Because, honestly, now. Why wouldn’t it be. Terrify yourself with an even larger version.
In other news, I’m taking the weekend off. Clearly I have plans. See you all on Monday.
Quick Election 2012 Update: I Got Nothing
May 4, 2012 By 76 Comments
It was noted to me that I’ve been quiet about the election recently, to which I responded, what is there to say? Romney, who was going to be the nominee, is the nominee, and the selective amnesia that partisans undergo when the selection process is finally done is well underway. Obama’s doing his Obama thing. We have just over six months before the election. Polls, opinions and prognostications mean exactly squat. And, I’m working on a project, so my attention is elsewhere. Add it all up: Bupkis for now. I’m sure that will change sooner than later, but for now, enjoy the fallow period, hey?
“Ask Me Another” Debuts Today
May 4, 2012 By 12 Comments
Preëminent geek musician — and close personal friend — Jonathan Coulton has a new project: A show on NPR called “Ask Me Another,” which as the NPR blurb describes it, is a show “that blends brainteasers and local pub trivia night with comedy and music.” And what is not to like there? Nothing, I say! Nothing at all. Here’s a page with even more description of the hijinx that will ensue.
It debuts today; where is it on your local affiliate’s schedule is up to them (it might air later in the weekend). And if you can’t find it there, here’s the podcast version. Why not listen to it? It’ll be the most fun you can have with your ears. Probably. Unless you’re getting an ear massage from [Insert Your Most Desired Object of Ear Lust Here]. In which case it’ll be number two. And that’s fine too.
A Quick Plug for 4th Street Fantasy Convention
May 3, 2012 By 7 Comments
As I have recently posted my Redshirts tour schedule, many of you know that I will be doing a stop at the Uncle Hugo’s book store in Minneapolis on Saturday, June 23rd. But I will also be at the Fourth Street Fantasy convention that entire weekend, hanging out with fantasy fans and writers like Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Mary Robinette Kowal and many others. I will also be baking at least one Schadenfreude Pie. And, I am likely to bring either a ukulele or my tenor guitar with me to terrify everyone for a five mile radius join in with the communal music making which is undoubtedly going to take place.
Why not join us? It will be a whole lot of fun, and that’s not just the Schadenfreude Pie talking.
Amanda Palmer, Kickstarter, and Everything
May 3, 2012 By 60 Comments
Today’s question from the mailbag:
Any thoughts on the success of Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter drive?
Unsurprisingly, I have several.
First, as background: Musician, creative person and delightfully weird human being Amanda Palmer put up a Kickstarter page to fund/sell her upcoming musical album, her first full-length production in a few years. She had a goal of raising $100,000 in a month; she raised that sum in something like seven hours, and three days in, she’s at (checks, it’s 10:20am as I write this line) $439,481. That’s pretty excellent.
Needless to say this has people saying this is proof Kickstarter is the solution to everything/doing everything one’s self is the solution to everything/eliminate the middleman, preferably with a shotgun/and so on. On the flip side, Palmer herself has noted detractors, including people who seem to believe Kickstarter is nothing more than high tech begging or pan handling.
So, with that as the background, my thoughts, in no particular order.
1. I think it’s fantastic for Amanda Palmer. I say that as a fan of her work, solo and as part of Dresden Dolls, as an admirer of her creative drive and willingness to put in the actual work of maintaining a career, and as someone who has a friend married to her, who she makes ridiculously ridiculously happy as far as I can tell. As a creative person, it’s both gratifying and humbling when people step up and support you — with money! Of all things! — so the fact she’s received so much support from her fans is just wonderful. The fact that Kickstarter, as an entity, has made it easier for her and other creative people to fund their projects, is also great, and one of the true benefits of the Internet age.
2. This is a decade in the making. I went back through Whatever to find the first time I made note of something Palmer did; the answer was November 2004, when I put in a link to the song “Coin Operated Boy” by her former band Dresden Dolls. That’s seven and a half years ago; the band was active for a few years before then.
Between then and now most of what I know about Palmer is her working her ass off: Making music, playing that music, going off and making more, and building both awareness and a fan base. She left her music label a few years ago and has been putting out music independently since then; she’s presumably learned a thing or two about the mechanisms of DIY art during that time — and in that time she’s trained her fans in the fine art of supporting a truly indie musician (or at the very least, a truly indie Amanda Palmer). This is hugely important.
All of which is to say that like so many overnight successes, this isn’t. It’s the result of someone working for a very long time to get themselves into a position to make the most of this particular kind of opportunity. Complementary to this:
3. Palmer has an awesome network. She’s got hundreds of thousands of fans to whom she talks every day via Twitter and other social media, most of whom are rooting for her success. She has friends and loved ones with similar or greater fan reach (even accounting for overlap), who are happy to promote her and her works. Basically, when something happens in the world of Amanda Palmer, it’s entirely possible for more than a million people to become aware of it almost immediately.
