Is there a Steampunk backlash? So says Design Observer via io9.

Myself, I do think one should distinguish between backlash as in: “Michael Phelps is a God!!…Oh, you know what, actually, he’s kinda boring…” and a backlash wherein something that has underlying intrinsic value gets copied/cheapened/ruthlessly exploited till it means nothing and then folks exclaim what a load of bollocks. Because to my mind “backlash” should be reserved for the former rather simple scenario, wherein we realize that it was a load of bollocks to begin with, and the latter scenario, wherein that which is lovely has been rendered a load of bollocks by forces larger that the original lovely thing.

Then to bring this post full circle—from one anthology edited by my host, to another:

Jeff’s Steampunk anthology -> Steampunk generally -> Paul DeFilipo, author of, inter alia The Steampunk Trilogy -> the Weird Universe that Paul just emailed me about this AM, totally check it out -> ta-da! Jeff and Anne’s other Tachyon anthology The New Weird!

(Ah, I love it when a post comes together…)

First off, I’m nervous as all get-out, as this is the first time I’ve guest-blogged and while I do blog over at Soft Skull News I think folks hold posts on this blog to a rather higher standard—longer and more discursive where appropriate; newsier, where appropriate; less hucksterism and shilling as always appropriate. So, having checked the previous sentence for grammar and stylistic balance, I’m ready to try to rise to the occasion, rather than dragging this blog down to my level.

OK so the title of the post. One the one hand, it’s the title of a book I’m publishing in a couple months, an anthology about working retail. I’m now rather optimistic about its prospects, having spent couple of years nervous about them—I’ve a shitty-assed track record with selling anthologies, unlike the proprietor of this here website. But the editor, Jeff Martin, is doing everything right, and we’re getting far more media and bookseller interest than I’d expected…But!

The purpose of this post is not to pimp out that book, but to beg publishers to stop acting as if the customer is in fact always wrong. (Because, you know, the title, it’s a joke. A bit of comic relief for the frazzled retail worker in a society of instant gratification, low service wages, and an endemic sense of entitlement amongst the affluent.) But there is a real tendency in our business to treat the customer as this perverse, mysterious, gullible, arrogant, narrow-minded, slightly thick, imperceptive lug. We largely talk down to him, dumb down for her, expect the least, fear the worst, and generally leave it up to the retailer to figure out how to reach him or her—we’ll get the book onto their shelves, we’ll pay them some payola, and then it’s their problem.

Of course it’s not, and not just because we’re in the only business where 100% of the product can be returned for full credit. It’s because fundamentally a publisher’s job is to connect the writer to the reader. Not the book to the retailer, but the writer to the reader.

This is not to denigrate the retailer. (I posted recently on my own blog about how one needs to understand the retailers if one is to do business well.) I don’t at all believe in  cutting the retailer out, but if we understand our customers better, the retailers will be very happy.

My most recent experience of this had to do with a cover. These past few days I’ve gotten e-mail, tweets and Facebook messages from various folks in response to a request on the blog for feedback on a cover. My dilemma—I’d an intuition that an unorthodox approach (not using the title or author, just an image) might just appeal to customers.

But a number of colleagues got nervous. Part of it was the fear of bucking convention, sure but part of it also stemmed, I believe, from the tendency to not really think about our readers, who they are, what they look for, what their circumstances are. So, I asked them! A little research, very informal. Not market research, not a focus group, not crowdsourcing (well, maybe a little bit of all the forgoing) just a request for a response.

I was relieved to learn I wasn’t crazy, that the unorthodox cover worked, but once that relief wore off, I started to realize that far more reader interactions like that are necessary, that the conversation about books that goes on in our culture now, gorgeously exemplified by Jeff’s house here, needs also to be going on much, much more in the whole apparatus that surrounds the words, houses the words, frames the words, makes it more or less likely you’ll read the words. I’m sure most folks don’t want to see inside the sausage factory, but I’m betting there are far far more than we’re currently admitting to the sausage factory, and if we expect y’all to eat our damn sausages, we’re going to have to spend more time with you guys figuring out how best to make them.

(I wish I could show you the responses, but my ass can’t figure out how to turn the comments on on my blog, long story…If any of y’all have clicked through to where I ask, feel free to comment here, along with whatever other comments you might have to make.)

