Category: Uncategorized

Should I submit to non-paying markets?

I’ve recently gotten back into writing and submitting short stories, and this is one of the questions on my mind.

Don’t get me wrong: I still believe in the top-down approach to short stories, where you start with the highest paying markets and work your way down. And I’m not going to write anything specifically for a non-paying market, unless it’s a charity anthology. That just doesn’t make any sense.

But what about a story that you’ve already sold somewhere, already self-published, and the non-paying market only wants non-exclusive reprint rights? I understand the pay-the-writer argument, and that’s certainly one approach, but there’s also the Jonathan Coulton, song-a-day, be prolific and fill the world with your work approach.

As far as I can tell, here are the pros and cons of publishing a short story with a non-paying market after it’s already been published:

Pros:

  • Improved chances of winning an award
  • Improved chances of appearing in a “best of” anthology
  • Networking opportunities with other publishing professionals
  • More readers will find you
  • More publishing credentials
  • Makes you part of a community

Cons:

  • Could damage author brand if publisher is non-reputable
  • Violates Kant’s categorical imperative
  • Costs too much in time and effort

What sayest thou?

Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

As a general rule, Heinlein novels are either really controversial (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), really meta (The Number of the Beast), really fun (Citizen of the Galaxy), or some combination of all three (Starship Troopers). Farmer in the Sky is one of the really fun ones.

This novel was written before the Apollo 11 moon landing, but it read like something from an alternate reality long after that pioneering era, where the space program never slowed down. For that reason alone, it was a fascinating book. You can really see how it inspired people back in the 50s and 60s to reach for the stars.

More than that, it was really fascinating to get into the knitty gritty of colonizing a world like Ganymede. This is one of Heinlein’s juveniles, so he doesn’t get too technical, but you can definitely tell that he did the research and built a plausible near future world. More than that, it’s the kind of world I’d actually love to live in. Ganymede is the new frontier, and the colonists who settle it are pioneers in every sense of the word. Not everyone makes it, of course, but those who do are rugged, resourceful, and remarkable.

This was a really quick read. There was a lot of little stuff that dates it to the 50s, like gender relations and the prevalence of the Boy Scouts, who are sadly no longer a cultural force in today’s society. None of it bothered me or threw me out of the story. If anything, it added to the novel’s charm.

Heinlein knows his stuff. This was a really fun book. If you’ve never read any Heinlein, Farmer in the Sky is a good place to start.

The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove

As those of you who’ve read my short story “The Gettysburg Paradox” know, I’m a huge fan of both the US Civil War and time travel stories. Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South is, quite possibly, the best combination of the two.

The novel starts just a few weeks after Gettysburg. The Army of Northern Virginia is in disarray, and a defeated Robert E. Lee has been forced to face the truth that the Confederacy has no real hope of winning the war. Then a bunch of time travelers in strangely mottled uniforms show up out of nowhere and supply his army with strange new guns called AK-47s.

Immediately, the tides of war change. Lee soundly defeats Grant at the Battle of Wilderness and presses on to Washington DC, which falls overnight. Triumphant, the South immediately sets about the peace negotiations with their northern neighbor, and prepares for a presidential election which Lee is expected to win. But disagreements about the fate of the new American nation soon arise between Lee and his benefactors, sparking a conflict that is truly out of time.

There’s so much to love about this book. Turtledove’s attention to detail is meticulous, not just in the obvious major ones, but in the little ones that have a disproportionate impact. For example, Lee appreciates the killing power of the  AK-47s, but what impresses him even more are the MREs that the time travelers carry. When the gunmakers in Richmond pick apart the AK-47 in an effort to replicate it, it’s really fascinating to get their take on its functions. It really does read like a bunch of 19th century denizens puzzling over technology that they barely understand.

But what really got to me were the characters. Having read The Killer Angels and Jeff Shaara’s prequel and sequel to that great novel, Robert E. Lee felt like exactly the same character, just in a different book. His genteel sense of propriety, his calm but unshakeable sense of honor, his love of his men and respect for his enemy—it really was the same guy. And the decisions he makes after the war is over, while truly radical, are also eminently believable.

It’s not just Lee, either. Lincoln, Soward, Longstreet, Forrest—all of them feel very much like the people they really were, inhabiting an alternate reality. Turtledove’s research into their characters and personalities was meticulous. And it wasn’t just the big names, either, as all of the 19th century characters, including a prostitute who pretended to be a man in order to join the infantry, are based on real people who actually lived.

Fantastic book—a must-read for anyone with an interest in time travel or the US civil war. Whether those interests intersect for you or not, you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book.

Trying out some pop ups

I just set up a pop up with a subscribe form for my email newsletter. It should only pop up once every two weeks, and only on the first page you visit. If you think it’s too intrusive or have strong opinions on the matter, let me know.

I’ll be experimenting with a few things in the near future, including pop ups. I may also change the layout here to the new WordPress Twenty-Nineteen theme. It looks interesting. Again, if you have opinions, I’d appreciate your feedback!

