The Status — A Very Long Summer and the WISB Funding Update
Two things: 1. The Lizards and Financial Mumbo Jumbo The last couple weeks have contributed tremendously to my long history of garbage-ness. I had to have one of my lizards (Taj) put down, today marks the day when my other lizard is expected to go into surgery (Noodles), and so on. Emotionally, I’m in one of those “well, life kinda sucks, but at least I woke up today” moods. Such events also have other ramifications — namely, financial ones (my vet has been very kind to me and allowed me to defer payments on some things; they’ve also reduced the cost of some of the bills when they didn’t have to — but cremation services and the like have still put a strain on my financials). I’ve got about $5 until next Friday, which I hope will be a large paycheck, because I really don’t need any more small ones; the first was pitiful considering that most grad students have nothing to work with over the summer. I’ve never understood why the University of Florida pushes back the payment process by several weeks so that you don’t get paid properly until a month into your teaching job, followed by a month or so of left over payments that they might as well have made during the semester. It’s the most bizarre payment scheme imaginable, and it causes a lot of grad students a lot of stress, since their financial situation prior to arriving here didn’t exactly make the transition easy. We start poor, we stay poor, and re-orienting the bills doesn’t exactly change this cycle… In any case, that’s sort of where I’m at. I’m sitting here, in my apartment, hoping that when the phone rings I don’t end up with a “so, he passed away during surgery” call. And I’m worried about whether what I have in my cupboard can keep me fed, or if some strange charge will throw me in the negative on my bank account, and so on. This must be what real life feels like. I don’t like it. But I’ve learned a life lesson, which is one I won’t forget any time soon. I’ll be better prepared next year. 2. The Funding Project (The World in the Satin Bag and “the Status”) In other news, since I’m rambling a bit here, I’d like to let you all know that I will be making a video of myself doing embarrassing things, as per our public agreement for reaching my funding goal of $1,000. You can still donate to the project if you’d like; I will honor the original fundraising scheme I set up here, so any donations will still earn you free stuff. I intend to spend the next week practicing, because I want to be really good at the Truffle Shuffle and Peanut Butter Jelly Time before I record myself doing it. This means I have to watch The Goonies and stare at every rendition of PBJT available on YouTube over the next few days. I want to thank everyone who donated, even if you only gave me a few bucks. You helped me a lot during a difficult time and I appreciate that. I’ve got all sorts of other things in works, such as stories with characters based on folks who donated, and the editing process is still underway. Once I finish this next edit (and then one more major pass with a friend), I will get the ebook compiled and sent to everyone who donated $10 or more. My hope is to have all of these things done before my birthday (Oct. 6th), and at the very least, in the event that I get run over by a bus or aliens abduct me and put me behind, it will be finished before the year is out. If the project is delayed until the end of the year, I will make up for it by doing something more for you all (free fiction, another embarrassing video, or whatever you’d like). I don’t want it to be delayed that far out, but life has been giving me whatever the hell it wants at the moment, so it’s always possible. Anywho! Have a good one!
American Lit Chalkboard Wonders
Technically the following images from my chalkboard-based lecture today include an essay on Slaughterhouse Five by Arnold Edelstein. You’ll need to scroll through the previous four images from my last post, but you all can handle that, right? Feel free to leave any comments if you find these amusing or have questions. Teaching Vonnegut has been a fascinating and educational experience. I can’t wait to teach it again! American Lit (4081) Chalkboard Wonders Note: I’m going to call these posts the American Lit Chalkboard Wonders (after the album), since future chalkboard images will have nothing to do with Vonnegut.
The Skiffy and Fanty Show #4.5 is Live! (Interview w/ Stina Leicht)
The title says it all. This week’s episode is an interview with Stina Leicht, author of Of Blood and Honey from Night Shade Books. The book is well worth a read, by the way. I’ll post a review of it here when I get a chance. Here’s the interview. I hope you enjoy it!
WISB Podcast: Chapter Fourteen (The End of the Beginning)
The chapter is late and I’m feeling like crap about it. Life is not being kind to me as of late, what with having to put one of my leopard geckos down, starting up school and teaching, and other similar issues. But it’s here and I’m going to get my crap together and put myself on a regular schedule. The fourteenth chapter finds James and his companions (Pea and Darl) at the far edges of Arlin City, inches from escaping. But escaping weights heavily upon James…and I’ll leave it at that so you’ll have something to look forward to! Chapter Fourteen — Download (MP3) Thanks for listening. Please give WISB a review on iTunes! (Don’t forget to check out what I’ve done to sweeten the pot for anyone who donates to the project. Plenty of free things are available, from ebooks, paperbacks, random letters from me, and even a character written about you into the world of WISB. Please consider donating!) (All podcast chapters will be listed on the Podcast page.)
