organizations that cover the news.

I can’t imagine at this point that Bob won’t carry through with his original threat to make this a series of anthologies. He has bottled lightning here, which is a very rare things indeed.

We must push.

There are a lot of angry people out there. You seem them marching for the first time in their lives. As well as asking how they can run for office to try to make the world a better place.

But there are also people who went into a spiral of depression. They need to know that there are people out there fighting for them.

Have you told them how much they mean to you? Nothing more than that. Depression is a terrible cloak that descends and wraps you up. You can’t get out of it, but must accept it and understand it, so that you can find the holes and wriggle free.

Been there. Done that. Got the scars.

Friendly words help.

This anthology is all about rage, at least for me.

But it is also about the love we have for each other. For the hurt, the sick, the lost. For those who need to be protected from the assholes and sociopaths of this world. Even if they work for the President.

They have been given a place at the table, when they should be whipped like curs and driven from the building.

This is your wake-up call.

The Resistance has begun…

I’ll blame Thomas Jefferson.

At one point, this nation’s foremost Francophile politician found the Metric system too French to be thought of as a universal standard, even though many of his contemporaries would have happily moved to that system of weights and measures. Instead, we stayed with the Imperial system, which is a functionally irrational way to do things.

This is on my mind because I have always expected that the Unites States would eventually succumb and stop doing things in pounds, cups, and feet. When I write science fiction in the distant future, I have to use some measuring system for things. As an American from the boring parts of the Midwest, I would be expected to use that system, but there are only a handful of countries still doing it the old way.

Indeed, my expectation has always been that the metric system would become the standard. Certainly, it is more coherent. But making conversions in my head is not always fun. (Thank God for the internet and people way more nerdy than me.)

David Drake always talks about measuring systems in the future with an eye towards history. What we use today bears little resemblance to what the Greeks or Romans used (and he reads Latin for fun). But the modern reader (e.g. Early Twenty-First Century CE and the next few centuries) will need a system they are familiar with.

Ergo, metric. Americans and Brits can figure it out. Everyone else is already there.

This is all on my mind because of Brexit. Used to be, one could expect that Great Britain would slowly lose the battle for cultural weirdness and migrate over a couple more generations into using the same system as the rest of Europe. (Certainly, the idiots in Brussels required that bananas be sold by kilogram weight, and not as individual, pre-packaged units.)

Brexit means that the UK will go their own way. Defiantly, as well, when you get right down to it. Two fingers in the air in a general south-east direction, if you will.

I expect one of the first things they will do is stomp back to the Imperial system for everything. They may even pass a law that metric measurements be removed from packages good in the grocery. (It is a deeply held thing with them.)

But it also colors my view of the distant future.

I am a student of international political economics. (Did my advanced work at Claremont Graduate School in exactly that topic.) And a nerd for currency arbitrage. Plus, my first published paper of a political nature was an analysis of changes in standards of living using US Census data for Kansas over several decades. (Back in the days when you had to program a computer to handle least squares linear regressions and load the data from a flat file. Think days to get results for analysis.)

So I watch the world grow and change.

In my youth, the Soviet Union was an up and coming power. (I was in Petrograd the day Yeltsin was first elected President in 1991, and expected the country to collapse that summer, which it did. Black market currency rates don’t lie.)

Europe was slowly coming together, but the Great Experiment hadn’t gelled yet and it was going to be a small collection of Western European states. (This was before they decided to bring everyone in before they were ready.)

China under Deng had started down the long path to power, but was only starting out.

I look around today (2017), and Russia is failing hard and fast. They are facing a population crash almost as hard as Japan among working ages. Russians are drinking themselves to death, while Japanese tend to not have many kids. Both nations are a century from becoming theme parks ready for some new thing.

China got old before it got rich, and is facing a huge demographic problem where there are too many young, single men who will never find wives, because there are so many more men. Plus, the government is riding a tiger. It has to keep delivering growth, or a number of angry people will start listening to demagogues.

India is an interesting case study. A gigantic democracy, slowly industrializing, slowly becoming a place called India. They aren’t really. Each of the three dozen states is largely organized around a distinct language, where English tends to be the one that everyone speaks as a second or third language. India reminds me of where the United States was in the early eighteenth century: each colony its own country slowly joining with the others in a prickly relationship to become a greater thing.

Their problems (in my jaded opinion) are that the best and the brightest frequently migrate permanently to the United States after they get educated. Yay for me, living in a place where so many smart people want to invent the future, but India has a brain drain going on. Those are the people that would transform the nation away from being caste-conscious and into a place where Dalits aren’t Dalits anymore.

And the growth the Indians do have, while impressive to westerners, is focused on a small fraction of the total population, while the vast underclasses are ignored and getting further and further behind.

Why does all this matter?

We’re going to space soon.

In science fiction, we’re going to the stars. Either Earth will be a mono-culture, or several Terran cultures will individually colonize the galaxy.

Who will those cultures be?

It is a lovely thought experiment I like to play. How would the future turn out if the men and women who set the template for the galaxy were Jordanian? Moroccan? Mexican?

The world of Alexandria Station assumes seven major trade languages, plus all the hundreds of smaller dialects largely limited to a single planet or cultural group: English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin, Kiswahili, and Bulgarian (don’t ask).

Languages as they exist today will largely standardize, and remain in place, only slowly evolving, because people can record their voice. That means that people will learn a new language from a “standard” template, rather than picking it up in their travels, absorbing words, and adding accents that eventually turn into a different spoken language. (See Mandarin, Cantonese, Fukinese, etc. that all use the same written words, but they speak their own dialect/language incomprehensible to others.)

So then I get back to the metric system.

The United States and United Kingdom use standard. Everyone else uses metric.

What will the future use?

Javier Aritza is currently operating in the year 7550CE. I’m close to done with Volume Six: The Last Flagship. You are about to be able to read Volume Four: The Pleasure Dome in a couple of weeks. (Volume Five: The Doomsday Vault comes out this summer.)

The metric system itself was a radical outgrowth of the French Revolution (and the Rise of Science from the ages of barbarity preceding).

I presume some radical social/political revolution someday will introduce some new system for doing things, but why, exactly, would you move away from a decimalized system? And if you don’t de-decimalize, why bother introducing a different decimalized system from the one you have?

But what if they future (and the galaxy) belongs entirely to a derivative/child culture of the US/UK alignment and everything is in stones, quid, and tablespoons? What does that do to all the science fiction out there?

I can’t be wrong, because I’m writing science fiction on a scale so grand that nobody will probably ever get there. (And if you do, please toast my memory and my ghost at this point at having gotten something even remotely close to accurate.)

You, the reader, needs to be able to understand distances, temperatures, and weights. I have chosen metrics. And, now that I think about it, I’m going to have to write an entire new epic space opera series (already planned, it comes after Jessica) where EVERYTHING is as convolutedly-English as I can make it. And they can get really weird: rods, hogsheads, and such.

I’m going to blame all of you, for not stopping me.

 

shade and sweet water,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA