Goblin Tales, Print Edition

A handful of people asked whether they would be able to get a print edition of Goblin Tales [Amazon | B&N]. Had I known at the time how long it would take to get the manuscript properly typeset, to create a full-wrap cover, to get my test proof copy in the mail, to go back and completely redo the typesetting–

Fortunately, I didn’t know! And I’m happy to announce that over the weekend, the USPS delivered the following to my door:

It’s roughly mass market sized (about 2-3 millimeters larger), 132 pages, and is priced at $7.99 through Lulu.

Interesting note: with most commercial publishers, the actual printing/paper doesn’t make up a significant portion of a book’s cost, due in part to the large print runs. But that’s not the case with a print-on-demand service. Despite the higher cover price, I end up making significantly less on the print edition: about $.50 vs. $2 for the e-book.

On the other hand, I admit to being a bit old-school, and I like having a book I can add to my ego shelf 🙂

I also just really like the look of the typeset page.

I’m working on enabling the download feature at Lulu, which would let people purchase a PDF file. That should eventually be available for $2.99, but I don’t know when Lulu will update the product page with the download info.

Lulu also has the PDF file for sale, which can be downloaded for $2.99.

I’m still waiting for Kobo to add the e-book to their site, and I’m continuing to talk to Wizard’s Tower about distribution. But for those who wanted a printed version of the book, it’s all yours. There’s even a coupon code: enter SPRINGREAD at checkout and you should get 20% off if you order by March 31.

My thanks to typesetting guru barbarienne, and everyone else who helped out with suggestions and feedback.

If anyone has questions about the process, I’m happy to share.

Diana Wynne Jones

As many of you probably already know, author Diana Wynne Jones passed away on Saturday.

Jones is partly responsible for the character of Golaka the chef in my goblin series. Back in late 2000, as I was finishing up the first draft of Goblin Quest, I picked up a copy of her book The Tough Guide to Fantasyland [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. This book was exactly what I needed as a newish writer, being a guidebook/dictionary to generic fantasyland, including every cliche and trope from Dark Lords to Eye Color to “reek of wrongness.”

It also has an entry for Stew, the official — indeed sometimes the only — meal of Fantasyland.

Now, let me share with you the never-before seen opening paragraphs from the very first draft of Goblin Quest:

Jig’s spoon sank forgotten into his bowl of stew as he tried to back further into the shadows. To his left, his friend Brak moaned.

“He’s going to choose us this time. I know it.”

“Hush,” Jig snapped. He tried not to panic, but even Golara’s wonderful stew couldn’t stop the knot of fear tightening around his heart.

I cringed when I read the “Stew” entry in The Tough Guide. Fortunately, it was only a first draft. I still had time to fix this! I went online and began researching different recipes, trying to adapt them for goblin cuisine.

Golara became Golaka, and soon she was preparing spicy rat dumplings and pickled toadstools and pot pies. She became interesting, and eventually turned into one of my favorite characters in the series.

I wonder how many other struggling new authors Jones helped with that book, which was such a brilliant idea — sharply written and highly amusing. If you appreciated Golaka and her rather twisted recipes, thank Diana Wynne Jones. And if you haven’t read Neil Gaiman’s post “Being Alive. Mostly About Diana.” go do it now.

First Book Friday: Elizabeth Bear

Welcome to First Book Friday.

Elizabeth Bear (matociquala on LJ) has won the Campbell award for best new writer, the Hugo award (twice), the Locus award for best first novel, and the Sturgeon award. If my math is right, she’s put out about sixteen books since 2005, not counting several short fiction collections. Plus she’s been quoted on Criminal Minds.

Personally, I’m waiting for her to write a book about a Giant Ridiculous Weredog.

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Jenny Casey is somebody who has lived in my head for a long time. Wounded, courageous, charismatic, with a take-no-prisoners sensibility and a voice that never hesitates to relate the truth she sees, be it breathtaking or horrible.

I suspect every writer has a few of these–the characters you can slip in to as easily as you slip into your favorite sweater. The ones whose rough patches and worn places just make them more comfortable. The ones whose voices wake you up at night with clever comments.

The ones who will not shut up and give you any peace at all.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six years old, and I figured out stories came from someplace. I had stories in my head; it just took close to twenty-five years to learn the skills necessary to get them out and onto paper in a form other people are actually going to want to read.

Jenny first came to me in 1995 sometime, and among the first words she ever said to me were I never sleep if I can help it. I wrote a bad action novella about her, and a much better short story (“Gone to Flowers”) which has since seen print, and reams and reams of backstory vignettes.

She seemed to want to tell me about her life, and I was eager to hear it. But I wasn’t yet the writer I needed to be to pull it off. And I had no idea how to learn to be that writer. So the pile of notes and unpublishable fiction remained just that–a pile, even though I went back and worked on it periodically. I was writing, but I wasn’t progressing.

In 2001, though, I lost my job, and in the wake of 9/11 could not find another. So I wrote. It was a coping strategy. In that same time, I fell in with a group of writers at the Online Writing Workshop For Science Fiction and Fantasy (in a bit of sweet irony, I am now a Resident Editor there) and they taught me all the skills I needed–the most important of which was learning how to learn.

I wrote five novels in two years. And the fourth of those was Hammered [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], which was based on some of those early notes, was good enough to impress Jenn Jackson, who agreed to become my agent. She sent me some rewrite notes, by means of which I tuned up the manuscript, and we started submitting it. I’d already finished Scardown by then–publishing is slow!–and while I was waiting, I went back to writing … I think it was Blood and Iron, at that point.

Jenn called one night and told me she had good news: Anne Groell at Spectra had made an offer on Hammered and its two sequels. I almost dropped the phone.

And then I went and started work on Worldwired.

Anne has since told me that at the time, the Jenny books were Bantam Spectra’s fastest turnaround from acquisition to publication. (The record’s since been beaten–I think by Kelley Armstrong.) She bought the series in November of 2003, and they were all in print by December of 2005. They made my name as a writer, quite frankly, and I am eternally grateful to Anne and Jenn for that … and also, it must be said, to Jenny.

Jenny’s still got that voice: straightforward, brittle, brutally honest, a little jagged-feeling. The difference is, now other people can read it too. By the timeline in the books, she’s going to be born on September 30, 2012.

I think I need to throw her a party.

Good News Chaser

Was feeling a bit raw after that last post, so I decided I needed a good news chaser.

1. Yesterday I typed “THE END” on the first draft of Libriomancer. It’s a short draft, and needs a lot of work, but it’s a finished draft, and I’ve got some ideas on what I need to fix to make it better.

2. I’ve also got page proofs for The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], meaning production is moving right along on that book. I should even be seeing ARCs soon 🙂

3. Goblin Tales [Amazon | B&N] has sold 101 copies on Amazon, another 48 on B&N, and is now available on iBooks as well. (Still working on Kobo, and I’m talking to Wizard’s Tower Press about getting it up there, which looks to be a bit friendlier for international sales.)

Your turn. Share some good news in the comments, and spread the happy.

My Penny Arcade Moment

Last night, I was talking about 80s TV shows with my kids, and my daughter started mocking Voltron. She was laughing, and asked if there were robot pigs to go with the robot lions.

Unforgivable.

So I posted to Twitter/Facebook, “My daughter is mocking Voltron. This is how child abuse happens.”

Had I been thinking, I could have anticipated what came next. I wasn’t thinking.

The majority of responses were amused. But there were a few who said it wasn’t funny, or that child abuse is never funny/should never be joked about.

Before I go any further, let me make one thing clear. I do not want this to be about taking sides. And I don’t want to see words like “oversensitive” or “overreacting” in the comments, ‘kay?

With that out of the way, the fact is, many people did find the comment funny. People who specifically identified as child abuse survivors said they were amused/entertained. They talked about the ability to laugh as a coping mechanism, and perhaps as a way to reclaim some power.  Elizabeth Bear commented, “When we can’t joke about awful shit, the awful shit has won.”

All of which would make it pretty easy for me to say “Well, most people weren’t upset,” and to ignore those few who were. That would certainly be more comfortable for me. The trouble is, the majority isn’t necessarily right. (They’re not necessarily wrong, either.) One of my goals as a writer is to entertain, and I think I did that for most of my readers … but there were questions I needed to ask myself:

  • Did that joke minimize or belittle what abuse survivors go through?
  • Did it encourage people to take child abuse less seriously?
  • Could it be personally hurtful to survivors of abuse?

Note that “Did my joke make people run out and abuse their kids?” is not one of the questions. That’s not what anyone was saying, and me framing it like that would be a pretty obnoxious strawman.