Again, this doesn’t happen overnight. Those friends and loved ones are collected through a lifetime; those fans are created through work, music and touring. Is Palmer using them to promote herself? I suppose she is, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say that those people are willingly choosing to be part of her messaging system. I’ve retweeted stuff from her before, not because I felt obliged but because I like being a participant in her success. I retweet other news from friends and people whose work I admire for much the same reason.
You can buy Twitter followers (if you’re willing to spend money stupidly), but you can’t buy a living network of people who are invested in you as a person and/or a creator. You have to earn that through work, and by being a person worth friendship.
4. Palmer doesn’t get to keep all that money. Leaving aside taxes (duh), Palmer has to pay production costs, musician fees, tour and travel expenses and all other costs incurred in the rather elaborate tiers of stuff she’s offering to supporters. A fair amount of that money will go out of the door again. Which is, of course, what happens when one is running a small business, which is precisely what Palmer is doing here.
One of my major concerns about Kickstarter projects in a general sense is that I often wonder how many of the projects actually end up in the black for their creators. This is particularly the case when it comes to writers, artists and musicians, who are famously complete shit at working through their finances anyway, but who are also, through Kickstarter tiers and through encountering production costs that were previously handled by other people, wading into financial waters they often know next to nothing about. I wonder if people understand that Kickstarter isn’t a magical ATM but a storefront, and that they are committing to running this store — production and fulfillment both — for the duration. I expect a lot of Kickstarters ultimately end up in the red because the people running them haven’t built out a business plan, and have no idea what they’re getting into.
I expect that Palmer may be one of the exceptions — precisely because she went DIY a few years ago and has had time to learn the ropes and to have some real-world, practical experience with what everything she does (and has proposed doing) costs in a financial sense. That said, I would love to know what sort of margins she’s working with here, particularly with some of her more elaborate tiers. I have reasonable confidence she’ll end this adventure of hers in the black, but I think everyone boggled by the money she’s raised might eventually be surprised how much of it she won’t get to keep.
5. Palmer has made some big commitments. For example, she’s sold 25 house parties at $5,000 a pop, which she expects to be able to fulfill in the next 12 to 18 months. So, that’s essentially 25 other tour dates for her on top of everything else she has to do. Yes, I know, $5k for showing up with a ukulele and hanging out at someone’s house for four hours doesn’t strike most people as hard work (heck, pay me $5k, I’ll totally pop by with my ukulele!). But you know what? Spending four hours being on in front of strangers — and formally performing for one of those hours — is actually work. I know because that’s what I do when I tour for my books. Palmer has other events listed which require more than just her showing up with a winsome stringed instrument, which aside from the financial considerations is more time/energy/effort/planning for her. I get tired just looking at everything she’s promised to backers.
(This is why, incidentally, people accusing her of “online panhandling” are trolling jackasses. Palmer doesn’t have a hand out for charity — she’s offering specific goods and services when you set down your coin. You know exactly what you’re getting, and what she’s committing to. Again, this is a small business, and one with a detailed menu.)
In sum: It’s awesome that Palmer’s Kickstarter has done so well — but look at what it’s entailed. It’s entailed time, effort, planning and work both backward and forward in time. That currently $439,000 isn’t a windfall for her; it’s a marker of what all that commitment to the work has earned.
If you’re one of the people looking at her Kickstarter money with stars in your eyes and awesome plans of your own in your head, ask yourself first: Have you put in the time? Earned the credibility? Scoped out the financial balance sheet? Made the commitment to fulfill every single thing you have promised?
Palmer has. If you haven’t — on any of this — be aware that your results, shall we say, may vary.
The Big Idea: Paolo Bacigalupi
May 3, 2012 By 29 Comments
Paolo Bacigalupi has made a name from himself — and garnered a shelf full of awards including the Hugo, Nebula and Printz — by taking a hard and not always comfortable look at the logical progression of today’s conditions into the future of our planet. In The Drowned Cities, the follow-on to his award-winning YA novel Ship Breaker, Bacigalupi looks again at the world we are creating today with our words and actions, and what it means for what we leave to those who come after us.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI:
When I started writing The Drowned Cities, I hadn’t planned to write about politics. Typically I write about environmental issues such as global warming or energy scarcity or GM foods, but as I was working on the book, our increasingly divided political dialogue and government paralysis intruded.
These says, I can’t help noticing how much time we spend busting unions in Wisconsin or warring over contraception in universities, or checking people’s citizenship papers at traffic stops, while our geopolitical situation and future prospects change for the worse. As I’ve watched this dysfunction deepen, I’ve started to consider other aspects of where we might be headed.
As much as we invoke Rome and its fallen empire as a metaphor for our present American circumstance, I’m more interested in Greece, and the failures of prototype democracy. I can’t help but notice how easily demagogues and rhetoric sway our citizens these days, and how we turn on any leader foolish enough as to tell us that the shadows on the wall are false–whether that’s the dream of endless American prosperity, or the mirage of American exceptionalism, or the fairy tale that taxes will never be raised at the same time as our military will never be trimmed.
Democracy is fragile. It takes people working together in good faith to make it function. And yet, these days we celebrate people who profit from undermining it. We bathe ourselves in the rhetorical flourishes of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity (and no, Keith Olbermann doesn’t float my boat much either), and it seems like you’re either a patriot or a traitor to your country. Environmentalist just want to kill jobs. Democrats are out to make America weak. The left is stupid, and the right is crazy. The Christians are trying to create a theocracy, and the socialists are hiding under every rock, just waiting to take over the government.
Division. Distrust. Contempt. Hatred.
Ironically, the demagogues who work so hard to deepen our divisions are getting rich at the same time. They hack away at their fellow citizens, and encouraging others to do the same. They devalue half our population’s humanity for the entertainment of the other half–and they make massive amounts of money. Rush Limbaugh alone makes $38 million a year from poisoning our political dialogue.
Almost all of my writing asks the simple question: If this goes on, what does the world look like? For The Drowned Cities, I asked: If everyone we disagree with is a traitor, where does that take us? If we can’t figure out how to cooperate, and if we always demonize one another, what sort of world do we hand off to our children in terms of politics and prosperity? The Drowned Cities is about the world after Rush Limbaugh and the rest of our talking heads have boarded their private jets and left the wreckage of the country behind. It about a world where we didn’t solve the big problems because we were focused on the small schisms.
In The Drowned Cities, warlord factions fight over territory, scrap, religion, and recruits. Two young children, Mahlia and Mouse, have been orphaned by the civil war and fled to the jungle outskirts. They’ve both lost their families and Mahlia has lost a hand to the war’s brutalities. Now, in the village of Banyan Town, they’ve found shelter, thanks to the protective influence of a humanitarian doctor. But even this fragile safety doesn’t last. War is coming Banyan Town. Soldier boys are in the jungles, sweeping the swamps with hunting dogs, searching for something that only Mahlia knows about. Something that the soldier boys will do anything to find, and something that Mahlia can never let them have, no matter what it costs herself, the doctor, or the town.
—-
The Drowned Cities: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Free preview of the novel on Kindle or Nook (US Only). Follow the author on Twitter.
ANNOUNCING: Redshirts Fan Art Contest, Top Prize $250 Entries Due 5/16
May 2, 2012 By 15 Comments
So, here’s the deal:
I think it might be fun to do a slideshow of Redshirts-related fan art in advance of the book release, but I have a problem: I don’t have any Redshirts-related fan art. Possibly because the book isn’t released yet.
How do I solve this problem? As so many problems are solved — by throwing money at it! Thus, a fan art contest for Redshirts (or more accurately, featuring the poor schmucks who are red shirts) that anyone can enter.
Here’s what I’m looking for:
1. Original art by you (this is important), not of any specific copyrighted universe except my own (i.e., no Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, etc — this is also important, because I don’t want to get sued), featuring red shirt characters, mostly being doomed in interesting ways, as red shirts so often are. This lends itself amusing situations for artists, and I encourage that, but the art doesn’t have to be funny; you can make it tense or exciting or sad or whatever. It should be not especially gory — think PG.
(For those of you who want to make your red shirts part of the Redshirts universe, here’s a link to an online excerpt of the book. Note you’ll have to register with Tor.com to access it. If you don’t want to do that, the excerpt is available for free in the US on Kindle, Nook, Google and iTunes. For the purposes of creating the artwork for the contest, I will grant you a Creative Commons non-commercial license to make a derivative artwork from the text.)
This should probably go without saying, but: The red shirt characters? Dress them in red shirts, please.
2. Artwork should be at least 1920 x 1080 and in those proportions regardless of size (i.e., HD-sized, and wider than tall — I do want to standardize the images) and in high-quality .jpg form, and sent as an attached .jpg file to “[email protected].” You may submit more than one entry if you’re feeling ambitious.
3. All artwork should be sent by 11:59pm (Eastern time) Wednesday, May 16, 2012.
Here’s what I have planned, and what you agree to:
I will look at each entry and pick the top 25 to 50 (or so) and then show those to my hand-picked jury, who will pick the five they like the most. Those five I will post here on my Web site to let my readers select the one they like the best. The top vote-getter will receive $250 and a signed ARC of Redshirts; the second place vote-getter will get $100 and a signed ARC; third place gets $50 and a signed ARC.
