Upcoming Class on Action Scenes

Next month I am teaching a new class with Cat Rambo’s “Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers.” This one is about action scenes and emotional storytelling.

The class will be held on April 8th at 1 pm Pacific (4 pm Eastern) Daylight Time. The class will be two hours long and costs $99 USD ($79 if you have taken other classes at the Rambo Academy before).

Here’s the course description:

Characterization and the emotional arc of a novel don’t step aside when the blasters start firing or people start throwing punches. The best action storytelling uses chases, misadventure, and fight scenes to foreground emotion, to show characters making big choices based on their feelings. Instead, the best action stories include the audience in the emotional rollercoaster of the characters. This class will talk through techniques for using action scenes to advance the plot and the emotional journey of your characters and how to make sure that the scenes are far more than choreography and flashy explosions.

Sign up to take the class here.

This class draws heavily on the experiences I had writing Annihilation Aria and what I’ve learned as a reader in the past few years as well as through analysis of some of my favorite action scenes in media over the past decade.

Announcing ANNIHILATION ARIA

I’ve been alluding to a [REDACTED NOVEL] for some time now, and I can finally drop the brackets and tell everyone what’s up!

My next novel is a space opera called ANNIHILATION ARIA, and it’s coming May 5th, 2020 from Parvus Press!

On Monday, Parvus tweeted this:

 

and this:

 

 

Which may or include zoomed-in sections of a soon-to-be-revealed cover. Who could say? 😉

Here’s the official announcement.

There will be more news about ANNIHILATION ARIA soon, from art to endorsements to some travel plans and more! This novel has been a long time coming, serving as a back-burner project for several years as I was wrapping up Season One of Genrenauts and as I was developing and writing Born to the Blade with the team and Serial Box.

 

Origins 2019 schedule

Hello again! It’s still convention season, and Origins will be my third con in six weeks and the end of my busy period with travel for the summer. I’ll be moderating several panels and speaking on a couple of others, and you can also find me in the Origins Author’s Library section of the exhibit hall much of the rest of the weekend. So if you’re headed to the show, I hope you’ll swing by and say hello!

 

Thursday, June 13:

1pm-2pm: Career Expectations: What can you expect from a writing career? How do you decide if you’re a success or a failure? Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Brozek, Michael R. Underwood (M), Robyn King

4pm-5pm: Next-level Worldbuilding for Prose or Gaming: Talking about power dynamics in worldbuilding, layering of history, cohesive/coherent worldbuilding that feels like it all connects, etc. Lucy Snyder, Michael R. Underwood (M), Doc Myers

 

Friday, June 14:

2pm-3pm: Pen and Pixels: Lessons from gaming for prose fiction and lessons from prose for gaming. Carlos Hernandez, Michael R. Underwood, Tracy Chowdhury, Gregory A. Wilson (M)

 

Saturday, June 15:

3pm-4pm: Branding & Marketing Yourself and Your Content: Running a podcast, releasing short fiction for free, blogging, Tweeting, etc. All the different ways to identify and bring more attention to your writing and your brand. Larry Dixon, Michael R. Underwood, Robyn King, Cat Rambo, Gregory A. Wilson (M)

 

Sunday, June 16:

1pm-2pm: Using Folktales, Legends, and Myths in Your Storytelling: Learning how to differentiate the different types of folklore and how to incorporate them into your worldbuilding. Mercedes Lackey, Doc Myers, Addie J. King, Michael R. Underwood (M)

Labor in the Publishing Industry

Things like close-open shifts at bookstores, where booksellers got less than 10 hours off the clock between closing one night and opening the next day. Co-workers at the B&N I worked at faced it more than once or twice.

It’s commonly known in the industry that most editors have to do most of their reading and/or editing at home, *after* putting in full-time hours in the office doing project management/meetings/etc. On salary, so no OT. That’s a culture of habitual crunch.

Publicists given 12 or more titles per month to cover, requiring either shoddy support for some titles and/or substantial, *habitual* overtime. Again, likely uncompensated.

Sales reps asked to read up on the titles they’re selling, which almost always happens outside of office hours. Again, uncompensated. I’m told this happens with some indie booksellers, too.