“The book market be flooded with bad books,” said the Bookstore Man!
The following comment was left on John Ottinger’s Grasping For the Wind. Specifically, I left it on a guest post by R. L. Copple entitled “Wading Through the Crap,” which is an interesting take on the “there will be so much crap” anti-self-publishing argument. I take some issue with the logic, even if I now also take issue with the anti-SP argument being refuted, but the post is interesting enough to check out on your own (which I expect you all to do; go on, leave some comments!) Here’s what I had to say: This post is just as riddled with fallacies, which is ironic when you argue that the post linked at the start is equally plagued by them. Two examples: 1. You say: “Now let’s say with the explosion of indie books, it adds 20,000 new titles to the pile each year, giving the reader a total of 30,000 new books to browse through. And let’s say the average reader will only like 2% of those books, meaning among those 20,000 indie books, they would have 400 books they would enjoy reading if they came across them. That means among the 30,000 books they could wade through, there would be 900 they would pick up if they came across them, which amounts to a 3% chance of finding a book they like instead of 5%. If that scenario was true, it would mean it grew a tad harder to find a book the reader likes, but only by 2%.” While a 2% decrease seems minor, in the grand scheme of book “finding,” it’s not. When you take into account the time, energy, and other variables that go into book “finding,” that 2% decrease is substantial, particularly since it represents a 40% reduction in possibility. That’s nothing to scoff at. You’re using numerical trickery here to suggest something that isn’t such a big deal, but you leave out the primary thing that makes readers very unlikely to buy anything whatsoever: wasting their time. Even a 1% (or 20%) decrease would put off a substantial number of readers who simply can’t be bothered to put in the extra effort to find something they may or may not like (which, let’s face it, even when you take into account the various ways readers come to books, and, thus, choose them, that doesn’t include the time and effort it takes for that reader to actually discover if they got the right book; this implies that your model must take into account the percentage of occurrences in which a reader found a book, but discovered upon reading that it wasn’t to their liking — contrary to popular belief in self-publishing circles, most readers aren’t willing to read huge previews and the like; if you’re lucky, they’ll read a page or two, which explains why publishers are so adamant about those first few pages, even today). 2. You spend a lot of time talking about slush piles and how readers see the demise of the slush pile as something good for them, since it means there will be more good books to find. The problem with this is that you earlier argue that the publication form is one of the least relevant methods by which readers come to books, and, thus, a direct contradiction of your earlier sentiments. Now, setting aside the lack of statistical support for most of what we’re talking about (nobody really knows how many readers care about the publisher and how many don’t, etc. only anecdotal evidence that suggests they avoid SPed books in bookstores), you still have the problem here of turning readers into slush readers. I hate everything to do with this concept, because the moment you make it my job as a reader to do a job other people should be doing and getting paid for (publishers, reviewers, editors, and related people, some of which may be related to non-traditional publishing models) is the moment you take all the joy out of reading, after which I’ll simply stop buying books. I’m not kidding. I will stop buying books completely, with the exception of things printed from the previous era of publishing. I have no incentive as a reader to participate in a system that wants me to do extra effort to find what I want. Most other markets don’t do this to me; in reality, most other markets have made it *easier* for me to find what I want to consume (think super stores, malls, online music stores with really good recommendation features, online music sites for streaming music, etc. etc etc etc etc etc). Yet it’s only in the book publishing world that we talk about making the consumer the worker. I wouldn’t be going out on a limb if I said a lot of readers who have recently come to routine reading would be equally inclined to leave the whole thing behind. Easy access isn’t necessarily a good thing (at least, it comes with consequences). It’s all about coupling easy access with tools that help the consumer find what they want without creating additional effort. The fact that SPers (and indies, trads, and other publishing models) are talking about a future which makes the consumer an unpaid intern is the most bizarre kind of archaic logic to me… Don’t tell me what you think on this post, though. Go respond to me and Mr. Copple on John’s blog. It’s an interesting discussion to have, methinks, even if I have made similar arguments elsewhere on this blog.