I may want to show off some or all of the pieces that made the initial cut through a slideshow, possibly with done as a YouTube or other video to accompany (non-disparaging) audio commentary and/or music. If I use your artwork, I may pan/crop/spotlight, etc., but otherwise will not alter the work.
If I choose to use your artwork for the slideshow, I will pay you $10 for a non-exclusive license to do so. The license will allow me to use your artwork in the slideshow/video, and will allow for the artwork, as part of the slideshow/video, to be shared via Creative Commons. I will make no other claims to your work (except as noted above, with regards to CC non-commercial licensing). You made it; it’s yours. I just want to be able to show it off.
Likewise, I have no intent to make any money from your artwork, except in the indirect sense that people may be inspired to rush off and get the book (I may include links or information on how to do that, but probably not over your artwork).
If I use your artwork for the slideshow/video, I will give you credit, either during the slideshow/video, or here on Whatever. I’m big on giving credit where credit is due.
(The top three pieces will of course be featured as well, under the same guidelines, although the $10 license is incorporated in the winnings.)
If you enter the contest, you do so with the understanding that I may choose to use your artwork for a slideshow/video and that you agree to allow me to do so, if I want to, under the terms noted above. Likewise, that you are aware that I may choose not to use or highlight your artwork, in which case there will be no compensation for your work (sorry).
Finally, I reserve the right to cancel the contest if I deem it necessary to do so, in which case I will not make any claim to any submitted artwork in any sense (nor will I give out contest awards). Let’s hope that’s not the case, though; I’m mostly just putting that there to cover my ass.
Who can enter:
Anyone, as far as I’m concerned. It would help me if you had a valid PayPal account, however, so I could send you whatever money I owe you as easily as possible (for me). That said, you’re responsible for awareness of all your local laws regarding contests and payments, blah blah blah.
Any questions? Put them in the comments. And yes, please feel free to send this to anyone you’d like.
The Big Idea: N.K. Jemisin
May 2, 2012 By 19 Comments
N.K. Jemisin is has been on a hot streak for the last couple of years; her novel The Kingdom of the Gods was nominated for the Nebula Award this year, and its predecessor The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo. That being the case, it’s not entirely a surprise that her latest novel, The Killing Moon, the first of two “Dreamblood” titles, is garnering starred reviews and other praise. So it might surprise you that the original idea behind The Killing Moon was maybe just a little silly. But as Jemisin explains, it’s not always just the idea, it’s what you do with it, and where it takes you.
N.K. JEMISIN:
I’m supposed to talk about the idea that touched off the Dreamblood duology here, but if I talked only about that, this would be a really short post. That’s because it wasn’t a very big idea, at least at first; really, I just wanted to write about ninja priests. Nothing grand or revolutionary, nothing especially thought-provoking, no gods or universes at stake. Just shadowy figures who would creep into people’s rooms in the dead of night and… I dunno, bless them to death or something. “Missed you at confessional today, Bob.” “Wha — AGCK!” That was how all this began.
But that’s the punchline of a bad joke, not a story, and fortunately the image that popped into my head to accompany it was considerably less silly than the idea itself. I envisioned a man — tall, shaven bald, remarkable in his stillness both physically and spiritually — standing at the foot of a bed and contemplating the person who slept there, whom he meant to kill. This man, this priest, would work only at night; indeed, night would be a holy time for him. And the clincher of his character was that he wouldn’t be doing it for some paltry material reward or to satisfy a bloodthirsty god; he would be doing it because he cared. He would intend only the best for his victims; indeed, he would be trying to save them from a far worse fate. He would love them. And what could be more effective — or relentless — than an assassin motivated by love?
This was the Gatherer Ehiru, protagonist of The Killing Moon, who spun himself in seconds from subconscious nothingness into conscious near-completion as a character. Once I had him, though, I had to begin the much more difficult work of figuring out what sort of society would harbor a man like this, and consider him an asset rather than a monster.
From the beginning I envisioned this story taking place in a land of warmth and water. I had a vague idea at first of placing it in pre-Columbian South America, possibly a fantasy analogue of the Incan Empire — but the place in my head felt much older, relatively speaking. It would be a society weighed down by tradition, I felt instinctively, and wealthy enough to support a large, powerful priesthood. It would be a civilized place, full of sprawling cities and temples, with an enormous populace and monuments huge enough to inspire awe… kind of like ancient Egypt. Since at the time I knew squat-all about ancient Egypt beyond what I’d picked up from many bad movies, I started researching it, and that only confirmed my choice. Egypt was perfect.
Next I tried to figure out why Ehiru — his name popped into my head too — would be sneaking into someone’s home to kill them. Obvious answer is obvious: for mercy. To ease pain or a lingering death. But that seemed too easy. Lots of societies have had to wrestle with how to care for their dying elders or deathly ill; none that we know of have evolved a cadre of mercy-killing priests. That suggested to me that there had to be something more involved. Something that would give the whole nation a stake in not only allowing but encouraging this priesthood’s activity. What could a priesthood provide that would benefit every citizen so much that they might be willing to sacrifice their sick and old…?