For the first two questions … I don’t know. I’d like to say no, because I’d like to think of myself as someone who would never say or do anything to minimize that kind of abuse. But the sad fact is, I’m human, and sometimes I screw up.

I think a more honest answer would be … maybe? One joke by itself probably won’t make much difference, but every rainstorm is made up of individual droplets. I don’t know.

As for question number three, let me put it this way. One response came from someone whose father used “watching a cartoon he didn’t like” as an excuse to beat them. Meaning I lobbed a grenade directly onto one of their triggers. And of course, I have no way of knowing whether others might have felt hurt or angry, but — understandably — chose not to tell me.

It’s not my place to say what people can or can’t joke about. But I’m the one choosing what jokes I make, and one thing I’m taking away from this is the need to be more mindful of who might be hurt by them.

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*The title refers to this post from last month.

Torchwood

So after loving four seasons of the new Doctor Who, I went ahead and got the first season of Torchwood for Christmas. (Thank you, Santa.) We’ve watched the first three episodes. I’m not sure how best to say this, but … well, if the show doesn’t improve, I guess I can always use the DVDs as backup air hockey pucks.

I knew going in that Torchwood was darker than Doctor Who. And I know it often takes a while for a new series to figure itself out (see Star Trek: TNG). So I’m going to keep watching. But it’s like someone took Doctor Who and sucked out everything that makes me love it, and I’m watching what was left over.

The very first episode introduces Torchwood, the super-secret agency dedicated to protecting London from aliens and alien technology. The Torchwood team is frankly unlikeable and annoying. Our standout asshole would be Owen, happily swiping and using alien date rape drugs. (This is one of the “good guys.”) But everyone on the team is blissfully ignoring the rules and swiping alien tech for their own purposes, and none of them strike me as particularly pleasant.[1. Random character note: I did like the twist in ep. 3 where Owen, who’s been set up as the vengeful one, immediately begins performing CPR and trying to save the life of the bad guy.]

And then there’s Captain Jack. Oh, Jack … I like you so much more when you’re not the leader babysitter. When you can be fun and sexy and impulsive.

Gwen is the most likeable, as the cop who first investigates and then joins Torchwood. But she’s not working for me either. I think it’s partly because she keeps screwing up, whether it’s breaking the alien rock with a chisel (who throws rock-piercing tools around at an alien landing site?), pressing random buttons on alien technology, or just sneaking that tech home with her — despite having seen what happened in the very first episode.

I have no idea why Jack keeps them around. Are these people really the best he could do? The Doctor picks up better partners just running down a street.

All of this I could forgive as the stumbling of a new show, but this is supposed to be a spinoff of Doctor Who, and it has none of the wonder of that show. Doctor Who can get pretty dark too, but it never loses that sense of wonder. And Torchwood, at least in the first three episodes, doesn’t have it.

I’m hoping it gets better, and I’ll continue watching. But so far, I am less than impressed.

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Convention Follow-up

Dawn’s in trouble.  Jim blew up some internet yesterday. Must be Tuesday.

Some follow-up thoughts to my post about conventions and membership comp policies.

I screwed up. I wrote that post in part to sort out my own feelings about what was and wasn’t fair before contacting Penguicon about scheduling and money issues. However, I ignored the fact that this is the internet, and of course my post would get back to the Penguicon staff, who would likely feel a bit blind-sided and attacked. It’s not like this is my first time online, and I should have contacted them privately before blogging about that aspect. Mea culpa, and I apologize to the folks at Penguicon.

Two links that came out of yesterday’s discussion:

My thanks to everyone who participated in the conversation. That’s one of the things I love about blogging — I hear different sides of an argument, and get a better understanding of various perspectives, whether I agree with them all or not. A number of factors seem to come into play with reimbursement policies, including the size of the con, the age of the con (startup cons may not have the budget to cover memberships), the location (U.S. and non-U.S. cons seem to have different attitudes … perhaps related to size), and the type of con (relaxacon vs. Big Media Con vs. professional-oriented vs. fan-oriented, and so on.)

The one thing I keep coming back to is the importance of communication. In many of the stories of program participants getting angry over convention policies, one of the biggest problems was people didn’t know they were expected to pay for membership until much later, sometimes when they showed up at the convention. A con has the right to make whatever policies they choose, but I think it’s very important to make sure everyone’s aware of those policies up front so that the participants can decide whether or not it’s worth their time to attend.