New plans for the blog

I’ve been revising my business plan lately, codifying a lot of things I’ve tried over the past year into a coherent, unified strategy. It feels like I have all the pieces now for a successful writing career, but I just need to figure out how they all fit together. That’s the goal.

One of those pieces is this blog, which has unfortunately fallen into a state of chronic neglect. I haven’t abandoned it entirely, of course, but I haven’t been focused as much on it as perhaps I should have. Instead of using it to support all the other things I’m doing, I’ve treated it more as a thing unto itself, which makes it a distraction instead of an essential part of what I do.

That’s going to change soon, because I think I’ve figured out how this blog fits in with everything else. But that also means that I’m going to make quite a few changes.

First, I’m going to post a lot more book reviews. Ideally, I’d like to post one every week. I’ve read a bunch of really good books over the last month, so once I sit down to review them I should have enough content for the next several weeks. In this way, my blog can reinforce my reading goal (50 novels per year) while also sharing something of immediate value to my readers.

Second, I’m going to experiment with pop-ups on my blog pages to get more email subscribers. I know, I know, everyone hates those things, but they do work, believe it or not. My email list is the centerpiece of my marketing plan, and if this blog is going to be more than a thing unto itself, I have to integrate it into that plan.

I’ll do my best to keep the subscription forms from being too intrusive, like having them only pop-up after you’ve scrolled to the bottom of the page, or only have them pop up on the first page you visit.

Third, I’m going to be a lot better about posting whenever I have a sale, a new release, or a featured book. I already have book pages for all of my titles, and it’s not difficult to post the links in the sidebar, or embed them in a blog post.

Fourth, I’m going to be a lot better about posting updates on WIPs, publishing projects, and other things that I’ve been up to. I already include those updates in my newsletter, but I could do a lot better at putting them here.

I want this blog to be both a platform for connecting with my existing fanbase as well as a vehicle for gaining new fans. So that’s what the content here is going to be geared toward. I’ll still include my personal reflections on various subjects from time to time, and I’ll probably put a few more blog series together, but I’m going to be more careful about keeping my readers in mind.

This isn’t a writing blog anymore—indeed, it hasn’t been a writing blog for the past several years—but I’m not going to put too many restrictions on what I blog about either. We’ll just have to see how it unfolds. As for the more controversial stuff like politics, I’m not going to hide from it, but I’m not going to wear it on my sleeve either. As much as you love it when authors of escapist fiction rant at you like your batshit crazy uncle on Facebook, it would seem that niche has already been filled many times over. </ snark>

There’s a bunch of other stuff I’d like to try out, but let’s stick to this for now. Book reviews, more frequent updates, and better integration with the email list. It’s going to be a great new year!

Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, since I heard that it’s a classic of the Sword and Planet subgenre and I’ve really liked the other Sword and Planet books that I’ve read. (Princess of Mars, The Dying Earth, etc. Come to think of it, I haven’t done a review of Princess of Mars yet, so that’s as good a reason as any to reread it!)

Besides the association with Sword and Planet, the Gor books have also spawned a subculture of BDSM, and for good reason. On Gor, slavery is not only normalized, it’s romanticized. A typical marriage ceremony consists of the groom binding up his bride, carrying her off on a giant bird, and throwing off her clothes to “show her people what had been the fate of [such and such girl].”

I don’t swing that way, but I thought I’d give the first book a try. I’d heard that the bondage fetishism doesn’t take over until the fifth or sixth book, and while it’s definitely there in Tarnsman of Gor, it wasn’t enough to make me put the book down.

As a swashbuckling action-adventure tale, I thought this book was pretty good. There definitely was no shortage of action, and while the plot twists were fairly predictable, they were also enjoyable and interesting. It’s a fun, if brutal book.

There were a lot of lengthy info-dumps, though, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that I had problems with the world. In general, it felt like the author had come up with a really cool world but not sufficiently thought it through. For example, if humans aren’t the apex predator on Gor, how are there so many human cities? If the caste system is maintained by deliberately sharing false information with the lower castes, how is that system long-term stable if the caste isn’t something you’re born into?

The general impression I got was that this world is a brutal, savage place where everyone is broken in some way, a lot like Mad Max. The thing is, I’m not sure that that’s what the author was going for.

That may just be an artifact of the time this book was written, though. A lot of older books that invented the tropes now seem stiff and wooden—not because they weren’t innovative for their time, but because we’ve seen those tropes so many times that we already know what to expect. Tarnsman of Gor was written back in the sixties, before role playing games and chihuahua-killing fantasy tomes had made world-building so important. Back then, it probably was enough to say “here’s a really cool world” without first thinking about all the ways to break it.

Again, that wouldn’t be so bad if all this book attempted to be was a swashbuckling adventure on another world. But at several key points, the narrator steps back from the story to explain some aspect of the world that was only tangentially related to the plot.

All in all, I give this book three stars. It’s worth reading if it interests you, but it’s not a must-read.