Unpaid overtime is, from what I can see and what I’ve heard, the *norm*, not the exception. Especially in the entertainment industry, where “passion” is supposed to sustain you. Where there are a hundred people eager to replace you if you leave your under-paying position.

New York State has done a version of this just on the NY level, which is a step in the right direction. Assuming it is enforced and workers aren’t intimidated into working unpaid overtime and not reporting it. I don’t know how it’s working in practice.

Also, let’s talk about how many agents are paid *only* on a commission basis – where it frequently takes several years to build up a client base with sales at a level necessary to make up a living wage.

Oh, yeah, what about the people that write the dang books?

So that’s a lot. And that’s not even including authors. If there’s one type of actor in the publishing industry without whom it could not even begin to function, it’s authors.

How many hundreds of hours of labor goes into each book? What % of book deals actually cover that spread at a level that comes out to even minimum wage? The fastest I ever wrote a novel was 31 days. 71k words for the first draft. About 3 hours a day.

I took Sundays off. So that’s 26 days times three hours a day. I put in *at least* 50 hours of editing & extra writing, and that’s lowballing. But we also have to count outlining, brainstorming, copy editing, page proofs, and promotion. Say another 100 hours for all of that.

(26 x 3) + 50 + 100 = 228 hours. I’d wager that is far onto the low end for a full-length adult novel. Even written very quickly, my $4k advance divides to become $17.5 an hour. Also, it’s not W2 money, that’s 1099 money, so I paid more taxes on it. Plus 15% of the gross went to my agent (which I do not begrudge at all). So I maybe, maybe, hit $15 an hour on that one, pre-tax. So $10 an hour post-taxes.

And that was the *only* novel I’ve been able to write anywhere near that fast. Most I’d say took twice to three times as long. The fast novel was the fourth in a series, so I really knew the characters and had a big arc ending to push for. I was also in good health at the time.

If it takes 500-1000 hours to write a novel and you’re getting $5k to $10 in advances, many of which don’t earn out, you’re looking at maybe $10 an hour, minus agent commission and taxes. For the person *who wrote the damn book everyone else gets paid to help publish*.

Staff and booksellers and other publishing professionals work on a lot of books at once, so the jobs are not a direct comparison. And they for sure add value and deserve to be compensated. Ultimately, my point is that just about everyone is getting screwed until you get into (probably) upper management or the C-suite.

Authors, editors, publicists, sales staff, booksellers, all grist for the mill. And who profits? Who is doing *really well* in this equation? Executives, stockholders, and a *very* tiny percentage of authors. Most of the costs and risks are born by the folks at the bottom. The authors that get dropped when a series doesn’t take off. The publicist let go because they struck out despite working their ass off. The booksellers let go when a chain liquidates to pay out stockholders.

As I think about this, I try to remember that I’m not the only person in the hot seat. I’m in the grind with my agent and (probably) my editors, publicists, sales team, etc. But Passion. But Love of Books. But Literature.

The people at the top are counting on passion. They’re counting on the fact that there is no end to the # of people that want your job or your spot on the list. But we have to do better. We have to demand better.

We can create a world where work is fairly compensated. Where people aren’t pushed to their breaking points to stay on top of the schedule. Where the expectation of unpaid internships doesn’t keep excluding marginalized writers & staffers.

So, what’s the takeaway?

What can I do? What can any of us do?

1) If you’re in a position to set work culture in your office, be a leader in taking care of your staff. In pushing upper management for overtime pay and/or more sensible hours.

2) Remember that you are not alone, not if you’re an author, agent, junior publicist or bookseller. That passion that gets used against us also links us with other people in the field. We can fight for one another.

3) Vote for candidates that support living wages and stronger protections for workers.

4) Investigate unionization and labor advocacy in your workplace.

5) Take care of yourself. Especially if no one else is. And then, if you can, try to help someone else.

“All The Nations of the Sky”

Born to the Blade S1 cover art - by Will Staehle
The flames of war burn bright, and options are growing thin.

The only way out for the Warders of the Circle is forward.

Today’s release “All the Nations of the Sky” by yours truly completes Born to the Blade season one!