Health and longevity, of course, for the rest.
There are some obvious real-world inspirations here. Gujaareh is in many ways a land out of a Sarah Palin nightmare; every older citizen’s final days are decided upon by a literal “death panel” consisting of both priests and the person’s own relatives. Also, as an American I live under the constant shadow of worry that I will fall ill or get hurt during a time when I’m without insurance. For most of us that means bankruptcy at best, homelessness or a terrible death at worst. This fear peaked for me a few years ago, when I took time off 9-to-5 life to write the last two books of the Inheritance Trilogy — just as the housing crisis triggered the Great Recession. So although in day job life I’m a career counselor who’s never previously had much trouble finding employment when I needed to, I did that time. Oh, I had insurance via the Freelancers’ Union, for the “affordable” price of $400/month. (If I hadn’t lived in New York, where there’s a critical mass of freelancers [including writers], it would’ve been $1100.) But as my “writing year” ticked into 15 months, then 18, my savings dwindled first to dregs, then fumes.
I was lucky: I found a job about a month before I would’ve had to cancel my health insurance. But I know many, many people who haven’t been so lucky. And while in theory the Affordable Care Act might alleviate some of this fear (if it’s allowed to stand by the Supreme Court)… it’s not really a solution to the problem, just a small and ill-fitting band-aid.
But Gujaareh, the Egypt-esque land in which Ehiru plies his trade, has found a workable solution. In Gujaareh every citizen contributes to the system: they are required to make monthly tithes of dreams. In the hands of skilled narcomancers — the priests of the Goddess of Dreams — these dreams can be used to generate a kind of supercharged placebo effect, accelerating wound-healing and boosting immune response to nearly every disease. Wet dreams can be used to encourage abnormal growth — the regeneration of lost limbs, for example — while nightmares stop abnormal growth, such as cancer. But the most powerful dreams, which can ease the most debilitating mental or physical pain and extend life itself, is obtained only at the moment of death. That’s where Ehiru and his fellow priests come in… and that’s when I realized I had a real story on my hands.
I also had to figure out Ehiru himself, and the circumstances that drive him to kill people out of love; the priesthood that supports and controls him like a family, and the theological cosmology behind it; the political and economic pros and cons, and the kinds of hard choices Gujaareen citizens have to make; and most importantly I had to figure out all the ways this whole system could go horribly, horribly wrong. But I don’t want to spoil any more.
So I guess we’ll have to see which part of the story attracts more readers: the adventure and conspiracy? The magical examination of socialized medicine and its consequences? Ehiru, the loving killer? His companions: Nijiri the killer-apprentice, Sunandi the nation-killer? The magic system rooted in psychodynamic dream theory, the medical system based on the collective unconscious? The promise of a sequel which will come out in just another month?
‘Course, if it’s the ninja priests that intrigue you, I won’t judge. That’s what did it for me, too.
—-
The Killing Moon: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Read the first three chapters. Read the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.
9 Scifi Films You Should See That You (Probably) Haven’t
May 2, 2012 By
The penultimate column of my FilmCritic.com career is upon us, and I’m using it to look at nine science fiction films I suspect most science fiction film fans (and those who would like to suggest they are science fiction film fans) have not seen, but should. It’s a list of important but semi-obscure films, and there is room for you to add a suggestion for a tenth film on the list in the comments. Go! While you can!
Me and Pat Rothfuss and Amber Benson and Felicia Day Talk About Characters For Roughly an Hour
May 1, 2012 By 12 Comments
The headline says it. Here it is. Enjoy.
(This was part of the Geek & Sundry debut, incidentally. Why not watch their shows and subscribe to all of them?)
The Redshirts Tour: Places, Dates and Times
May 1, 2012 By 103 Comments
Now it can be revealed: All the places to which I will be going on my book tour for Redshirts. As I mentioned previously, there are some places here that I’ve never officially toured before (Philly, Boston, Houston, Chicago), so I’m very excited to be able to have them as part of the itinerary. If I’m not coming to your town this time around, sorry. Maybe next tour.
But if I am coming to your town: BE THERE. I’ll make it worth your while, I promise.
