A few cool things happened over this last week, so I’ve assembled them here for public consumption:
KristinD at Bitten By Books gave Attack the Geek 4/5 stars
Mick Happy Reviews gave Geekomancy 4/5 stars
The Shoot the WISB team (myself included) discussed the original 1954 Godzilla
Earlier today I linked to this essay about writing female characters:
And so I wanted to say just a bit more about it, especially idea #6 – swapping the gender to make a male character female without changing anything else about the role.
Just today, I turned in the submission draft of The Younger Gods, the first book in a new Urban Fantasy series with Pocket Books.
The book has a substantial cast, but my favorite character in the book might have to be Dorothea, one of The Broadway Knights (a secret society that protects the homeless of New York City from threats mundane and supernatural). And here’s why that’s relevant. When I first created Dorothea, her name was Graham, and she was male.
I wrote Graham for about 15-20K words of the book, then decided the character would be cooler, and the cast more balanced, if Graham were a woman. I wrote the rest of the novel with Dorothea in the role, and when it came time for revisions, I went back to change the pronouns and tweak the physical description of the character. And that was it.
When I re-cast Graham as Dorothea, the character felt more distinct, more compelling, just because I’d re-approached the role, challenged my assumptions, and taken the extra step. I hope readers will approve of the results. And when I write my next novel, I’ll be on the lookout for other characters that I could flip gender-wise or re-interpret as people of color to make sure I’m writing a more diverse, more representative cast.
I come from musical people. Not just Musical People (Broadway, etc.), but music people. My parents met doing musical theater, my little sister is likely to study Vocal Performance/Musical Theater at college, I’ve performed in musicals and spent more than ten year in various choirs.
Even though I’m five years out from my last music gig, music still has an incredible impact on me. Even being a writer, music is still the form most likely to get me from emotionally neutral to teary in 60 seconds flat.
I’ve talked before about the fact that I write to music. In fact, music is so integrated into my process that I seldom really feel like I have my head wrapped around a story concept until I’ve settled on at least a small handful of songs that take me to the right mental/emotional headspace.
Here’s some music that’s gotten me moving and kept me writing in the last few months:
Postmodern Jukebox “Die Young”
Daft Punk ft. Farrell Williams “Get Lucky”
Amy McNally Hazardous Fiddle
Grace Potter & The Nocturnals “Stars”
Two Steps From Hell Archangel
Hi all. Because I have a zillion projects that I’m juggling right now, I’m late on the Eligibility Round-Ups for 2013 work.
Eligibility
I only published one fiction work in 2013 — CELEBROMANCY, the second in my Ree Reyes urban fantasy series. It is a 2nd in series, but it was written to be accessible to new readers and a stand-alone for folks who don’t like series. It’s available in ebook and the audiobook is performed marvelously by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Mary’s performance of CELEBROMANCY is eligible for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form, due to the current interpretation of how audiobooks are handled for eligibility. I’d strongly encourage people to consider their favorite audiobook performances of 2013 when drawing up your Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form ballots.
I suppose I am also eligible for the World Fantasy — Special Award: Professional for my work as the Sales & Marketing Manager for Angry Robot Books. But in reality, that award should go to someone making more of an impact on the field. I’m still warming up at Angry Robot — my best is yet to come.
My other award-nominable activity is on the fannish side. I am a contributor to the Skiffy & Fanty blog, which is eligible as best Fanzine. I am also an occasional co-host on the Skiffy & Fanty Show, which is eligible for best Fancast.
And my proudest S&F achievement for 2013, if by proud I mean delighted because it was so much fun, is the Skiffy & Fanty Show Torture Cinema episode on Sharknado. Recording that episode included far more laughing and hilarity than the Daily Recommended Dose, and was really what cemented my friendship with Shaun Duke, Jen Zink, and Julia Rios, who I would go on to join in Skiffy & Fanty hostitude. That episode, taken on its own, would be eligible for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form. And wouldn’t it be cool to have something not a movie win the Hugo? Super cool. I won’t shill hard for my novel, but I will shill for that podcast episode. It was super-cool.
Recommendations
This news story via TruthOut caught my interest:
The article mentions Writeahouse, which I’ve blogged about before.