I’ve learned SO MUCH about writing, storytelling, and business from this series, and am so grateful to my co-writers Cassandra Khaw, Malka Older, and Marie Brennan. They brought so much to the series and I have learned a lot about storytelling from each of them. I’m grateful to @serialboxpub for taking a chance on this series, for bringing the team on-board to help make new moves in storytelling, to meet readers where they are in their busy lives, commuting, sneaking in bits of reading time here and there, and so on.

I’m so honored that the series has connected with readers and that I’ve had the chance to push myself as a storyteller. Having reviewers covering the series week after week has been an utter delight.

In working on projects since BORN TO THE BLADE, I can already see the improvements to my craft – in characterization, worldbuilding, action scenes, and sentence-level craft. It’s been a lot of hard work and even more excitement, wonder, and joy.

So thank you to everyone who has been reading the series, to everyone that reviewed an episode or the season or talked about it with friends. The future of Born to the Blade now comes down to word of mouth and continuing to spread and earn new readers.

If you want to see what happens next for Kris, Michiko, Ojo, and everyone else, keep talking about the series with your friends!

BONUS: new readers can get the entire first season for just $1.99 at serialbox.com/redeem with the code SUMMER18

Born to the Blade continues with “The Gauntlet”

Born to the Blade episode 4 “The Gauntlet” is here!

Kris will face six warders in their challenge to win Rumika a seat in the Warders’ Circle.

Born to the Blade - Episode 4 - "The Gauntlet" by Michael R. Underwood. From Serial Box Publishing

But has Kris made the alliances needed to win? Will they try to power through on prowess alone?

“The Gauntlet” completes act one of the season. Relationships are put to the test, characters forced to choose between orders & their own desire.

This episode was an absolute delight to write, and here’s some of the why:

“The Gauntlet” was the first episode I’d written once I had already read other team member’s takes on the characters and world. We’d already developed the characters at the summit, but as a writer, it is a whole other thing to read how other writers depict characters.

This episode was where I really started to see what this project could do in terms of impacting my craft, the challenge of working back and forth with the team as well as putting my personal stamp on the world in prose and not just concept.

A big part of that stamp was The Gauntlet itself. I drew on my personal experience competing in martial arts tournaments, from TKD to SCA fencing, as well as non-physical tournaments, where mental will is perhaps even more prominent as a factor in determining success.

Putting Kris through six life-defining duels over a very short period of time, while trying to maneuver politically to garner support even when they might not win, meant drawing on my own experiences as a competitor. It meant remembering the bruises, the heartbreak, the elation.

The other part that was the most fun was getting to showcase the different warders and their fighting styles. I drew on my experience with historical European martial arts as well as East Asian styles.

And then I got to add wizard dueling on top.

The idea for the magic system in Born to the Blade came in part from a desire to have magic feel *embodied*. To push hard against the direction that D&D pointed, where Wizards have d4 hit dice and can’t swing a sword worth jack.

The duels I wrote in the gauntlet and throughout the series are my current best efforts to further the art of writing duels and combat scenes in the genre.

I wanted to write duels so emotionally compelling that my easily-fatigued-by-action-scenes wife would love them. I wanted to show readers and maybe some writers that action and fight scenes can reveal, test, and develop character just as much as any other type of scene. People show who they are in a million great and small ways when they take up arms or choose not to.

And through it all, there is Kris. This daring, ambitious, dynamo far more at home in a training gym than a court setting. They are the vessel of their nation’s hopes and dreams and they push themself and learn about themself in ways they didn’t expect.

So that’s “The Gauntlet.”

Read “The Gauntlet” by subscribing at Serial Box and get the best deal on the whole season in ebook + enhanced audio.

Or you can read one episode at a time:

Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Kobo

Born to the Blade S1 cover art - by Will Staehle

The Data Disruption launch

The new Genrenauts story is here!

Cyberpunk is one of my very favorite genres. Movies like Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner were formative for me growing up, as well as The Matrix. I played the hell out of Netrunner card game growing up, as well as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020. In school, I got to take a SF/F class from a professor whose specialty is cyberpunk.