And now: Places, dates and (when known) times:
Tuesday, June 5, 12:00 PM
Book Expo America, New York , NY
Wednesday, June 6, 6:30 PM
Barnes & Noble, Philadelphia, PA
Thursday, June 7, 7:00 PM
Books & Co, Dayton, OH
Friday, June 8, 7:00 PM
Joseph-Beth, Cincinnati, OH
Saturday, June 9
Brazos, Houston, TX
Sunday, June 10
Lake Forest Bookstore (Indian Trails Library), Chicago, IL
Monday, June 11, 7:00 PM
Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, WI
Tuesday, June 12, 7:00 PM
Vroman’s, Pasadena CA
Wednesday, June 13, 7:00 PM
Burbank Central Library, Burbank CA
Thursday, June 14, 7:00 PM
WORD Bookstore, Brooklyn NY
Friday, June 15, 7:00 PM
Harvard COOP, Cambridge MA
Monday, June 18, 7:00 PM
Schuler’s Books, Lansing, MI
Saturday, June 23, 7:00 PM
Uncle Hugo’s, Minneapolis, MN
Thursday, June 28, 7:00 PM
Joseph-Beth, Lexington, KY
This summer I will also be at the Fandom Fest in Louisville, KY, Comic Con in San Diego, CA, and of course at Chicon 7 in Chicago, IL. There may also be a couple of surprise drop-ins as well at other places; we’ll have to see what the schedule holds. But for now: This is the tour!
The Big Idea: Arthur Salm
May 1, 2012 By 10 Comments
This is a Big Idea whose author I have a great deal of pleasure introducing to you, because the debut novelist you are about to meet, Arthur Salm, is a dear friend of mine — the book editor at the San Diego Tribune back when I was an but an intern there, more than two decades ago (the paper later merged to become the San Diego Union Tribune, where Arthur continued in that role). After years of reviewing and talking about books, Arthur’s gone to the other side and written Anyway*, a coming-of-age tale that’s getting some lovely reviews (Publishers Weekly calls it “sweetly comic”) and aims to capture the essence of being twelve. How to do that? By treating the main character Max — and the readers — in a certain way. Here’s Arthur to explain.
ARTHUR SALM:
My Big Idea started out as No Idea At All.
Four years ago I left my job as Books editor and columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune and sat down to write a novel. I hadn’t the vaguest wisp of a story in mind, but I had the tone down, I tell you, down: This was to be an antic, dark comedy, because … well, it sounded like fun.
Problem was, I’d never written fiction. I had, in fact, spent 20+ years trying not to write fiction, what with being a journalist and all. So on Day One, after arranging the cat on my lap (she’s still there, or rather, here), I thought I’d take a test drive: a short story for my then 12-year-old daughter. Just to see if I could make stuff up.
Right away Max, my 12,-almost-13-year-old narrator, started coming up with asides and tangential comments. I remembered that when I reviewed David Foster Wallace’s essay collection “Consider the Lobster” I peppered the piece with 30 of what I hoped were fun and funny footnotes (Wallace was, of course, Master of the Footnote) and that it was the best time I ever had writing anything. So I started putting Max’s meanderings into footnotes.
After about four hours I leaned back in my chair and screamed at the ceiling, “NO! I do not want to write a *%^#$&^ children’s book!”
Because I don’t read, and have never read, children’s books. I don’t collect stamps or listen to opera or watch football, either. Nothing against any of them. Just not interested.
But now I was writing a children’s book … without a clue as to what children’s books are “like.” Which is when I got what I hope will pass for a Big Idea. Or a Large-ish Idea, at least.
Here we have to detour back to the newspaper biz. People were always asking me, “Is it true that newspapers are written on a sixth-grade level?” It’s one of those modern myths (e.g., “Everyone should drink eight glasses of water a day”) that make no sense if you think about them for two minutes, but are generally accepted because most people don’t think about anything for two minutes. Anyway, one of the preposterous notions attendant to the “sixth-grade level” myth is that reporters are able to calibrate their prose to the reading level of the average American 11-year-old. (Copy editor kicks story back to reporter: “You’ve got two eighth-grade vocab words in the fourth graf, and the sentence structure in the lede is fifth-grade at best.”)
Not having a clue, then, as to how to downshift my writing into middle-school gear, I made up my mind not to. They’ll get it, I told myself. Just write the story. The only concessions I made were 1) no super-complex sentences that wander off into a maze of subordinate and sub-subordinate clauses, because eighth-graders just don’t sound like that; and 2) keep an eye on the vocabulary: no “plangent” or “purblind” or “peripatetic.” Aside from that, just write the story.
Because what “Anyway*” is about, really – as much as a book is “about” anything, another argument altogether – is that fleeting netherworld in which one is neither a little kid nor a teenager, but a (semi)-independent being balanced precariously, giddily, gloriously in between. It’s about that feeling: Max is intensely aware of (and ecstatic about) no longer being a little kid, and he knows that the social and chemical assault of teen-hood lies dead ahead. So he’s fiddling with his identity … and when he goes to a week-long summer family camp, he sees a chance to re-invent himself. Nobody there knows him. He can be anything, be anybody he wants to be.