This overall strategy is intriguing, and not just as a part of the creative class this approach is intending to support/use to drive economic growth.
When the details of the PPACA started to become clear, I got a big dose of hope — more support for the arts means more artists living off their art, means fewer artists needing day jobs, means those day jobs go to other people, means the audience for art has more money to support artists.
Programs like this, acting together with the PPACA, could make some serious changes for what it means to be an artist in the USA, and in who can afford to live as a working artist. The easier it is for anyone to make a living as an artist, the more working artists we’ll see, and especially more artists from diverse backgrounds, rather than just artists who have inherited money or have an economic support system to allow them to work without making as much money.
The Thode Island plan is still in proposal stages, and it’s early to see how well facets of the PPACA (Medicare expansion, state exchanges, and plan rebates) will all work in execution, but I’m choosing hope for the moment.
Last month, I had the honor of being a guest interviewer over at the excellent Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers, and Fans, talking with Gregory A. Wilson, author of The Third Sign and the forthcoming Icarus.
Greg is normally a host on the show, but he and Brad have done a two-part series where they, the hosts, take a turn in the interviewee seat. It was a great time, and I’m really happy to have been able to help shed some light on Greg’s project Icarus, which is being made into a graphic novel with comics artist Matt Slay.
Greg and I had talked a bit before about Icarus, and I’m really pleased to see him bringing his vision for the story to life in graphic novel form.
You can listen to the interview here:
And here’s a link to the Kickstarter! It’s reached its initial goal, and now looking at very cool stretch goals.
W00t! It’s that time again, folks – It’s Angry Robot Open Door time!
“But Mike, what are you talking about? I am conveniently unaware of the Angry Robot Open Door periods for informative purposes.”
Angry Robot, being constantly on the lookout for fresh blood and new approaches to the genre, periodically open our doors to unagented submissions, allowing writers to submit directly to the publisher for consideration. We’ve acquired a number of books this way, and some of those have gone on to be our stronger sellers.
Updated:
Bonus: If Angry Robot acquires your book, you and I will get to work together!
I think every blogger has a graveyard of half-finished drafts of posts that they can’t quite find the time or words to finish to their satisfaction. One of mine is about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA, commonly known as Obamacare.
Thankfully, instead of having to finish that post, I can link you to several other posts made by working artists and critics to give a sense of what ACA can mean for our country, as well as what it has already done.
Critic Alyssa Rosenberg, on what the ACA could mean for artists: http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/10/02/2719011/affordable-care-act-artists/
Author Kameron Hurley, sharing a horror story from her own life about what can happen when you’re young and uninsured in America pre-ACA. http://www.kameronhurley.com/the-horror-novel-youll-never-have-to-live-surviving-without-health-insurance/
Author Jay Lake, who is living with terminal cancer, about what ACA has already done in extending his life: http://www.jlake.com/2013/10/03/politicscancer-the-government-shutdown-and-the-aca-and-me/
For myself, I’m very excited and optimistic about PPACA/ACA – I think Alyssa’s dead-on about the potential for artists and freelancers, and if I wasn’t really happy with and excited by my current job, I’d be taking a serious look at going full-time as a writer in 2014 with the healthcare exchanges. As-is, I’m going to be looking at the exchanges anyway, to see if I can save money by switching over to the exchanges and strengthen the pool by participating as a healthy young person.
What the exchanges, the employer mandates, and the individual mandates will actually look like and how they will shake out in terms of costs, really remains to be seen. But ACA has already taken a big step forward in several areas, (the ones discussed above, among others) from our total cluster@$% of a healthcare system to something somewhat less callous and exploitative. Maybe one day, we’ll move forward from PPACA and institute a real, single-payer, universal healthcare system like the vast majority of the rest of the developed world.
Dear all,
Today I’m handing the reins of the blog to my friend Steven R. Stewart. Steve and I met at World Fantasy in San Diego, and he quickly impressed me with his generosity, his curiosity, and his humor. I was very excited to see that he’s launched an already-successful Kickstarter to tell the tale of the first generation of children raised on Mars. I think this is the kind of SF we really need – a return to an optimistic, youth-oriented future, where the future is something great and exciting, not dark and terrifying.
In the last day of the Kickstarter, they’re pushing for a cool Halloween bonus issue.
