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.

https://bundlerabbit.com/the-middlings-sampler

I did warn you this was coming. And you get to listen to me a little bit, because I’m in an awesome bundle with some amazing people (and one writer I totally squeeeeee over, but you folks knew that.)

Here’s the fun part: www.Kobo.com has decided to sponsor us on this one, partly to help build the model, and partly because Mark is an awesome guy. Kobo is a competitor to Amazon for books, primarily in Canada and Japan, so if you get the whole bundle, Mark has thrown in coupon for a free book from Kobo, your choice. Whatever. READ!!!  🙂

I’m also going to do a BOGO at some point, since I have some new titles coming up but also some random Kobo giveaways, because I want to support competition in the ecosystem. In addition to the BOGO that Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is going to do for me, if you send me a note about the bundle, I’ll send you something to read.  What that is depends on what you have or haven’t read yet. (I’ve got SF, fantasy, poetry, pulp, and other stuff, so pick something or tell me to get silly.) If you’ve read everything I have up in the bakery, let me know that too and I’ll delve into the archives. (What, you thought I had published EVERYTHING? Silly human. I have things I wouldn’t have gotten around to for years.)

There will more news as we go.  For those of you who are on my mailing list, I’m sending a new newsletter out a little early this time, since it’s normally out May 1, but the bundle will be done before that.

If you have any questions, comments, ideas, or dirty jokes, please do NOT hesitate to share them.

And thanks for being fans, friends, and supporters.  It means a lot.

bd

I drove to Portland, OR yesterday. A friend was celebrating her birthday. First, we had lunch with the Portland Writers Consortium, and introduced them to a new friend. And talked a lot of business and gossip about the magical, fading land of Traditional Publishing.

It kind of felt like the sort of gossip one would expect as the asteroid had just hit, and the dinosaurs were looking up at the spreading mushroom cloud with the first hints of concern.

For those of you who haven’t been following the (largely hidden) news, several of the big New York (Traditional) publishing houses have been having a blood-letting recently. As in, one of the major owners (the bean counters) has recently laid off something like four thousand people at one shop. To put that in context, one editorial group my lunch mates were familiar with had eight people in it, this time last year. They have two now. And those are the youngest two, in terms of experience (and salary) in the industry.

One gentleman was talking about how had had kept the same contract language, rolled over, since 1996. But the woman who kept giving it to him no longer was employed there. So he has just finished one contract, and will finish his other one shortly, and then will become an orphan.

To give you more context, they fired Nora Roberts’ editor. So she walked out the door and went somewhere else.

The problem is that not all of these people will find jobs elsewhere in the industry. What we are seeing (IMHO) is the consolidation of what used to be hundreds of medium and large publishing companies down into the Big Twelve, and then the Big Eight, and more recently Big Five. New York will probably be down to a Big Three shortly.

Economics of scale theories suggest that everyone else will bail out and sell themselves to one of the others, until you reach the hard kernel that will survive. And this will happen in the next 12-18 months, I suspect.

It doesn’t impact on my life much. I made the decision a long time ago not to even waste my time pursuing the concept of an Agent and a book deal. I can write what I want, and publish it how and when I like. And (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your take on these things), I’m likely to make more money than many of the authors out there. I certainly did last year, even if that amounted to barely more than walking around money.

Most traditionally published writers make under $10,000/year. Yes, you read that correctly. Less than one quarter of what the US considers median income.

The big names, those people you recognize and read, make good money. They aren’t getting the million dollar advances any more, but they aren’t starving. One person I respect greatly, who has his fingers on the pulse of publishing, put it this way. “Now I have to string together $50,000 and $100,000 advances instead.”

He won’t starve. And you’ve probably read his books before this, and will probably read more of them in the future.

But most writers never see that kind of cash.

They write a novel and try to find an Agent. Maybe they get lucky and find one that will take them on and try to get a deal. There just aren’t great deals anymore. At lunch yesterday, the gentleman with the big name talked about $3,000 advances. He earns well on the residuals when the advance is covered, and has a lot of books out there that sell well.

But he is a known quantity.

Newbies, like me, don’t even get offered contracts.

Every once in a great while, a newbie might get a great contract because the editor believes they might be the next JK Rowling, or Suzanne Collins. They get bidding wars fought over their debut novels.

This happens less and less, however. Only a couple such deals were reported last year. None have been reported for this year to date. (Whereas even as few as five years ago, there were close to a dozen.)

But the sad truth for most mid-list writers is much different.

IF (big if) you get a novel deal, it has to explode in terms of sales or you get dropped. (A critical success—meaning a book much beloved by critics—will still be dropped if the sales aren’t great.) Fifty years ago, in the age of smaller and medium-sized publishers, you might be able to write three or five novels, working with a good editor to hone your craft and build your audience. You could make a comfortable living. Not rich, but making enough to live on and maybe raise a family.

Today, it is one and done. You bottle lightning, or you get dropped.

And that’s for the thousands of young writers who try each year. One or two of them might succeed.

I could spend a lot of time trying. I might even succeed.

Why?

I am statistically more likely to be hit by a bus than I am to get that million dollar publishing deal. And I would read the damned contract they offered me, red-line it, and send it back with their stupid clauses crossed out. Their lawyers would never allow them to sign a deal that didn’t screw me out of my rights every way they could.

That’s what book contracts for newbies look like. Established writers, big names, tend to get better deals, because they are willing to walk, or sue.

So I’m back to watching the mushroom light spread across the sky. The wind is picking up. The folks at the table are concerned that maybe the weather is changing.

And I’m watching the sky burn as the world ends.

Their world.

I have four novels available. Number five will be out this summer. I’m about to drop a novella that takes place in the Jessica Keller series. I’m about to publish a new Doyle Iwakuma story. I’m midway through the fourth Jessica novel. I’m planning to edit and participate in two anthologies later this year. I just bought several research books for the next novel. I have a whole bakery of things for people to read.

My world won’t end.

Old school authors are starting to get the rights to their old books back, partly because the big publishers don’t want to spend the money converting them to ebooks, when they won’t see enough return to justify that level of investment.

Newer books, those already available in ebook format, will never go out of print, so that young writer who did get a deal won’t get the rights back for decades. (There is a law that says thirty-five years. Not before. But only if the writer pays attention and is smart about it.) So the new writer gets doubly-screwed.

Fabulous Publisher Babe™ is actually going to see some business from the transition going on. She knows everyone. And she offers a really good deal, either to help them self-publish, or to do it for them. She gets business from other pros who would rather just pay her to do that stuff for them so they don’t have to climb that learning curve and can keep on doing the thing they love most, writing.

Everyone wins in this new economy, except the folks who wanted to work for Traditional Publishing in New York. They got screwed pretty badly in March.

And the light from the mushroom cloud is climbing over the rest of the world’s horizon…

WIBBOW = Would I Be Better Off Writing?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: more yes.

Been down with a nasty cold all week, sleeping, coughing, hacking, and yuck. The worst part was that I just wasn’t able to think. Sitting in the middle of a novel (okay, right at the end of Act I, but still…) and there were no words. None. Emptiness.

Ended up surfing the interwebs, walking all the way through FB, grinding pinterest, catching up on reading. The artist side of my head worked fine. I even sat down and designed a new character for some future Pathfinder campaign (hero or NPC encounter TBD), because that was about the limit of my brain.

It was late yesterday before I had words again. Today before I could commit them.

It’s a hard feeling, not being able to write. Once I made the decision to be a writer, that was what filled up all my spare time. Thinking about writing. Thinking about how to be a better storyteller. How to be a better writer (different thing). How to reach a wider fan base so that I can inch closer to my dream of being able to support myself purely on my words.

Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) has her various income streams. She has Knotted Road Press (I’m just an employee and talent). She also is a member of Book View Cafe. She does publishing work for other folks, as well as covers and interiors. She had other businesses she runs, unrelated to her writing. She has a supportive spouse.

(Don’t mind me, I’m feeling down on myself a little, but it’s nothing serious.)

I am slowly building my bakery. Publishing short stories, novellas, and novels. Participating in anthologies like the CampCon stuff. Editing anthologies. Doing bundles.

I had a story come out in an anthology this week. I’ll have a novella in the Jessica Keller stories come out as part of a bundlerabbit bundle in two weeks. I’ve got a whole new novel getting ready to come out sometime soon. I’ve just sent off a new Doyle Iwakuma novella to first readers. I’m actually getting things done.

But the brain just has not been there. And it frustrates me to not be farther along than I am. But I’m getting there. (Thank you for listening to me rant. I always wonder if anyone but my mother actually reads my blog.)

But I’m feeling better. Got 1800 words done this morning, for the first words in four days. The future looks bright again.

The other topic I want to talk about today is world-building.

Unlike most writers, I didn’t come at genre-fiction through any of the normal channels. I wrote poetry for a while (you can see some of it here and even buy some of it as well). I’ve been into role-playing games for how long? Wow. Yeah. Longer than some of you have been alive.  I even did plays and screenplays for a while. (You know where I can get $5M to make a movie with? Heh.)

One of the reasons I don’t do short fiction is that I tend to create whole worlds before I start writing. History, philosophy, technology, culture. Depth and detail.

That takes a while to do. And I end up with way more stuff than is appropriate for 4,000 words and then never come back again. I get invested.

