The latest episode is here. Jen and I talk to Lavie Tidhar about his latest book, Osama from PS Publishing, and some difficult topics like terrorism, 9/11, and Osama Bin Laden. You definitely don’t want to miss this one, folks!
The first one to guess correctly what is inside this cylinder will win a book from me. Something with science fiction and fantasy in it. No joke. Take a wild guess…
I thought I’d share a little something I posted on the Google+ page for The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Why? Because I love the arts and the impassioned mini-rant I posted sums up how I feel about literature and film and music and other art forms. Before you read it, though, ask yourself why you think the arts are so important. What about reading books or listening to music or watching movies (etc.) makes the experience more than simple consumption? Now here’s my mini-rant: Bear McCreary is one hell of a composer. I think his work on Battlestar Galactica is a masterpiece on par with Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings symphony (yes, I’m calling it a symphony). The song below, for example, guts me every freaking time. And I love it. I love how music (or literature) can make me feel things. That, to me, is what makes art amazing. If you open yourself up to it, the experience is rewarding. It reminds you why you’re human. It reminds you why existence is so grand and wonderful and that we should wake up every day and say “I’m alive” as our first optimistic thought. So when people suggest cutting liberal arts programs, it always feels to me like they’re trying to cut the soul out of humanity. Forget that English teachers are the glue of civilized society because they are the arbiters of language. Forget that liberal arts programs are incredibly dedicated to research, to cross-disciplinary practices, and so on. Forget that humanities professors take their teaching more seriously than most any other academic department. What matters about the arts is what it does for and to us as human beings. Open yourself up to an experience. Feel it. Breathe it. And remember that every day someone tries to remove a book from a library or cut funding from liberal arts programs, etc. etc. etc…every day those things happen is a day finding your humanity or soul or whatever you want to call it is that much harder. The sciences are our gateway to the future, but the arts are our gateway to what makes us human. You can’t live without both and still call yourself Homo Sapiens sapiens.
I asked on Google+ whether folks would be interested in this post. A few people said they were, and so here I am telling you about why people like me (i.e., the poor) need electronic submissions. For a different take on this issue, see Mari Ness’ troubles with accessing a post office due to physical constraints. My constraints are primarily financial. I’m not going to pretend that I am the poorest person in the world. Nor am I going to suggest that I cannot truly afford the occasional hard copy submission. Anyone with the extra time can probably poke holes into my finances and find the money to pay for postage, whether by cutting out my social life (which isn’t all that glorious to begin with) or making other kinds of sacrifices. But it seems to me that poking holes doesn’t really change the point, and it certainly doesn’t change the fact that fewer and fewer markets refuse to accept electronic submissions. In any case, here goes: Not All Writers Have Mountains of Disposable Income I’ll use myself as an example. I have a guaranteed income of around $12,600 annually for the next two years. That is not an exact figure, and my income does increase if I get summer teaching and it will increase because I am taking up an adjunct position at a local community college (for which I am not paid terribly well). But for now, let’s only talk about the income I know I will have this academic year: $12,600. With that amount of money, I have to be able to afford the following: rent, utilities, college fees, school books, food/various necessities (toilet paper, over-the-counter meds like vitamins, cold medicine, etc.), health costs (medication, doctor appts., etc. — I’m an asthmatic and a cancer survivor), and career “maintenance” (making sure I have a working computer, conferences, etc). You could also include the things I buy as a consumer and the little I get to spend towards maintaining a basic (and I do mean basic) social life. I think a healthy social life is crucial to mental health (for me, that means occasionally having lunch with friends, not running off to binge drink in Vegas). But I won’t include that below. If you’ve ever lived on $12,600 a year, then you know that buying all of those things is not easy. Even taking a rough estimate from my own life (minus a few of the above categories) isn’t exactly inspiring: Rent: $575 x 12 = $6,900 Utilities: $156 x 12 = $1,872 (it should be noted that I have been reducing my consumption and hope to bring my utilities bill down considerably once the “year” switches out) College Fees: $630 x 2 = $1,260 School Books (rough estimate): $200 x 3 (Fall, Spring, Summer) = $600 Food (Gainesville ain’t cheap, and I don’t consume endless amounts of garbage): $150 x 12 = $1,800 Prescription Medicine: $25 x 12 + $25 x 2 = $350 That by itself (dropping “various necessities,” “career ‘maintenance,’” and so on) adds up to $12,782, though it does not include other expenses which I can’t yet anticipate (health complications, etc.). That means I have less guaranteed income than what I have to spend on necessities, which also means I have to find ways to make up the difference in other ways (selling things, advertising revenue, praying I get summer teaching, etc.). That also means that whatever extra I can get isn’t going to be spent on shipping charges to F&SF (who seems to be the only relevant holdout) or Interzone, who I am desperate to submit to. I’m going to save that extra dough for emergencies, such as if I get extremely ill, or for other necessities, or even for giving myself a day off somewhere other than in my apartment (i.e., doing something for my mental health). Where in that lot am I supposed to “easily find” the $2-$3 per package shipping cost I have to pay in order to send my work to all those pro markets that don’t take electronic submissions? And if it’s so hard for me to cook up the money, or justify spending it based on always being unsure what my actual income will be, just imagine how difficult it is for people living in other countries, where shipping to the U.S. can cost ten times as much (adjusted for local currency value)… This is the problem. It’s not about being too lazy to take my work seriously enough to print it out and send it to publishers. It has always been about the cost to me as a writer to send my work to a publisher. That is not an investment I am willing to make, because it’s not actually an investment. Investments have reasonable guarantees, and that’s not how writing works. There is never a guarantee that you’ll receive something in return, as well there shouldn’t be. I don’t expect a critique of my story, nor do I expect an editor to publish my work simply because I sent it to them. What I do expect is that the financial burden doesn’t fall upon me when the technology is clearly available to make such burdens non-existent. From that perspective, markets which do not allow electronic submissions have remained relatively invisible to me. Because they must. Their policies exclude people like me simply because I am not financially able to feed the post office in order to regularly send work to magazine publishers. And they exclude plenty of other writers simply because they don’t live in the United States. I see that as detrimental to the genre. How can you say that you represent the best of the genre when you have artificially excluded entire segments of the world’s writing population? The answer: you can’t (though some publishers make exceptions for foreign writers, which is kind of like a kick in the balls for us poor people). I am fortunate, though. My income will be
I usually don’t remember my dreams. But when I do, they are weird. Take, for example, one of my more recent dreams: For some strange reason, I and a bunch of friends — whose faces I can’t remember — were transported by an unknown party to a semi-real replica of Earth somewhere in the vicinity of Cassiopeia. I say semi-real replica because parts of the world that I was able to explore looked exactly like the hill my grandma lives on. In any case, somehow we were sent to this planet, in which strange, tattooed humanoid people — who refused to speak to humans — drove around in camper trucks and Winnebagos. And then there was the crazy lady in the tiny white Nissan truck. I managed to flag her down and ask her for help and she explained to me that we should all watch out for the Green Nothings, the apparent villains of the dream. And then she got on a motorcycle, drove off a cliff, and landed on top of a Winnebago half-submerged in the ocean, where a boat full of Pops and Fruitloops (among other brands of cereal) floated. Is that not a weird dream? I also dream about zombies. Specifically, the zombie apocalypse, in which I, for some odd reason, become a bit of a hero due to my mad skills in zombie killing. In any case, dreams are a wonderful way to come up with ideas for stories — or at least to explore your subconscious brain, where crazy happens to live. But the one thing I’ve always had trouble with is trying to understand why my dreams happen. That is: what sparks these little details? Why did I dream about Green Nothings and biker chicks and Winnebagos? I haven’t thought about a Winnebago in years, as far as I can remember. And I don’t want one either. And why Cassiopeia and a semi-real replica of Earth? What crazy thing is behind all of this? I don’t know, and I’m sure you don’t know either, but it makes one wonder… So here’s the deal: I want to know what kind of crazy dreams you have had. Leave a comment. And if you know what my dream is about, leave a comment about that too!
