The other week I finished work and chilled for a while in front of the TV. I flipped some channels, tried to decide if I could be bothered (the answer is usually no), but then came across Tim Roth.
I liked Roth in Reservoir Dogs, though he seemed to just have poor choice in rolls, for the most part. Still, I can get behind Roth, and I sit round and I watch this show that he's in called Lie To Me, which offers the premise of a doctor who has created a business around being able to tell if people are lying or not. Half based on intuition, half based on the little facial ticks and gestures people have, he stumbles around with a bunch of people prettier than him, and solves crimes. And why not? In America, anyone can solve a crime. In fact, in a curious way, you could argue that the promise of American TV is that, no matter who you are, you will have the chance to solve crimes and save innocent people. Of course, your chances seem to be marginally better for this line of work if you're British and someone cynical, unshaven, and unpleasant (though deep down you really care for people, and you mask this behind your cynicism).
The show isn't so bad, to be honest. I caught a second episode of it tonight and while it was a bit of a copy of House--which is probably a copy of something else--I liked Roth enough to hang for the whole thing. After a while though, I got thinking about how malleable the crime genre is--how there seem to be so many ways in which the whole case solving thing can fixed to a concept and a case, and how open it is. In many ways, I thought as I sat there, the crime genre is one that can go anywhere, and do anything. Then I realised that you could do the same with romance.
Then I decided that was enough of thinking about genre, because really, in the end, it's just some rules and expectations, and there's nothing saying you can't do whatever you want with it.
(crossposted)
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As previously mentioned, this one is in the upcoming December issue of Asimov's, and really caught the attention of several LSS readers. "As Women Fight" is a really marvellous, crunchy story of literal gender battles in a society where couples must fight a duel each year to decide who will be the woman and who the man in the relationship. There is an impressive amount of gender commentary to be unpacked in this short, sharp piece.
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Happy Birthday for yesterday ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) thawrecka - hope you had a splendid day and a truly awesometacular year!
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This post is brought to you courtesy of two other posts: one by John Scalzi about writers and money, one by Gillian Polack about overheads for writers. I am going to offer my view on the question 'should writers be paid more?' and I'm afraid you ain't gonna like it.
Yeah, OF COURSE writers should be paid more. I mean - I'd love to sell a story a month for $2000.
But - well - that ain't gonna happen either, so let's be real about this whole thing.
It's about markets, about supply and demand.
Bluntly put, there are too many writers. To a certain extent, that is a product of the consumer's demand for diversity (different books, different publishers, different genres), but across the board, there are too many people who can crank out decent fiction that's readable. There is an oversupply in the fiction market. Therefore a magazine can get away with paying $10 a story AND be a well-respected venue, AND attract huge numbers of submissions. With POD and ebooks paving the way, the same is now going to hold for novels.
I am a reader. There are more novels in genres I like to read than I'll ever be able to read. So writers (and their publishers) are going to clamour for my attention. They're going to try and make me WANT to read their novel. Not their competitor's, but theirs. The competitor will be doing the same. Then someone's going to come a long and say 'you can have this book for half price/free'. I may not always bite, but I probably will sometimes. Publishers will charge for 'gatekeeping' fees (and producing paper books), but they can afford to screw the author, because there will be hundreds of others waiting to be published, happy just to see their name in print never mind the money.
As much as I hate to say this, I don't think this problem is ever going to get solved until we 1. establish a closely-monitored worldwide society of publishable authors with a limited membership, or 2. cull the population of authors.
Since neither is feasible, I'd think it would be good if authors got over their sense of entitlement, kept their day jobs (which are likely positions in services where there isn't a rampant oversupply) and accepted that you can only make a living out of writing if you hit the jackpot. And this is probably what most writers are doing.
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Yesterday I put the finishing touches on my novella 'The Sleeping and the Dead', the third story in Mark Deniz's Ishtar project AKA Red, Hot and Bad. I'm pretty happy with it but it has yet to be sighted by any eyes other than mine. So it may well completely suck. The day before I submitted a story to Clockwork Phoenix 3. So, in all, I consider I've had a productive writing time since I returned from WFC.
I've got a bunch of reading to complete for the Anthologies and Collected Works judging category of the Aurealis Awards. When that's done I'll be commencing work on Arctica in earnest, a novel I've been busting to engage with for at least a year, probably longer. I had laid down 28,000 words of first draft already but I've decided to scrap them and start again after a combination of research and plot structuring led me to some cleverer ideas.
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| User: | kaaronwarren |
| Date: | 2009-11-10 10:08 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
My fascination with marginalia meant there was no way I could leave behind "Who Did What an illustrated biographical dictionary". Apart from the fact I think there should be a question mark in the title, a previous owner has written their additions in the front cover:
John Newton (sailor then clergyman) wrote the poem "Amazing Grace" then mayed into song.
Silent Night translanted 300 languages, written by Catholic priest, first perform in 1817 Oberndorf Austria. German soldiers sang 1914 on the Western Front.
and others.
We spent a while the other night looking up surnames of people we know. I can't claim any famous Warrens because that's an adopted name. There were no Hansons and no Farrers.
We also tried to find Australians and New Zealanders in the book but they were few and far between. Not one Pacific Islander, I don't think.
Anyone want me to look up their surname? Anyone got any suggestions of Aussies or Kiwis who might have made the cut?
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Mari Ness brings us another quirky little piece called "Gravestones" in Hub Issue 78. I enjoyed her experimentation with form and the piece made me laugh - that's rare for a punchline to work for me in a short piece
Just a shout out to Shadow Unit - I only just got on board, starting with Episode 1 of Season 2 and I am utterly engaged and drawn in. I have them open in one window and keep sneaking peeks for the next little instalment as I work my way through a lot of other reading. Each episode is long but worth the time! (If you like a good cop drama thrown in with your SF - this is for you.)
"Spar" by Kij Johnson is one of my favourite works for the year. At just over 2000 words, it's not long. It's essentially one long sex scene but in that short space of time and action, issues relating to power, consent, lack of consent, self, lack of self and sexual orientation and preference, as well as motivations underlying all of these are explored. This piece is utterly exquisite.
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Some photos of some things I've been working on lately.
Now redbraids has finally received it, her block for the quilting bee:
Late last week, catundra offered to help me out of my paralysis in progressing my Kimono Wallhanging by recutting the red borders which, um, were cut crooked. She fixed those and cut the final borders for me and this is how far along the project is now:
Not sure if you can see but the fabric is slightly skewed on the top border so that it moves from no symbols to the top bit of the symbols of the row below where it meets the red border. I'm debating unpicking this. Grr.
And at the same time catundra was fixing this, I was telling her about the red diamonds issue on the tumbling blocks quilt - that I know where they are going but they aren't really working for me. Suddenly we were on a mad dash out to the patchwork shop before closing, I'd bought new red fabrics and this is the new test block for random insertion in the monochrome:
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If you're in Sydney this coming Thursday evening, November 12, why not pop along to Berkelow Books, Leichhardt for the launch of Couer de Lion's novellanthology X6. Richard Harland will be doing the launching honours. All X6 authors: Margo Lanagan, Terry Dowling, Cat Sparks, Paul Haines, Louise Katz, and Trent Jamieson will be there. If you can't get there and would like to buy the book, check out details on the website
Personally, I love a good book launch... The fun begins at 7pm
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Siren Beat by Tansy Rayner Roberts and Road Kill by Robert Shearman, of Dr Who fame by Twelfth Planet Press was a very enjoyable read. This is the sort of book that should be in the delis and newspaper outlets next to bus stops for a fun, lighthearted read on the waysomewhere.
I found Siren Beat to be somewhat in the same vein as Horn (Peter M Ball, also Twelfth Planet Press), and enjoyed what felt a lot like a shared world. I found Siren Beat to be more my style though; more sex, more sensuality. Both books had hard decisions for the lead, and I liked the feel of Tansy's voice in this book. Her characters are desperate and broken, and I felt for them and everything that happened. The ending really pulled this story out of 3.5 for me and into a 4.
Road Kill is a bit more of an uncomfortable read, and I loved it for that too. (Complex, me?) The awkwardness of sex; the things people do to survive great trauma, and once again the difficult decisions of life. Rob's characters were easily believable, caught on the horns of delimas and staggering around doing the best they can in an unusual situation. I don't want to give away any more, but two very normal people get caught up in something not very normal at all.
No great truths come out in either of these stories, no transendent stories of the amazingness of life, but both very good, enjoyable reads. Definitely pick a copy before it sells out.
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I tell my daughter, who will be doing the HSC next year, that there is only one subject within maths you'll ever use in later life, and that is statistics.
So let's have a bit of statistics.
A birdie who helps run a magazine tells me that his acceptance rate from held submissions is 60%. This is not going to be true across the board, but for this exercise, I'll assume it's even.
So a 'hold' can result in two outcomes, reject (0), accept (1).
If you have two submissions on hold, the possible end results can be summarised in a table that looks like this:
0 0
0 1
1 0
1 1
Two submissions, two possible outcomes for each, four possible end results for the combined two submissions. There is a 25% chance that none will be accepted, a 25% chance that both will be accepted, and 50% chance that one will be accepted.
Three submissions:
0 0 0
0 0 1
0 1 0
0 1 1
1 0 0
1 0 1
1 1 0
1 1 1
OK, the number of possible outcomes has doubled, and the chance that none will be accepted has dropped to 12.5%
In fact, you'll find that every time you add one submission, the number of possible outcomes doubles.
So if I have seven submissions on hold, there are 2 by 2 by 2 by 2 by 2 by 2 by 2 = 128 possible outcomes, OF WHICH TOTAL REJECTION FAIL IS ONLY ONE, less than 1% chance, right?
Yeah, right. Dream on.
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via LikeItHateIt
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...she'll follow you anywhere.
Link.
(crossposted)
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My fictional characters have taken me over: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Parrish-Plessis-and-Tara-Sharp/168148911946?ref=mf
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| User: | kaaronwarren |
| Date: | 2009-11-09 07:51 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
It's been rather an eventful week. My story in the Guardian Weekly has drawn some jealous responses from people wanting a poster; sorry, but I gave all the big ones to BearCage Productions, the film company making the "A Positive". Yes, I've seen the movie, and yes, it's bloody brilliant. Links and announcements soon!
I took Donna and Matthew in to see the hardware store for themselves, and they stocked up on some smaller posters. The fella behind the counter told us they had a whole room of posters. "Full floor to ceiling," he said. But the only man with the key was in Auckland. He won't be back till I've left the country! Oh, the tragedy of it. I can imagine the treasures slowly mouldering in that room.
One thing I wanted to do before we left Suva was to use the magic words at a certain supermarket. This supermarket, called Uno, sometimes carries French Cheese. Word goes out and it's all gone in a couple of days, so you have to make sure you know the right people. I'd also heard that they had great vegetables, but every time I've gone in there, it was floppy celery and old fennel.
Then I heard about the magic word. It's not enough to say, "Do you have any cheese? How about great vegetables?". You have to say, "Can I see the freezer room please?"
J and I went in last week and used the magic words. The freezer room was opened up to us. Inside; asparagus, corn, mushrooms, bright green broccoli, bean sprouts. Wonderful stuff! Here's a really bodgy photo of the fellas who work there, taken with J's phone:
They are really lovely guys, and all wanted to jump into the picture!
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I think it's been three weeks since I last posted my progress, supposed to be weekly so I should get back into this.
36 tasks done (doesn't seem enough for 3 weeks!)
7 personal (3 household, 3 errands, 1 TV (UK Queer as Folk S1 and 2)
25 TPP (4 ASif, 10 General, 4 R/SB, 1 BoE, 2 novellas, 2 Sprawl, 2 Horn)
1 A4
3 Craft
13 sent to Did Not Finish
(Oh and started new job, and sat Job Interview for Application 2. Reading for Aurealis Awards and Last Short Story also not on this list.)
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I haven't felt like blogging in a while. Thanks to those who checked in, I'm alive and ok. And doing a lot of things, as usual. Thank you for your concern! I have some big thoughts bubbling away and that's taking up a lot of my brain space. Hopefully things will return to regular programming soon.
And everyone is always blathering on about beginnings, I'm posting my first chapter of my NaNo novel here. It's a first draft that I've cleaned up a bit, removed the BS that were just notes for myself. It's only a bit over a page A4, about 700 words.
( read the chapter )
Any general reactions? Does this work as beginning of a mystery SF with romantic subplot? Yes, the dude at the end is a major character.
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Remember those fingers? Well if you have any to spare, cross them now, because I got another 'I'll hold this for a while and get back to you later' reply. Eeks!
I read a book today, the title and author of which shall remain unidentified, that pissed me off so much in so many ways, I hardly know where to begin. One of its crimes was its cliche and unrealistic portrayal of scientists. So I wrote a rant about scientists in fiction.
Since I've finished the NaNo novel wordcount, I'll be spending some time on working out a few details on the story. Expect to see no great wordcount wonders.
I'll be making my first ever simultaneous submission this week. Website #1 doesn't say I can't, website #2 says I may, providing I fess up. It's been with #1 a while (ahem) and I'll miss the deadline for #2 if I don't send it next week. So there you go. I am now officially evil.
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So there have been lots of links floating around in the wake of Publisher's Weekly releasing their list of the Top 10 Books of 2009, in which no women apparently wrote anything remotely worthy of being on the list. It seems. I've been following the responses to that - Tansy wrote a great one as did Lizzie Skurnick and The Mumpsimus.
I was just reading threemonkeys's post about what he was reading, and this really struck me:
Thinking of awards as a result of reading a bunch of short story collections. It would be hard to count how many awards all the stories in these four collections have won but it would be a very large number. In one case the collection as a whole won a World Fantasy award too. The collections were The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians by Bradley Denton, Things will Never be the Same by Howard Waldrop, A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by Jeffrey Ford. You might think one of those collections doesn't quite fit with the others. Don't think that, they belong together. But here is the thing. All these collections come from small scale publishers. All those awards and all the quality and all that enjoyable reading and the big guys aren't interested. I don't blame the big publishers - they are driven by what sells and short story collections don't sell in great numbers. I blame all those people who proudly say "oh I don't read short stories". People are entitled to taste preference, but I don't get the attitude that seems to go with it so often that short stories are somehow lesser things. Where did that come from.
I didn't do the Biancotti book for sales. I produced the collection because I thought it was a book worth doing. It struck me that not only do women seem to be conspicuously absent from awards lists (though that is not true for Biancotti), or year's bests (also not true locally for Biancotti) but they also seem, at least in Australia, to be much less likely to be collected in single author collections (and yet?). Or collected a lot later in their writing careers, once they have "proved" themselves (ah). I wanted to change this somehow and it seemed to me that the best way to do that was to put my money where my mouth was, to believe in female writers and start producing their collections, which was one of the reasons for this book.
The thing though was the sales on A Book of Endings have been really strong and the book is holding its own financially. It's not a book I will regret doing on any grounds - working with Biancotti was a fantastic chance to work with someone so brilliant and driven, and I learned a lot in the process and grew as a publisher and editor. The book has sold well, and it's only been out just over two months. It has also received the most attention and publicity of all the TPP books, including Horn. I'm proud of this book. And I'm proud of it standing out there as an example of the kind of books that I want to produce at Twelfth Planet Press.
Many people told me that single author collections don't sell. Many other people told me that readers had been long waiting for a Biancotti collection. It's hard to know what is really true until you test things out. The thing that strikes me though is that ... critical acclaim, and literary criticism and awards and best of lists seem so out of step with sales figures. A book can be considered to be "the best of the year", but ... if it doesn't really sell, and readers don't embrace it, what does that mean? (This question still stumps me, I have thought about it a lot and don't really know yet.) You can't argue against a phenomenon like Harry Potter or Twilight, books that got people who don't normally read to read. Were they good books? Were they *quality*? Were they not good because men didn't like to read them? If only young girls bought and read them, is it suddenly unimportant? Even if they bought them in extreme, beyond comprehension, numbers?
It strikes me as so odd to constantly go round and round having the same simple conversation - that just because you cannot relate to material and thus it doesn't capture *your* imagination, it is somehow a lesser book/story, yet if the book/story you think is great doesn't capture my imagination and I cannot relate to it, then there is something wrong with *me* and not the book. It seems so obvious to me that different readers, with different life contexts, would appreciate different books to each other. And that it is not only ridiculous, but pompous, ignorant and selfinvolved, narrow minded and unintellectual, that for a book to be considered "best/good quality/worthy" it must have the perspective, gaze and appeal to/for and of a white male audience.
I feel embarrassed now for the people who compile homogeneous lists and present them to the world. It's kind of like wandering onto a packed train with your fly down or a bit of toilet paper attached to the heel of your shoe. Everyone else is trying not to catch your eye and is cringing just a little inside. But the more these lists kind of keep happening, the more I think, "wow, you don't represent or even consider me, and what I am looking for in a reading experience". And I devalue the worth of the recommendation and I move on.
And the big question, do single author collections sell? I think the right ones do. Are they worth doing? I think the right ones are.
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