The Haul of Books 2.0: Books Received Vol. 3
It’s time for yet another edition of the Haul of Books, in which I tell you about the stuff that recently showed up at my door in one form or another. Let’s get started: The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike by Philip K. Dick (Tor) The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike was written by Philip K. Dick in the winter and spring of 1960, in Point Reyes Station, California. In the sequence of Dick’s work, it was written immediately after Confessions of a Crap Artist and just before The Man in the High Castle, the Hugo Award–winning science fiction novel that ushered in the next stage of Dick’s career. This novel, Dick said, is about Leo Runcible, “a brilliant, civic minded liberal Jew living in a rural WASP town in Marin County, California.” Runcible, a real estate agent involved in a local battle with a neighbor, finds what look like Neanderthal bones in Marin and dreams of rising real estate prices because of the publicity. But it turns out that the remains are more recent, the result of an environmental problem polluting the local water supply. We Can Report Them by Michael Brodsky (Four Walls Eight Windows) In We Can Report Them, Bert, the director of an unorthodox TV commercial, aims to canonize a serial killer as a viable cultural hero. Pudd, the serial killer, has undergone a pseudoreligious conversion. These two, plus Joyce, a patient combating her fatal disease on any terms but the real ones, all seek answers through creation, expressing their unique slant on what passes for reality in defiance of authority. The Devil’s Diaries by Nicholas D. Satan (Lyons Press) Narrating the Devil’s random musings on key dates through history, “The Devil’s Diaries” reveals Satan’s part in such things as the Fall; musical moments at the crossroads; the invention of the tetrapak, making work for idle hands; small print; Faust; decorating hell circle by circle; the joy of getting all the best tunes; and, lawyers. The Dark One reveals his disquiet at the way some of this finest ideas have been hijacked and credited elsewhere; and confesses his frustration that much of his best work goes unappreciated. We also gain extraordinary insights into his private thoughts, and discover that even Satan gets depressed. Geist by Philippa Ballantine (Ace) Between the living and the dead is the Order of the Deacons, protectors of the Empire, guardians against possession, sentinels enlisted to ward off the malevolent haunting of the geists… Among the most powerful of the Order is Sorcha, now thrust into partnership with the novice Deacon, Merrick Chambers. They have been dispatched to the isolated village of Ulrich to aide the Priory with a surge of violent geist activity. With them is Raed Rossin, Pretender to the throne that Sorcha is sworn to protect, and bearer of a terrible curse. But what greets them in the strange settlement is something far more predatory and more horrifying than any mere haunting. And as she uncovers a tradition of twisted rituals passed down through the dark reaches of history, Sorcha will be forced to reconsider everything she thinks she knows. And if she makes it out of Ulrich alive, what in Hell is she returning to? Spectyr by Philippa Ballantine (Ace) Though one of the most powerful Deacons, Sorcha Faris has a tarnished reputation to overcome, which is why she jumps at the chance to investigate a string of murders in the exotic city of Orithal. But it is there that her lover, the shapeshifting rival to the throne, is targeted by a cruel and vengeful goddess, unwittingly unleashed by the Emperor’s sister. Sword of Fire and Sea by Erin Hoffman (Pyr) Three generations ago Captain Vidarian Rulorat’s great-grandfather gave up an imperial commission to commit social catastrophe by marrying a fire priestess. For love, he unwittingly doomed his family to generations of a rare genetic disease that follows families who cross elemental boundaries. Now Vidarian, the last surviving member of the Rulorat family, struggles to uphold his family legacy, and finds himself chained to a task as a result of the bride price his great-grandfather paid: the Breakwater Agreement, a seventy-year-old alliance between his family and the High Temple of Kara’zul, domain of the fire priestesses. The priestess Endera has called upon Vidarian to fulfill his family’s obligation by transporting a young fire priestess named Ariadel to a water temple far to the south, through dangerous pirate-controlled territory. A journey perilous in the best of conditions is made more so by their pursuers: rogue telepathic magic-users called the Vkortha who will stop at nothing to recover Ariadel, who has witnessed their forbidden rites. Together, Vidarian and Ariadel will navigate more than treacherous waters: Imperial intrigue, a world that has been slowly losing its magic for generations, secrets that the priestesshoods have kept for longer, the indifference of their elemental goddesses, gryphons—once thought mythical—now returning to the world, and their own labyrinthine family legacies. Vidarian finds himself at the intersection not only of the world’s most volatile elements, but of colliding universes, and the ancient and alien powers that lurk between them. The Mall by S.L. Grey (Corvus) Dan is an angsty emo-kid who works in a deadly dull shopping mall. He hates his job. Rhoda is a junkie whose babysitting charge ran off while she was scoring cocaine. She hates her life. Rhoda bullies Dan into helping her search, but as they explore the neon-lit corridors behind the mall, disturbing text messages lure them into the bowels of the building, where old mannequins are stored in grave-like piles and raw sewage drips off the ceiling. The only escape is down. Plummeting into the earth in a disused service lift playing head-splitting Musak, Dan and Rhoda enter a sinister underworld that mirrors their worst fears. They finally escape, but something feels different. Why are the shoppers all pumped full of silicone? Why are the shop assistants chained to their counters? And why is a