Trying to Catch Up

I've resisted comment on the question of vanity presses this weekend, and broke my embargo only recently, on Jackie Kessler's informative and humorous post. I don't actually say much about the current situation because it's been said very well by so many people now I can't begin to link them all.

But... (you knew there was a 'but', right?) one of the things I keep seeing on-line, and perhaps I fail to understand what I'm reading clearly, is the open declaration of the Fall of the Evil Empire of Gatekeepers -- publishers and agents -- combined with a declaration of democracy, of readers deciding what is, and is not, to sell.

I'm not a publisher; I've never worked for a publisher. I have friends who have worked in various editorial positions. All of my interactions with the industry known as publishing have come through the bookstores I've worked in since I was sixteen years of age. I've worked in chains, and in independents, and anything I understand about the industry and its workings comes both from that, and my experience as the third side of the triangle -- as an author.

But I felt, in the end, that I had to comment, and I've cut and pasted my post from the above-linked blog beneath the cut, and then added more (I would have added more on her blog, but it was already way, way, too long).
( Read more... )

I love breaking new words most of the time. I love the sense of exploration and surprise. I dislike it when I have to fight the book for every single sentence, but that's part of writing novels. I also have the nagging sense that I'm not doing anything productive if I don't produce new words on something. This is, of course, entirely writer-neurotic.

What's harder with multiple projects on the go is that much of the 'writing' process doesn't involve new words -- it involves the necessary iterations that follow them.
( What I've done in the last several weeks )

I'm in the store, where we're having a signing for a YA authorial debut.

But the thing that caught my eye was: Child of Fire by Harry Connolly.

And yes, burger_eater, I did, in fact, say: OMG, Burger Eater's book is here!

And in other news, the "last chapter" of Cast in Chaos, after two chapters, really is the one I'm writing now. Honest.

I had a wonderful time at the Worldcon. I met many people for the first time. Patrick Rothfuss probably thinks I was either stalking him or present as multiple clones.

I am, of course, struggling with the post-con weather, as it were. And I now have five hundred messages in my various inboxes, and posts on the web-site, and am feeling inundated, but in a good way.

( Some highlights from the Worldcon )

I'll be heading to Montreal for the 2009 Worldcon, Anticipation. My schedule is as follows:


When: Thu 14:00
Location:  P-518A
Title:  One Genre or Many?
Session ID:  557
All Participants:  Farah Mendlesohn, Michelle M. Sagara, Pat Rothfuss,
Gary K. Wolfe, Ellen Klages
Moderator:  Gary K. Wolfe
Description:  Lots of people assert that SF and fantasy are really
part of one overarching field called the fantastic; but in this case,
why are critics of both developing different languages to describe
them?


When: Fri 11:00
Location:  P-516AB
Title:  Second Time Around
Session ID:  759
All Participants:  Alexander Jablokov, Michelle M. Sagara, Nick
DiChario, Robert Silverberg
Moderator:  Robert Silverberg
Description:  Some writers go on hiatus for years; others find the
vagaries of publishing take them out厃et the urge to write lures them
back. Is it a matter of unfinished business, or is writing an
addiction?


When: Fri 12:00
Location:  P-510C
Title:  Manga for Kids
Session ID:  291
All Participants:  Madeline Ashby, Michelle M. Sagara, Jus de Pomme
Moderator:  Madeline Ashby
Description:  We'll discuss Japanese comic books most kids 12 & under
will enjoy.


When: Sun 10:00
Location:  Other
Title:  Michelle Sagara Signing
Session ID:  1476
All Participants:  Michelle M. Sagara
Description:  Michelle Sagara Signing
Duration:  0:30 hrs:min


When: Mon 12:30
Location:  P-512AE
Title:  Author Reading
Session ID:  247
All Participants:  Kari Sperring, Michelle M. Sagara, Pat Rothfuss
Description:  Patrick Rothfuss; Kari Sperring;  Michelle Sagara.
Duration:  1:00 hrs:min
Language:  English
Track: Reading

I hope to see some of you there!

The truth about John Scalzi:

I've just come home from Confluence 2009. It's a small convention in Pittsburgh, and I've gone there three years running; I missed one year in which I went nowhere, and was pretty much absent from the real world in all possible ways.
( Confluence 2009 and meeting John Scalzi )

Someone on the publisher-side of the industry has started a blog about the workings of the industry itself. It's relatively new, and it is, imho, absolutely critical information for people who want to make a living in this business if they want to understand some of how it works. It's here. In particular, I loved his explanation of sell-through, what it means, and why high sell-through is not necessarily a good thing.