As a result, I write lots of little stories in the same worlds, with the same characters, following them over time, rather than wrapping it all up in one big novel. Not that I don’t do novels, but I really do enjoy writing the novella better. I can concentrate on one event, one task, one turning point in someone’s life, rather than wander through the shire and then to Mordor and back again in order to have some meaning.

This is on my mind because soon I’ll be publishing a whole new novel, book one in a new trilogy that is straight up super-hero/spandex. I already have Two and Three plotted out, and will get around to them as time permits. More Jessica Keller first.

With superheroes on my mind, I wanted to put together a whole other superhero story, but set it in a different time and place. Different characters. Different problems.

But because I had already had all the rules and physics for “how and why superpowers?” worked out, I could just pick up Kai Di Peng’s world and create other heroes and villains, put them in a different era and on a different coast, and go forward.

(That was the pain in the ass about being sick all week. I have heroes and villains largely worked out, and wanted to start exploring story ideas. You have to be able to brain to do that.)

Kris always says to throw out the first four ideas you have when it comes time to write. Partly, your first instincts will end up being low-hanging fruit, or writing on rails, and not turn out to be memorable or distinct. There are only a few stories out there. What makes your better than everyone else’s? (Trick question, luck and voice.)

So you take the first ideas and write them down, and then let yourself edit them, adding notes, ripping chunks out, adding new ideas, ripping those out. Eventually, you (hopefully) end up with something novel and cool for folks. You have to be able to brain to do this.

So I’ve been world-building in my spare time. Superheroes. Supervillains. Super problems. Strange implications. Dirty secrets. Believable resolutions. Happily-ever-afters. (And let me tell you how much it sucks to be standing on the back porch, in the rain metaphorically, watching your ideas sit down to dinner while you can’t brain.)

Even thinking about blogging was hard. Nearly skipped the whole concept all together, except I use this time to organize my thoughts. To think about how I think about things. To make myself a better writer by working out concepts here, and getting feedback from interested folks (Thank you, those folks who respond. I read them all, delete the trolls and bots, and post them up in a day or so. And I’m happy to have offline conversations. I learn from folks when that happens. Serendipity).

So, for those of you who have made it this far without hurting yourself rolling your eyes, how do you feel about superhero stories? I don’t mean comic books, because I can’t draw better than stick figures, and you would have to deal with something like XKCD or OOTS. I mean superhero stories as (genre) fiction. Real characters, with real problems, overlain with physics-defying crap happening in the background? (J.D., I already know your answer.)

Most of you are here because I write SF. (Nobody reads the fantasy stuff, from what I can tell.) Would you read a story about a young woman whose best friend is killed, where she swears vengeance and sets out to achieve it? What if the killer was a superhero, so she had to make herself into a supervillain to do it? That is book one of Modern Gods: The White Crane. Kai Di Peng. Villainess.

Hopefully, you’ll come along for the ride. I have a LOT of world built. It would be a shame not to share.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West Of The Mountains, WA

Horseshoes, Hand Grenades and Magic

There is a new CampCon anthology available today!!! I have a Brak story in there (technically a Sleipnir story, but whatever).

Get yours today.

Every year, the folks behind the Fiction River Anthologies (Kristine Katherine Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Kerrie L Hughes, Rebecca Moesta, Mark Leslie Lefebvre, John Helfers, and Kevin J Anderson, editing) do a workshop down on the coast to provide the guts of the thing. It goes like this:

Once a week, in the dead of Sunday night (mid-day for Dean) participants get an email with this week’s theme, editor, and rules. From that moment, the writers have until midnight the following Sunday night/Monday morning to deliver your story: on topic, in theme, within length requirements.

If you’re late, you aren’t in.

Now, repeat that for six week.

This year, the topics were: Fear, Justice, Taverns, Wishes, Aliens, and Pulse Pounders. So: horror, crime, travelers, YA, SF, and adrenaline.

Forty something authors participated. Big names, newbies doing their first Coast Workshop, everything in between, and one camp cook (me). Fabulous Publisher Babe™ does these as a participant, but I just sit in awe and watch.

Actually, that’s not true. I go down for one very specific reason over and above taking a week off to be a writer. Some of you already have heard that I’m going to be editing a pair of anthologies this year, targeted for publication in 2017. This is where I learn my own craft.

So you have 40+ writers that have done stories, and most of these people do all six. And they are all damned good. These are the kinds of people who support their families on their writing alone.

Each day of the workshop is dedicated to one anthology. All (five or seven) of the editors will be at the front of the room, a Greek Oracle of accumulated wisdom.

For each story, Dean reads the title. John reads his summary of the story (which can be quite silly), and then each of the editors takes a turn discussing the story.  For each of them, they are telling the writer if they would buy the story for that particular anthology, or not, and why. The authors each sit quietly and listen and (hopefully) learn.