Consequences? Yup.
That kind of a story, that kind of sensibility, can’t be conveyed by writing down to what we imagine to be a kid’s level of sophistication. It’s grown-up stuff, if you will. And here’s my Big (Large-ish!) Idea: This is exactly, but exactly the point in life when people start to GET stuff. They’ll get it. Twelve, 11-, 10-year-olds will get it.
And so, I hope, will 20-, 31- …maybe even 62-year-olds.
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Anyway*: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
It’s Not the First of May Without Jonathan Coulton
May 1, 2012 By 15 Comments
It’s a hallowed tradition here on Whatever to play “First of May” by Jonathan Coulton on the first of May, provided I can remember to do so. I remembered! So crank it up, provided you are not some place where a sprightly song about springtime fornication will in fact get you in trouble. In which case, maybe headphones are appropriate.
May/June Big Idea Update
April 30, 2012 By 1 Comment
For the Big Idea, I’ve now scheduled all of May and all but the last three slots of June. If you queried about May but haven’t heard from me, a) sorry, I thought I got responded to everyone, b) I’m full up. If you have a June book that comes out in the last two weeks of that month, you may still query for those slots, but I would hurry if I were you. Thanks.
Barnes & Noble & Microsoft
April 30, 2012 By 21 Comments
People are asking if I have any thoughts about the just-announced partnership between Barnes & Noble and Microsoft in the eReader market. My major immediate thought about it is: Oh, good, a robustly-funded competitor for Amazon in the eReader market. That makes for three major eReader portals/ecosystems (the other being Apple; there are four if you count Google, but I don’t think they’ve quite got their act together yet). This offers choice for consumers and a little breathing space for the publishing industry that’s still freaking out about the idea of an Amazon eBook monopsony.
On the monopsony score I would still very much like to see a better way for independent booksellers to be able to enter the eBook market, because whether we’re talking Amazon, B&N/MS, Google or Apple, we’re talking huge companies carving up an emerging market and effectively shutting out retailers that aren’t on the Dow Jones. But that’s really another matter entirely. For now: Yay, more competition. Let’s see how it works from here.
Toby Buckell has some more thoughts on the matter here.
My New Toy, 4/30/12
April 30, 2012 By 36 Comments
It’s called a tenor guitar (specifically this one). Which means that it’s a guitar, but it’s got four strings, and naturally those four strings are the highest ones. It’s also tuned like a ukulele, which means that all the chords I’ve learned on the one transfer to the other, which is in fact very useful. I got it when I was in California, at the Folk Music Center in Claremont (which for music trivia fans is owned by the family of musician Ben Harper; I believe I was rung up by his mother).
I went in with my friend Natasha to get her a ukulele for her birthday (this one, in fact), and one of the folks behind the counter was fiddling around with the tenor guitar. He gave it to me to try and about three minutes later I was calling Krissy to let her know I was about to drop a non-trivial load of cash for an early birthday present to myself. The store had to ship it; it arrived today.
The quick verdict after a couple hours of playing it: Well, I like it very much. I had no idea tenor guitars existed before I walked into the store, but had occasionally thought that it would be cool to have a guitar-sized uke, so this obviously fits the bill. My history with guitars has not been sterling; I have a couple but I have difficulty with some chords (mostly the ones that require laying one’s finger across the entire fretboard) so I’ve never been able to get a good sound from them. This one has fewer strings and requires less effort to play, which suits my general relationship with musical instruments (i.e., very casual and not inclined to put in the large amount of effort required to be excellent).
That said, I can already tell that the tenor guitar is far less forgiving than the ukulele. One of the things that I like about the uke is that even when you screw up a chord, it still sounds winsome; it’s an instrument that affords the play a huge margin for error. The tenor guitar is more like a guitar in this regard; when I screw up a chord I notice it. It also reminds me that my strumming is completely crap. So if I want to actually sound good with this guitar, I will have to put in more effort than I do now. Maybe not as much as with a six string guitar, but more than I do with the uke.
Which is fine; it’s good to have a challenge and I think I will make the effort. First task: Toughen up the fingertips on the fretting hand. These are metal strings. Ouch.
Incidentally, if you live near Claremont or happen to be going through the area, I do recommend the Folk Music Center to you. There’s a huge number of very cool instruments there, stringed and otherwise, and the folks who work at the store are knowledgeable, nice, helpful and, clearly, able to spot someone who wants a tenor guitar even before he knows he wants one. Give them your business.
And Now, My Penguicon Guest of Honor Bio
April 29, 2012 By 30 Comments
As many of you know, this last weekend I was Guest of Honor at Penguicon, the open source and science fiction convention, held this year in Dearborn. I was asked for a bio to put in the convention’s program guide, and at this point you may imagine I am deadly bored of writing bios for myself. So I decided to do something silly. So below, please find the bio I wrote for the Penguicon program book. You may be amused.