I was a bit young to read Cyberpunk when it was first emerging in film and fiction. But as a Millennial/Gen Y/Oregon Trail generation kid, I grew up in an ever-more Cyberpunk world, with global communications technology, global mega-corps, consolidation, ever-more-impressive medical and technological breakthroughs, automation, rising corporate influence on government, and so on. It’d be pretty easy for me to argue that Cyberpunk is the genre most reflective of the world I’ve known growing up. It’s given me many of the tools I use to see and analyze the world, in terms of the social impact of technology, how labor, corporations, and politics intersect, and humanist questions about androids, robots, and so on.

Also, it’s got cool fight scenes.

So it’s little surprise that the majority of my non-novella short fiction is cyberpunk. “Kachikachi Yama” and “Can You Tell Me How To Get to Paprika Place” are both cyberpunk stories, though their focuses are very distinct. Cyberpunk aesthetics show up in the Ree Reyes series as well, especially in Hexomancy.

Acknowledgments 

I want to thank John Appel, Devan Barlow, Beth Cato, and A.F. Grappin for their great beta reader feedback on this story. Richard Shealy’s copy edit helped me say what I want to say with clarity. Thanks also to Sean Glenn for keeping the visual style of Genrenauts going with his cover design, and to Meg White Underwood for being my first reader and final proofer, as well as a marvelous brainstorming buddy. And once again, thanks to everyone who backed, promoted, and otherwise supported the Genrenauts Season One Kickstarter.

So without further ado, here’s The Data Disruption! It’s free on all ebook platforms. Check below for more information about the story.

Amazon * Barnes & Noble * iTunes
GumroadKobo

The Data Disruption cover. Design by Sean Glenn

Design by Sean Glenn

 

When Stories Break, You Send in the Genrenauts!

The Genrenauts are a group of story experts who travel to parallel worlds. Each is the home of a narrative genre—Science Fiction or Romance, Fantasy or Western—populated by archetypal characters and constantly playing out familiar stories.

The Genrenauts’ mission: find and fix broken stories. If they fail, the ripples from the story worlds will cause havoc and devastation on their home world.

In the world of Cyberpunk, D-Source, a noted hacker, has disappeared, leaving his team’s storyline to grind to a halt. Angstrom King leads the Genrenauts on a mission to find out what happened to D-Source and how to get the cyberpunks back in the action.

World-spanning megacorporations…suspicious mercenaries living on the edge…lethal computer programs designed to tear your mind to shreds…the Genrenauts will face all these and more to get the story back on track—before it’s too late.

A short story in the world of Genrenauts (a finalist for the r/Fantasy “Stabby” Award for Best Serialized Fiction.)

Those links again:
Amazon * Barnes & Noble * iTunes
GumroadKobo

Norwescon Schedule

Next week, for the first time, I will be attending Norwescon in Washington. Even cooler, I’ll be attending alongside my boss, Marc Gascoigne, representing Angry Robot Books as the Spotlight Publisher for the con. It’s kind of like being a Guest of Honor, but in a publisher-specific fashion. A number of our authors will be in attendance, as well. It should be a grand old time.

Here’s my schedule! I’ve left off the specific info on things that I’m not certain are open to the full attendance of the convention. It may be that some of those are in fact open, and regardless, I hope to see people during the con!

Thurs

Opening Ceremonies
7:00pm – 8:00pm @ Grand 3 and Grand 2
Nancy Kress (M), Catska Ench, Cory Ench, Ethan Siegel, Ian McDonald, Marc Gascoigne, Mike Underwood

Friday
The Geek Life
11:00am – 12:00pm @ Cascade 9
Shannon (M), Shubzilla, Mike Underwood, Jason Bourget

Interview and Q&A with Angry Robot
1:00pm – 2:00pm @ Grand 2
Adam Rakunas (M), Marc Gascoigne, Mike Underwood

Saturday
Autograph Session 1
2:00pm – 3:00pm @ Grand 2

Autograph Session 2
3:00pm – 4:00pm @ Grand 2

What’s New at Angry Robot
5:00pm – 6:00pm @ Evergreen 1&2
Marc Gascoigne, Mike Underwood