Here’s Steve:
—
As I write this, I’m sitting by a window that overlooks my grassy lawn—a carpet of organic solar panels that turn sunlight into sugar—and the busy residential street beyond. A steady flow of traffic—human beings in wheeled metal boxes—comes and goes a little too fast for my liking. I have kids, and they play in this lawn, near this busy street. I love my little girls; I don’t want them to break, to go out like a candle, to stop being.
It is night, the moon is out, and I think to myself how crazy all this is. That’s a real place, that ball of white up there in the sky, a place I could plant my feet, draw in the dust with the toe of my boot. It’s not hypothetical. It’s not an idea. It’s really there.
Near the moon, a faint pink dot hangs in the starry sky. It’s a real place too, a red planet, our next door neighbor. It’s so small, so easy to miss, and we could go there.
One day, if we can muster the courage, we will go there. We will live there. As NASA director Mike Griffin said, “One day…there will be more humans living off Earth than on it.” I agree, and I think that’s the way it should be. Earth is just a dot, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” all too easy for some cosmic cataclysm to swat out of the sky. If we want to continue surviving in this absurd, beautiful universe, we have to strap on our pioneer hats and get to work.
So here I am, a 29 year-old fiction writer with two kids and a wife, and zero background in science, mathematics or engineering. How can I help bring this bold future into being? How can I pitch in, or at the very least, cheer on the men and women who can? How can I cheer my loudest?
Generation One: Children of Mars is my attempt to do just that—to create a smart, accessible piece of entertainment that will hopefully encourage young people to look up at that pink dot in the sky and think big about humanity’s future in space. It’s a comic book about kids growing up on Mars and discovering what that means, and what it costs. You can learn more by watching our project video here.
My team and I launched the Kickstarter on August 6th, and so far, the public response has been overwhelming. People are hungry for this kind of story, far hungrier than I had realized. They want the same bold future I want, and that gives me hope. Because once we believe it’s possible, it will be.
We’ve been lucky enough to secure the endorsement of Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of “The Case for Mars” and President of The Mars Society. He had this to say about the project:
“Someday Mars will have its own Laura Ingalls Wilder to tell the tale of growing up on the new frontier. But with ‘Generation One: Children of Mars,’ we can experience some of that story now. It’s going to be great.”
There’s only a handful of days left in the Kickstarter. Join us. Come alongside us as we tell this story; be a part of our journey. It’s the same journey humanity has been on since the beginning: a quest to spread out and survive, to understand and grow, to become more than what we are.
Let’s add to the discussion—and have some fun in the process. We’re human after all.
—
And a cool poster for their final stretch goal:
Poster for Generation One Halloween issue stretch goal
I’ve been worried about Indie Bookstores and eBooks for a while. I work with independent bookstores across the Midwest, and many of them started feeling the sting of Amazon’s growing market share even before the meteoric rise of eBook sales. But as the Kindles rolled out and eBook sales started to pick up, Indies were left in a lurch.
Then came Google, a sometimes-not-evil tech giant, partnering with the American Booksellers Association to allow Indies to sign up and get access to the Google eBooks store — for a fee of $200-300 a month, per store if the business has multiple stores. This meant that several notable independent chains, including Joseph-Beth Booksellers, decided not to opt-in to the program, leaving them without an eBook selling solution.
When Google announced it was ending the bookstore affiliate program, I got worried. The idea of Indies being shut out of the eBook sales market was troubling. There’s no reason that people who are loyal to independent bookstores but like reading eBooks shouldn’t be able to make sure their friendly local gets a cut of eBook revenue if they want.
So I was very relieved when I saw this announcement: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/zola-aims-to-replace-google-books-then-take-on-amazon/
It seems like the folks at Zola have a well-developed plan for building the company up as a comparable alternative to Amazon or BN.com’s online stores, and the partnership with authors could be a cool feature. I hope that they’ll be able to deliver, that Indies will be able to opt-in with much less overhead costs, and that they grow into a strong alternative to the established online eBooksellers. Amazon has a very sophisticated system that they’ve streamlined over years, and a lot of their success comes from aggressive and smart business practices. But I’m wary of any one company getting too much control of an industry, and Zola might help spread the market around a bit more.