Fantasies for young readers are almost always a joy to read. I’m no sure what it is about such books. Maybe it’s to do with the whimsical style — of which Down the Mysterly River has plenty — or the adventures — ditto. Or maybe there’s something else I haven’t discovered yet. In any case, Willingham’s children’s fantasy, Down the Mysterly River, is an exciting adventure story with a wonderful mixture of fairy tale and detective mystery. Too bad I don’t have kids to read this book to… Expert boy scout Max “the Wolf” wakes up in a forest without any idea how he got there — or any idea where “there” happens to be… Soon Max discovers that this forest is part of a new world, inside of which a group of violent hunters known as the Blue Cutters seek out new lives to trim and prune into their “proper forms.” With his new (mysteriously talking) companions — Banderbrock the warrior badger, Walden the less-than-spectacular-sheriff bear, and McTavish the monstrous cat — Max sets off on a journey to meet a mysterious wizard and discover why he and his companions have been whisked away to such dangerous world. Down the Mysterly River channels a number of interesting genres. The most obvious is fantasy, which is an unavoidable fact both for the reader and for Max, who has to come to grips with the reality of the world around him. The second is the young detective story, which Willingham brings out through Max via a methodical set of steps of detection. These detective elements are interesting, though I have to admit that they sometimes felt forced. That is until you get to the big reveal, which immediately draws into focus Max as a character and the old-time-children’s-story feel he evokes. The same thing can be said about the dialogue, which sometimes seemed too advanced or perfect for a character as young as Max; but once you realize what has been happening throughout the book, you start to understand why Willingham writes dialogue in the way that he does. To be perfectly honesty, young folks are probably not going to notice these issues. With or without the ending, however, the mixture of elements works, in part because it gives Max an enhanced sense of agency in a story that could reduce him to the victim trying to escape an evil that wants to kill him. Having Max attempt to discover “why” things are happening, to put it another way, makes for a story that does more for its reader than provide an extended chase. That said, Willingham’s plot and pacing is expertly crafted. The story moves at a good clip and the twists in the story are sure to amuse or shock readers (there are two major twists or revelations, plus a fair deal of minor ones; the ending, however, will blow your mind). Willingham makes a good effort to introduce the genre mixture and Max’s character traits without damaging the flow of the adventure story; in many respects, he succeeds. One issue I had with the plot’s construction, however, was Willingham’s use of non-central POVs to show things the main characters couldn’t see. These are fairly minor, and are perhaps more common in literature for young readers than I am I aware, but they can pull you out of the suspense. Regardless, the journey of the main characters is rarely disrupted, moving forward with an even dose of revelation and action. Willingham also succeeds at constructing a cast of sympathetic (or terrifying) characters. Max is a clever young boy who refuses to let the situation get the best of him, but also a boy who has a strong sense of morality — he’s easy to sympathize with as a result. Banderbrock is a warrior with a soft heart who serves as a wonderful companion, and the interactions between the badger and McTavish — which translate roughly to an animal kingdom version of “I’m tougher than you” — are amusing. Walden, who is the only actual member of law enforcement in the group (though a bad one), is also lovable as a character, which seems perfect for a bear. And the more you learn about him and watch him try to adopt Max’s detection skills, the more you love him. How can you fault a big, hug-able bear for being a less-than-stellar sheriff? Even the Blue Cutters, who are the story’s villains, are interesting characters — and it’s because of them that I want to see more stories set in this world. They are pure villains, but there is a hint of complexity in Down the Mysterly River that I think Willingham needs to explore — either through additional Max stories or via some other character. There’s a lot left to be told about this world. Overall, Down the Mysterly River is a fantastic book. The characters are amusing, the young detective storyline is compelling, and the fantastic elements are enjoyable and exciting. I had trouble putting this book down, in part because I wanted to know why Max ended up in the world and in part because the mixture of genres and the characters seemed to beckon me through the cover. Hopefully others will feel the same way. If you want to know more about Down the Mysterly River, check out the publisher’s website. You can find the book just about anywhere books are sold (except, perhaps, the Moon).