The Evolution of Star Wars
7:00pm – 8:00pm @ Cascade 9
Spencer Ellsworth (M), Dylan Templar, David Fooden, Mike Underwood, Rob Stewart
Sunday
Closing Ceremonies
4:00pm – 5:00pm @ Evergreen 3&4
Rob Stewart (M), Catska Ench, Cory Ench, Ethan Siegel, Ian McDonald, Marc Gascoigne, Mike Underwood, Nancy Kress

Birthday Reflections

It feels weird to have a birthday and focus on joy with the current political climate, but the concert I went to last night was 100% what I needed. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Pulse events present orchestral music in a fresh, accessible way, and last night they played alongside Lake Street Dive.

I listened to classical pieces (new and old) that I’d never heard and got to lose myself in the richly textured performances. Next was Lake Street Dive themselves, a band of classically-trained performers who have found solid success in popular music, thanks to technical skill, great songwriting, and a lead singer with a truly singular voice. This set was far more rocking than the festival show I saw several years ago as they were starting to break out. It brought me so much joy to see them pack and captivate a 2,000+ person room.

And then, after 100 minutes of amazing music performing each on their own, the BSO and Lake Street Dive combined for a short set of LSD’s songs with 20 performers on stage. Lake Street Dive’s music is already textured and dense, and with 5x as many instruments, the magnified effect was transcendent.

But it wasn’t just the music that made the night. Before the show, there were local food vendors and local performers, like a mini indoor festival.Food, drinks, and then unforgettable music.

But that wasn’t the end.

After, we got to go backstage.

The friend whose +1 I was knows one of the bandmates, and so we got to meet and chat with each of them. I found out that the guitarist and the guest keyboardist are both SF/F fans, so we talked science fiction, the differences between prose and music, writing across media traveling for work.

The whole night was a magnificent, life-affirming event that reminded me of the power of the arts. I’ve spent so much time these last few months on the day-to-day short-term resistance – calling, sharing info, etc. All important stuff. But to keep from burning out, I need to resist through art as well as the day-to-day. To celebrate & remember what we’re fighting for.

So the birthday gift I need to give myself is permission to rotate off the front lines and make art. I’ll still make my calls, but the last few months have been utterly exhausting, reacting to every new indignity and making dozens of calls per week to rouse my reps to action. I’ve been recovering from surgery, which has kept me from the protests, but I’ve been no less active for it.

It would be easy to focus entirely on art, but I want to fight the short-term and on the cultural level. As with many things, balance. So that’s my goal for this year. To find and maintain a balance. To live fully without burning out or hiding behind my privilege.

Kameron Hurley, a brilliant fiction writer and one of the sharpest, clearest voices in SF/F, has talked about her strategy for getting through the Trump era – she talks about how she imagines herself 30~ years from now, looking back on who she was and what she did to get through all of this. And then she tries to figure out what it will take to get through to that future.

What we do right now will be remembered. Not just personally, but by our families, our friends, our neighbors, and by the world. Most of us would prefer to live in peaceful times, to never know a massive upheaval. But that is not the world we live in.

So this year, I will fight, I will live, I will laugh, I will love. I will make art and phone calls, I will go to conventions and to rallies. I will geek out with my friends about comics and share information about executive orders or legislation.

This push for balance is not some revolutionary new idea – activists and civil rights advocates have had to find this balance throughout history. I’m just a bit late to the game, like many of us are. But we’re in this together, and there are people who have been fighting the good fights for many years, people we can support and learn from.

So if you need permission to take a break, like I did, this is me giving you permission. As the resistance shifts from the rage of the inauguration and the flurry of horrendous initial actions to the sustained opposition and campaigning for run-offs/special elections this year and the big races in 2018, we’ll all need to take care of ourselves and one another to make it through this.

Because we can do this. The DJT White House and the GOP have abandoned their duty to the American people, but we’re still here, we have the numbers and the tools to protect the vulnerable, and if we can survive to 2018 with elections about as fair as we had in 2016 (noting that the 2016 elections had major problems in voter suppression, gerrymandering, and voter intimidation), the resistance can win, and can hold DJT accountable where the GOP won’t.