Also, a couple of comments about yesterday's post have cropped up on LJ; I've added them to the original post, because they're both very good, and I thought I'd also mention them here in case people haven't seen them. jmeadows has posted an eloquent, and less personally focused response than minehere. matociquala, whose name I just mistyped five times, has posted her personal take on both issues here, and it is pure Bear :).

A long time ago, in a comment thread, I indicated that the way authors talked about their own work, in the nearly context-less space provided by on-line venues, should be done with some caution, because many people who are not writers take it as a statement about the objective value of the work.

For this reason, for instance, writing "OMG I hate every word of this book it is all complete garbage" or "OMG if I didn't need to eat, I'd throw this book out the window" can have an unfortunate effect on readers who don't have to live with writers, or who are not also writers, because the long dark night of the novel is a months-long process with which all writers are familiar, and many readers are not.
( My sort of brief comment on an agent's dislike of the phrase 'It's Good Enough )

ETA: jmeadows has posted an eloquent, and less personally focused response here. matociquala, whose name I just mistyped five times, has posted her personal take on both issues here, and it is pure Bear :).

I really like Confluence, and my husband and I will be heading there this coming weekend, the 24th-26th of July.

My programming schedule for the weekend is:

Friday 5pm Oak   
Why are there so many Twits on Twitter?   
John Scalzi, Laurie Mann, Michelle Sagara West,Sarah Zettel   

Saturday 12pm Salon A   
Folklore and the Roots of Fantasy   
Alan Irvine, Michelle Sagara West, Susan Dexter, Bill Mayhew

Saturday 1pm Oak   
Is Amazon "Kindling" a New Generation of Readers   
Thomas Seay, Gary Markette, Michelle Sagara West, Jean Goldstrom

Saturday 2:00 PM   
Autographing   
Michelle Sagara West

Saturday 4pm Jr Ste   
Kaffee Klatsch   
Sarah Zettel, Michelle Sagara West     
              
Saturday 5:30 pm Willow   
Reading   
Michelle Sagara West   

And I hope to see some of you there!

Edited because I in theory know my own name

This is a bit late, for which I apologize, and it's probably not of interest to anyone who isn't already attending the convention, but my schedule for the weekend at Polaris 2009 is as follows:
( my schedule under the cut )

ETA: cut tags

I work part-time at an SF/F specialty store. Once upon a time, in a world before children, I managed it, and I've been there in one capacity or another for a Very Long time.

I did something the other day which, on immediate reflection, surprised me. Three people came into the store; they were in their twenties, two men, and a woman (with very lovely red hair). The young woman asked me for recommendations--and this is the part of the job that I love, and have always loved, because I get to talk about books, and I can do that all day long. Seriously.

So the young woman was thinking about the various recommendations, and one of the young men came up to the counter to buy a book. It was a paperback (which will be relevant in a minute). He paid for the book, then turned to the young woman and said, "It's time to go."

She said, "But I haven't found anything yet."

And he said, "Well, how long does it take?"

So, I leaned over the counter, holding the book for which the customer had paid and I bonked him on the head with it. No, seriously. I bonked a total stranger who had never been in the store before on the head. With his book. Which he had just given me money for. And while I was doing this, I was saying, "Hey! You don't tell someone that they're coming to browse in a bookstore, but they have to leave just because you've found something to read!"

The young woman and the other young man broke out laughing, and the other young man said, "She doesn't even know you and she knows you deserve to be smacked upside the head!"

And then, of course, I realized that I had just hit a total stranger over the head. I think I managed to say "I have younger brothers, sorry >.>."

So... I was relating this with some chagrin to a customer of many years, and he was laughing at me, and at the idea that I was shocked that I had done this. I have never done it before. I mean, not if I don't actually know the customer.

When I pointed this out, he said, "Take a poll of all the people who actually know you and see if any of them are surprised."

So: It is poll time!

Michelle has hit a total stranger on the head with a book that he has just purchased. Not, of course, hard enough to cause any damage to anything other than dignity (hers and his).