Ideally, it seems like it would be helpful for the initial communication between con and participants to include the following:

  • Is this an invitation to be a participant, or just a poll who might want to do programming? (There was discussion and disagreement on what constituted an official invitation to participate at a con.)
  • What is the reimbursement policy for participants?
  • In the case of something like Penguicon, with different tiers of participants, what exactly would the arrangement be for this guest? (Turns out I’m a “nifty” guest, meaning I wouldn’t have to pay the $25 … but I didn’t find that out until yesterday.)

Finally, it occurs to me that it’s easy for me to sit back and tell the con staff what they should do. However, while I feel that these are all valid points and worth discussing, it’s also important to remember that the con staff are volunteers, and they work their asses off. As someone who enjoys the con experience, I want to thank everyone who chips in to make them happen.

Convention Comp Policies

Most of the time, when I attend a convention and do programming, membership is comped (i.e., I don’t have to pay for a convention badge). This makes sense to me. Generally you have to do a minimum of 3 or so panels, but at that point you’re considered to be contributing to the con, just like someone who volunteers for X hours in exchange for a comped badge.

This isn’t always the case. Three examples come to mind.

1. World Fantasy Con. I was told I could do either a reading or a panel last year, and either way I was still paying the $100+ for con membership. For a world convention, where the majority of attendees are authors, you just can’t comp memberships to everyone who wants to do programming … nor can you put everyone who asks onto as many panels as they want. It’s the nature of the convention, and I get that.

2. Windycon. Their policy for years has been that authors pay for membership like everyone else. But if you do X number of panels, they’ll mail you a check several months later to reimburse your membership. I’ve asked about this policy, and it was blamed on “panelists who took their comp badges and then blew off their panels.” I’m … skeptical. Is this really such a huge problem? If so, then why aren’t other cons doing this? And why not just stop inviting those particular individuals to be on programming?

ETA:  My explanation above is quoted from an e-mail I received when I asked about Windycon’s policy, but I’m told that this is a vast oversimplification.

3. Penguicon. Program participants at Penguicon get a reduced rate. I believe it’s $25 this year. In some years, I’ve been told I could be a “nifty guest,” and got my membership comped for that, but I believe nifty status is pretty much up to the whim of whoever’s doing programming. I know of at least two authors who refuse to do programming at Penguicon for this reason, and I suspect there are more. Penguicon is a really fun con, but this aspect does make me a bit cranky.

I understand that panels can be publicity for authors, and we’re benefiting from exposure. At the same time, if I’m reading my Penguicon schedule correctly, I’m scheduled for eight panels, and the group signing, and a reading … and being told I’ll have to pay $25 for the privilege of working my ass off that weekend.

I generally enjoy doing panels. And they do help me sell a few books. But don’t pretend it isn’t work. And I find myself wondering … am I really so popular they want me on eight panels, or is this a result of other authors backing out?

I need to follow up with Penguicon’s programming staff about this, but I’m trying to sort out what’s fair. Should authors be content to pay for registration and settle for “exposure”? (I can tell you exactly what I’d say to a magazine or anthology that offered to pay me in exposure…) Or am I slipping into diva mode by expecting to be comped for my membership?

Discussion welcome, as always. I would especially love to hear from other authors and from folks who organize and run cons, to know what you think.

4 Links and 1 Lesson

The Lesson: iBooks will yank your e-book from the store if it contains any Amazon or B&N links. Good to know.

The Links:

Hal Duncan talks about segregation in fiction at the SFWA Blog.

Via Writer Beware: Author who files charges over a bad review ends up being fined the equivalent of $11,000. I’m no lawyer, so I won’t claim to fully understand all of the details, but I believe the legalese translates to “Don’t be a dumbass.”

Via theguindo: California’s proposal to eliminate library funding. Unfortunately, libraries seem to be a popular target these days.

Confessions of a Slush Reader at Shimmer.  “Slush readers are like lonely folks sitting at a singles bar: we came here to fall in love.  The odds aren’t good because the goods are odd, as the old saying goes, but there is one truth—when we start reading your story, we want it to be beautiful.”

First Book Friday: Gini Koch

Very imporant administrative note: Goblin Tales passed 100 sales yesterday!