I’m very pleased to introduce the always dynamic and dashing Richard Nash as this week’s guest blogger on Ecstatic Days. Richard Nash was Publisher of Soft Skull Press from 2001 until 2007 when he sold the company, staying on as Editorial Director. He was one of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Editors to Watch for in the Coming Decade in 2005, and won the Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2006. The hours he doesn’t spend with his wife and eight month old daughter are spent trying to bring more writers together with more readers.

I would have liked to write a bit more today, and give you details of what the pictures I’m about to show you are… But I had a terribly busy day, I’ve sent a book to the printer and I have prepared for a 12 hour ride tomorrow, to Prague.

Yes, I’m going to Prague, and from there I’ll go to Plzen, where the czech New Weird convention Parcon is waiting its guests of honour: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Hal Duncan, Ian MacLeod and Edward Miller. The Czechs are launching their own version of the VanderMeer’s NEW WEIRD anthology, and I (and my girls too!) are going to meet the VanderMeers! Again!

This will be my third third degree encounter with Ann and Jeff, after their Romanian tour in 2006, and Utopiales Festival in Nantes, last November. I can’t wait to see them! And I’ll promise I’ll write more tomorrow. Until then, HERE are a bunch of pictures taken during the four day blitz-tour of Romania. You’ll see the VanderFrog himself, and his princess, and if you look closely, you might recognize a certain big bad bear, the same who is now saying good night!

When I was a kid, my parents had a few couples of friends with whom they used to play cards on Saturday evenings. Whether it was bridge night or canasta night, we almost always had someone over for dinner on Saturday. This led me to believe that having guests was somewhat a fatality for my poor parents. At about the age my daughter Stefana has now, one of these visiting couples made the mistake to ask me what I wanted to become when I’ll grow up. I answered without hesitation: “I wanna be a guest!”. They laughed politely and my mom, knowing me, tried to move on with the conversation, but the lady who had asked me in the first place wanted to know more: “Why a guest?” And the answer silenced her (and sent my dad to the bathroom, where from we almost instantly heard him laughing histerically): “Yes, a guest, because guests always come when the house is cleaned, the food is ready and there’s only fun left to be had”.

I remembered this anecdote (one that my dad used to bring up whenever there were not so welcomed guests around) today, thinking that I have finally achieved my childhood dream. I am a guest, and a guest-blogger at that: the blog is here, the audience ready-built and eager for my words. In consequence, it’s time to have fun!

No, no more letters from my lawyer this time. Fun has become a peculiar notion for me, the almost forty-year-old publisher and reviewer (I do the occasional book reviews on my blog or for Nautilus, a webzine hosted by my fiercest rival in Romanian publishing but edited by my friend, writer Michael Haulică) who spends most of his time reading and writing about books. Fun is NOT reading books for review or publishing consideration purposes. Fun is spending time with my girls and doing carpentry work at the country house I bought this spring. And fun is also reading books for my own pleasure. I might end up reviewing them or even publishing them, but the initial impulse is, ALWAYS, aimed at having fun. I buy them from Amazon.com or B&N (they finally lifted the ban from Romanian ordering) or in the local bookstores or at bookfairs. Sometimes friends send them, sometimes I find them (on this blog, sometimes). I read them in days or merely hours. And these are the books I always end up recommending to others, even if I’m not their publisher, even if my best interest would be to push my own books. These are the ones that get pictured in my now regular bookporn blog posts, with their covers displayed to be seen by all, with sometimes even their first page being offered, scribbled with an autograph, to the salacious eyes of voyeur readers.

And, since being a guest is about having fun, I thought I’d show you some of the books I’ve had fun with this year, so far. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Jeff, I’m now widely known to the world as an ex-wrestler turned mobster, with a murky past and a happy family life, who’s passing his time hunting big game in the South China Sea and trading weasels for iguanas in a remote corner of the world, where the navy patrols the Danube under noontime fireworks, fishing out bored swimmers looking to cool off…

Oh boy… Sometimes I wish all of that would be true. The (whole) truth is far more prosaic. Most of my adventures happen among books, me being a bookaholic. But how wonderful these adventures can be! Reading has brought me lots of excitment, and guest-blogging here brings back nice memories.

I remember a day far back in 1998, when I was writing most of my letters in longhand and only the official letters deserved to be printed, when I used to sneak in my wife’s office at the City Hall to get some time online when she wasn’t using her computer. Besides from reading my emails and quickly uploading my answers (written the day before on my ancient second-hand Pentium 286) from a 3.5” diskette, I searched like mad the internet for some free online fiction. Back then, Romanians were blacklisted by Amazon.com, online ordering for foreign books was an utopic dream and the local public library was stocking only classics in English.

That’s when I discovered a website called Infinity Plus, and the loads of fiction that a wonderful guy named Keith Brooke was putting out for us. Among the stories some of my favorite writers had allowed Keith to publish, there were some terrific texts written by names I had never heard of. One that really got to me was a story called “Flight Is for Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over” by a guy named Jeff VanderMeer. There were other stories by him on Infinity Plus, so I read them and was blown over by his imagery and wonderful imagination. Among other nice things Keith Brooke was providing - along with the stories and short author bios - there were links to the (somewhat rare at the time) websites the authors or their fans maintained.

So I went over to find out Jeff’s web presence and found an e-mail address and wrote him a passionate fan message. At the time I was editing a digest-sized magazine called Fictiuni, the only F&SF magazine that was published at the time in Romania. Its periodicity was erratic, but I had managed to put out some nice issues (two or three at the time, of the seven that got published by the time it folded, in 2001). I was also planning to move on from translating and editing for one of Romania’s major publishers to founding my own publishing company and, a dream I still entertain, representing foreign F&SF authors on the Romanian book market. So, besides asking for the right to translate some of his stories in Romanian (to be published in Fictiuni), I dared to offer Jeff the chance to be the first author I was to represent here, in the carpathic landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m very pleased to welcome Horia Ursu, one of my Romanian editors, as the guest blogger for Ecstatic Days this week. Ursu is very active in the Romanian literary community, running Millenium Press and working on various other projects (some of which I am sure he will tell you about). Ursu has also contributed photographs to articles in Locus. He lives in Satu Mare, Romania, with his wife Lucia and his daughter Stefana (all three pictured above).

UPDATE: Now, Horia is a dear friend and it just so happens that he is a character in my Predator novel, which is coming out in Romania September 1. So I thought I’d reproduce below a pivotal scene about Horia from the book, especially given Sir Tessa’s unease in the comments thread below. (And, yes, I know it’s unlikely, the single swat, head gone, but this is a Hollywood movie basically…)
Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the final day of my stint here at Ecstatic Days, and I wanted to let you know that I’ve very much enjoyed the privilege of sharing my thoughts with you. While I prepare to surrender the stage to your next host, I’d like to invite you to come by my full-time blog http://www.entertheoctopus.wordpress.com any time. I’d love to see you there…after you visit Ecstatic Days, of course!

Thank you to all of you, and to Jeff, for hosting me here. It has been a pleasure.

Just breaking in for a second to let readers know that the first installment of my political fiction column is up on the Huffington Post. This time around, most of the books reviewed are in some way science fiction. I do capsule reviews of Jessica Z, Little Brother, Pisstown Chaos, and several others. In the future, the column will focus on one or two books at a time, in more depth, and include non-genre fiction.

The visibility and longevity of this column will depend on clicks and comments. If you like the idea, or are just curious, please go check it out.

POSTED BY MATT STAGGS

What do you think of when you hear the word “faerie?” A tiny, winged lady in a sparkling cloud of pixie dust? Mischievous little people hiding beneath toadstools? Maybe those Keebler elves and their magically fattening cookies come to mind. No matter what, the image of the faerie – actually its very definition – has changed dramatically over the ages, and it is likely that your own idea of faeriedom has been shaped by shifts in religious thinking, technological growth and popular culture.

Like any other matter of folklore, the origins of the faerie myth are obscure and subject to scholarly debate. In the matter of Celtic faerie stories, some have posited that their stories of the Tuatha de Danaan’s war against the fierce “Fir Bolg” are actually ancient memories of Ireland’s early Gaelic invaders’ defeat and subsequent extinction of the isle’s aboriginal inhabitants. Some further suggest that some of the “goblins” of Celtic myth were based on this ancient people, described as dark and hairy, and that the Gaelic people – the Tuatha de Danaan were subsequently mythologized as the early Celtic gods and goddesses.

Read the rest of this entry »