Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

So a month back I wrote a snitty little post on why I wouldn’t read And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer, which is the newly authorized sequel to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I mean, dammit, I love Adam’s trilogy. I think the first three books are as near to perfect as fiction writing can be.

Then Colleen Lindsay offered to send me a copy of the book to read. When the book arrived yesterday, I opened it and read a bit and found myself laughing. Which is deeply disturbing. I mean, if I like the book does that mean individual authors and their particular creative visions no longer matter for crap?

Okay, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic. And I must finish reading Colfer’s book before I can say if it is good or not. But this has made me wonder. Are we entering a world where fanfic—i.e., diving into the imaginary worlds of others—is the new norm among writers?

(more…)

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

What first brought you to the speculative fiction genres?

A few years ago I was talking with Mike Resnick at the Context convention. Upon learning I was from Alabama, he said it was his experience that most SF fans down South didn’t come to the genre through the traditional routes, i.e., by reading genre fiction. Instead, they came to the genre by way of SF films, comics and video games.

I find the essence of what Resnick said to be true. Today most fans of written science fiction, fantasy and horror first come to the genres through the visual mediums. Witness the success of Dragon Con, and compare their unbelievable attendance to that of the biggest traditional SF convention.

I believe one reason Resnick made this remark is because until recently, the American South and most other non-coastal areas of the United States had fewer opportunities to engage with written SF. Before the rise of the mega-sized bookstores and Amazon.com, it was difficult to stumble across SF in smaller cities and rural areas. Yes, you could order books through the mail, but that is different from finding a book by chance or through a friend and falling in love with the SF genres. I remember going to the bookstores of Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1980s and early 90s, and finding only a few speculative fiction titles. If you didn’t live in a New York City or Los Angeles prior to the last 15 years, good luck being introduced to written SF.

But visual SF? It was everywhere. And even today, it’s much easier to discover SF through the visual mediums.

I was lucky because my grandfather spent decades collecting science fiction and fantasy books by mail, so I was exposed to written SF from an early age. But I was also exposed to genre tropes through the highly successful SF films, comics and video games of the last 30 years. So I can easily see how many people today are coming to the genre by a different route than people who were raised on SF literature before 1970.

So my question for people is, what brought you to written speculative fiction? What keeps you here? Do many people make the jump from the visual SF mediums to written literature? Does it make a difference if there’s a generational difference in how people come to our genres?

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

When Jeff selected a group of guest bloggers to keep this site going while he was on his book tour, he told us “I don’t mind at all if you plug your projects, just vary the content if you do so.” I’m going to take him up on this with a blatant plug for my novella “Sublimation Angels.”

The novella was published in the Sept./Oct. 2009 issue of Interzone, a wonderful British SF magazine which I provided a sampler for last week. Anyway, my novella is now available as a PDF download and includes the great art Paul Drummond created for its initial Interzone publication. “Sublimation Angels” is a hard SF story with an old school twist, which SF Signal called “A captivating story about freedom, rebellion, and seeking the truth”  and Suite101 called “One of the best novellas of the year.”

Download the story here. I hope people enjoy it.

And in other news, the Nebula Awards nomination period is now open. I’ve posted information about the process and my nominations on my website. And no, this isn’t an attempt to bring “Sublimation Angels” some nominations. The novella isn’t eligible since it was published in Interzone, although why overseas print magazines aren’t eligible but overseas online magazines are is hard to understand.

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

Here’s a simple story about how important cover art is to an author’s book sales. There’s this struggling new writer named John Scalzi, who has a first fantasy novella coming out called The God Engines. Okay, I’m being a bit silly—we all know Scalzi. But for me, this book wasn’t an automatic buy. While I’ve really enjoyed Scalzi’s science fiction novels, I wasn’t sure I’d buy a fantasy from him.

Then I saw the cover by Tomislav Tikulin (see right) and decided to take a pass. This isn’t a pan on Tikulin. I usually love his art. If you go through his online portfolio, you’ll see a ton of amazing illustrations, any one of which would make me buy the story they’re based on. But in this one case, the art didn’t work for me, so I decided to take a pass.

(more…)

Guest blogger Kameron Hurley does most of her ranting at her blog, Brutal Women. You can find  some of her recent fiction in Year’s Best SF 12, Strange Horizons, and EscapePod. She currently makes a living as a marketing and sales copywriter in Ohio, and has sold or nearly sold or sort of sold or is still in the process of selling a book called God’s War, which may or may not actually be published at some unspecified period from an as yet unspecified publisher. Stay tuned.

When I interviewed for my current job as a copywriter, one of the questions they asked was, “What happens when you’re not inspired? I mean, when you’re not in the mood to write? When you’re not feeling creative?”

I laughed. “Writing is a job,” I said. “You work at it the same way you would any other job. Even when you don’t feel good. Even when it feels like all you’re writing is crap. You endure.”

This has been a great mantra for my day job work. I write copy all day long. I write copy when I’m hungry, miserable, tired, depressed, exhausted, uninspired, stressed out, and under pressure. Because it’s my job. You write copy or you starve.

But when it comes to my second job… when I get home every night and kiss my partner and work out and eat some food and trudge upstairs to start writing fiction… well, that same “write or starve” mentality just doesn’t motivate me.

I worked far better when I was either actually starving… or under contract. Having a book contract makes it feel more like write-or-starve work. When you’re just plugging away for yourself… most days it’s like pulling teeth.

The worst is when I’ve gone weeks or months without writing anything of note. Getting out of the habit of writing is like getting out of the habit of eating well or exercising. You fall back into bad habits and suddently it’s all World of Warcraft and MST3K and coming up with new and interesting ways to eliminate sugar and carbs from common recipes.

And those first few days of getting back into your routine are torture.

These days, my fiction writing has too-often fallen into that category: something tough and time-consuming that I know I need to do because, dammit, it’s good for me. After sitting in front of a computer writing all day, the last fucking thing I want to do when I come home is sit in front of the computer for another 3-4 hours working on writing projects.

Hence, all that dithering.

But what gets me back on track? How do you roll back into a routine after falling from grace?

I tackle writing wipe-outs the same way I tackle work-out wipeouts. So, I haven’t worked out in a week and it’s tough to get back into it. So I say, OK, I’ll just do 10 minutes tonight. Or, I’ll just do half that pilates video, or just one of those weight training circuits (instead of all 5). Then the next day I say, OK, just 10 minutes. You can do 10 minutes. And by day three I’m like, hey 15 minutes, huh. You can do that.

And 15 goes by like a breeze and suddenly you’re at 20, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re back up to 30-40 min a day 5 days a week, and you don’t feel quite so doughy anymore.

Writing is like that.

Cause see, if you sit down after a long break and say, “I’m going to finish this fucking chapter tonight,” or “I’m going to write 2,000 words today,” after six weeks off… it’s like saying you’re going to hop on the treadmill and run 5 miles after playing Assassin’s Creed and World of Warcraft every night for the last four weeks. Chances are, you’ll fail. Then you’ll feel bad about yourself. Then you associate that bad feeling with the actual working out you *did* do, and you’ve totally scarred your writing experience.

When I put together my new writing schedule, it looked a lot like my workout schedule after a couple weeks off. For the next two weeks, I need to write just 100 words a day on Babylon, the third book in my God’s War series.

Yes, you read that right:

100 words.

I got this idea from Tobias Buckell. See, anybody can write 100 words. And chances are, after the first 50, you’ll warm up a bit and write *more* than 100. I cleared 500 tonight without really thinking about it.

Small steps. Little increments. Writing novels, in particular, is an endurance sport, not a sprint. One of my big mistakes after every writing hiatus is to try and attack the issue head on with crazy 5,000 words a day goals that left me burned out and miserable after a few days.

But 100 words?

This blog post is over 700.

100 words about an exiled bounty hunter picking up a contract on a diplomat? I can SO do 100 words about that.

It’s easy to forget that writing isn’t always about big word counts and huge sacrifices. Sometimes it’s just the small, steady, accretion of words.  Even just 100 at a time.

Hello. My name is Rachel Swirsky, and for better or worse, I’m a short fiction writer. This is relevant to today’s post — and indeed, to my entire last week — because for me, fantasy and science fiction has turned out not to be just a fun occupation, but also a disease vector.

Last week, my husband and I headed over to San Jose for the World Fantasy Convention, where — among many other entertaining things — I was able to meet our fair hosts, the VanderMeers. Unfortunately, my husband and I came home with more than just our free tote bags full of books (and by the way, wow, World Fantasy really piles on the free books. I think someone was being paid by the pound).

Now, a mere seven days after contracting the swine flu, husband and I are doing much better. I’m even able to start thinking about things like blogs again.

Which brings me to today’s shameful, shameless purpose.

I had hoped to ease into guest blogging with a few reviews, some weird links, and maybe a political rant or two. Instead, having lost a week to cough and fever, I’m going to leap into the breach with some self-promotion.

Last week, upon my return from the World Fantasy convention, I discovered not only that I was contaminated with swine flu, but also that my novellette, “A Memory of Wind,” had just gone up at Tor.com.

“A Memory of Wind” tells the story of the sacrifice at Aulis from Iphigenia’s perspective. Traditionally, her voice has been ignored; the original Greek tragedy, Iphigenia at Aulis, concentrates on the pain of her father, Agamemnon, as he decides whether or not to have his daughter killed so that he can go to war. I began writing “A Memory of Wind” several years ago, after seeing a feminist reinterpretation of the tale in which Clytemnestra (Iphigenia’s mother) was given her turn as protagonist. I wondered whether Iphigenia would ever get her chance to speak.

I worked on this piece at the University of Iowa, where a very famous author informed me that anger was never an appropriate inspiration for writing.

I ignored him.

Here’s an exerpt from the beginning of the piece:

I began turning into wind the moment that you promised me to Artemis.

Before I woke, I lost the flavor of rancid oil and the shade of green that flushes new leaves. They slipped from me, and became gentle breezes that would later weave themselves into the strength of my gale. Between the first and second beats of my lashes, I also lost the grunt of goats being led to slaughter, and the roughness of wool against calloused fingertips, and the scent of figs simmering in honey wine.

Around me, the other palace girls slept fitfully, tossing and grumbling through the dry summer heat. I stumbled to my feet and fled down the corridor, my footsteps falling smooth against the cool, painted clay. As I walked, the sensation of the floor blew away from me, too. It was as if I stood on nothing…

And now, I shall provide a unicorn chaser to follow my own self-promotion. Behold, greeting cards for after the zombie apocalypse:

(Check out David Ellis Dickerson’s entire entertaining Greeting Card Emergency series, and possibly also his book, House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions.)

I’ll be back later this week with reviews, weird links, and politics.

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

There’s a lot of chatter these days about Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF slowly dying. I suspect that like Mark Twain, not only have the rumors of their impending deaths been greatly exaggerated, they’ve been exaggerated to push a diverse set of agendas, ranging from online publishing triumphing over those pesky dead tree mags to the perpetual concerns over the genre’s aging population of readers.

One surprising thing about this angst is the belief that the American style of SF magazine publishing—using a digest format—is the only way to achieve SF magazine success. For proof of another way to thrive, please consider the British magazine Interzone.

(more…)

Guest blogger Kameron Hurley does most of her ranting at her blog, Brutal Women. You can find  some of her recent fiction in Year’s Best SF 12, Strange Horizons, and EscapePod. She currently makes a living as a marketing and sales copywriter in Ohio, and has sold or nearly sold or sort of sold or is still in the process of selling a book called God’s War, which may or may not actually be published at some unspecified period from an as yet unspecified publisher. Stay tuned.

Surviving the Book Contract that Wasn’t

I’ve been writing with the intent of becoming “a writer” on and off for the last 15 years. Published some stories, etc. Done some guest blogging. I even make a living now as a copywriter. I’ll be turning 30 in January, which gives you an idea of how long I’ve been slogging away at becoming a storyteller.

But what is that? A storyteller. I can tell stories all day long. To friends, at parties, in letters, in emails, on my blog… but whether or not we take a storyteller seriously has – for the last half century or so – largely hinged on one’s ability to be published by a major press. Today, $$ success often equals seriousness and respectability, as Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown can attest (ha!). And I grew up with the intent of being a “writer.”

But… I do actually write copy for a living. Doesn’t that make me a writer? What did being a “writer” mean to me?

It meant publishing books.

End of story.

Because that’s what being a “serious” writer is.

Right?

So you can imagine my delight when I sold my first novel, God’s War, as part of a three book deal in February of last year. After over a decade of writing like a mad woman, scrambling madly across the world, scribbling madly through writing workshops, spewing much snarky rage on my blog, attending beer-and-books conventions, collecting well over a hundred rejections, and writing madly, passionately, crazily, and – often – very badly – I had been awarded that solemn tag of writerly respectability – a book contract. This wouldn’t be a publication in a pulp magazine, the sort that left my friends and family merely bemused. This was a major contract from a major publisher.

So I did what any new writer does, after screaming and scribbling for over a decade:

I got soft.

There’s something strange that happens when you sell your first book. For me, it was initially pretty anti-climatic, then… it was like somebody let all the air out of my tires. I’d been so close for so long with so many different books that actually selling one felt like falling off a cliff after hiking – barefoot and bloody – for days. You’re so exhausted that the freefall feels effortless.

So I waited for things to get started.

And waited.

And… waited.

I met with my editor at Wiscon that May, and learned we would start edits in July.

But July soon turned into August. August to September, then November… and nine months after I sold my novel, with no movement or update on what had been going on with it since May, I got a call from my agent telling me that my editor had been let go. They were still publishing the book, she said, but I’d be working with another editor.

I felt far sorrier for my awesome editor than myself, frankly.  Publishing fucking sucks.

My buying editor gave me a call after that and explained the reasoning behind passing my book off to another editor at the house and not another (which I wholeheartedly agreed with).  It was a shitty situation all around, but everybody was doing their best to make it bearable.

Once I started working with the new editor, things started to clip along. I got regular updates on what was happening with the book. My release date was pushed back to spring 2010 instead of fall 2009, but who cares, you know? At least the book was being published. I had expected far worse.

My new editor and I worked mad ages to clean up the book. We finished three rounds of hard-won edits and got to see the book improve by – if not leaps and bounds (it was a pretty good book already) – then certainly by significant lengths (and certainly with far more sense and less confusing fight scenes). When we were ready to wrap it up, my editor sent it off for copyediting.

I wrote up and sent in my acknowledgements page.

It felt good to send off that acknowledgements page. I was tracking my progress with another writer I knew who had just sent off hers a few weeks before. We both had three book deals. It was fun to pace myself with other writers.

I started getting excited about writing book three, since book two was just about finished and just needed some revisions.  I started writing the opening chapter after sending off the acknowledgements, full of a serene sense of the inevitable awesomeness that would be book publication.

And then… a strange period of silence.

Only a few days, yes, but on one of those days, I was supposed to receive my copyedits.  And my editor was always good about acknowledging emails, but hadn’t responded to receiving my acknowledgements page.

Ripple of worry across a still pond.

When your agent calls you in the middle of the day, you’ve either sold a book or had your contract canceled.

In May of this year, my agent called me at lunchtime and told me my contract was canceled.

Three books.

Just like that.

Nothing personal, apparently. They were just looking for ways to cut costs, and an untested debut novelist with a three-book deal is a good candidate for the ax.

I had hardened myself for this news before the call. That pond ripple helped. So I took it pretty well. After all, things could be worse. I was still employed and had health insurance.

It’s not like anybody died.

We were going to get all the rights back, and we were going to get paid.  I figured we could turn the book around fairly quickly, resell it, and I’d still get to see a book published before I was 30.

But the bottom was slowly falling out of the publishing world.

And I was caught in the middle of it.

I waited three more months for the book to get released and paid out so we could sell it again. In publishing terms, three months isn’t a lot of time. But trust me, when you’ve got a three book debut series sitting around in limbo, it feels like three years.

I stayed tight-lipped about the whole thing aside from a few writing folks, because it felt incredibly embarrassing to have a contract canceled. It felt like I’d done something wrong. Like I was somehow deficient. Like I had failed as a writer.

I tried to be pro-active. Asked my agent if we should shop another series in the meantime (yes, I have a five book series waiting in the wings). Tried to work on producing other projects. But she felt strongly that this series would make a great debut, and I knew she was right.

That didn’t make it any easier.

And I just couldn’t get myself to write anything in the meantime.

So I sat on my hands for three months.

Getting a book contract cancelled isn’t the worst thing in the world. But the waiting is a fucking nightmare. The sitting around with no control over anything. You sort of own your work, but not really. And… you know, I’m not a bitter mid-lister. I don’t have any experience with this sort of thing. I had no idea how to conduct myself.  I had no lack of projects to work on… But I had lost all motivation to do them.

I had finished book two before the fallout, so I tried to concentrate on that. I kept opening and closing and re-opening the files, dithering around with revisions and line edits. Dither, dither, dither.

I tried to start book three again – got a chapter and a half in – and just… stopped. And began to dither, dither, dither.

I started working on some stalled short stories.

Dither, dither, dither.

I spent a lot of time cocooning with my partner, and reading, and cooking. I put all of my energy into my day job. Took on more responsibilities. I became intensely career focused.

But my whole fiction writing world had stopped turning.

Why?

Why, after 15 years of slogging along with very little outside acknowledgement, did I suddenly let the loss of something I’d never really had get me stalled?

The trouble is, when you give somebody else a measure of control over the timeline of your career, you’re not really sure what to do when they drop the ball.

You need to be polite, and demure, and easy to work with – that’s what all the agents and publishers and pros tell you. You need to grin and bear it and show your teeth and say, “Why yes, yes, these things happen in publishing.”

Because they do.

And you can’t do a fucking thing about it.

For better or worse, we have a lot of tools that weren’t available to writers a decade ago. We have paypal donation buttons, easy online publishing, lulu.com, and social media. If we’re willing to put in the work without the initial injection of cash we’d get with a formal advance, we can create whole worlds in virtual space and go back to the old patron system.

But it still helps to have some measure of success and respectability before you start supplementing your income from cash-strapped publishing houses.

So, despite how much the world has changed, I still want the respectability. I want my book sitting on a shelf at Books & Co. I want to be reviewed. I want to be read. I want to be able to sign physical copies of books that don’t make people sneer because only “really terrible fan fiction writers” and “wanna-be”s use lulu.com.

I want that delighted tone in my mother’s voice when I named my publisher and she said, “My God, that’s… that’s a real publisher!”

The old houses may be cash-strapped dinosaurs, but they still give your work a measure of seriousness and respectability that you just can’t get by selling copies out of the trunk of your car.

But the price we pay for that sometimes feels pretty raw.

Someday, we’ll resell God’s War. Someday I’ll see a book of mine at Books & Co. But until then, I have other things I have to do with my fiction. Things I have control over. I’ve got an old trunk novel I’d like to share, some short stories to finish, and another book to start. Because though my writing life may have stalled out for the last two years, the real world has not. The real world keeps spinning.

If I want my fiction life back, I have to take control of it again. It was never anyone else’s to begin with, of course, but… sometimes it’s easy to forget that when you enter into a contract with a big publishing house.  Sometimes you still expect that when you win the book publishing lottery, all of your work is done, and all your dreams will come true.

In fact, it marks the point where your hardest work begins.

No one cares more about my work than I do.  And I’m ultimately the one who’s responsible for its success or failure…  And defining what exactly “success” and “failure” mean.  I can tell you right now that having a book contact canceled doesn’t make me a failure. But not getting up afterward? Not pressing on after two years of dithering?

That would make me a failure.

And it’s my fear of remaining a failure that’s kept me out here in the dark for so long.

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

Here’s a horror story to strike fear into every writer and reader: An emerging author’s first two novels are published by a small press, where the books sell very well. The author begins writing the third book in the series to wrap up his story. However, thanks to the increasingly insane publishing world, readers won’t see this new novel anytime soon.

I’m talking about the Blood Magic series by new author Matt Cook. The first book (titled Blood Magic) was released in 2007 by Juno, a publisher of paranormal romances. As I wrote in my review at that time, the novel is a must read for any fan of fantasy or horror. The sequel, Nights of Sin, was published last year and is even better than the first, taking Matt’s characters into unforeseen emotional and storytelling ground. The books did extremely well, with both being nominated for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and becoming two of Juno’s best-selling titles.

(more…)

Guest-blogger Will Hindmarch is a freelance writer, graphic designer, and game designer. He also blogs at the game/story outfit, Gameplaywright, at his home venue, The Gist and at the tumblelog, the Word Studio Notebook.

Halloween has come and gone, and with it went the Twitter-fiction event, Cthalloween, which I first wrote about at Gameplaywright. (See the whole event via the Twitter hashtag: #cthalloween)

I went into the event with hardly a plan in mind, writing as things struck me, aiming more for mood than story, because I figured only a few people would catch more than a few tweets at a time. Plus, I had to bail before the end of the event, due to Halloween parties and my untweetable phone. Maybe that was an ill-thought plan, but I’d been focused on too many other writing assignments to really devote much time to planning this little riff. So it goes.

What I ended up with is a little less than 700 words of somewhat creepy ramblings with a bit allegory, I think. In hindsight, this reveals more about what I find scary, I think, than it does anything about how to write horror.

What was planned was the notion of taking something omnipresent and trying to twist it towards the macabre somehow. That is my go-to formula for horror, whether it’s in fiction or games or the performance art of running storytelling games. What was also planned was the idea of my character being a melange of the suggested archetypes (Citizen, Artist, Professor, and Cultist) — I went with the Citizen’s paranoia, the Artist’s chilling visions, and a trace of the Cultist’s lunacy. You tell me if any of this ended up at all creepy or Lovecraftian.

If I had this to do over (like, say, if another MMOSE happens), I’d create a character that wasn’t so isolated and unraveled, so that I could directly interact with the tweets of other writers, especially locals like @Servantofproces. Instead, I tried to keep my tale small (without giving up the Lovecraftian alien monstrosities).

Here, then, is my #Cthalloween story (“story”), modestly edited but still in the form of its original 140-character bursts, and with a lurid purple title slapped on it:

Branches Beneath The Silver Tower

Bad dreams last night. Yet the further I get from sleep, the sharper the images get. I remember branches, black branches.

Trying to shake last night’s abnormal dreams. Going for a walk to take in some jack-o-lanterns. Neighborhood’s real quiet.

People are just standing at their windows, staring out into the street. Staring at me, as I walk by. Pumpkins are glowing.

The rain has stripped the leaves from the trees. Naked trees arch over the street above me, tangled black branches.

Back home, where the trees seem bare, not like they were when I left. Locking the doors.

Last night’s dream getting sharper—black branches snaking against a sky of pallid clouds, and a sound like chewing.

Trying to work, but when I blink I see serpentine veins pumping black sap. I picture hooves pounding quaggy ground.

(more…)