Future conventions, please note: I do not intend to put forth this much effort every time I am Guest of Honor. I really am lazy.
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John Scalzi is your Guest of Honor this year. He’s the New York Times best selling author of eight science fiction novels, winner of two Hugos and the proprietor of Whatever, one of the longest running and most popular personal blogs on the Internet. But you can find out any of that information by looking through Google and Wikipedia. What don’t you know about John Scalzi? Here is an exclusive list of facts you won’t find anywhere else but here.
TEN THINGS YOU DID NOT KNOW ABOUT JOHN SCALZI
1. The word “Scalzi” means “barefoot” in Italian. But it also means “lightly salted” in Czech, “full of mucus” in Romanian, and “unspeakably gifted in the erotic arts” in Catalan. Scalzi himself often wears shoes, has clear nasal passages and is rarely to be found in a salted state, lightly or otherwise. He does not, however, contest the Catalan definition.
2. Scalzi, a precocious lad, wrote his first short story at the tender age of two, a story about how the moon had gotten unusually bright, heralding the end of the world. Coincidentally Larry Niven published the Hugo-winning short story “Inconstant Moon” that same year, with exactly the same theme. This occasioned the toddler Scalzi challenging Mr. Niven to a duel at LACon I, which Mr. Niven, unable to understand the soft-palate pronunciation of Scalzi, did not accept. The challenge remains unaccepted to this day, leading to a life-long enmity between the two men, much to the confusion of Mr. Niven.
3. The members of the Scalzi clan are known for their flowing, Fabio-like manes of hair, yet Scalzi himself gives every appearance of being short-haired and balding. How can this be? The answer is that at the age of fifteen, Scalzi selflessly and courageously donated 80% of his scalp to an unfortunate child who was tragically born without follicles. After a sixteen hour operation involving three teams of doctors, the hair transfer was successful, and the child went on to a full recovery. That child is Scott Lynch.
4. Scalzi was a world-class bocce player, tipped as “the next Umberto Granaglia” by both Sports Illustrated and Bocce Monthly, but abruptly left the sport while still an amateur competitor. When contacted by ESPN about his departure, Scalzi said only, “it used to be about the game, man,” and would give no further comment. He has not picked up a bocce ball since.
5. Scalzi was born with three nostrils. The third nostril is not on his nose. It’s still somewhere on his body. However, contrary to rumor, Scalzi does not give out prizes if you can guess where it is.
6. In 1989, Scalzi found the Rainbow Connection, but his attempts to notify the Muppets of the discovery have been fruitless. Scalzi has said that he will not reveal its location to anyone but Kermit, but notes there is already a Starbucks there.
7. Scalzi is a master of the following things: Stealth, surprise, disguise, deception, kung fu, puppets, large herbivores, cupcakes, the letter “e,” stealth, and redundancy.
8. Scalzi invented the term “Ninja” in 1998, then invented a time machine and went to the Sengoku period of Japanese history to give the idea to a group of spies who were ambitious but lacked marketing skills. He was paid a pound of gold for idea, which he then placed in a bank to earn compound interest, and then came back to the present. He is now the richest man in the history of the world, with a net worth of sixty quadrillion dollars.
9. No, Scalzi will not buy you a drink. He’s got to save those sixty quadrillion dollars for when he really needs them.
10. If you say Scalzi’s name three times, he is likely to appear somewhere near you. Because, hey, he’s the Guest of Honor at this convention. It’s not like he’s going to be hard to find.
Traveling Home
April 29, 2012 By 13 Comments
Keep yourself amused; I am heading back home. More updates to come when I get back. That is all. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves whilst I am away.
I’m Busy Today, So To Keep You Amused, Here’s a Clip of Me on Oprah in 1996
April 28, 2012 By 102 Comments
Yes, it really happened. I was on the show to rebut the women who wrote that odious book The Rules. No, I was not actually AOL’s Relationship Columnist; Oprah’s people made that up. Yes, that is a very Cosby sweater I’m wearing. Yes, that’s my real hair. It was the 90s, man. Enjoy. See you later.
Industrial Toys and Me
April 27, 2012 By 24 Comments
So, here’s a bit of secret news that I can now share with you: I’m part of the team at Industrial Toys, a new video game company that’s going to be bringing some jaw-droppingly awesome games into the mobile space. I can’t tell you what precisely I’m working on there at the moment (except to say, hey, remember when I said “jaw-droppingly awesome”? Yeah, that), but I can say I’m working on the story and… other things.
Here’s the announcement in the Industrial Toys newsletter (sign up for it! Enjoy it!). More details about the work I’m doing with IT coming up when it comes up. I can promise, however, you won’t be disappointed.
The Blatherations of Others