For the writer, this is invaluable information about why the story worked or didn’t work, from some of the best names in the field, including the only person to ever win a Hugo award as both a writer and an editor (Kris). The others are all professional editors with decades of experience in the field and dozens of novels. Freaking amazing insight.

(One of the rules is that though all the authors have the opportunity to read all the stories, the authors are FORBIDDEN to discuss the stories with each other. The only ones allowed to express an opinion are the editors. This is not a peer workshop. This is led by seasoned pros.)

So each editor reviews the story. They have different tastes, different impressions, different back-stories. You will see a broad swath of opinions.

What’s fun is that only one person matters.

The last editor to speak is the one who is actually buying for her anthology. You might have six people who hated the story, and one who loved it and is buying it. You might have six who loved it and rated it a strong buy, and get down to the last person saying “I didn’t get it.”

Editing like this normally happens in a blank room. The author only gets an acceptance letter, or a rejection, with no exposure to the actual sausage-making.

What this workshop does, is it teaches writers how to understand the editorial process, hands on. It really drives home that given a professional level of storytelling (and these folks are pros), it all comes down to a matter of taste.

For me, I go to the evening sessions, after all of the stories have been reviewed. That’s when the fun part happens.

Having picked 4 strong buys and 20 maybes, the editor now has to “build” their anthology.

This is the secret sauce. This is the reason I take a week off work and bribe my way in the door with fresh brownies.

Last year, many of the stories were at the top end of the length category, so around 6,000 words. When it came time to buy, the editors all had around 70,000 words to work with, so roughly 10 stories, plus anchor authors (big names invited to send in a story). Several very good stories didn’t make it last year because the editor simply ran out of space.

People took that to heart. Stories came in around 3-4,000 this year, and some editors ended up with 15 stories.

Lesson: in addition to on topic and theme, shorter stories have a better chance of being bought.

Also, the editors talk to themselves out loud while working, so you see them rate every story into genre and sub-genre, and then talk about only having one of this genre and seven of that. As a result, the one gets in, and only two or three of the seven do.

Lesson: understand what other contributors are likely to do, and try to find corners where you are all alone.

If you hit everything else—theme and genre and word count—but nobody else will have done something like this, you create a slot in the editor’s mind that needs filling. And guess what? You have just written piece to fill it.

Lesson: swing for the fences when it comes to weirdness. Don’t go for low-hanging fruit or obvious stories.

This year, forty-some writers turned in 250-some stories. Roughly 1,100,000 words. One point one million.

The quality of work, after several years of these workshops, was such that last year, they did an extra, seventh anthology just from the left-overs. And it was filled with really good stuff. This year, they just said up front that there would be a seventh. And that editor had to cut their story selection for the final anthology down from the twenty-five stories he originally wanted, AFTER the other six had taken what they wanted.

I’m a pretty good writer. I don’t do short fiction, like this stuff. (Technically, what I do it serial fiction. The soon-to-be-fourth Brak story coming out this week is an example.) I could probably spend a year honing my writing chops to be able to fit into the middle of this group in terms of skill or craft, if I wanted to take the workshop next year.

But to reach that level, I would have to take an entire year of working on short fiction, and doing nothing else. Seriously, these people are that good. And worse, they’re going to spend this next year working on their own craft, so I would maybe, barely, hold my own with them, year over year.

If I was committed to short fiction, I probably would make that choice. I would have, two years ago.

Instead, Fabulous Publisher Babe™ suggested I go longer, and write more novellas and novels, so I can sell my stuff Indie. There are already bookstores and places on the West Coast where you can buy my novels off the shelf (squeeeeeeeeeeeeee). I need to keep turning out longer material to keep my fans happy, and to keep growing the pool of folks looking forward to buying my next title.

But I learned a LOT from being there. The two anthologies I’m planning to edit will be different from these, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I spent the five hours driving each direction discussing editing. Every morning, a long walk on the beach and around to Taft, talking craft. How to organize, what order to put things in so as to evoke the emotional response I want from the reader. Even how to stack stories in order to have strong and weak ones complement each other as the reader encounters them.

That being said, if you want an amazing selection of writers to read and discover, I highly recommend that you go wander through the back catalog of Fiction River and get yourself some issues. All around a theme, so you will be exposed to a variety of genre exploring such a thing, from Romance to Science Fiction, Mystery to Fantasy. (And these authors are being nominated for major awards, sometimes for stories in the Fiction River anthology. Let that sink in for a moment.)

And you will help support these authors. For many of them, short stories in an anthology like this are advertising for their novels. They are a way for you, the reader, to be exposed to a new voice that you might like, in the hopes that you will go walk their catalog and be excited enough to tell other people about it.

Because that is a significant view of the future of Indie publishing, right there.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA