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.

I tried to stay out of the great rate fail debate, aside from posting some snarky Cliffsnotes to the whole affair. But it turns out I snarked prematurely, because after I posted a new writer naively waded into the affair, saying established writers were only trying to prevent the newbies from succeeding. After having a great stack of screaming outrage shoved down her throat, she probably staggered away thinking, “What the hell? Why are writers so touchy about short story pay?”

Here’s why: In our hearts, we know making professional rates for our short stories mean we’re still being paid nothing at all.

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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 you dare call yourself a writer! If that’s the case, here’s my question: What reference books sit on your desk?

And yes, we know all about that amazing resource called the internet. And yes, we all use Wikipedia as a quick learning tool (even if we don’t admit it). And yes, if we have to quickly look up the spelling of a word, we Google it.

But what reference materials are so vital to your writing that they sit in bound form on your desk?

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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.

(What’s this all about? Check out Booklifenow Monday afternoon.)

Time’s sped up and is roaring forward. Only about three days until we leave for the World Fantasy Convention, after which I embark on a five-week book tour you might’ve heard about once or twice on this here blawg thing.

A long and complex book tour has more people involved than just the author. In addition to all of the venue contacts and others on the ground at the locations, as well as the good folks at Underland and Tachyon, there are the people at VanderCentral who’ve been masochistic enough to be conscripted sign up for the experience.

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(The remains of writers who never did understand the lifecycle of a book. Photo by the highly recommended Jeremy Tolbert.)

I won’t inflict Booklifenow links on you every day (although I may run an update in the sidebar), but will be informing you of new content during this, our launch week.

Cory Doctorow vs Booklifenow: Vertical vs Horizontal Learning:
“Complaining about someone’s visibility is as pointless as complaining about someone’s shadow being too long. Further, he’s taking a big risk in a lot of ways, and like most pioneers his experiments won’t just contribute to his own ongoing success but will open the way for a plethora of new approaches by others.”

Booklifenow on the Lifecycle of a Book:
“If there’s one way that agents and editors could help their writers it would be by not assuming any prior knowledge of this lifecycle—although it is true that the process can change from publisher to publisher.”

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(Thanks to John Coulthart for the great cover.)

This morning Booklifenow.com went live with a welcome message and a breakdown of the book’s table of contents. Please drop by and “sign” the first post with a comment if you’re so inclined. We’ll be offering new content every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Initially, most of it will come from the book or expand on themes from the book, but we’ll also have guests like Colleen Lindsay dropping by. Every Friday my partner on Booklifenow.com, Matt Staggs, will post a Top 10 links for the week, focusing on sustainable creativity and sustainable careers. These links lists will reward the best and brightest out there for clarity of thought, factual accuracy, and innovation.

Anyway, go check it out! This first week, to celebrate the launch, there will be content every day, not just M-W-F, including posts on book covers, the pillars of your Public Booklife, the pillars of your Private Booklife, and a fresh look at the lifecycle of a book. Content always posts early in the morning.

Thanks to Luis Rodrigues for creating the great site, and to Publishers Weekly for being amenable to the idea of co-existence with their Booklife portal site, and for, in general, fostering a real sense of community through their web presence and blogs.

Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer is now available online and through most bookstores. Please feel free to post an Amazon review, and to spread the booklifenow.com link around. This is a true start-up and word of mouth works wonders.

To my surprise and delight, the first Amazon review is from one of my Clarion mentors, James Patrick Kelly. Really an honor.

This is the first time I have ever reviewed a book on Amazon. I have been teaching writing for almost twenty years and have been collecting books about writing for much, much longer. Booklife has easily leapt into my top five and is probably one of my top two recommendations for writing books. Some of what you will read here is advice I myself have given in the past, the rest is stuff I wish I’d had the perspicacity to say. But I don’t need to now. I’ll just tell people to buy Jeff VanderMeer’s new book.

Below the cut, you’ll find thank you’s to everyone who contributed to the book. In many ways, large sections of Booklife provide ample evidence of the great discussions about writing we’ve had here at Ecstatic Days. So, thanks. Above all else, a huge thanks to my wife Ann, not just for contributing significantly to the book but for being there and helping out so much in so many ways during the writing of this book.

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Readers of this blog and Facebook friends might’ve noticed that the frenetic pace of my creative and professional life hasn’t really let up in over two years. Vacations have helped a little, travel for business has even helped in terms of getting me out of the house, but in general my brain hasn’t been able to turn off for a long time. It didn’t help that the beginning of this year I was supposed to be able to take a break, and then couldn’t because a NY publisher whose passive-aggressive editorial staff I hope rots in hell (the only time in 25 years I have felt this way–I generally love editors) managed to wriggle out of a contract-on-my-desk book deal that would’ve given me some space, doing so in a dishonorable way that burned more than a hundred hours of time I could’ve spent on other projects and thus income.

Luckily, though, that book deal, for what’s now called The Steampunk Bible, came back from the dead with a new, awesome publisher and editor at Abrams. Since then, my general situation has continued a marked upswing. Booklife and Finch are off to the beginning of excellent launches, the Endurance book tour is going to be amazing, and other opportunities like teaching at Clarion next year have very much put the bloom back on the rose.

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(Finch, hitting bookstores on November 3.)

The postman brought a box of Finch today. I opened them half-reluctantly for some reason, then just about died when I saw the top copies were gap-toothed: the left margin of the cover didn’t quite match up to the interior pages. Then saw these were only the first few on top, and the rest were fine. I’d had a sudden image in my head of these village-idiot-looking copies populating bookstores. But, not to worry. The majority look awesome.

In the back, there’s the classiest advert I’ve ever seen in a book:

And it looks awesome next to the Murder by Death CD (that band is just so bad-ass; don’t know another word for it).

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(All images in this post are *unauthorized* dramatic re-creations from our novella “The Mona Lisa,” with the spaceship played by a model given to Ann and me by a Romania friend. These images do not in any way represent screen shots from any new or future version of Halo, okay dude?)

UPDATE: Tessa’s version of events, which involves a lot more swearing…

There’s nothing like a little challenge to roil the blood and take over your life for a couple of months—all while not being able to say much of anything about it publicly, but, finally, I can announce that: Tessa Kum and I have sold a monstrous, kick-ass, action-packed, insanely entertaining 35,000-word novella entitled “The Mona Lisa” to Tor editor Eric Raab for the anthology Halo: Evolutions–Essential Tales of the Halo Universe. Other contributors include Tobias Buckell, Brian Evenson, Karen Traviss, and Eric Nylund. Halo: Evolutions should be available in bookstores by November-December.

Our story is set in the period between Halo 1 and Halo 2, in the Soell System, amid the debris field now circling the gas giant Threshold. The Prowler Red Horse is on a recon mission that largely consists of salvage. As the story opens, they’ve just brought a strange civilian escape pod on board the ship. For once, there are signs of life, and Sergeant Zhao Heng Lopez and her team are waiting for the engineers to get the pod open, unsure of what it might hold. What they find inside eventually leads them to [REDACTED---CLASSIFIED], which might hold the secret to [REDACTED---CLASSIFIED] and [REDACTED---CLASSIFIED] with ice cream and a thick [REDACTED---CLASSIFIED] that’s [REDACTED---CLASSIFIED] in the hold, after a flash of earlobe.

One thing we wanted to do was break with tradition, so our two main characters are women: Sergeant Zhao Heng Lopez and medic Benti. Other prominent characters include the Prowler’s commander, Foucault, his AI Rebecca, the pilot of a Pelican named Burgundy, a slew of marines, and, erm, someone wielding a cricket bat. Yes, you heard correctly. A cricket bat. How’d that sneak in there? The Aussie influence from Tessa, my partner in crime on this Bataan Death March of an experience. (Me: “Wanna collaborate on a Halo story, ‘cause I’m in over my head?” Tessa: “Hell yeah!” Two months later: “I’m gonna die if I read this again,” “Where the hell am I again? My brain doesn’t work anymore.” Ann: “Jeff, I’m sick of this *#(!&)@ process, too.”)

As readers of this blog know, I am indeed all about process, so below the cut you’ll find some insight into the story behind the story, for anyone who’s interested. (I’m sure Tessa or Ann will correct me if I get anything wrong!)

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Well, a box of them reached my house, at least. I don’t know if the book will be in stores by October 14, but I would imagine within the next two weeks. You can also, of course, always order it from either Amazon or Indiebound.

It’s perhaps some indication of just how busy I am that my first reaction on opening the box was, “yep, that’s it all right–why isn’t it gold-plated?”, and then I went back to this playlist feature I’m writing for Large Hearted Boy.

Took me a few minutes to circle back to the box and look at them again and squint, pinch myself. “Are these real? Surely I’m destined to be in pre-production purgatory with these suckers for all time? Surely this isn’t the finished book.”

Went back to work, picked up a copy on my break, brought it back to the table. Wondered again why it wasn’t gold-plated or have starship engines to propel it. Put it down. Picked it up. Looked at it like the apes did at the monolith in 2001. Went back to work.

I’m still not sure what to make of this mirage of an intruder.

Anyway, booklifenow.com will go live by around October 21.