Ahem. Where was I? Oh, right — First Book Friday, with Gini Koch. From Gini’s website, some of her hobbies include mooning over pictures of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, and training her pets to ‘bring it’. I met her at World Fantasy, and… well, let’s put it this way. Her cover for Alien Tango features blue explosions, a rocketship, and an angry gator. Energetic, lively, fun, and a little random.

Gini’s a lot like that.

Her third book about “Super-Being Exterminator Kitty Katt and the Alpha Centaurian she loves,” is called Alien in the Family [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], and comes out on April 5.

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I didn’t think I was cut out to be a writer because I don’t outline, and I was told by a teacher (who I knew, even at age 15, to be an idiot) that unless you outlined, you couldn’t write ANYthing. And yet, I believed her. For 20 years. And, for those years, any time I’d try to write an outline, I’d lose all the joy of the idea, bog down, and end up with nothing useful after hours of time expended.

But I always wrote in my head. I just didn’t think playing out scenes constantly was being creative — I thought it was how I passed the time while everything around me moved so slowly. I’m a multitasker of the highest order and if I don’t have something occupying at least the front and the back of my mind, said mind tends to wander into all those lovely worlds I wasn’t qualified to write.

My first novel came about because the particular voices in my head were SO loud, obnoxious and demanding, that I wrote their story down just to shut them up. I was supposed to be working (on the weekend) but looked up 8 hours later to see a lot of pages written — and a novel taking shape. I’d also discovered a joy I hadn’t known before and realized this was the thing I wanted to do, wanted to BE. I also realized that I was doing just fine without an outline.

As I wrote more and more, my technique got better. Most would have trunked that first novel, but I loved the characters too much — they were the REASON I was writing, the reason I’d discovered the thing I truly loved to do. So, I rewrote their story. In full. 9 times.

And am rewriting their story a 10th time, because while my agent loved version 9.2.2 and shopped it around, and also while we got some incredibly complimentary rejections, because it’s set in the Old West and has people on horses it’s considered a “Western”, and they don’t sell, dontchaknow. So, the characters gave me their blessing, and we’re off into a different spin. I’m excited, my agent’s excited, and the characters are excited. But I digress…

Fortunately, I didn’t know about, and then ultimately ignored, most of the writing advice out there. I’m a linear writer, I need music and chaos around me to get anything done, and I work on a variety of things at once. The idea of having to “finish one thing before you go onto the next” is alien and abhorrent to me. If I’d listened to it, I wouldn’t be published. In anything. I wrote well over a dozen novels (none published yet, some trunked, some waiting patiently for me to go back and fix them like I did my beloved First Novel) and triple that in short stories, with some novellas along the way. But I still wasn’t “there”, and I knew it.

Touched by an Alien [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], came about through a variety of steps, the most significant being these, all of which took place in roughly the same year:

  • One of my friends was constantly nagging me to “write funny” — I finally listened to her, and the first professional sales I ever made were in short humor; 
  • I started playing around with different POV options, particularly going from 3rd person only to trying out 1st person;
  • I finally found the crit partner I truly clicked with, and watched my writing move from really good to truly publishable;
  • I realized I needed to understand pacing innately, which I didn’t at the time, and so I gave myself an assignment to write a variety of short stories in varying lengths, from micro-fiction up to 10,000 words. When I finished all of this, somehow, I  indeed understood pacing and ended up with a large variety of stories to sell, many of which have indeed sold (under different pen names).

And then I had a dream — a dark, noir-ish, scary dream — and I fully intended to write a dark, noir-ish, scary story. I was still doing my short story assignments, and this looked to fit my 4,000 word slot.

By page 3, the character’s voice had taken over, by page 5 I realized this was going to be a lot longer than 4,000 words, and by the end of the first chapter that dark short story turned into a funny, sexy, science fiction novel. As I was writing it, I realized it was “the one”… the novel that would get me a great agent. It was, and said agent sent it directly off to DAW Books. The rest, as they say, is history.

Would I change anything? Yeah. If I could do it all over again, I’d ignore that teacher’s rule, like I ended up ignoring all the other rules, and start writing decades sooner. But, you know, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up with Kitty Katt and Jeff Martini and my Alien series. So, perhaps the journey’s gone exactly how it should have. As a person, that’s my view. As an author, well … there’s bound to be a story in all of that somewhere.

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