Poll #1425569
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 113

You are

Because it's the first of July, and it's Canada Day, I've posted the first chapter of the upcoming Cast in Silence on my web-site. Which can now be reached at www.michellesagara.com, (ETA: apparently, this doesn't work as a page-line in LJ, but does work if I cut and paste it. I don't know why. But: the website is here) but is still the same wordpress site it's always otherwise been. It's tucked away in the Chronicles of Elantra side-bar, under the Cast in Silence entry.
—–
Okay, and now, the question.  Well, first the preamble (because of course I can't ask a question without a lot of preamble).

Well, actually some pre-preamble. This question was lifted in its entirety from what I just posted on the web-site, and if you've read it already, there is nothing new here, and I apologize. This actually brings up another point: I'm now (mostly reading) Twitter, Facebook, LJ and my usual RSS feeds. One thing that makes me crazy is the people who post to Twitter and then repost what they've written on Twitter to every other feed. Which shouldn't bother me. I've taken to watching only the Twitter, or only one of their various sites, if they do this, though, because I don't need to read the same thing four times, no matter how interesting it was the first time. So. I'm happy to read anything once. I hate to read it multiple times. And, of course, I'm posting almost the exact same thing (minus this small rumination) on two sites.

You may throw fruit now. Hopefully you will be as bad an aim as I am.
( A Question about content, mine )

I pretty much expected it. I was ready for it. This is what I told myself last night, when I finally went to sleep.

But I am thoroughly depressed by what I, in theory, expected, so obviously I had silently hoped for a different result. I don't live in the US, and I don't live in CA. I live in Ontario, in Canada, where gay marriage is a simple fact of both law and daily life. Prior to the advent of legal marriage for gays, I knew a number of people whose SO's were in the hospital dying of AIDS -- and who were denied the ability to be with their SO's in their last days because of the narrow-minded and ultimately evil (really, truly, imho) decisions of the rest of their family, even though, right up until the point that hospitalization was required, they were the ones who were physically caring for them -- a right that could not be denied a legal spouse.

Pointing to the ways in which a "separate but equal" commitment does not detract from daily life misses that single point. Think about it: If your SO's mother is denying you all access to her son because you aren't kin, how exactly, in CA, are you going to prove that you have the right to access? What are you going to say to the hospital staff? You can argue that you are, in fact, legally entitled to visit and to be there -- but what are you pulling out of your pockets to drop on the staff's desk? When you are already reeling in shock and pain, how are you building up your bureaucratic arsenal to be there to comfort the dying -- and to gain, for yourself, possibly the last hours you will ever have with the living?

No cut-tags here, because, honestly? CA, I do not get it. I understand the ways in which the Supreme Court was hampered -- but they should never have been hampered that way in the first place. To those who voted for prop 8: I don't understand your fear. I don't understand your bigotry. I don't understand your hatred. No one is telling you what to do. No one is telling you who to marry. Or who to sleep with. No one is pointing their mocking teen-age fingers at you and calling you gay. Okay? (I may, at this point, be calling you a whole host of other things, but my fury is not entrenched in law.)

It is not as if the lesbian and gay communities are asking for something outrageous. They are not asking for your jobs, your homes, your children, or your money; they're not demanding equal sexual time with you or your spouse; they're not trying to secede. What horrible and agitating thing are they struggling to achieve? They want to get married. Wow. That's it. They want to be able to get married. I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around why this is considered so ultimately terrifying because if you actually unpack the fear... there's not a lot there. They want the chance, in front of friends, family, and their entire community, to put their money where their mouth is: to make the public commitment.

I am, absent obvious racial characteristics, as middle-of-the-road as one gets. I am married, I have two children, I have a mortgage. My husband works full-time; I work part-time and write. I hate housework. My parents are in and out of my house all week. I am not writing from any radical fringe or any radical mode of thought. My marriage, and my family, are not lessened by gay marriage; they are more threatened by a society that continues to attempt to entrench bigotry in its constitution. I understand bigotry. I know what my parents lost--as children--in the internment camps of the second world war. I know what their parents lost, as adults with families they couldn't even keep together, so I understand bigotry. I understand the costs.

There is enough loneliness and unhappiness in life that denying people the chance at a public, successful marriage seems petty, small, cruel. Will all of the marriages survive? Probably not; many marriages don't. But the profound hope and promise of the beginning is one of the ways one gets through the storms and the upheavals. We promised. It was witnessed. It meant something. Denying people this happiness and this hope just spreads misery and isolation.

Please, do not do this. Do not continue to do this.

jessicac posted the following in the previous thread, and I wanted to say a little bit about it, so I broke it out here.

 I don't know if you have seen this, but as a writer who sometimes does not have novels magically shooting out your eye sockets and onto bookstore shelves Lo-Pan style every six months, I thought you might find it amusing:

George R.R. Martin does not work for you

I did -- and I both loved it and have some reservations with it, oddly enough. Well, no, not reservations with what was said, because I feel that what was said is all true.

But: ( my own thoughts, as a writer of a multi-volume story, as opposed to a series, beneath the cut )

ETA: proper lj-cut tags. Sigh.

I did not delete Chapter One of all my older novels. Although by the time I was into the newer novels, I'd reached that point of frustrated editing mode in which the new ones weren't entirely safe, either. I'm hoping to be able to post a chapter of Cast in Silence sometime soon, as a sort of teaser. I unfortunately asked about Cast in Chaos because I tend to use the title of whatever I'm working on now as the "current" new book.

The website is here, and I'm now, once again, asking about possible short stories to put up on the site here.

Several helpful people have pointed out the ways in which my own web-perusals are not necessarily the norm, so I'm taking suggestions for short pieces--for download--that might actually give some sense of my over-all writing. Because I'm on the inside of the story and can't honestly objectively tell. So please feel free to wander over and leave a comment or suggestion. Or, you know, put one here.

I am attempting, for the third time in my life, to have slightly more useful information and stuff available on my very under-utilized web-space.

Some of this involves putting up first chapters of various published novels on-line for download or .html perusal. But...the only file formats I have for these chapters are the ones they were submitted in. So I'm opening up what was a working file, and I'm reading it and trying to make sure that it more or less matches the later line-edited, copy-edited published version.

And because I'm doing this, I'm looking at sentences that I wrote fifteen years ago...and I'm trying, desperately, not to revise those sentences now. Or some of the paragraphs. Normally, when looking at a book, I don't have this impulse (I may, on the other hand, have the usual despairing but I could do this so much better now ones, but those are natural, I think, for anyone who is looking at work that is fifteen years old). But since I'm looking at a file...

An intervention may be required.

I have good news and bad news.

The good news first: DAW is buying three more Michelle West novels!

The bad news: the 1st of those three is actually the second plot arc of the book I've been working on for the last fifteen months.

( explanations, which are a lot like groveling, behind the cut )
ETA: articles. Because articles are good.

I mentioned earlier that I have been using the equivalent of MS Word's wordcount while writing, and that this has not perhaps been very smart. I know that we're all looking at the lengths of our various books, and I was wondering: How do you keep track of wordcount while writing? Because I had an extra 45K words and an extra 25K words when looking at the page runoffs on the two books I did write in Scrivener, and this was ... unfortunate. And I would like not to repeat it if I can*.

If you need to turn in a 100k manuscript--or a manuscript of a specific maximum length--do you check the runoff count as part of your daily writing, do you format it in manuscript format so you write -to- a runoff count?

ETA: * I am aware that there might be a bit of gentle mockery at this point

fiction_theory said:
Keeping all these things in mind that you have said, are there things that a first time, unpublished novelist looking for an agent should be doing to help themselves out in the search for an agent?

Meaning: are there mistakes the first timers make that hold them back from being able to make a deal with an agent? Are there things they should be doing that they aren't?

The obvious mistakes are ones that anyone who does a little research can avoid; they can submit in the format that the agent requests, they can make sure they're submitting to an agent who is open to what they write, etc. I am absolutely certain that no one who is reading this would send a Western to an agent who primarily handles romances, or send hard copy to an agent who has decided to accept only e-submissions, or address a letter to "Nate Brandsford", for example.

And, as usual, I hit that little thing that says: Too many characters when replying.
( The rest of the answer, which is not as long as the previous one, honest, here )

rowyn said:

I agree with you that editors and agents have interests that align pretty well. I'm curious about the utility of agents, though. Do you think they're providing a valuable service for publishers or writers, in the case of first-time authors? I can see the benefit of agents to established authors; I'm hazier on how they help unpublished ones, or what they do that the publishing house couldn't do cheaper with their own readers or interns.

I broke this out of comments because it's a two part question, and at least one part is something I'm often asked. For anyone who knows the answer, or who doesn't feel like reading mine, I've answered the question behind the cut. To your complete lack of surprise, it's not really a short answer.
( Read more... )